The Next Village

There is a (very) short story by Franz Kafka, with the title The Next Village. When I first read it, aged 17, and studying for German A Level, I think I thought it was simply amusingly weird. Now, aged 55, and getting a first good long look at old age (still in the distance, but closer and a damn sight more real than A Levels), my view of it has changed several times.

Here is the whole thing, in my translation:

Grandad always used to say: "Life is amazingly short. Looking back, even now, everything is all so closely crowded up that I can scarcely imagine, say, how a young person makes up their mind to visit the next village without the fear that -- quite apart from any mishaps -- even the length of a normally, happily unfolding life will be nowhere near enough time for such a trip."

Now, I think it's easy to take this story at face value. How very true, you might think: the older I get the quicker the time seems to go! How clear my childhood seems, but where, for the love of Dora Diamant, are my car keys? Short, sharp, and to the point -- good old Kafka! You could get the thing made up into a little poster to hang over your desk. "You don't have to be Kafka to work here, but it helps!"

However, for what it's worth, I always think it's good to remember that Kafka had a sense of humour. And, as that classic double act Deleuze and Guattari point out, the problem with most readers and critics is that they retreat from the experience of the unknown to the knowable, from the uncomfortable to the comfort zone: Kafka's castle must be "god", transformation into a beetle must be about oedipal conflict, etc. As Freud is alleged to have said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Or, as G. Marx did say, "Mind if I don't smoke?"

I refer you to my earlier post Impossible Things. Is it not amusing that an old man, at the end of his "normally, happily unfolding life," comes to the realisation that a trip to the next village (a journey he has presumably made many times) is actually impossible? That life, as lived, has an exponential quality which makes the banal, the eminently possible, as daunting as a trip to Mars? Perhaps it's a joke you can only get if you have ever slumped in a room (depressed, drunk, wasted, or simply lazy) and longed to be in that impossibly distant corner shop.

[Note added 25/9/23: Are you reading this post? I'd really appreciate it if you would tell me why, and how you got here! This is by far one of my most read blog posts, but I have no idea why it is so popular. Have you been set this story as a translation or interpretation exercise? Is there some word or phrase in here that brought this post up in a search? Or perhaps you are really just a robot inflating my viewing stats for no obvious reason? So please, either comment below or send me an email (address in my profile top right). Thanks!]