Kafka, in other words, wrote parables illustrating a theology that does not exist, that he implies but does not supply. Though apparently reduced to submission, they unexpectedly raise a mighty paw against it. They do not modestly lie at the feet of the doctrine, as the Haggadah lies at the feet of the Halakah. But it is their misery and their beauty that they had to become more than parables. Kafka’s writings are by their nature parables. Kafka’s real genius was that he tried something entirely new: he sacrificed truth for the sake of clinging to its transmissibility, its haggadic element. (It is also to denude Dante of his strangeness, but that’s an argument for another day.) Closer to the mark than the Dante comparison is Walter Benjamin’s contention, from the shorter of his two essays on Kafka collected in Illuminations: To say this, however, is to denude Kafka of his strangeness. Hence critics’ easy recourse to finding in his fiction crystallizations of Kierkegaard, Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud, just as Dante is supposed to be Aquinas versified. If he did not solely intend to say that Kafka’s work narrates a journey through hell, he also meant that Kafka sums up-but in concrete images rather than axioms and scholia-modernity’s art and thought. Auden referred to Kafka as the Dante of the modern age. Selected Short Stories of Franz Kafka by Franz Kafka
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