Page 68 - GALIET KAFKABEL JOB, KANT AND MILTON: Omnipotence, Impotence and Rebellion IV+

Galiet & Galiet
farther away from the fountain of life.”390 Milton’s notion of truth “is compar’d in Scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetual progression, they sick’n into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition:”391 the very traditions and customs Job and K, defiantly and heroically challenge. Milton’s fabled call to shun the “double tyranny of external and internal customs”392 is maximized in Job and K during their trials, not as a heresy per se,393 but rather as a Miltonian struggle against custom, conformity and oppression.
Groundless, Job and Josef K challenge not only the prison of custom Milton vehemently deplores,394 but the injustice that might is right. If Job, enlightened, denounces his friends’ belief system, Josef K, brainy and cultivated, challenges the unfit legal drones in their attempt to govern him (T49-50, 52, 183-6), in the same way Milton denounces the irrational and incompetent legal drones that undercut, challenge, and try to govern their superiors as Plato and Aristotle too warn.395 The Trial’s Court, whether religious or political, benefits the interest of the strongest,396 anti- Socratic maxim anticipating the theories of the social contract397 and the bestialities of 20th century’s fascism and Latin American totalitarianism: mise en abysms of Kafkabel’s and Jobel’s inaccessible courts refuting civil rights, dignity, and agency as decadent mirrors of the eternally recurring tyranny of the infinite plus one: ¥+1.398
The Book of Job and The Trial crisscross the defiance of exile with futility and impotence. If Job and K, intimidated, defy in bitter agony and free rein Yahweh’s and the Judge’s arbitrary might (9:20, 10:1, 23:1-7; T13-8; 126), their paths are beset with snares (18:5; T205), the hellhounds399 of terror and Death400 chase them (18:5; T205, 225-31), and whichever way they turn (18:5; T208-9), they meet them closing in from every side (18:5; T225-31).401
390 Brod, Max. Franz Kafka. A Biography. Trans. By G. Humphreys Roberts (Chapter I to VII) and by Richard Winston (Chapter VIII). New York, Schocken Books, 1937. 175
391 Milton. Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. By Merritt Y. Hughes. Areopagitica. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1957. 543
392 Please see note 66 on the tyranny of custom. Milton. Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. By Merritt Y. Hughes. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1957. 754-58
393 Milton quotes in a fabled passage, “a man may be a heretick in the truth; and if he believe things only because his Pastor sayes so, or the Assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds, becomes his heresie.” Milton. Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. By Merritt Y. Hughes. Areopagitica. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1957. 543
394 Milton agrees with Plato. He argues that custom is never allied to reason but to licence, the passions, and indulgence. See Plato’s Republic VIII, 582c. Milton says that, “untrained minds are, therefore, naturally vicious, permitting wretched rulers. When human beings are irrational, they can neither discern good from evil, nor a good King from a tyrant King and justice flees away; it becomes perverted. Thus, the rule of law becomes a tyranny that serves the master and not the people or commonwealth. Rather than freeing and elevating minds to greater deeds and freedom, it enslaves them and reduces them to servility and fear, and dissent and civil war. Moreover, when the appetites govern, the desire for power overwhelms corroding virtue, and inviting disorder and chaos to reign. In this state, humans incapable of self-governance are incapacitated to govern a nation.” Milton. Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. By Merritt Y. Hughes. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1957. 754-58
395Milton.CompletePoemsandMajorProse.Ed.ByMerrittY.Hughes. TheTenureofKingandMagistrates.Indianapolis:HackettPublishingCompany,Inc., 1957. 759-60. Plato. Republic. Plato. Plato Complete Works. Ed. By John M. Cooper, D.S. Hutchinson. Indiana, Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1997. Aristotle. “Politics.” 1252a-1253b. The Basic Works of Aristotle. Ed. By Richard McKeon. New York: The Modern Library, 2001. 1127-28
396 Plato. Republic. Book I. 338c. See Argument between Callicles and Thrasymachus. Plato Complete Works. Ed. John M. Cooper, D.S. Hutchinson. Indiana,HackettPublishingCompany,Inc.,1997.Thequotereads,“Justiceisnothingotherthantheadvantageofthestronger.” Trans.ByGrube-Reeve.
397 Milton posits that the social contract was instituted to bind each other from mutual injury. This view was similarly held by some pre-Socratics, Plato’s Glaukon in the Republic, and Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan, and Jean Jacques Rousseau in the Social Contract. Milton. Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. By Merritt Y. Hughes. The Tenure ofKings and Magistrates. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1957. 754
398 Nietzsche posits that in a world of indestructible and finite atoms, their infinite possible combinations in the eternity of time results in an infinite number of universes with an infinite number of identical moments, or an infinite recurrence (Wiederkehr) of identical cases. Nietzsche. Thus Spake Zarathustra. 57. The Convalescent. Trans. Thomas Common. Cumberland: Wordsworth Classics, 1997. 214
399 The man from the country sees fleas in the doorkeeper’s collar, suggesting it is a dog’s collar (T215-17) and that priests were dog-gods in the likes of Egyptian Anubis or Am-Heh, the Underworld Judges and devourers of millions. It also recalls the likeness of the hellhounds in many underworlds of those that devoured millions, and whose dogfaces had been hungry for sacrifices. This is my own figurative interpretation of Kafka based on his sentiments about dogs in relation to the Old Testament. I felt it was relevant to extend the metaphor to the God of the Underworld of Egyptian mythology, Am-Heh simply because it resonates with K’s own sacrifice, and with K’s perception that the Prosecutor and his servants are hounds, and that Lady Justice is a Huntress. Am-Heh lives past the lake of fire, swallows souls, and devours hearts. K is executed in the heart. There is also an eerie resonance, applicable only in English phonetics and visuals, to “Am” “He,” recalling Yahweh’s “I am that I am” of Exodus. And there is also the two HH and the AE of Yahweh in its name. This is just an etymological intuition. Maybe there is a link to the Tetragrammatons’ through Egyptian mythology of Anubis or Ah-Heh absolutely worthy of study. One of the figurative uses of the term “dog” in the OT, relevant to Kafka’s usage in The Trial is to designate the wicked. In Isa. 56:10-11, it alludes to Israel’s greedy or corrupt religious leaders, and in Phi. 3:2, it possibly refers to a Judaistic party within the church. It is also applied to men in excessive humility (I Sam. 17:43; II Sam. 3:8).
—68—