Page 71 - GALIET KAFKABEL JOB, KANT AND MILTON: Omnipotence, Impotence and Rebellion IV+

Galiet & Galiet
limits of the soul on your journey even if you walk every path. So deep is the principle it contains.”412 And so unending are its ways,413
the ever distant {3⁄43⁄4 please read as “from”}
“I3⁄43⁄4Deity” “I3⁄43⁄4I” and the “I3⁄43⁄4they” the Tree of Good and Evil 3⁄43⁄4 the Tree of Life the Prosecutor 3⁄43⁄4 the Defendant between polarities
Paradise Lost 3⁄43⁄4 Paradise Regained Guilt 3⁄43⁄4 Innocence
What may unfold or blossom amidst these trees of good and evil and life in the deserts of being? What genuine Rose? At the jaw of tyranny’s Law, art announces the cult to the anti-metaphor, to Parra’s anti-poem,414 to Adorno’s death of poesy after the Holocaust.415 Kafka’s poetic world is “an anti-world, the negative mirror of history.”416 Dwelling also in an anti-world, Job’s poesy does not revere God (15:1). Job’s anti-poesy is as much a cry of dereliction as is Kafka’s anti-poesy. If Job cries, “why do you hide your face and consider me your enemy?” (13:24; 9:14-17), K cries where is the Judge that I never saw? (T230-31). There 3⁄4 only a whisper and a trace, a faint memory of innocence and the glory of days past (29; T228), of a joyous idyll conjugated with lament for Job, and with Eden’s beauty for K (T228).417 Job knows his Redeemer lives; K believes there must be a Judge. In Job, there is awareness of divine presence, in K, of divine absence. What whispers and sorrows may not in these heaths be heard? What laments or prayers? Was there anyone that had cared (T230) amidst the infinite recurrence of numberless series of Lost Edens and Uzes?
In the desolate deserts, the heath landscapes replicate themselves towards a reality of endless dispossessions, of endless barrenness, of the endless trials of the soul. There 3⁄4 there is no Shekinah for Job, no pillar of cloud to guide him through his desert wonderings. Though his redeemer lives (19:25-27), He does not answer. There 3⁄4 there is no divine presence for K, no Judge, though he yearns and believes in one (T214) to guide him through his attic
412 See Fragment 48 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers 9.7.6-8 Long. 44. Waterfield, Robin. The First Philosophers. The Presocratics and the Sophists. USA: Oxford University Press, 2009.
413 Max Brod argues that Kafka’s Great Wall of China and The Trial are texts that never come to an end, and in their endless nature, they emulate Kafka’s attempt to meticulously know the unending souls of men. Brod, Max. Franz Kafka. A Biography. Trans. By G. Humphreys Roberts (Chapter I to VIII) and by Richard Winston (chapter VIII). New York: Schocken Books, 1937. 67
414 Just as the Theatre of the Absurd is an anti-theatre, Chilean Parra is hailed as Latin American’s vanguard anti-poet in an anti-Chile. Parra, Nicanor. Poemas y Antipoemas. Ed. De René Costa. Madrid, España: Ediciones Cátedra (Grupo Anaya, S.A.), 2005.
415 In Adorno’s view, “The critique of culture is confronted with the last stage in the dialectic of culture and barbarism: to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric, and that corrodes also the knowledge which expresses why it has become impossible to write poetry today.” Adorno, Theodor. Prisms. “An Essay on Cultural Criticism and Society.” Trans. By Samuel and Shierry Weber Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1967 (originally quoted in Prisms in 1955). 19
416 Anderson, Mark. Reading Kafka. Prague, Politics, and the Fin de Siècle. “Introduction.” Ed. Mark Anderson. New York: Schocken Books, 1989. 5. See also footnote 4 in page 267. “Hence the religious, allegorical interpretations of Kafka’s first readers, including Max Brod, Margarete Susman, Kurt Tucholsky, Hans- Joachim Schoeps, Herbert Kraft and (in a different notion of allegory), Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, and Theodor Adorno. The French Surrealists, who saw in Kafka’s writings the objectification of an archetypal dream world, merely shifted this allegorical reading into the realm of the unconscious.”
417 This alludes to K’s vision on his way to his execution of the beautiful island-garden where he enjoyed himself many times. For the last time, he sees lush trees, the parting waters, and a woman at a distance. Her genuine identity remains shrouded in mystery. Perhaps she alludes to a vision of Eve before The Fall or she symbolizes the feminine Shekinah departing.
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