On Parables
by M. Munro
Many complain that the words of the wise are always merely parables and of no use in daily life, which is the only life we have. When the sage says: “Go over,” he does not mean that we should cross to some actual place, which we could do anyhow if the labor were worth it; he means some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us, something too that he cannot designate more precisely, and therefore cannot help us here in the very least. All these parables really set out to say merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already. But the cares we have to struggle with every day: that is a different matter.
Concerning this a man once said: Why such reluctance? If you only followed the parables you yourselves would become parables and with that rid of all your daily cares.
Another said: I bet that is also a parable.
The first said: You have won.
The second said: But unfortunately only in parable.
The first said: No, in reality: in parable you have lost.
“If you only followed the parables,” it has been written, “you yourselves would become parables.” How is one to understand “follow” here? “The words of the wise are always merely parables,” “many complain” in the parable’s opening words, “and”—are therefore, it’s implied: something of consequence is to follow—“of no use in daily life, which is the only life we have.” For “when the sage says: ‘Go over,’ he does not mean that we should cross to some actual place, which we could do anyhow if the labor were worth it; he means some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us, something too that he cannot designate more precisely, and therefore”—my emphasis—“cannot help us here in the very least.”
How is one to follow that?
“If you only followed the parables you yourselves would become parables and with that rid of all your daily cares.” Because as opposed to parables—as opposed, that is, to “some fabulous yonder,” “something unknown to us”—“the cares we have to struggle with every day: that is a different matter.” Yet to be “rid” of them? By “becoming” parables?
“I bet that is also a parable.”
“Also” a parable? What does that also insinuate here?
Parables, since they are “of no use” there, are opposed throughout the body of Kafka’s parable to “daily life,” “the cares we have to struggle with every day.” But in the parable’s final line parable is opposed to “reality.” There’s an easy equivalence in daily life between “daily life” and “reality.” And by opposing parable to each—to “daily life” and to “reality”—Kafka seems to confirm that synonymy. Yet what Kafka does in reality is confirm it in parable. Parable insinuates between “daily life” and “reality”—and here is its “use,” the care it demonstrates—the “merest” divergence (“the words of the wise are always merely parables”) by opposing each in turn, first one, then the other. So that one no longer follows from the other. Not as it does so easily, so carelessly, as in (thus) “daily life.”
To have thus discreetly introduced a certain “reluctance.”
Thus (also) “the words of the wise.”
“All these parables really set out to say merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already.” And yet: Between “the incomprehensible,” which we “know” “already” (“the incomprehensible is incomprehensible,” that’s “all these parables really set out to say,” “merely,” “and we know that already”), and what no one has any doubt the sage “means” (“when the sage says: ‘Go over,’ he does not mean that we should cross to some actual place,” but “some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us”), perhaps there’s located “something” that can, in fact, be “designated more precisely”: Between the “unknown” and “the incomprehensible,” in short, how is one to situate knowledge in parable? How is one to place it? And conversely, unavoidably: How, in parable, is one to understand place?
Nor least: What follows?
What’s lost thereby?
What won?
The title of the parable is “On Parables.” Parable is where the stakes are set, where Kafka sets down stakes. (“I bet that is also a parable.”) That the stakes are set in parable does not mean that the fallout can in consequence be limited to it. It is in “the only life we have” and so making of it in its recounting “a different matter” that parable is what “On Parables” will have—with the most scrupulous and uncanny care—gone over. You follow? You yourselves become parables.
About the Author:
M. Munro is author of the open access chapbook, Theory is like a Surging Sea (Punctum books, 2015).
