In the case, the singular case, of Franz Kafka, the law of diminishing returns might be applied in an adapted form: the more diminished the text, the richer the return. He was a master of the fragment, and an aphorist every bit as great as Nietzsche or Rochefoucauld. Consider these few examples. “A cage went in search of a bird.” “I feel like a Chinaman going home; but then, I am a Chinaman going home.” “There is a destination but no way there; what we refer to as way is hesitation.” “In your struggle with the world, hold the world’s coat.” And then there is that famous, and famously sly, response he gave to his friend Max Brod who had asked if there was any hope to be had in the world: “Plenty of hope – for God – no end of hope – only not for us.”
In this splendid new selection from Kafka’s fiction – though Kafka’s fiction calls for some other, unique designation – Mark Harman, professor emeritus of German and English at Elizabethtown College in the US, begins with two fragments, Wish to Become an Indian and The Trees, which might be epigraphs written specially by Kafka himself.
