K.

VIII. The Blanket of Moss

“The Burrow” is the closest one gets in Kafka to a testamentary piece of writing; it was composed during his last winter, 1923–1924. The story’s tone is that of a scrupulous account, as if to say: if you really want to know what my life was like, you’ll find the logbook here, but stripped of every inessential thing, reduced to a geometry of movements, above and below the blanket of moss that marked the entrance to my burrow. The entire story is a deductive chain descending from a single utterance, four words from the Diaries, written at the beginning of 1920: “Meine Gefängniszelle — meine Festung.” “My prison cell — my fortress.”

What is “The Burrow” about? A subject Kafka touched on many times, in his Diaries and in numerous letters. Always allusively, never systematically. It had to do with a “way of life,” one that was — he came to think — irreducibly his, but that in the beginning had been almost a game, a challenge, a dare. By the end, though, it was clearly a necessity. That way of life — or rather that survival regimen — revealed itself ever more clearly and rigorously thanks to the action of what Kafka called the writing. But the writing in turn had simply brought to the surface that which already existed anyway: a lag, a caesura in the “current of life,” in which, he knew, he had “never been swept up.” He hadn’t succeeded in so being, wouldn’t have wanted to be, couldn’t have been.

Every so often Kafka got the urge to investigate how it all began, how that “way of life,” which would later become the only way of life for him, had first come into being. Once in the Diaries, in an entry from January 1922, he described those beginnings in language so calm and cool it sounds definitive:

The evolution was simple. When I was still happy, I wanted to be unhappy and drove myself, using all the means that my times and my tradition made available to me, into unhappiness, yet even so I always wanted to be able to go back. In short I was always unhappy, even with my happiness. The strange thing is that the whole act, if one performs it in a sufficiently systematic way, can become real. My spiritual decadence began with a childish game, however conscious I was of its childishness. For example, I would deliberately contract the muscles of my face, or I would walk down the Graben with my arms crossed behind my head. Annoyingly puerile games, but effective. (Something similar happened with the evolution of my writing, except that later the evolution of my writing came regrettably to a halt.) If unhappiness can be forcibly induced in this fashion, then one should be able to induce anything. However much subsequent developments seem to contradict me, and however much it conflicts in general with my nature to think this, I can’t by any means accept that the origins of my unhappiness were inwardly necessary, perhaps they had some necessity of their own, but not an inward one, they swarmed in like flies and like flies could have easily been driven away.

The German language has two words that can mean “burrow”: Höhle and Bau. Opposing words: Höhle refers to an empty space, a cavity, a cavern; Bau refers to the burrow as construction, edifice, articulation of space. For the animal who speaks in “The Burrow,” the two words correspond to two different ways of understanding the same space. The Höhle is the burrow as refuge, “safety hole,” pure terror reflex, attempt to escape the outside world. While Bau, the burrow as construction, has a self-sufficient, sovereign quality, indeed is concerned above all with continually verifying its own self-sufficiency and sovereignty. Confusion over the two meanings is practically offensive — and the unidentified animal rejects it indignantly: “But the burrow (Bau),” he says, “is certainly not merely a safety hole!” In fact he never once uses the word Höhle to describe his burrow. And for no one does he show as much disdain as for that hypothetical animal — surely “a pathetic wretch”—who would expect “to dwell where he hasn’t built.”

“The Burrow” is a single outpouring of words — the last pages are not even paragraphed — that breaks off at the beginning of a sentence. But according to the text’s animating principle, the narrator could continue narrating indefinitely. Only one creature can stop him: his shadowy counterpart, should he by some chance emerge from his purely acoustic existence, ceasing to dig in the burrow as if it were his own and instead showing himself snout to snout. That would be a mortal clash. Or else that undefined, harassing creature might simply vanish, to be replaced by another supposition and other anxieties. In any case the interruption of the text would be haphazard and abrupt. Because, like the constant, relentless whistling that comes through the tunnel walls, the buzz of words from the narrating animal is unceasing. Nothing can calm it, not even certainty. “I’ve reached the point where I no longer even wish to feel certainty,” admits the burrow’s builder — and that is enough to show us the inexhaustible and compulsive nature of his enterprise.

In “The Burrow,” Kafka strips away every contingency and reveals the compulsion of writing in its irreducible state, as a pure chain of gestures. Everything becomes vastly abstract, but at the same time the word, on this bare, hidden stage, takes on a pathos it has never before achieved in narrating itself. And certain sentences or sentence fragments stand out with a painful intensity, reverberating endlessly through the hollow tunnels:

the murmur of silence in the stronghold

it’s as if the spring from which the burrow’s silence flows had been unsealed

Precisely by virtue of being the owner of this great and vulnerable work, I am naturally defenseless in the face of any slightly more serious attack, my happiness in possessing it has spoiled me, the vulnerability of the burrow has rendered me vulnerable, its wounds pain me as if they were my own.

the great burrow stands defenseless, and I am no longer a young apprentice, but rather an old master builder, and what strength I still possess fails me when the decisive moment comes.

Gregor Samsa is a creature akin to the undefined animal who narrates “The Burrow,” but he lacks that animal’s constructive genius and speculative mind. He lacks, in short, a burrow. His room has undergone only the slightest of transformations, indicated by his three locked doors. Gregor simply hasn’t had time to think about such things, what with having to rush through the outside world, from one train to another, spurred on by his alarm clock, in order to earn enough to maintain his family and to pay off his father’s debts. But Gregor too could use a blanket of moss to conceal the entrance to his room. Lacking one, he’s the most exposed of creatures. The outside world can’t help but wound him, like the cruel apples his father throws at him. And though Gregor is as big as a dog when he stands, his nature as an insect — or rather as an indeterminate Ungeziefer, a word that already suggests noxiousness — predisposes him to his only possible end: elimination. No one needs a burrow more than he, and even the humblest kind would do, the kind that’s merely a “hole for saving one’s life” and as such is scorned by the wise animal who narrates “The Burrow” and harbors quite different ambitions. But Gregor won’t get one. He gets nothing but bare walls over which to run madly and a couch under which to squat. He always feels like one who finds himself nude among people who are clothed, covered, protected, armed — while he, with his delicate legs, is defenseless.

“The Metamorphosis” is a story of doors that open and close. And above all doors that are locked or forced. Gregor Samsa’s room has three doors. When Gregor, one rainy morning, wakes to find himself transformed into something resembling a beetle, roughly a meter in length, he immediately thinks anxiously of the late hour and the inherent torment of working as a traveling salesman who must rise early, while other salesmen can afford to “live like harem women.” A little while later he hears insistent knocking on all three of his doors: first he hears his mother’s voice, behind the door that leads to the living room; then his father’s, behind the door that leads to the hallway; then his sister’s, behind the door that leads to her room. Gregor is besieged by voices — and all three doors are locked. Because Gregor has taken “the precaution bred by his travels of locking every door at night even at home.” So reasonable and quotidian is Gregor’s train of thought up to that point that no one — not even Gregor — is given pause by the strangeness of this fact. To lock three doors every night within his own house, a house inhabited by a father, a mother, and a sister to whom he is very attached, is not by any means normal behavior. And not only did Gregor impose this ritual on himself, he “congratulated himself” on it. By locking those doors, he prepared a sealed space, ready for a metamorphosis. But seen through the persecuting eyes of the outside world, his door-locking gesture is a declaration of hostility. As the chief officer of his firm will say, in an accusatory tone, having come to see what happened to Gregor Samsa: “You are barricading yourself in your room.” But that very room, admittedly “rather on the small side,” furnished with the most commonplace of household objects, the only personal touch being the photograph of an unknown woman in a hat, boa, and fur muff, hung on a wall in a frame that Gregor himself cut with his fretsaw in a spare hour, has become a sealed and impenetrable enclosure — the precondition for achieving any metamorphosis, including the one that manifests itself in Gregor’s own body. Of course, Gregor didn’t know that. He must have wanted only to separate himself a little more clearly from that small community to which all his energies, especially since it was decided that he should pay off his father’s debts, have been devoted. Or perhaps he didn’t want such a separation. But one occurred. And every separation (even a slight one) is a total separation. This physical and metaphysical law was never the object of Gregor’s reflections. But laws hold sway regardless, even among those who are ignorant of them.

From the moment when Gregor, on his way to bed, absentmindedly locks the three doors to his room, his entire life becomes a series of doors that open and doors that close. In the beginning it is Gregor himself who won’t open up, since he doesn’t yet know how to control his big beetle body. In the end it’s his sister, his executioner, who chases him back to his room, by now crowded with “skeins of dust and filth.” Gregor will hear her scream: “Finally!” as she turns the key in the lock. Between these two extremes, a harrowing series of intermediate stations: the door that opens because the sister is bringing food for the insect; the door that again is opened so the sister and mother can remove the furniture from the room; the door that opens because Gregor, standing on his hind legs like a dog, succeeds in laboriously turning the key with his mandibles; the door that is left open in the evenings so that Gregor, “remaining in the darkness of his room, invisible from the dining room, could watch the whole family at the lamp-lit table and listen to their conversations, more or less with their consent”; and the half-open door through which Gregor is able to spy on the three bearded boarders as they chew the food his mother serves them.

In the three months of Gregor’s life as an insect, his door is for him the emblem of the “borderland between solitude and community.” If Kafka abandoned that region “only in the rarest of cases,” Gregor manages to do so only once. Draped like Glaucus emerging from the sea, except with “bits of thread, hair, and leftover food on his back and sides” instead of algae, mosses, and shells, weakened by fasting and insomnia, still aching from the wound his father inflicted by hurling an apple at him, Gregor Samsa has “no qualms about inching across the immaculate dining room floor.” His gesture is heroic — and prefigures his mystical suicide. As a man, he was indifferent to music; only in his animal metamorphosis have sounds revealed to him “the path to longed-for and unknown nourishment.” For that nourishment, Gregor is prepared not only to die but to go on the attack. After having shown for weeks the most delicate modesty in hiding himself behind a sheet and under the sofa, Gregor dares to consider “taking advantage for the first time of his terrifying appearance” (much as Kafka did in writing “The Metamorphosis”) in order to reach the music’s source. Doing so will get him only as far as his sister and her violin, at which point he confides to her his plan to send her to the conservatory. Rising on his two hindmost legs, which are by now accustomed to such exertions, he pulls himself up to the level of her shoulders and “kiss[es] her neck,” exposed in its nakedness, “without ribbons or collars.” The cumbersome beetle kissing his sister’s neck is the most excruciating of all moments musicaux. And an unbearable erotic vision as well. It would have been able to revive the great wind that “blew in from the past,” from millions of years ago, to which the chimpanzee Rotpeter will one day refer in one of his academic talks. But that won’t be acceptable. That great wind, observes Rotpeter with supreme irony, can now be nothing more than a “breath tickling the heels of whoever walks this earth: the small chimpanzee and the great Achilles alike.” For this reason, Gregor’s reckless appearance on the dining room floor is followed, a few minutes later, by the sister’s judgment: “We must try to get rid of it.” The next morning the cry of the bony charwoman resounds: “Come look at this, it’s croaked!”