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Old Goriot is a fascinating book. It could be approached from any number of directions. One of the first which emerges for me is its influence upon Dostoevsky's conception of Crime and Punishment: what does a talented young man do when he realizes that the Social Contract was a swindle? It would not do to take the comparison too far, but Vautrin sounds strikingly like Raskolnikov at times. The odd juxtaposition of the gruesome and the saccharine finds its way into both novels. In one, they meet in the figure of Goriot, in the other - let's say, provisionally - the Marmeladov family (the only nuclear family in the novel). Both have self-sacrificing women, although the poor sisters and rich society women of Balzac's novel are reconfigured as Raskolnikov's sister (who gets her own corrupt and wealthy suitor) and Liza, the obligatory bearer of consummate humility.
Rastignac and Raskolnikov are both young men whose talents brook no comparison with the wretched stop reserved for them by society. More interesting, perhaps, than the difference in responses is the degree of success each meets in defiance of his lot.
But of course Old Goriot is as much about the its eponymous character as it is about Rastignac, who enters from one side of the narrative and departs from the other, his future rather more open than Raskolnikov's after the epilogue of Crime and Punishment. As far as Goriot is concerned, his story might have found a parallel in a slightly more melodramatic Kafka story told from the point of view of the father's disappointment in his inadequate son.
Goriot's love his daughters is as exaggerated as the squalor to which his devotion has reduced him. In his imagination, God's attitude toward his creation compares unfavorably to the old man's regard for his daughters. Several times, our narrator describes his feelings for them as those of a young lover.
The relationship is mutually parasitical. He has given them the fruits of his life's work, but he has denied them the capacity for independent existence. Again and again the daughters lament that they have been given into marriage before they had a chance to learn to think: "Fathers ought to think for us." Both end up in the clutches of avaricious and contemptible men. Both take on lovers as a matter of course, but Rastignac soon discovers that this is not a particularly lucrative position. The relationship of mistress and lover is likewise that of reciprocal exploitation. The father cannot bear to be apart from his daughters, but he has promoted them to circles into which he cannot be admitted. They are at the mercy of a social system which strips them of the money which granted them access to it. In the end he condemns the institution of marriage for separating daughters from fathers and the succession of generations for leaving daughters without the protection of their patriarch. The reproduction of the species and the process of life are obstacles to the feedback loop in which father and daughters are supposed to remain, profiting from each other as they wither away. Given the state of the world, the old man knows that his daughters could never be faithful to him. As is so often the case, he reveals his wisdom in the ravings of his dying hours:
'Neither of them!' cried the old man, sitting up. 'They are busy, they are sleeping, they will not come. I knew it. You have to die to know what your children are. Ah! my friend, do not marry; do not have children! You give them life; they give you death in return. You bring them into the world, and they push you from it. No, they will not come! I have known it for the last ten years. I sometimes told myself so, but I did not dare believe it.'
He invests his life in them, but he expects a return: a lifetime of attention from them both. But he knows it will not come. Like Georg Bendemann's father knows that his son has been plotting his betrayal with the Russian friend.
This relation of parent and children brings to mind that of Vautrin and Rastignac.
I once tried to justify my love for Kafka to a pair of incredulous friends. My failure was total. Not only were they not convinced, but my own faith in Kafka's works was shaken by my inability to locate their substance. After numerous false starts, I was confronted by the nihility of that which I was trying to defend. Why is Kafka great? I was left with the most idiotic of claims: because he is really unusual.
And so, let me make another attempt, in a vacuum this time. Something of the extraordinary nature of Kafka's modest oeuvre makes itself evident when one reads interpretations of his writing. Invariably, these interpretations appear grossly inadequate to their task. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the satisfactory interpretation of Kafka is the despair of any theoretical scheme. This is the obstacle which none of them manages to overcome. In each case, the attempt brings the interpretive method to the brink of its own dissolution. Strangely enough, the reason for this seems to be that each one works so well.
Kafka as the prophet of totalitarianism, Kafka as the psychoanalyst avant la lettre, Kafka as theologian for an absent God, Kafka as writer of minor literature. All these attempts are idiotic.
Without access to any of the works I have read or the many more which I have only perused or read about, I cannot substantiate my easy dismissal of all this scholarship, no doubt written by people more learned and intelligent than I. But whenever I read an interpretation of Kafka, I am left with the impression - although I have succeeded in articulating this impression only now - that the interpretive process crushes the supremely delicate tissue of the work, smashes it into dust, and leaves nothing but its own superstructure standing.
Any interpretation of Kafka in accordance with a given theory leaves nothing except that theory. Kafka disappears. He is explained away. If one wants, one can reduce Kafka to weird father-son relationships, monstrous women, dark corners, beds, and laws written down in porno books. Gregor Samsa and the protagonist of "The Judgment" are sons who can find no light in the shadows of their fathers. So total is their domination that they turn into insects or carry out their own death sentences. There's quite a lot of guilt here, you know. Or "Investigations of a Dog" is a theological allegory: dogs are to people as people are to god. But the allegorical aspect is totally irrelevant to the narrator's pursuits. The dogs' obliviousness to humans is less an indictment of their ignorance than it is a dismissal of the irrelevant "higher" beings. What the investigator is searching for is eminently immanent to the world of dogdom.
If K.'s attempts to reach the castle are like man's attempts to reach God, then God is absolute banality.
Kafka's works are striking in that they seem to be symbolic, when they are not. If "The Metamorphosis" seems to be the most symbolic work, then maybe this accounts for its popularity. It is the easiest of the stories to understand.
If Kafka has been misread by those emphasizing the tortured interiority of his works, then what to make of "The Cares of a Family Man?" Was the audience supposed to laugh at this story too? It is wrong to interpret laughter as signaling the opposite of seriousness. Sometimes one laughs in despair. This is not the kind of tepid laughter that one encounters among people at uncomfortable parties.
A few years ago, there was a book released portraying Kafka as an active man-about-town, successful bourgeois bureaucrat, and connoisseur of high-end pornography. The attempt was to humanize him, I suppose, and that is a worthy enough endeavor. There have been enough hagiographies of Kafka. It is all too unfortunate, then, that in the 21st century, to humanize a person is to point out his hemorrhoids. Kafka purchased pornography? You don't say! [and really, you don't, insofar as the 'pornography' was a literary journal. Show Kafka a modern Russian pop video, and he would probably have cried.] The publication of Kafka's office writings does not do much to convince me that he was an exemplar for the managerial class or that one can produce the works he did while 'enjoying' the 'life' which is served to us with added vitamins and minerals.
If the attempt to humanize a writer means making him as banal and worthless as I, his reader, am, then I think I prefer the hagiographies. There is a reason I read Kafka instead of re-writing him.
If I were an artist, I would create life-like statues of attractive naked women and position them in a landfill. Honesty and freedom. I would insist that this is not an allegory, but merely a paraphrase of life as it is.
