)

SOURCE: "The Objective Depiction of Absurdity," in Quarterly Review of Literature, Vol. 2, No. 3, 1945, pp. 211-27.

[In the following excerpt, Magny discusses the theme of "fundamental solitude" in "A Hunger Artist."]

One must not look on Kafka merely as a spirit of denial, who ridicules all human ambitions because he cannot comprehend their nobility: he feels on the contrary very strongly the nobility of any aspiration or effort, whatever its object. The end of the ape's Report [in "A Report to an Academy"] is full of legitimate pride, the pride of the life that has attained exactly the goal it set and which does not admit the suggestion that "perhaps it was not worth the trouble." Kafka simply refuses to consider the ontological value of the end toward which man aspires and gives us only the most humble, and usually grotesque and vulgar, expressions of it. In Kafka our...