G.
C. Kalman
Kafka’s
Prometheus
(Preliminary version, totally)
Prometheus
Von Prometheus berichten vier Sagen:
Nach der
ersten wurde er, weil er
die Götter an die Menschen verraten hatte, am Kaukasus festgeschmiedet, und die
Götter schickten Adler, die
von seiner immer wachsenden Leber fraßen.
Nach der
zweiten drückte sich Prometheus im Schmerz vor den zuhackenden Schnäbeln immer tiefer in den Felsen, bis er
mit ihm eins
wurde.
Nach der
dritten wurde in den Jahrtausenden sein Verrat vergessen, die Götter vergaßen, die Adler, er selbst.
Nach der
vierten wurde man des grundlos Gewordenen müde. Die Götter wurden müde, die Adler wurden müde, die Wunde schloß sich
müde.
Blieb das
unerklärliche Felsgebirge.
- Die Sage versucht das Unerklärliche zu erklären. Da sie
aus einem Wahrheitsgrund kommt, muß sie wieder
im Unerklärlichen enden.
Prometheus
There are four
legends concerning Prometheus:
According to the
first he was clamped to a rock in the
According to the
second Prometheus, goaded by the pain of the tearing beaks, pressed himself
deeper and deeper into the rock until he became one with it.
According to the
third his treachery was forgotten in the course of thousands of years,
forgotten by the gods, the eagles, forgotten by himself.
According to the
fourth everyone grew weary of the meaningless affair. The gods grew weary, the
eagles grew weary, the wound closed wearily.
There remains
the inexplicable mass of rock. - The legend tries to explain the inexplicable.
As it comes out of the substratum of truth it has in turn to end in the
inexplicable.
(After the translation of Willa and Edwin Muir, in The Complete Stories, Edited by Nahum
N. Glatzer, Schocken Books,
New York 1971, p.432)
There are only very few writings of Kafka
where there are any references to the Greek mythology – or even any intertextual references whatsoever. Notably, besides Prometheus, there is The Silence of the Sirens and Poseidon, there is a reference to the
One could conclude that Kafka was not
interested in mythology. Or that he did not know too much about it. Or that,
more generally, he was not interested in writing about texts, that is, writing
texts on texts. It is evident that all these conclusions are false.
First of all, in a great number of Kafka’s
writings, there is a certain mythological touch. I would not want to suggest
that it is Kafka’s intention to create, produce or reproduce some kind of
mythology, but he uses some specific devices, partially, at least, very simple stylistic
tricks, to construct a sort of mythological atmosphere; and in his entire work,
there is a clear stratum of parables, partly as a specific genre, party as part
of his novels. Kafka’s mythology is sometimes pretty close to what we would call
tales; where the heroes are not
characterized by the usual ways that novels would employ, where deeds are not
explained by the narrator (or this explanation is very much reduced), and so
on.
So even if I would not suggest that Kafka
creates a mythology –he is very far from doing so - , he makes use of mythology
in several ways. Partly, he breaks it into parables; whereas mythology, as we
know it from Greek mythology, for instance, is supposed to be a long,
meandering story with recurrent characters, with a great number of sub-plots. Partly,
he examines the machinery of working of the mythology, by creating fake myths, by
transforming real myths or by deforming the conventional form of myths. His
myths are, in fact, parodies of the myth itself, experimental transformations
of mythical thinking, challenges of the traditional ways of telling stories.
Truncating the myth of Prometheus into this very short story is clearly a subversive act, I could even say that it is ironic. Not only because it radically changes the length of the original story so that there is practically one character remaining on the scene, but more emphatically because it radically changes its aim. Instead of telling the story of a hero, his deeds and the consequences of his deeds, the narration is restricted to the consequences. Note that there is a very significant absence in Kafka’s text: there is nothing there about the heroism of the hero, about fire or about humanity, technological or any other progress whatsoever. Kafka is interested only in the very last moment of the chain of events – in punishment, or, to refer to another text of his, in judgment.
What we witness in this text is that it is
a myth turned into parable. We are tacitly advised to see this story as a
parable, as if there were something very important behind it, even in this very
short form. Very roughly, whereas a short part of the myth is not supposed to
refer to some general truth, to an example of human behavior, sin, virtue, and
so on, here the narrator seeks for some explanation
(Erklaerung) of something. He tells the story as if
there would be something for which it serves as an explanation or
interpretation.
Prometheus is not only about Prometheus – it is also – or I would say
primarily – on the myth of Prometheus. On the working of the myth, on the
possible forms of myth, on the special rules of the myth. The first conclusion could
be that if one reduces myths into a simple story, it will not explain anything.
A myth, the text suggests, cannot be used for explanation of any sort.
However, Kafka’s Prometheus is a parable and yet it is not a parable; it has a form
of a parable, but one cannot infer to any deep or transcendent idea from it –
and, moreover, it is not a parable;
it is a radically shortened myth, so that the reader finds it quite natural
that he will not make any Erklaerung from it; but he
is also advised, in the last lines, to drop all the possible interpretations he
may have by virtue of his earlier knowledge of the myth of Prometheus.
Why do we have four versions of
Prometheus’s story here?
1. One of the interpretations could be that it is an imitation (or
rather parody) of the scholarly presentations of the Greek myths which often
have several versions. It mocks the scrupulous efforts of the text editors to
fix all the possible forms of a myth. (In a similar way as the legendary
exclamation of the classical philologist arriving to the see: “Thalassa! Thalassa! Aber man kann auch
sagen: Talatta! Thalatta!”) The strange – or ironic – aspect of these versions
is that they are very much different, as if they were not originating in the
same myth. Implying that even the most controversial or disconnected texts can
be, traditionally, the versions of the same, allegedly original, myth.
2. Another, closely connected, interpretation is that a myth is not
only presented by scholars in its versions, but it is in fact a sort of sum of
its different, overlapping forms – as for instance Claude Lévi-Strauss puts it.
Thus, to understand the story in its profundity, one must take into account the
whole set of related stories. The conclusion – ironically, again – is that we
cannot really do anything with this set, we are not at all better off having
all the versions. The lesson we would try to figure out of the story is even
more obscure.
3. Third, the versions can be taken as different aspects of the story. The first version is timeless; that is, it
takes place in a perpetually iterating time, in a mythical time structure where
an act is repeated infinitely, until the end of times – a typical punishment in
Greek mythology, see, for instance, the case of Sysiphos
or the Danaides. The second story is, however, placed
in a world of time moving ahead, a time with progression and consequences. The
act always repeated has its tangible traces in the real world: slowly and
gradually the hero disappears, “until he became one with”
the rock. In this story, there is an end (as there was a beginning and a
middle, too). The third story has a similar structure, but we are not clearly
informed what had in fact happened; we do not know if forgetting was a slow
process or rather a sudden event, and even the conclusion is not clear – what
has in fact happened? The torments have simply stopped? And did it all depend
on the eagles? And if the second story states that in the now of the
story there is nothing left there but the cliff, what could we find in the now
of the third one? The fourth story is similar to the third one, and both
actions (forgetting and growing weary) is mostly a result of time; but
there was a process which cannot be either perceived nor controlled by the
actors, and in this version the cause is shifted: it is not a function of the
eagles but of the “meaningless affair”.
4. A fourth interpretation could be that the three stories are the possible outcomes of the first one, and the variations give clues for an understanding of the nature of punishment. The first punishment has the good old mythic structure: not only is it life-long, but perpetual. The first outcome (that is, the second version) is the infinite pain and the total perishing of the hero, and, this way, the punishment is really completed. The third is forgetting – perhaps as a sort of pardoning; sins are forgotten, punishment ends in a sort of forgiveness. The fourth does not give this absolving, it is a random or accidental or merely physical conclusion, without any further motivation. Punishment may end in an unexpected and unintended way.
(4a.
Theoretically, one could speculate that we could read the four versions as
falling in the same line, that is, chronologically or sequentially ordered –
but it is too far-fetched. It may be true (or even it must be true) that the first version is chronologically the first,
and also that the second is the second; but logically the fourth (weariness)
should precede the third, and not vice versa.)
5. A fifth interpretation of the variational
structure is that Kafka imitates the Midrashic
structure here. Midrash is an explanation or
interpretation of the Scripture; or, rather, explanations along with explanations
of explanations. It is a particular way of reading and interpreting a biblical
verse. A part of the Scripture will have, of course, several interpretations,
and there are, moreover, a number of additional textual and interpretational traditions
connected to that part or, rather, to the interpretation of that part. Also,
the form of Kafka’s text will also remind us to the Hassidic Tales, those for
instance published and rewritten by Martin Buber.
These tales often have variations modifying the “original” – or, rather, the
starting – text. Kafka, then, plays with smelting down Greek mythology into the
Jewish tradition, he muses in fusing the two horizons. The stake of this
operation is to see what happens if these two ways of thinking are confronted:
which will roughly mean the confrontation of mythology and parable. An
interesting difference is that both in Midrash and in
Hassidic legends there is always an authority standing behind the story as well
as its interpretation. Names of those who told or interpreted the story are
carefully given, they are held responsible for what is told. In mythology – and
in Kafka’s text – however, the legend is told
in four variations, and the final paragraph is told by the nameless
narrator.
So much about the possible interpretations
of the four legends told about Prometheus. (Let me add that the Hungarian word monda which
preserves the word mond,
“say”, is much closer to the German original “Sage” than the English word legend, which refers, in turn, to the
reading of the story.)
But how can we make a parable of Kafka’s
Prometheus? How can it be interpreted so as to offer a sort of lesson, a clear
guidance, some moral to draw? It seems that the text refuses to show any simple
way to do this. In fact, in its last line it expresses that the legend ends in
the “inexplicable”, it is this refutation which seems to be the very point of
it. However, one can try. For instance, Victor E. Taylor and Gregg
Lambert, in their manifesto for the future of theory argue that „[t]he future
of theory, similar to its past, will be Promethean”, in Kafka’s sense, inasmuch
as “the legendary, heretical writings … forming the corpus of theory
remain the "inexplicable mass" giving rise to a desire to explain, to
refute, to show, and to occasionally hide the contours of its own "image
of thought."” That is, we are always confronted with texts which remain to
be interpreted, which give a difficult task for every coming generation; for
Taylor and Lambert, then, the main point of Kafka’s Prometheus is the ever
renewing challenge to explain which has hitherto remained inexplicable.[1] - This
interpretation, however, uses Kafka only as an illustration, and not in a quite
acceptable way. It seems to forget that in Kafka’s text it was the legend which tried to explain the inexplicable, and it was the
legend which came out of the substratum of truth, and it is because of this
that it had in turn to end in the inexplicable.
Another interpretation, that of Heinz Politzer[2], implies
that the “substratum of truth” is the forlornness of Prometheus as a result of
his presumption, a trait of the Greek heroes. This is, then, something which
cannot be explained. Politzer adds that Kafka’s
reference to the Greek gods in the Castle
just as in his Prometheus implies the
complete incongruence of grandeur and the Modern world; consequently, what
cannot be explained here is the presence of an ancient hero in our world.
Kafka, Politzer says, „stressed the nightmarish
quality of a thoroughly modern despair by blending it in a mock-heroic fashion
with the inevitability of Greek myth”. For Politzer,
then, Prometheus is a parable of
confronting worlds, that of the world of Greek myths and that of Modern man.
There is, however, a fifth, implicit,
legend hidden in the text. It says that the birth of the legend of Prometheus
itself is due to the presence of the
This parable which refuses to be a parable, which challenges any explanation (by saying that its subject matter will always remain inexplicable), is, for me, a parable about explanation itself; it is also about myth and parable. It is a parable of parables.
What is it that is not explained in the legend? What will remain unexplained are the facts presupposed or taken for granted: that is, that Prometheus did in fact steal something from the gods; that it was a sin; that he deserved the punishment; that the rock and the eagles are proper instruments of his punishment; that punishment must last for a lifetime. All these elements would require explanation, sometimes even motivation.
However, this quest for explications runs
completely against the mythological nature of the “legend”. A mythological
story is specific in its great realm of presuppositions, it is its
characteristic trait that it must leave quite a lot of things unexplained. And
Kafka who himself made wide use this device, as I have noted earlier, knew this
nature of the myth very well. So what is suggested here is that since myth does
not explain anything, it must be myth itself which requires explanation.
What can one interpret? The rock cannot be
interpreted since it is part of the reality. What came out of the substratum of
truth cannot be explained or interpreted since there is nothing to explain or
interpret. It just exists. It is something given. What we could interpret are
the variations and the texts. A rock in turn is singular, individual,
particular. An interpretation is always focused on texts, that is, it is always
an interpretation of interpretations – ultimately, an interpretation of the
interpretation of the world around us. This is the fundamental principle of Midrash. A Midrashic
interpretation is never about the truth in the world – it is about texts
(ultimately, the Scripture). Reality or truth itself must remain and will
remain inexplicable, whereas the texts about reality or truth can and always
will be interpreted.