Franz Kafka's 'The Warden Of The Tomb' - writing 'back to front'. Doesn't Kafka often write his one imaginative and original idea right at the start of his story - after which he fits things around, and sometimes sadly loses interest and never finishes the writing, for in a very real sense he's already done what he came to do: present a predicament?
A man wakes up finding himself metamorphosed into an insect - on page one. A man makes his way up to his apartment to find a pair of celluloid balls introducing themselves to him in a bouncing way - on page one. A burrow-dwelling creature contemplates the safety of his tunnels; a trapeze-artist decides to never come down - all from the off.
Surely it's only a limited number of writers who can come up with original ideas - ones which (importantly) chime with a readership? So the things are important, and Kafka tends to get them down from the off. The Warden Of The Tomb is an example of just this.
And sometimes this device makes a story read back-to-front, surely? A narrative about a curiously lonely bachelor (Blumfeld An Elderly Bachelor) usually moves from an introduction to the curious bachelor, plagued in his office by two unserious assistants, at home lonely and fussy and deciding not to get himself a dog, and ends up with a finale, a fantastical appearance of two celluloid balls that plague him once he's returned home to his apartment. Only Kafka's story doesn't. It opens with the finale, it opens with the 'good bit'. And The Warden Of The Tomb can be read in a similar way.
Kafka's fantastical image is that of an old tomb-warden who has for years been engaging the ancestors of the Prince of this realm, to whom the tomb belongs, in nightly wrestling matches. This idea and this image turns out to be a flashback; The 'good bit' is right at the beginning. Back to front.
Explanations and expansions are then rolled-out. A Prince who is faced with the words of his placid Chamberlain, his rebellious Steward, and The Female in the form of two women who are trying to access him sexually both with their separate agendas; a Prince who has two preoccupations, that of governing his people, and that of consulting his ancestors for a way to 'strengthen his foundations'.
Back-to-front writing is a technique used by several writers (and film makers), but they don't normally use it because they have a rare great 'hook'; they use it for other creative reasons. But of course 'great hooks' are one of Kafka's huge rare talents.
Of course if you do have one of these hooks, surely it makes sense to put it down at the outset. It answers the purely practical problem of grabbing a reader's attention at the start, and it avoids the similar risk of losing a reader before you've delivered your 'great scene'.
A story told this way is perhaps a more sophisticated one, one that avoids the simplicity of a start, which moves to an expansion, which moves to a finale. Perhaps slightly more sophisticated than the simple narrative then, but a method that does create its own problems. After your grand finale at the front - where do you go? On the risk side there is the tendency to wander a bit; on the opportunity side there is the task of trying to grab the type of readership who are curious about how someone (or with Kafka some creature endowed with human-like thoughts) has got itself into this predicament. And oh aren't they always predicaments in Kafka's world.
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