Franz Kafka had a pretty good read on people. He recognized, among other things, the strange but vital interpersonal rules that enhanced one’s credibility or diminished it, depending on the circumstances and the individuals concerned. If you’re at all familiar with Black Mirror, the Channel Four and Netflix sci-fi / horror series, you might have caught the premiere episode of the third season. It concerns people living in a society where social media popularity translates to real societal value, and affects things as mundane as how people respond to you in passing to those as significant as where you’re allowed to live and work. The human dynamic of this scenario, abandoning the technological component, is quintessential Kafka terrain. One wonders what a depiction of social media would look like in his methodical and capable hands.
No more is Kafka’s talent for descrying nuance in just this sort of human behavior, the concept of what makes one a credible source, on display than in the story, “The Village Schoolmaster [The Giant Mole].” In it, readers are offered information regarding the piquant discovery of an abnormally large mole in the unnamed region’s countryside — hence the bracketed auxiliary title. But the brackets are a much better touch than one might first be given to assume. They hint at the kind of compartmentalization into which the mole is relegated throughout the story’s telling. At first blush it’s a story centering on a peculiar and inexplicable phenomenon not unlike other Kafka stories, such as “The Metamorphosis” and “Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor.” Instead, though, it is crafted to speak of issues very different, far less surreal than a giant mole, and much more characteristically human.
Accordingly, the story’s title does not bury the lede. It is, indeed, about the village schoolmaster who discovers the giant mole’s existence, first and foremost. Even more awkwardly it’s told through the first-person narration of a “Mr. So-and-So,” as designated by the village schoolmaster but this is according to the narrator, an individual also referred to as a businessman, and therefore of a rank suggesting he’s held in some esteem by society, esteem it’s safe to presume a lowly schoolmaster is beneath. And so the story begins to show its true nature, describing the contrivances of credibility and those possessing the means to adequately and convincingly argue their case, with all the superfluity accompanying any and every overture or public gesture. The truth can be manufactured, and it often is.
It’s conspicuous how the narrator chooses to handle the situation presented by the village schoolmaster. He appears to earnestly want to help the schoolmaster but can find no way to adequately achieve this object, one that is ultimately botched despite his hyper-awareness of all possible consequences. As the narrator puts it:
On the one hand my own influence was far from sufficient to effect a change in learned or even public opinion in the teacher’s favor, while on the other the teacher was bound to notice that I was less concerned with his main object, which was to prove that the giant mole had actually been seen than to defend his honesty, which must naturally be self-evident to him and in need of no defense.
The narrator occupies his narrative with summing up the travails / dilemma of attempting to represent the side of the schoolmaster and his veracity. There is no debating where the mole fits in, i.e. entirely tangentially. The mole is an aside, maybe even a footnote, but probably it doesn’t even warrant a footnote. They could be talking about spontaneous toilet explosions and the narrative would change little at all. The trick of the thing is in best representing a man, in the schoolmaster, who sees no reason he should be on trial, and in point of fact, actually shouldn’t. The village schoolmaster should be considered truthful until proven false, arguably, but that isn’t how these things tend to play out.
It’s about how we the people negotiate the landscape of human interaction, how to best speak on another’s behalf with the classist tools you possess, what cultural / political capital you possess, to warrant being believed. The narrator definitely understands the nature of human behavior, or at least as goes these finer points of custom.
“Believe me,” is the preferred expletive of our new president, one that follows seemingly every boastful claim he offers up to the American people. His critics note it’s precisely for this reason that we shouldn’t trust what he says, that he shouldn’t need a phrase better suited to a used car salesman than a sitting U.S. President to reinforce his positions. This rings especially true when you take inventory of how little Trump has statistically given us to believe in. Politifact has rated Trump’s various statements as “True” an abysmal 4 percent of the time. He’s scored “Mostly True” a not-much-better 12 percent of the time. His combined score “True / Mostly True” score is edged out slightly by the number of times he’s been awarded the dubious distinction of “Pants-on-Fire” (scored 17 percent of the time)—the score reserved on Politifact for only the most egregious, bald-faced lies.
And yet Trump’s mendacity hasn’t seemed to hurt him a whit with his adherents, the fawning minority of the electorate that handed him the American presidency last November. It’s a fascinating, if terrifying development, but not one literary prognosticators of Franz Kafka’s talents couldn’t have foreseen. Veracity and the person doing the speaking have always gone hand-in-hand. Men have historically had the benefit of being believed over women, the very wealthy over the very poor, the dominant racial group in a given society over all others, and so on and so forth. Trump fits neatly into this picture, too, having literally admitted to groping and assaulting women in previous statements, and suffering no consequences for said statements. This is what the power of belief gets you. Failing to possess it, meanwhile, can have fatal consequences. Eric Garner’s pleas of “I can’t breathe” fell on the deaf ears of police officers restraining him in New York City, an error that cost Garner’s life.
It is hard to imagine Trump being deft enough when interacting with others to have a sense of what allows an individual to be believed. But it’s possible, and probably more likely, that you don’t need to be aware of this tendency in humans in any abstract way to exploit it. It is the result of a kind of sixth sense people in Trump’s position possess. The benefits of power are ever-present, even when they’re unconsciously wielded. Trump, in the unlikely event that this happens at all, would never need to worry about being restrained so roughly by the police that he might be asphyxiated.
In “The Village Schoolmaster [The Giant Mole],” after the narrator publishes a pamphlet with the misguided belief that it will help confirm the truth of the schoolmaster’s claim, he soon discovers a different truth:
In other words, he was of the opinion that I had merely damaged his credit, and that my belief that I had been or could be of assistance to him was simplicity at best, but more likely presumption or artifice. He was particularly fond of saying that all his previous enemies had shown their hostility either not at all, or in private, or at most by word of mouth, while I had considered it necessary to have my censures straightway published. Moreover, the few opponents of his who had really occupied themselves with the subject, if superficially, had at least listened to his, the schoolmaster’s, views before they had given expression to their own: while I, on the strength of unsystematically assembled and in part misunderstood evidence, had published conclusions which, even if they were correct as regarded the main point, must evoke incredulity, and among the public no less than the educated. But the faintest hint that the existence of the mole was unworthy of credence was the worst thing that could happen in this case.
In the schoolmaster’s eyes, at least, the narrator had taken his work and presented it ham-handedly to the public, which itself undermined its credibility. Indeed, the forum of precisely how something is presented can evoke skepticism, too. Since we’re seeing this from the narrator’s perspective, there is something noticeably absent to the reader, as well. We cannot know for ourselves just how awkwardly the narrator has bungled presentation (though the narrator does admit he was in error) or if this—as the narrator hints at—is an impulse of the schoolmaster to absolve himself of blame. The schoolmaster effectively tells the narrator, at least I was given a chance to be heard, however middling. You, meanwhile, shot yourself in the foot before you’d even begun, and wasted all of your cultural capital in the process, reducing yourself to a status below my own. Quibbling and bickering amongst themselves, the hoi polloi fights for the meager scraps of credibility that are left to them and clawing for superior, however minimal, standing.
This passage likewise brings to mind Trump’s invocations of “FAKE NEWS!” If a source has been so thoroughly undermined as to remove its credibility, no matter the substance of what it’s claiming, it simply won’t be believed. The power of despots in action is their ability to sculpt credibility while actively undermining the voice of any others in media and elsewhere that could present evidence to the contrary. If you’re working at a deficit in belief already, this can be virtually impossible to overcome in the space of public opinion, the space in which what is truly true and what’s not is increasingly decided.
The media, for its own part, does itself no favors by leaping onto sensationalized accounts of scandal and so forth that could give said despot or any acting authority the ability to reasonably undermine them. A terrifying “Boy Who Cried Wolf” scenario arises, and the media is left to deal with the baffling overplay of their hand. Matt Taibbi recently issued a clear warning of this prospect to the media and overzealous Democratic politicians in relation to the trials and tribulations of the embattled Trump administration.
I’ll say it was easy for me to feel a ton of unintended resonance in this story from my standpoint as school teacher to the esteem still given to businessmen, such as Trump. Trump is clearly offered a great deal of leeway by his proponents and fans, leeway that would, one imagines, allow him to immediately declare a giant mole rat has been ravaging the American countryside, despite having no evidence to bolster his claim, and have it be believed outright. Perhaps this is where Kafka’s businessman, “Mr. So-and-So” truly falters, thinking he needs to provide evidence at all. Recent studies regarding the public’s trust in certain societal institutions suggest, despite all the ways it has actively abused this trust in recent years (the housing crisis and subsequent financial collapse, the automobile industry bailout, Occupy Wall Street, large-scale corporate outsourcing, Citizens United, and so on) that corporations remain a source of information the public has generally kept its faith in over the past year (2016-17), as opposed to government and media, which people trust far less comparatively.
Rebecca Solnit’s recent comments seem particularly apt in regard to the crossroads we’re at as a nation in the wake of Trump’s election, and with it all the baggage that remains wedged firmly between factions of the American people, “Who is heard and who is not defines the status quo. By redefining whose voice is valued, we redefine our society and its values.” I tend to think both Solnit and Kafka understand how fraught with hazards such reworking of this status quo will be.
