6 - Kafka’s later stories and aphorisms

Summary

Despite the immense amount written about Kafka's work, a number of the stories (and parables and fragments) composed during the last years of his life have gotten too short shrift. These pieces, produced in the years after 1915, following Kafka's abandonment of work on The Trial, include diary entries, the aphorisms of 1917/18 that Max Brod entitled 'Reflections on Sin, Suffering, Hope, and the True Way', and lengthier stories like 'The Great Wall of China', 'The Investigations of a Dog', 'The Village Schoolmaster', 'The Little Woman', and 'Josephine, the Songstress or: the Mouse People'. Their relative neglect may be due to the fact that, to employ Martin Greenberg's useful distinction, they are 'thought' stories rather than 'dream' stories, the reflections of a narrator absorbed in exquisitely refined 'research'. A piece like the unfinished 1922 story 'The Researches' [or, more commonly, Investigations] of a Dog' ('Forschungen eines Hundes') exemplifies this late style.

The inquiries of such narrators address a matter that often falls short of visual realisation. ‘The Village Schoolmaster’ (‘Der Dorfschullehrer’, 1915), also known as ‘The Giant Mole’ (‘Der Riesenmaulwurf’), for example, begins with the report of a giant mole:

Those, and I am one of them, who find even a little ordinary-sized mole disgusting, would probably have died of disgust if they had seen the giant mole that was observed a few years ago, not far from a small village which gained a certain passing notoriety on that account.

(GWC:I)