Discussion - Week Fifteen - Kafka - The Burrow

[Jim]

This discussion covers the story, The Burrow


Despite all of our planning and effort, are we ever really safe?

[Zadignose]

This has been a favorite of mine in the past, and it remains a favorite now that I've read it again. It's very obsessive in pursuing its idea, entirely awash in anxiety, full of familiar undermining and contradiction and qualification. It could be read as an analogy for many various phenomena, but it remains largely enigmatic... is it a parable, is it an expression of a spiritual quest, the challenges of writing a great novel, the inevitability of death and the futility of all our efforts, the nature of knowledge and doubt, the methods of scientific inquiry? The efforts to master one's own will? Confusion? All of these and other things? Or is it principally about the difficulties of living in a burrow and trying to avoid being eaten by predators? Is it basically one more idea that the author latched onto, developed with his own unrelenting method, without having to be concerned with what it might "represent" to one viewer or another? Is it another nightmare of sorts, which is a little too concrete and specific to dismiss as mere nightmare? Is it an expression of the anxieties of a schizoid who is entirely distrustful of all society? Is it... you get the picture.

What the hell is the protagonist? He's manlike and beastlike, but not entirely either. He refers to claws, pounding with his forehead, he's big enough to casually carry a whole rat in his mouth, he's analytical in a way we would never expect any beast to be (and perhaps only the most peculiar or neurotic humans could be...), he refers to his early "manhood," etc.

And then, the story cruelly refuses to relieve our anxiety and doubts. There is a strong untestable hypothesis, and then... "all remained unchanged."

"But you do not know me if you think I am afraid, or that I built my burrow simply out of fear."

There are many surprises throughout. "There are also enemies in the bowels of the earth. I have never seen them, but legend tells of them." Legend? Whose legend? Our protagonist is without community! Or... Even more enigmatic, but possibly played just for laughs: "I must go my long round of all the passages... as I often did, or as I have often heard that it was done."

"Poor homeless wanderers in the roads and woods, creeping for warmth into a heap of leaves or a herd of their comrades, delivered to all the perils of the earth!" So, is this actually just an extension of a common anxious desire for security while surrounded by the war- and interwar-year realities? (I referenced depression era earlier, but Kafka died earlier than that).

"But it is this very uniformity of the noise everywhere that disturbs me most..." It's the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation, you fool!

More of Kafka's tendencies to relate a specific event as though it were a universal, here achieved by a momentary switch to the second person: "And this growing-louder is like a coming-nearer; still more distinctly than you hear the increasing loudness of the noise, you can literally see the step that brings it closer to you. You leap back from the wall, you try to grasp at once all the possible consequences that this discovery will bring with it. You feel as if you had never really organized the borrow for defense against an attack; you had intended to do so, but despite all your experience of life the danger of an attack, and consequently the need to organize the place for defense, seemed remote--or rather not remote (how could it possibly be!)--but infinitely less important than the need to put it in a state where one could live peacefully." Yup, that's how it generally goes!

Or, as Jim put it, "are we ever really safe?" is probably the most succinct way of expressing the thesis. (Answer being "no.")

[Ellen]

I was struck by the overwhelming need for an impossibility: security. The more the protagonist tries to guarantee his security, the worse the nightmare becomes. And it seems (amongst many other things) a description of the human state-we must be/cannot be secure.