Shop Talk by Philip Roth Page A

that that is why we
are
here.
    I'd like to know what role Kafka may have played in your imagination during your years of being here to be insulted. Kafka was banned by the Communist authorities from the bookstores, libraries, and universities in his own city and throughout Czechoslovakia. Why? What frightened them? What enraged them? What did he mean to the rest of you who know his work intimately and may even feel a strong affinity with his origins?
    Klíma: Like you, I have studied Kafka's works—not too long ago I wrote an extensive essay about him and a play about his love affair with Felice Bauer. I would formulate my opinion on the conflict between the dream world and the real one in his work just a little bit differently. You say: "The dream, according to Kafka, is of a world of probability, of proportion, of stability and order, of cause and effect—a dependable world of dignity and justice is what is absurdly fantastic to him." I would replace the word
fantastic
with the word
unattainable.
What you call the dream world was rather for Kafka the real world, the world in which order reigned, in which people, at least as he saw it, were able to grow fond of one another, make love, have families, be orderly in all their duties—but this world was for him, with his almost sick truthfulness, unattainable. His heroes suffered not because they were unable to realize their dream but because they were not strong enough to enter properly into the real world, to properly fulfill their duty.
    The question why Kafka was banned under Communist regimes is answered in a single sentence by the hero of my novel
Love and Garbage:
"What matters most about Kafka's

personality is his honesty." A regime that is built on deception, that asks people to pretend, that demands external agreement without caring about the inner conviction of those to whom it turns for consent, a regime afraid of anyone who asks about the sense of his action, cannot allow anyone whose veracity attained such fascinating or even terrifying completeness to speak to the people.
    If you ask what Kafka meant for me, we get back to the question we somehow keep circling. On the whole Kafka was an unpolitical writer. I like to quote the entry in his diary for August 21, 1914. It is very short. "Germany has declared war on Russia.—Swimming in the afternoon." Here the historic, world-shaking plane and the personal one are exactly level. I am sure that Kafka wrote only from his innermost need to confess his personal crises and so solve what was for him insoluble in his personal life—in the first place his relationship with his father and his inability to pass beyond a certain limit in his relationships with women. In my essay on Kafka I show that, for instance, his murderous machine in the short story "In the Penal Colony" is a wonderful, passionate, and desperate image of the state of being married or engaged. Several years after writing this story he confided to Milena Jesenska his feelings on thinking about their living together:
You know, when I try to write down something [about our engagement] the swords whose points surround me in a circle begin slowly to approach the body, it's the most complete torture; when they begin to graze me it's already so terrible that I immediately at the first scream betray you, myself, everything.
    Kafka's metaphors were so powerful that they far exceeded his original intentions. I know that
The Trial
as well

as "In the Penal Colony" have been explained as ingenious prophesies of the terrible fate that befell the Jewish nation during World War II, which broke out fifteen years after Kafka's death. But it was no prophecy of genius. These works merely prove that a creator who knows how to reflect his most personal experiences deeply and truthfully also touches the suprapersonal or social spheres. Again I am answering the question about political content in literature. Literature doesn't have to scratch around for