Curriculum Vitae
Franz Kafka
1883 - Franz Kafka was born in Prague on 3 July.
1889–1893 - Primary school on the Fleischmarktgasse (Meat Market Street). Sisters, Gabrielle, called Elli (1889); Valerie, called Valli (1890); and Ottilie, called Ottla (1892); were born during this period.
1893–1900 - Studies at the Altstädter German Institute. First friends are: Oskar Pollak and Rudolf Illový. The Kafka family lives on the Zeltnergasse (Zeltner Street).
1901–1902 - Higher education at the German University of Prague; first, chemistry; in the summer, German studies, then law. Spends the summer holidays at Liboch, near Prague, and travels to Munich. First meetings with Max Brod. Correspondence with Oskar Pollak; Kafka writes to him on 20 December: “Prague doesn’t let go. Of either of us. This old crone has claws. One has to yield, or else.” Kafka, at the age of nineteen, is expressing the tension he feels between the place in which he has to live and his desire to overcome its limits. In this respect, his writing is a kind of journey that is captive, to a liberation that he would have be total and knows to be impossible.
1903 - Up until this year, has destroyed his first exercises in style. Reads Nietzsche. July: state exams in history of law. Writes to Pollak on 9 November: “Today is Sunday, when the clerks always come down Wenzelsplatz across the Graben, and clamor for Sunday quiet... The others, however, who walk on the Graben smiling because they do not know how to use even their Sunday—I’d slap their faces if I had the courage and didn’t smile myself.” The letter ends with evocative lines on the Charles Bridge and the churches that point in the Prague sky: “People who dark bridges cross, / passing saints / with feeble candles. / Clouds that parade across gray skies, / passing churches / with darkening towers. / One who leans on the squared stone railing, / looking into the evening waters, / hands resting upon ancient stone.”
1904 - Autumn / winter: probably, the first draft of “Description of a Struggle” (“Beschreibung eines Kampfes”).
1905 - In the month of August, he travels to Zuckmantel, Silesia, to stay at a sanatorium; relationship with a woman older than himself.
1906 - Obtains his doctorate in law. In October, begins the year of legal work necessary to exercise the profession.
1907 - Writes “Wedding Preparations in the Country” (“Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande”). The family moves to Niklastrasse (Nicholas Street). In October, he starts work at the Prague office of the Assicurazioni Generali, a company headquartered in the Italian city of Trieste, then Austrian.
1908 - The first prose pieces appear, eight fragments, in the magazine Hyperion. Beginning in July of this year until July 1922, works at the Arbeiterunfall und Versicherungsanstalt (Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute).
1909 - “Conversation with the Supplicant” and “Conversation with the Drunk” are published in Hyperion. Spends his holidays in Riva (on Lake Garda) with Max and Otto Brod. On 29 September, the Prague daily Bohemia publishes the tale “The Airplanes at Brescia” (“Die Aeroplane in Brescia”). He started to write a diary.
1910 - In the Easter supplement of Bohemia, five prose pieces appear under the title “Reflections” (“Betrachtungen”). Starts writing the Diaries. He attends Yiddish theater performances. In the middle of October, travels to Paris with Max and Otto Brod; Kafka falls ill and returns alone to Prague. In early December, travels to Berlin.
1911 - Spends his holidays by the lakes in northern Italy with Max Brod. Spends a period at the Erlenbach sanatorium. His interest in Yiddish theater grows and he makes friends with Jizchak Löwy. (Kafka is attracted by the vitality of this theater of Eastern European origins, which contrasts, perhaps, with the rigor of the performances in Prague by German theater companies.) The Diaries are already voluminous. On 9 October he writes: “If I reach my fortieth year, then I’ll probably marry an old maid with protruding upper teeth left a little exposed by the upper lip.” (Kafka died a month short of his forty-first birthday.) In February, writes The Urban World (Die städtische Welt), an extraordinary dream. From 26 August to 12 September, with Max Brod, passes through Munich on his way to Zurich, Lucerne, Lugano, Milan, and Lake Maggiore. From Italy they go on to Paris, where Kafka writes some notes as an exceptional observer, and then return to Milan, where they see plays at the Fossati Theater. In Paris, they have seen Racine’s Phaedra and Bizet’s Carmen.
1912 - A decisive year for the writer. During the first months he starts The Man Who Disappeared (“Der Verschollene”), which will later be given the title America by Max Brod). Spends July in Weimar with Max Brod. Is introduced to Felice Bauer, with whom in October will begin a copious correspondence. From November to December, tireless and insomniac, writes “Die Verwandlung” (literally, “the transformation,” but known generally as “The Metamorphosis”). By January 1913, has written seven chapters of The Man Who Disappeared, the original title of the novel, which for a long time was published inder the title of America. In December, gives a public reading of “The Judgment” (“Das Urteil”). The number of pages in the Diaries decreases while the letters to Felice abound.
1913 - In Leipzig, Rowohlt publishes Meditation (Betrachtung), which has been in circulation since November 1912. In January, Kafka travels to Berlin to meet Felice Bauer’s family. In May, makes a second trip to Berlin. In September, travels to Vienna, Venice, and Riva.
1914 - In June, becomes engaged to Felice Bauer. In July, breaks off the engagement. Travels to the Baltic. In August, moves to his own rented lodgings on Bilekgasse street. Begins writing The Trial (Der Prozess). Elias Canetti, in his 1969 essay Kafka’s Other Trial (Der andere Prozess Kafkas), makes a connection between the “trial” of Kafka’s engagement and breakup with Felice and its transformation into the novel The Trial. (Klaus Wagenbach also points this out in his magnificent Kafka, of 1964.) Meets Felice’s friend Grete Bloch. October: writes “In the Penal Colony” (“In der Strafkolonie”).
1915 - In January, goes to see Felice Bauer. In March, moves to his own apartment on Lange Gasse (Long Street). (Kafka almost always lived with his parents, except for some periods such as those noted and his final days in Berlin.) The expressionist playwright Carl Sternheim presents the Fontane prize money to Kafka. November: in Leipzig, Rohwohlt publishes “The Metamorphosis” (“Die Verwandlung”). “The Metamorphosis” is displayed in bookshops, along with “The Judgment.”
1916 - In July, goes to Marienbad with Felice. Writes short stories for A Country Doctor (Ein Landarzt). In Munich, gives a reading of “In the Penal Colony.”
1917 - In the evening and at nights, he worked on Alchemists Street, then takes a room in the Schönborn Palace. In July, becomes engaged to Felice for the second time. On 4 September, is diagnosed with tuberculosis. Takes a leave from work and spends time in Zürau with Ottla. Writes “Aphorisms.” In December, in Prague, breaks off his engagement with Felice for the second time.
1918 - First, to Zürau, where he studies Kierkegaard; in the summer, to Prague. In September, to Turnau; in November, to Schelesen. Relationship with Julie Wohryzek, from a modest family, greatly displeases Kafka’s father.
1919 - A Country Doctor and “In the Penal Colony” are published. Spends the summer in Prague. Becomes engaged to Julie Wohryzek. Spends the winter with Max Brod in Schelesen. Writes “Letter to his Father” (“Brief an den Vater”), a document as hurtful as a shot to the hierarchical heart of the family, but prevented from reaching its intended recipient by his mother.
1920 - Sick leave in Merano. Correspondence with Milena Jesenská. Summer and autumn, office work in Prague. Breaks up with Julie Wohryzek. Goes to Matliare, in the Tatra Mountains, for the following months. Strikes up a friendship with a doctor, Robert Klopstock.
1921 -In the Tatra Mountains (Matliare) until September; in Prague for the rest of the year.
1922 - January and February in Spindelmühle; returns to Prague. Reads pages from The Castle (Das Schloss), which he works on from January to September. In the spring, writes “A Hunger Artist” (“Ein Hungerkünstler”) and in the summer, “Investigations of a Dog” (“Forschungen eines Hundes”). Spends June to September in Planá with Ottla, then Prague.
1923 - Spends July in Müritz, on the Baltic Sea. Meets Dora Dymant. Goes to stay with Ottla at Schelesen. From September to March, lives in Berlin with Dymant, a Zionist who revives in Kafka the desire to go and settle in Palestine. Writes some of the narratives that, together with those of the previous year, epitomize the purest traits of his production: “A Little Woman” (“Eine kleine Frau”) and “The Burrow” (“Der Bau”).
1924 - Berlin. In March, leaves for Prague. Writes “Josephine, the Singer, or the Mouse Folk.” Kafka can neither talk nor swallow his food. Leaves Prague at the beginning of April. Goes to the Kierling Sanatorium, with Robert Klopstock and Dora Dymant; dies there on 3 June, while Dymant has gone out for a moment to fetch flowers for him. The writer is buried on 11 June in Prague. “A Hunger Artist” is published that summer.
Lluís Izquierdo is a Lecturer in literature at Barcelona University and a writer. He is the author, among other books, of Kafka y su obra (1983), Seńales de nieve (1995), and Sesión continua (1998).
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CHAPTER 1: KAFKA
The Referential Kafka
Kafka once referred to his writings as “die Darstellung meines traumhaften inneren Lebens” (T 546). Like dreams, his texts combine precise “realistic” detail with absurdity, careful observation and reasoning on the part of the protagonists with inexplicable obliviousness and carelessness. As a prelude to my attempt to identify a model of hegemony in Das Schloß and Der Prozeß , I want to argue in this section that these “dreams” are neither mysterious religious, philosophical, or perhaps psychological allegories whose “referential” content has no independent significance, nor are they merely “the product of a whimsically intricate, at times perverse fantasy.” Rather, they are affected by and respond to the social and political reality Kafka experienced, much more than is apparent from a first reading of his texts, which, “purged of the conventional references to time, place and proper names in nineteenth-century realist narratives” (Anderson, KC 6), and liberated from the laws of physics, seem initially to want to deny their historicity. “Alle seine Geschichten spielen in demselben raumlosen Raum,” writes Adorno, “und so gründlich sind dessen Fugen verstopft, daß man zusammenzuckt, wenn einmal etwas erwähnt wird, was nicht in ihm seinen Ort hat, wie Spanien und Südfrankreich an einer Stelle des Schlosses” (Aufzeichnungen 337). Despite all this, then, I want to argue in the vein of Ernst Fischer:
Knappheit, Entfettung, Abstraktion wird angestrebt. Die Aufmerksamkeit wird auf Details konzentriert, die wesentliche Züge der Problematik in Sicht bringen. Dennoch sind diese Details…keineswegs zeitlos, sondern als Details des Zeitalters, ja noch mehr, der verfallenden Habsburger Monarchie erkennbar. (161)
There is a level at which Kafka’s texts really are concerned with metaphysical speculations about “das Unzerstörbare” and our irremediably intolerable distance from it—the Zürau aphorisms put this beyond doubt—but not to the exclusion of everything else. A simple example is the short text “Gibs auf!” :
Es war sehr früh am Morgen, die Straßen rein und leer, ich ging zum Bahnhof. Als ich eine Turmuhr mit meiner Uhr verglich, sah ich, daß es schon viel später war, als ich geglaubt hatte, ich mußte mich sehr beeilen, der Schrecken über diese Entdeckung ließ mich im Weg unsicher werden, ich kannte mich in dieser Stadt noch nicht sehr gut aus, glücklicherweise war ein Schutzmann in der Nähe, ich lief zu ihm und fragte ihn atemlos nach dem Weg. Er lächelte und sagte: "Von mir willst du den Weg erfahren?" "Ja", sagte ich, "da ich ihn selbst nicht finden kann." "Gibs auf, gibs auf", sagte er und wandte sich mit einem großen Schwunge ab, so wie Leute, die mit ihrem Lachen allein sein wollen. (B 87)
This certainly lends itself to metaphysical interpretations about the difficulty or impossibility of finding “the true way” ; one could also enjoy it simply as an absurd (and funny!) situation. We are not told where or when the incident takes place; we have no background information about the narrator. Nevertheless, the text also conjures up an image of a hectic city in which the narrator has to hurry (mich sehr beeilen) even before anyone is in the streets. The thought of being late terrifies him so much that he becomes unsure of the way—and so the city must be sufficiently big and confusing to make it possible not to know the way to the train station—and the agent of the State who is ostensibly there to help and protect the citizens (Schutzmann) turns out to be sadistically uncooperative. This uncooperativeness is of course not literally “realistic,” but can easily be taken to be suggestive of real conditions—and gains another dimension if one sees the narrator’s predicament as reminiscent of the situation of German-speaking Jews in Prague, never quite at home among nationalist and anti-Semitic Czechs and Germans. This is a sketchy outline of the interpretive possibilities. It is intended only to give a first indication of how one might extract political and social commentary from Kafka—and in the remainder of this section, I hope to demonstrate that such readings are justified. I also hope it is clear that this approach to Kafka does not require a denial of the validity or interest of more “metaphysical” viewpoints.
At the most general level, “Kafka’s negative relation to history is itself subject to historical analysis” (Anderson, RK 21), as Mark Anderson has convincingly argued. Anderson points out the “decadent” aestheticism of Kafka’s early texts, letters, and general lifestyle: “Kafka consciously played the role of dandy and littérateur, dressing with the refined elegance that was then common for an aspiring writer, and frequenting the popular literary clubs, cafés, and cabarets of Prague” (KC 51). With increasing thoroughness, Kafka attempts to purge this aestheticism from his life and his writing. Hence Kafka’s remarkable diary entry about “dieting” in all other areas of his life for the benefit of his writing:
Als es in meinem Organismus klar geworden war, daß das Schreiben die ergiebigste Richtung meines Wesens sei, drängte sich alles hin und ließ alle Fähigkeiten leer stehen, die sich auf die Freuden des Geschlechtes, des Essens, des Trinkens, des philosophischen Nachdenkens der Musik zu allererst richteten. Ich magerte nach allen diesen Richtungen ab. (T 341)
He changes even his handwriting from Gothic to Latin script, pursues various programs of nutrition and exercise in order to rescue his body’s natural vigor from the unhealthy decadence of modern life, and disciplines his writing into the sparse, (deceptively) simple prose characteristic of his writings after “Das Urteil,” so that “Kafka’s ‘purity,’ the ‘stripped-down,’ ‘anonymous,’ ‘existential,’ quality of his texts, is a function of the repression of his own aestheticist origins, his negative relation to fin-de-siècle ornament” (KC 7). Anderson argues in detail that this transformation was in line with a general “crisis of ornament” at this time. As a paradigmatic text for his argument, Anderson cites the following parable, written by Kafka in January of 1918:
Vor dem Betreten des Allerheiligsten mußt du die Schuhe ausziehen, aber nicht nur die Schuhe, sondern alles, Reisekleid und Gepäck, und darunter die Nacktheit und alles, was unter der Nacktheit ist, und alles, was sich unter dieser verbirgt, und dann den Kern und den Kern des Kerns, dann das übrige und dann den Rest und dann noch den Schein des unvergänglichen Feuers. Erst das Feuer selbst wird vom Allerheiligsten aufgesogen und läßt sich von ihm aufsaugen, keines von beiden kann dem widerstehen. (H 77)
Anderson points out that “the process of ‘undressing’ the self, according to the logic of infinite deferral familiar to us from Kafka’s other works, is an endless task” (KC 5). This task, in other words, can never be completed, and so even apart from the historicity of Kafka’s asceticism, there is still much of history to be found in Kafka’s texts.
Even critics who view Kafka’s social message as pernicious, like Lukács, Helmut Richter, and Günther Anders, agree that he provides an insightful representation of the alienated experience of twentieth century capitalism. Benjamin’s formulation is especially vivid:
Im Zeitalter der aufs Höchste gesteigerten Entfremdung der Menschen voneinander, der unabsehbar vermittelten Beziehungen, die ihre einzigen wurden, sind Film und Grammophon erfunden worden. Im Film erkennt der Mensch den eigenen Gang nicht, im Grammophon nicht die eigene Stimme. Experimente beweisen das. Die Lage der Versuchspersonen in diesen Experimenten ist Kafkas Lage. (36)
The volume Aus Prager Sicht contains similar statements, from both sympathetic and hostile critics, in almost every contribution.
Mark Anderson gives a particularly insightful analysis of Kafka’s representation of alienation in Kafka’s Clothes. He argues that Kafka represents modern life as an unceasing traffic of people and commodities, playing on the “transportational,” commercial and sexual meanings of the German word “Verkehr”: “ein immer wechselnder, nie andauernder, nie herzlich werdender menschlicher Verkehr,” as Gregor Samsa puts it (E 58). This world of shifting surfaces is represented in Kafka’s texts in particular by clothing, of particular significance to Kafka because of his father’s fancy-goods business dealing in fashionable inessentials ; “nicht die schlechteste Kinderschule,” Kafka calls it in his “Brief an den Vater” (H 136), but he goes on to declare emphatically that he came to hate this first school. Anderson cites an early passage from “Beschreibung eines Kampfes,” in which the Supplicant reduces Paris to a glittering, ornamental surface: “Gibt es in Paris Menschen, die nur aus verzierten Kleidern bestehen, und gibt es dort Häuser, die bloß Portale haben, und ist es wahr, daß an Sommertagen der Himmel über der Stadt fliehend blau ist, nur verschönt durch angepreßte weiße Wölkchen, die alle die Form von Herzen haben?” (B 41) Adorno advises readers of Kafka that they should “auf den inkommensurablen, undurchsichtigen Details, den blinden Stellen beharren” (Aufzeichnungen 329). Anderson’s thesis sheds light on many such details, for example, the last sentence of “Das Urteil,” “In diesem Augenblick ging über die Brücke ein geradezu unendlicher Verkehr” (E 53), which insists on the social context of what one might otherwise read as merely a fascinatingly paranoid account of a father-son conflict. Kafka’s comment on this ending, reported by Brod, “Ich habe dabei an eine starke Ejakulation gedacht” (Brod, 158), can also be approached in Anderson’s terms, in terms of the sexual traffic implied by “Verkehr,” a dehumanizing sexual traffic which, as we shall see in the following section, is intimately associated with the Law and the Castle. Gregor Samsa’s job as an anonymous “Reisender” dealing in clothing samples—from which his metamorphosis liberates him into the artistic freedom of a “Luftmensch” who is most at ease hanging from the ceiling (compare the trapeze artist of “Erstes Leid,” or the floating dogs from “Forschungen eines Hundes”), but who then (like the Hunger Artist) cannot find the food he likes (except perhaps for music) in this world—becomes particularly meaningful in the light of Anderson’s concept of the “traffic of clothes.” Anderson also explains the vagueness of Kafka’s America in Der Verschollene. Ritchie Robertson points out that Kafka’s intent was to represent “das allermodernste New York” (Br 117), and that he made a point of depicting recent inventions such as cars, typewriters and telephones as everyday objects in his America (Robertson 45); yet there are basically no recognizable “geographic” descriptions. Our most concrete visions of the country are the Statue of Liberty holding a sword, a bridge connecting New York and Boston, and two “cinematic” views of New York’s bustling traffic: Karl’s view of the harbor traffic, “eine Bewegung ohne Ende, eine Unruhe, übertragen von dem unruhigen Element auf die hilflosen Menschen und ihre Werke!” (V 20), which distracts him from his defence of the stoker, and his view of a busy New York street from his uncle’s window, which gives Karl the impression “als werde über dieser Straße eine alles bedeckende Glasscheibe jeden Augenblick immer wieder mit aller Kraft zerschlagen” (V 38). It is not that Kafka’s otherworldly interests make concrete details irrelevant, but rather that these details disappear into a succession of unstable surfaces in the unceasing flow of traffic which Kafka represents. What does not disappear, however, is “the situation of the poor, the unemployed, the homeless, as the basic feature of immigrant life in America” (KC 113)—we will return to this below.
With respect to Der Prozeß, Anderson explains the first guard’s “schwarzes Kleid, das ähnlich den Reiseanzügen mit verschiedenen Falten, Taschen, Schnallen, Knöpfen und einem Gürtel versehen war und infolgedessen, ohne daß man sich darüber klar wurde, wozu es dienen sollte, besonders praktisch erschien” (P 7): this suit invites interpretation by its busy surface, but the effort of interpretation ends in futility, “ohne daß man sich darüber klar wurde, wozu es dienen sollte.” In the same way, Kafka’s characters in both Das Schloß and Der Prozeß present surfaces that invite interpretation, but then frustrate it because they lack the (illusory?) “depth” of the characters in realist novels, in which every surface detail is “coded in terms of [the character’s] past history, character, or imminent fate” (KC 156). Clayton Koelb draws attention to the Brückenhofwirtin’s curious analysis of what it might have meant when Klamm “called” Frieda:
Und daß er Frieda manchmal rief, muß gar nicht die Bedeutung haben, die man dem gern zusprechen möchte, er rief einfach den Namen Frieda—wer kennt seine Absichten?—daß Frieda natürlich eilends kam war ihre Sache und daß sie ohne Widerspruch zu ihm zugelassen wurde war Klamms Güte, aber daß er sie etwa geradezu gerufen hätte, kann man nicht behaupten. (81)
Koelb concludes that Klamm’s intention is thus explicitly shown to be “absolutely unavailable,” and adds that this obviously also applies to Klamm’s intentions with respect to K. (Koelb 58). Unable to penetrate these surfaces, the K.s are reduced to their characteristic paranoid speculations as to what might be behind them, and are exposed to such speculations themselves, most extremely in Das Schloß, where the reader is left baffled by the accumulation of contradictory suspicions formulated by everyone about everyone else.
Anderson argues that Josef K. is symbolically drawn into the Law’s “traffic of clothes” when the guards require him to put on his best suit for his meeting with their superior, and is expelled from it when he is required to undress for his execution by the exquisitely dressed executioners whose top hats are “scheinbar unverrückbar” (P 305), an apparently irremovable surface. He notes frequent references to clothes throughout the novel, and in particular also to their sexual connotations: the guards’ interest in K.’s “Wäsche,” and the subsequent sado-masochistic scene of their punishment, the windows piled high with bedding as K. seeks out the court premises for his first interrogation, the “Waschfrau” whose “embrace” by the student disrupts this interrogation (because of the unexplained “Kreischen” that turns out to come from the student), the importance placed on a good suit for the “Auskunfgeber”—and most interestingly, the remarkably bad air in the court corridors that causes K. such discomfort is caused in part by “Wäsche” hung out to dry by the tenants below (P 99). (The portraits of the judges that K. comes across turn out to be just another layer of opaque “clothing” that reveals nothing: they are all painted almost identically, according to a convention designed to pander to the judges’ vanity.) In addition to these associations with sexual “Verkehr,” Franz’s “Reiseanzug” and the “uniforms” associated with the court (marked only by makeshift badges and buttons) create a link between clothing and the court’s bureaucratic “Verkehr”: “the circulation of legal documents, clients (‘Parteienverkehr’), lawyers, and officials through the labyrinthine hallways of the Court” (KC 159). Anderson concludes that amid this bustling “traffic of clothes,”
The world has become inscrutable, conspiratorial, and K. and the reader are caught at the surface of things, anxiously trying to restore the lost relation between a sign’s physical appearance and its meaning…. K. will never see anything more of the court than [Franz’s] impenetrable clothing and facial expressions, will never receive a response to his most basic and legitimate question: Who are you? (KC 158-9)
A similar argument can be made for Das Schloß, although Anderson does not do so, apart from briefly pointing out the great attention paid to clothing in that novel, e.g. in Pepi’s long discourses on the need to dress well to work in the Ausschank, in the part played by Barnabas’ clothes in K.’s immediate attraction to him, and in the Herrenhofwirtin’s curious demonstration to K. of her store of dresses at the point where the text leaves off. As we shall see in the following section, sexual “Verkehr” is as prevalently and sordidly associated with the Castle as with the Law, and bureaucratic “Verkehr” is the subject of some hilariously farcical passages of Das Schloß. This traffic is itself fickle and unpredictable: the whims of the officials are perhaps most amusingly evident in the distribution of files at the Herrenhof which K. witnesses; Olga’s description of the traffic between the Castle and the village is also notable in this respect:
Einmal um acht Uhr morgens fahren alle auf einer Straße, eine halbe Stunde später wieder all auf einer andern, zehn Minuten später wieder auf einer dritten, eine halbe Stunde später vielleicht wieder auf der ersten und dort bleibt es dann den ganzen Tag, aber jeden Augenblick besteht die Möglichkeit einer Änderung…. so wie die Ausfahrordnung hinsichtlich der Straßen unregelmäßig und nicht zu durchschauen ist, so ist es auch mit der Zahl der Wagen. Es gibt ja oft Tage, wo gar kein Wagen zu sehen ist, dann aber fahren sie wieder in Mengen. (342)
Thus an exhausted K. hoping for a ride on a deserted street can be told “Hier kommt kein Schlitten…hier ist kein Verkehr” (27), when in fact the bustling traffic of the authorities continues with unabated irregularity. In Das Schloß, the surfaces themselves are more explicitly uncertain than in Der Prozeß, beginning with the description of the Castle structure itself, concealed by fog and darkness in the first paragraph , and then revealed to be not one monumental building, but rather a complex that seems to be “aus Dorfhäusern zusammengetragen,” already appears to be decaying everywhere, and reminds K. of a little city (17). The Castle’s tower is anything but a secure landmark; it merely happens to be the only tower visible at the moment, “dessen Mauerzinnen unsicher, unregelmäßig, brüchig wie von ängstlicher oder nachlässiger Kinderhand gezeichnet sich in den blauen Himmel zackten” (18). The road to the Castle somehow mysteriously does not ever seem to reach it (21), and a sustained look at this “visually slippery” surface is not possible: “die Blicke des Beobachters konnten sich nicht festhalten und glitten ab” (156). This uncertainty of appearance extends to people—witness the uncanny ability of the Gehilfen and even apparently of little Hans (225) to look young or old according to circumstances, and above all Klamm’s shifting appearance:
es hat sich aus dem Augenschein, aus Gerüchten und auch manchen fälschenden Nebenansichten ein Bild Klamms ausgebildet, das wohl in den Grundzügen stimmt. Aber nur in den Grundzügen. Sonst ist es veränderlich und vielleicht nicht einmal so veränderlich wie Klamms wirkliches Aussehen. Er soll ganz anders aussehen, wenn er ins Dorf kommt und anders wenn er es verläßt, anders ehe er Bier getrunken hat, anders nachher, anders im Wachen, anders im Schlafen, anders allein, anders im Gespräch und, was hienach verständlich ist, fast grundverschieden oben im Schloß. (277-8)
The Castle, like the Law, thus presents an impenetrable surface, despite all of the K.s’ efforts. Corresponding to the series of ever more powerful doorkeepers barring entry to the Law, Das Schloß presents us with the more mundane (less memorable) image of a series of offices (“Kanzleien”) separated by barriers one eventually cannot cross—but with the added twist, quite in line with Anderson’s theory, that if one has in fact successfully crossed them, one cannot know it:
gewiß er [Barnabas] geht in die Kanzleien, aber sind die Kanzleien das eigentliche Schloß? Und selbst wenn Kanzleien zum Schloß gehören, sind es die Kanzleien, welche Barnabas betreten darf? Er kommt in Kanzleien, aber es ist doch nur ein Teil aller, dann sind Barrièren und hinter ihnen sind noch andere Kanzleien. Man verbietet ihm nicht geradezu weiterzugehn, aber er kann doch nicht weitergehn, wenn er seine Vorgesetzten schon gefunden hat, sie ihn abgefertigt haben und wegschicken…. Diese Barrieren darfst Du Dir auch nicht als eine bestimmte Grenze vorstellen, darauf macht mich auch Barnabas immer wieder aufmerksam. Barrieren sind auch in den Kanzleien, in die er geht, es gibt also auch Barrieren die er passiert und sie sehn nicht anders aus, als die, über die er noch nicht hinweggekommen ist und es ist auch deshalb nicht von vorherein anzunehmen, daß sich hinter diesen letzteren Barrieren wesentlich andere Kanzleien befinden, als jene in denen Barnabas schon war. (275)
In this sense the Gemeindevorsteher’s words to K. remain true to the end:
“Sie sind eben noch niemals wirklich mit unsern Behörden in Berührung gekommen. Alle diese Berührungen sind nur scheinbar, Sie aber halten sie infolge Ihrer Unkenntnis der Verhältnisse für wirklich.” (115)
But in another sense, K.’s contacts with the Castle are not at all “scheinbar.” Behind the shifting and contradictory surfaces presented to him, K., like his namesake in Der Prozeß, imagines he will find a higher authority that will give coherence to these appearances. But as I will argue in the next section, there is no higher authority that can do this: the contradictions that the K.s perceive are the contradictions of the hegemonic order, contradictions that are normally smoothed over (or not perceived) by “common sense,” but which cannot be resolved (within that order), because they are a necessary aspect of hegemony. To conclude from these contradictions that there must be a higher level at which they will disappear is thus a fallacy: “if the law remains unrecognizable, this is not because it is hidden by its transcendence, but simply because it is denuded of any interiority: it is always in the office next door, or behind the door, on to infinity” (Deleuze and Guattari 45).
In more traditional Marxist terms, Kafka is praised in particular for revealing the alienating nature of the division of labor. Thus, Ernst Fischer writes
Kafka [hat] sich immer wieder mit dem Problem von Arbeit und Beruf auseinandergesetzt, also mit einem entscheidenden Problem der mechanisierten, industrialisierten, kommerzialisierten Welt. Vor der Spezialisierung, Taylorisierung, Zerstückelung der Arbeit zurückschaudernd, fühlt Kafka das Auseinanderklaffen von Beruf und Persönlichkeit…. viele seiner Helden…werden durch den Beruf, durch Sachzusammenhänge, den Mitmenschen entfremdet, von der Vergeblichkeit ihrer Bemühungen überwältigt. (162)
This is most evident in Der Verschollene, in which the abuses of capitalism are abundantly evident, from child labor to physically miserable work environments, an absurdly vicious discipline, and the accompanying corrupt “democratic” politics. Ritchie Robertson identifies as Kafka’s most important source the journalist Arthur Holitscher’s accounts of his travels in the United States and Canada, which emphasized “widespread poverty, unemployment and the resulting terror, and the merciless exploitation of the industrial worker…. the Taylor system…. the use of workers as mere machinery” (Robertson 48). Robertson goes on to summarize in detail the enslavement of human beings to machinery, the stultifying discipline, and the ruthless oppression depicted by Kafka in this novel (48-53).
In the novels we are discussing, the most explicit statement in this regard is K.’s consideration of the consequences of accepting the Castle’s apparent offer of employment early in the novel:
Wollte K. Arbeiter werden, so konnte er es werden, aber dann in allem furchtbaren Ernst, ohne jeden Ausblick anderswohin. K. wußte, daß nicht mit wirklichem Zwang gedroht war, den fürchtete er nicht und hier am wenigsten, aber die Gewalt der entmutigenden Umgebung, der Gewöhnung an Enttäuschungen, die Gewalt der unmerklichen Einflüsse jedes Augenblicks, die fürchtete er allerdings, aber mit dieser Gefahr mußte er den Kampf wagen. (43)
K. never actually attains the privilege of experiencing the demoralizing effects of employment as a land surveyor, but we do see him in his absurdly miserable job as school custodian. Anders argues that “Kafka…shows a man’s profession as his exclusive mode of existence, and man as completely swallowed up in it” (48). The obvious example is the account of Josef K.’s life prior to his trial: he works late (“meistens bis neun Uhr” (30)), his romantic life is restricted to a weekly visit to a waitress, and his social life revolves around a Stammtisch which he values for the “connections” he can make there in order to get an edge over his superior, the Direktor-Stellvertreter—as indeed most of his energy at work seems focused on the competition for advancement in the company between himself and the Direktor-Stellvertreter. Anders also notes the “Prügler”’s response when K. asks for mercy on behalf of the two guards: “Ich bin zum Prügeln angestellt, also prügle ich” (112). Characteristically, Anders goes on to claim that “When [Kafka] identified a man with his profession this was not realism only but also the projection of an inner wish” (50), but this argument misrepresents the text, whose representation of the sadistic viciousness of the Prügler scene and the cold, drab emtpiness of Josef K.’s life is hardly enticing.
Reduced to anonymous economic cyphers amid this bustling traffic, people are dehumanized. Our dim awareness of this, Adorno argues, accounts for the panic induced by Kafka’s uncanny doubles, most obviously the Gehilfen in the novels we are considering:
Proust wußte von dem leisen Unbehagen, das den überrieselt, der auf seine Ähnlichkeit mit einem ihm fremden Verwandten aufmerksam gemacht wird. Bei Kafka ist es zur Panik gesteigert. Das Reich des déjà vu wird von Doppelgängern bevölkert, Wiederkehrern, Pojatzen, chassidischen Tänzern, Knaben, die den Lehrer nachmachen und plötzlich uralt aussehen, archaisch; einmal zweifelt der Landvermesser, ob seine Gehilfen ganz am Leben sind. Zugleich aber Abdrücke des Heraufziehenden, buchstäblich die schopenhauersche Fabrikware der Natur, Menschen, die im Fließbandverfahren hergestellt sind, mechanisch reproduzierte Exemplare, huxleysche Epsilons. (Aufzeichnungen 334)
Hence K.’s description of “dieser nicht sehr appetitliche Gehilfe, dieses Fleisch, das manchmal den Eindruck machte, als sei es nicht recht lebendig” (S 371), and Frieda’s eerie feeling that “es ist Klamms Blick, der mich manchmal aus ihren [der Gehilfen] Augen durchfährt” (S 219); hence the “Einheit, wie sie fast nur lebloses bilden kann” (P 306) in which K. walks with his twin executioners at the end of Der Prozeß. It is then no accident that the K.s are never physically described, and are reduced to initials. In the next section we will discuss in more detail how well their behavior fits into the alienated, reified world represented in Der Prozeß and Das Schloß; what sets them apart is only the persistence with which they fight for their rights when they find themselves in conflict with this world.
Evidence of Kafka’s sympathy for and involvement with socialism and anarchism supports such readings of Kafka’s texts as representing modern alienation, and alienated labor in particular. Brod describes Kafka’s experiences at the Worker’s Accident Insurance company:
Sein soziales Gefühl wurde mächtig aufgewühlt, wenn er die Verstümmelungen sah, die sich Arbeiter infolge mangelhafter Sicherheitsvorkehrungen zugezogen hatten. “Wie bescheiden diese Menschen sind”, sagte er mir einmal, mit ganz großen Augen. “Sie kommen zu uns bitten. Statt die Anstalt zu stürmen und alles kurz und klein zu schlagen, kommen sie bitten.” (Brod 102)
His own job with the Worker’s Accident Insurance company was extremely pleasant by comparison, with short hours (8 a.m - 2 p.m. daily) (although Kafka still complained bitterly about its interference with his writing), but he did experience harsher working conditions in his brief stint with the “Assicurazioni Generali,” whose exploitative work conditions (arbitrary unpaid overtime, two weeks vacation every two years “if requested”) Wagenbach lists in detail (142). But Kafka knew that even this was still comparatively humane: his diary entry after a visit to a factory his family acquired shows him to be concretely aware of the dehumanizing conditions under which the majority of the labor force worked, which he could observe at first hand at this factory and on his inspection tours for the Workers’ Accident Insurance Company to classify factories according to the degree of danger involved in working there:
Gestern in der Fabrik. Die Mädchen in ihren an und für sich unerträglich schmutzigen und gelösten Kleidern, mit den wie beim Erwachen zerworfenen Frisuren, mit dem vom unaufhörlichen Lärm der Transmissionen und von der einzelnen zwar automatischen aber unberechenbar stockenden Maschine festgehaltenen Gesichtsausdruck sind nicht Menschen, man grüßt sie nicht, man entschuldigt sich nicht, wenn man sie stößt, ruft man sie zu einer kleinen Arbeit, so führen sie sie aus, kehren aber gleich zur Maschine zurück, mit einer Kopfbewegung zeigt man ihnen wo sie eingreifen sollen, sie stehn in Unterröcken da, der kleinsten Macht sind sie überliefert und haben nicht einmal genug Verstand, um diese Macht mit Blicken und Verbeugungen anzuerkennen und sich geneigt zu machen. Ist es aber sechs Uhr und rufen sie das einander zu, binden sie die Tücher vom Hals und von den Haaren los, stauben sie sich ab mit einer Bürste, die den Saal umwandert und von Ungeduldigen herangerufen wird, ziehn sie die Röcke über die Köpfe und bekommen sie die Hände rein so gut es geht, so sind sie schließlich doch Frauen, können trotz Blässe und schlechten Zähnen lächeln, schütteln den erstarrten Körper, man kann sie nicht mehr stoßen, anschauen oder übersehn, man drückt sich an die schmierigen Kisten um ihnen den Weg freizumachen, behält den Hut in der Hand, wenn sie guten Abend sagen und weiß nicht, wie man es hinnehmen soll, wenn eine unseren Winterrock bereithält, den wir anziehen. (T 373-4)
Brod cites Kafka’s utopian program for a “besitzlose Arbeiterschaft” (H 93-4) as a product of such experiences, and he (106-7) and Wagenbach (61-2, 161-4) cite various accounts of Kafka’s support, from a young age, of socialist causes, and of his attendance at anarchist meetings. This evidence is controversial, as some of Brod’s and Wagenbach’s informants appear to have been unreliable (see Robertson 139-40 for a skeptical summary), but it does gain some credibility from the overlap between the various unreliable accounts.
Goldstücker is representative of critics who warn against overestimating these arguments for Kafka’s socialist and anarchist insight and engagement. Thus, he says of Kafka’s program for a “besitzlose Arbeiterschaft” that it is “ein typisches Produkt utopisch-sozialistischer Gedankengänge und [es] erweckt den Eindruck, als hätte sein Autor vom kapitalistischen System, von der Lage der Arbeiterklasse unter diesem System, von den Bestrebungen dieser Klasse noch nie etwas gehört” (Prager Perspektive 41). Similarly, he sees Kafka’s “Heizer” as a remarkably insightful portrayal of the plight of the proletariat, in which Karl Rossmann already explores the possibility of a communion with the proletariat which will reappear in Das Schloß, but which nevertheless portrays the proletariat as “die leidendste Klasse” (Prager Perspektive 38), as necessarily tragic—although he adds that one can see in this text also
eine eindringliche Kritik der Schwächen der damaligen sozialistischen Bewegung…, eine Kritik an der mangelnden Kampfentschlossenheit, an deren Nebelhaftigkeit der Vorstellungen von der neuen Gesellschaftsordnung und dem zu ihr hinführenden Weg, und vor allem eine Kritik an den im Lande endemischen Nationalitätenkämpfen, die sich (ähnlich wie die rumänische Nationalität Schubals im Hirn des Heizers) beständig in den Vordergrund drängten und die wichtigsten Fragen vernebelten. (Prager Perspektive 40)
Ritchie Robertson similarly argues that Kafka’s general political position is best described by the label “romantic anti-capitalism” (141 ff), and Stölzl lists the eclectic variety of Kafka’s pre-war political pursuits (87). In a slightly different context, Robertson quotes the following criticism of the dehumanizing effects of technology from Kafka’s letters to Felice, whose attitude to the “lebendiger Schreibmaschinist” (though surely ironic) is certainly not that of a socialist or anarchist:
Eine Maschine mit ihrer stillen, ernsten Anforderung scheint mir auf die Arbeitskraft einen viel stärkern, grausamern Zwang auszuüben, als ein Mensch. Wie geringfügig, leicht zu beherrschen, wegzuschicken, niederzuschreien, auszuschimpfen, zu befragen, anzustaunen ist ein lebendiger Schreibmaschinist, der Diktierende ist der Herr, aber vor dem Parlographen ist er entwürdigt und ein Fabriksarbeiter, der mit seinem Gehirn eine schnurrende Maschine bedienen muß. (F 241)
In general, Goldstücker makes the plausible argument that if Kafka’s socialist contacts and sympathies had been as pronounced as Wagenbach and others argue, his socialism would have been more immediately evident in his texts. Goldstücker also argues convincingly against the reliability of another of the principal sources of evidence for Kafka’s alleged anarchist contacts, Gustav Janouch’s Gespräche mit Kafka , and more generally points out the unlikelihood that such extensive involvement of Kafka with anarchism could have occurred without the knowledge of Brod, or of the prominent anarcho-communist S. K. Neumann, and without Kafka ever mentioning it in his diaries (Prager Perspektive 41-2).
Much Marxist criticism (for example, the contributions by Hermsdorf, Garaudy, Reimann, Schumacher, and Richter in Aus Prager Sicht) proceeds from an acknowledgment of Kafka’s insights into the alienated experience of modern life to a criticism of his failure to see any hope for progress beyond this state of affairs. This argument is made representatively and particularly forcefully by Lukács. Anders’ views in this respect go even beyond Lukács in accusing Kafka’s texts of complicity with the horrific world they represent. I will summarize and attempt to refute these criticisms in the last section of this chapter.
Especially in recent years, critics have been supplementing general observations about Kafka as the “poet of modern alienation” by looking more concretely at Kafka’s historical situation as a comparatively affluent German-speaking Jew in Prague in the decaying Austro-Hungarian empire. In this respect, perhaps the most obviously “referential” (and still quite general) aspect of Der Prozeß and Das Schloß is their representation of bureaucracy. Stephen Beller describes the Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy in Vienna and the Jews 1867-1938. This bureaucracy is pathologically inefficient and corrupt:
Vienna was simply not the capital of a liberal state or even of a rational autocracy. Everything was done with a touch of Schlamperei: Wickham Steed noted that nowhere else had he seen a culture which had so many words to express the idea of “slovenliness.” Nothing was done quite as it should be. This was Kafka’s state. Kraus spoke of “Bürokretinismus,” nothing ever quite worked out the way foreseen. It was another manifestation of the same system which allowed Protektion. If you knew the ropes, if you were on the inside, everything was easy. Problems began when you were not one of the initiated, when you operated on the written laws rather than the unwritten ones. ( 175)
The officials are vain, and everyone panders to their vanity: “In the bureaucracy, everyone was given the title of the job above them” (176). And despite everything, Beller identifies an absurd adulation of this state of affairs, and in those who perceive the squalor and viciousness for which this system is responsible, a helpless cynicism:
This all culminated in an enormous self-satisfaction, which quite contradicted the facts of Viennese existence. The truth was often an extreme poverty, terrible housing conditions, and the hysterical nastiness of social groups such as the artisanry, who felt threatened by new developments. The reverse side of the sickening self-adulation in songs such as Wien, Wien, nur Du allein was a cynical realization of the mess the empire had become, and the impotence of the ruling classes to do anything about it. (176)
As we shall see in the following section, this resembles Kafka’s representation of bureaucracy in Der Prozeß and Das Schloß remarkably closely. Kafka’s bureaucracies are thus much less of a caricature than they intially appear to be.
Eduard Goldstücker argues that Kafka’s perspective on the crisis of the Austro-Hungarian empire was particularly suited to develop an awareness of capitalist alienation and reification:
In Prag, vor allem in seinem deutschen Bereich, und hier wieder vor allem in dessen jüdischer Mehrheit, war also durch das Zusammentreffen vieler Umstände mit dem Antritt des Imperialismus eine Situation entstanden, die den deutschen und unter ihnen vor allem den jüdisch-deutschen Dichtern Prags einen tieferen Blick in die Krise der Zeit eröffnete als das anderswo möglich gewesen wäre…. (Prager Perspektive 35)
His argument remains quite general: At a time when capitalist nation-states were generally gaining in strength (recall Williams’ analysis of the term “nation”), the Austro-Hungarian empire was proving to be an anachronism whose bureaucratic sluggishness and ethnic disputes stood in the way of the irresistible forces of capitalist expansion. Goldstücker goes on to point to the general crisis of bourgeois liberalism and humanism resulting from the rise of imperialism and nationalism, and the particular effect of this crisis on the German-speaking Jews of Prague, who could see the impending collapse of liberalism leaving them entirely at the mercy of the growing forces of anti-Semitism and of Czech nationalism.
Despite the many satisfied references in Aus Prager Sicht to the valuable contributions of the conference to an understanding of how Kafka’s specific circumstances in Prague affected his writing, Goldstücker’s very general outline is in fact the extent of these contributions, apart from an occasional reference to the impact of Prague’s narrow alleys and old castles and buildings on the atmosphere and physical setting of Kafka’s writings. Much more informative are Klaus Wagenbach’s biography of Kafka’s youth (actually published several years before the conference), and more recent work by Christoph Stölzl, Ritchie Robertson, and Mark Anderson. We have already had occasion to refer to some of their findings above, and more will be discussed in the remaining sections of this chapter; I want to end this section with a brief discussion, based on their work, of Kafka’s situation as a German-speaking Jew in Prague.
Pavel Eisner’s observation about the “triple ghetto” in which Kafka lived, as a Jew, as a German speaker, and as a member of a comparatively affluent bourgeois family, has become a cliché. Anders summarizes this general argument exhaustively:
For where indeed did he belong? As a Jew not quite to the Christian world; and as a non-practicing Jew—as he originally was—not quite among the Jews. As a German-speaking Czech, not quite among the Czechs; and as a German-speaking Jew, not quite among the Bohemian Germans. As a Bohemian, not quite to Austria. As an official of a workers’ insurance company, not quite to the middle class. Yet as a son of a middle-class family, not quite to the working class. He cannot feel at home among his office colleagues, for he knows himself to be a writer. But he is unable to live entirely as a writer either, for he sacrifices his energies to the welfare of his family. But “in my family I am more estranged than a stranger.” (18)
Wagenbach speaks of Kafka’s “soziologisches Ghetto,” and writes, “Die daraus resultierende Fremdheit…erscheint im Werk…in ihrer richtigen und gefährlichen Proportion” (77). More recent Kafka criticism sees these notions as simplistic, and attempts to describe more carefully the nature and development of the various factors involved, the relations between them, and their specific effect on Kafka. My attempt at a summary in what follows is heavily indebted to Stölzl and Robertson.
The emblem of Hermann Kafka’s shop depicted a jackdaw perching on the branch of an oak tree. “Kavka” is Czech for “jackdaw,” and oak trees were associated with Germany; thus, the symbol could appeal to customers of both nationalities in a time when intense nationalism was dividing Bohemia along linguistic lines. Where “unentschiedene Zweisprachigkeit” (Stölzl 25) had been the norm, Bohemians were required, as of 1880, to declare officially their “Umgangssprache” (language of daily intercourse), and this placed Bohemian Jews in an awkward position. Whereas even in 1900, 90% of Prague’s Jewish students were being educated in German, the percentage of Prague Jews declaring Czech as their “Umgangssprache” increased from 26% in 1890 to 55% in 1900 (Robertson 4). This must be taken as an attempt to accommodate the Czechs: declaring Czech as one’s “Umgangssprache” increased one’s chances of being left in peace during anti-German and anti-Semitic riots (this worked for Hermann Kafka on at least one occasion), and of being exempted from more or less officially organized boycotts of Jewish stores, and from other reprisals (in 1900, as in 1800, about 50% of Bohemian Jews were engaged in commerce (Stölzl 23)). The last liberal cabinet in Austria had fallen in 1879, and in 1883, Czech nationalists took over the Bohemian parliament from the liberals, as the “Enlightenment ideals of humanism and tolerance were in retreat, while nationalism, anti-Semitism, and revolutionary socialism were on the advance” (Robertson 4). In this nationalistic climate, the stakes of being accepted as part of the Czech or the German camp were high, but regardless of their response to the language question, this acceptance proved unattainable for Bohemian Jews. Germans saw themselves betrayed by the Jews’ increasing declaration of Czech as their “Umgangssprache”; Czechs felt that these declarations were insincere, all of which played into anti-Semitic stereotypes of Jews as untrustworthy and manipulative. Nationalist anti-Semitism on both sides was thus aggravated. Nationalism (whose economic roots we have discussed in the Introduction) also interacted with a long tradition of economic resentment of Jews, based on their disproportionate prominence in commerce and the professions. Czechs in particular saw the Jews as responsible for their economic exploitation, and Stölzl describes a bloody correlation between economic crises and anti-Semitic riots and boycotts. Academic posts became increasingly difficult for Jews to obtain, and almost no Jews were employed in the public service. The poorer Germans felt similar economic resentment, but in Prague itself they were few in number, so that, as Stölzl points out, the general trend of increasing anti-Semitism was not borne out within Prague-German society:
Seit den ersten Regungen des völkischen Antisemitismus unterdrückte die altliberale Führungsschicht des Prager deutschen Großbürgertums konsequent jede leiseste Äußerung von Judenfeindlichkeit in den deutschen Organisationen…und es gelang…tatsächlich bis 1914, einen gesellschaftlichen cordon sanitaire um die völkischen Studenten an der Universität zu ziehen, die aus der deutschböhmischen Provinz nach Prag strömten; erst recht gelang es bei den völkischen outcasts, dem verschwindend kleinen Rest eines deutschsprachigen Kleinbürgertums in Prag. Die von 1883 bis 1914 ständig steigende aktive Beteiligung jüdischer Bürger am öffentlichen deutschen Leben Prags ist ein deutlicher Beweis dafür, daß die Juden—freilich nur soweit sie genug ökonomisch arriviert waren—keinerlei besondere Schwelle zu überschreiten hatten, um ins deutsche Establishment aufgenommen zu werden. (54)
In 1883, a young girl was mysteriously found murdered in the Hungarian town of Tisza-Eslár. The murder was blamed on the Jews, focussing the forces of anti-Semitism into a mass hysteria, led in Prague by a theology professor claiming that the Talmud authorized Jews to murder and abuse all non-Jews, and reviving medieval theories about Jewish ritual child murders. In 1899, the shoemaker’s assistant Leopold Hilsner was accused of ritually murdering a young girl in the Bohemian village of Polna, and sentenced to death, then to life in prison, and finally pardoned in 1916. From 1911-3, Kafka followed a similar case involving a Russian Jew, Mendel Beilis, who was finally acquitted. Stölzl quotes the following passage from the Betrachtung as an indication of the disorienting experience of all these interrelated, yet also mutually contradictory and utterly unpredictable currents of hate:
Ich stehe auf der Platform des elektrischen Wagens und bin vollständig unsicher in Rücksicht meiner Stellung in dieser Welt, in dieser Stadt, in meiner Familie. Auch nicht beiläufig könnte ich angeben, welche Ansprüche ich in irgendeiner Richtung mit Recht vorbringen könnte. Ich kann es gar nicht verteidigen, daß ich auf dieser Plattform stehe, mich an dieser Schlinge halte, von diesem Wagen mich tragen lasse, daß Leute dem Wagen ausweichen oder still gehn, oder vor den Schaufenstern ruhn.—Niemand verlangt es ja von mir, aber das ist gleichgültig. (E 31-2)
The two main patterns of behavior among Western Jews in response to this were assimilation and Zionism, the former being associated more with the generation of Kafka’s parents, the latter with Kafka’s own. Kafka was an avid reader of the Zionist journal “Selbstwehr,” which began to appear in 1907, though modern critics generally agree that he never became a Zionist. The journal urged assimilated Jews to give up their futile and humiliating quest to become part of the German or the Czech camp, or, somehow, of both; to stop acquiescing to anti-Semitism and develop their own Jewish identity. Less obviously than “assimilationism,” Zionism also involved internalization of anti-Semitic stereotypes; in particular, its ideal of athletic Jews working in the country was simply a reaction to the stereotype of Jews as parasitical tradesmen. Neither assimilated Jews nor (most) Zionists had much respect for Eastern Jews; hence the need for Kafka to try to dispel the audience’s “fear” of Yiddish in his talk on the Yiddish language; hence also the limited success of the Yiddish actors by whom Kafka was so fascinated in 1911 and 1912. As Baioni argues in “Zionism, Literature, and the Yiddish Theater,” what Kafka admired was not so much the quality of the Yiddish plays or of the acting (which embarrassed assimilated Jews, and was described as “deformed” and “sickly” by the Zionist press (Baioni 104)), but the “natural,” joyous, unselfconscious Jewishness conveyed by the actors, unmediated by any “reaction” to Christianity or anti-Semitism—and unattainable for a Western Jew like Kafka. In his diary, he especially admires two characters, “Leute, die in einer besonders reinen Form Juden sind, weil sie nur in der Religion aber ohne Verständnis und Jammer in ihr leben” (T 58) , and notes generally, “Bei manchen Liedern, der Aussprache ‘jüdische Kinderloch’, manchem Anblick dieser Frau, die auf dem Podium, weil sie Jüdin ist uns Zuhörer weil wir Juden sind an sich zieht, ohne Verlangen oder Neugier nach Christen, gieng mir ein Zittern über die Wangen” (T 59).
Kafka’s job with the Worker’s Accident Insurance Company made him a lucky exception to the rule that Jews could not obtain public employment; he appears to have been quite popular among his fellow workers and to have had a good relationship with his boss. There is no record of his being the victim of any dramatic anti-Semitic incident. But even such relative good fortune could do little to help a Jew forget his or her Jewishness in the atmosphere I have described. Stölzl quotes Arthur Schnitzler, writing in 1912: “Es war nicht möglich…für einen Juden…davon abzusehen, daß er Jude war, da die anderen es nicht taten, die Christen nicht und die Juden noch weniger” (quoted in Stölzl 14). Kafka’s own position varied. He himself includes “Antizionismus. Zionismus” indifferently between “Germanistik” and “Hebräisch” in a list of aborted undertakings in his life in a 1922 diary entry (T 887). In 1914 he writes, “Was habe ich mit Juden gemeinsam? Ich habe kaum etwas mit mir gemeinsam…” (T 622); in 1920 he tells Milena, “Wir kennen doch beide ausgiebig charakteristische Exemplare von Westjuden, ich bin, soviel ich weiß, der westjüdischeste von ihnen, das bedeutet, übertrieben ausgedrückt, daß mir keine ruhige Sekunde geschenkt ist, nichts ist mir geschenkt, alles muß erworben werden, nicht nur die Gegenwart und Zukunft, auch noch die Vergangenheit, etwas das doch jeder Mensch vielleicht mitbekommen hat, auch das muß erworben werden…” (M 294). It is difficult to judge how much of Kafka’s extreme self-criticism, such as “Ich schreibe anders als ich rede, ich rede anders als ich denke, ich denke anders als ich denken soll und so geht es weiter bis ins tiefste Dunkel” (O 21), to attribute to “Jewish self-hatred,” but the following passage, also written to Milena, is unambiguous in this respect: “manchmal möchte ich sie eben als Juden (mich eingeschlossen) alle etwa in die Schublade des Wäschekastens dort stopfen, dann warten, dann die Schublade ein wenig herausziehn, um nachzusehn, ob sie schon alle erstickt sind, wenn nicht, die Lade wieder hineinschieben und so fortsetzen bis zum Ende” (M 61). His obsession with exercise and nutrition, and his experiments with gardening and carpentry might be taken as a “Zionist” reaction to anti-Semitic stereotypes. His consistent interest in Jewish culture (after 1911), his speculations about emigrating to Palestine (see Br 277), and his (successful ) efforts to learn Hebrew should be added to this picture, as should, on the other hand, his admission “ich…habe nicht den Zipfel des davonfliegenden jüdischen Gebetmantels noch gefangen wie die Zionisten” (H 89). The picture is ambiguous, but I think it is clear that Kafka’s “responses” to his position as a German-speaking Jew in Prague were sufficiently intense and varied to enter into his writing. To be specific, I want to identify three ways in which this aspect of Kafka’s experience conditions his perspective on the hegemonic order. This will at this point sound rather speculative, but I will substantiate the following sketches in the remainder of the chapter.
The first is that in the novels, we experience the hegemonic order from the perspective of a stranger—in Der Prozeß, this is the case in the sense that Josef K. is a stranger to the workings of the Law that arrests him, with which everyone else in the novel seems to be familiar. The stranger is generally met by hostility and suspicion, a suspicion that is sometimes outrageous and unpredictable, somewhat like the accusations of ritual murder we saw being levelled at Jews in Kafka’s time. As Robertson, among others, observes, “guilt precedes wrongdoing” in Kafka’s fiction (33). The stranger’s efforts to assimilate to the requirements of the system inevitably fail; it becomes clear that all the paths available within the system will only aggravate his situation—and “Ein Bericht für eine Akademie” shows that even if this path is successful, the reward is not enticing. This perspective appears hopeless, but is in fact instructive, as it reveals the (repulsive) functioning and the contradictions of the hegemonic order, hence motivates resistance, and in the course of demonstrating the impossibility of resisting within the system, begins to provide hints of other possibilities.
Secondly, it turns out that the “strangers” are complicit with the system, and that this is part of their problem. This obviously corresponds to the foregoing discussions of “Jewish self-hatred,” but applies also in another way, namely the integral role played by Jews in the capitalist hegemonic order underlying nationalism and anti-Semitism. This complicity is of course itself conditioned by the hegemonic order (in this case, the profit motive was supplemented by legislation barring Jews from “traditional” occupations in crafts and agriculture), but it is not therefore any less destructive: “Geldleihe, Wucher, Untergang des kleinen Bauerngrundbesitzes, Niedergang des Handwerks unter der Konkurrenz der Verlags- und Fabrikindustrie, die vielerorts rein jüdisch war…: da wuchsen soziale Spannungen, häufte sich emotionaler Zündstoff auf, den die jüdischen Aufsteiger in ihrem Kapital-Akkumulationswahn ignorieren mochten” (Stölzl 33-4). In particular, this complicity makes the “strangers” blind to the possibility of taking collective action against the hegemonic order—just as Stölzl points out the role of “Jewish self-hatred” in preventing an effective collective Jewish resistance to anti-Semitism (117-8).
The third characteristic aspect of Kafka’s perspective on hegemony that follows from the above discussion is that he is led to reflect on language. Kafka’s letter on “Mauscheln” to Max Brod seems to reproduce anti-Semitic claims that Jews’ use of German (or any other language, by analogy) can never amount to more than an illicit, sterile, possibly even destructive borrowing:
…so mauscheln wie Kraus kann niemand, trotzdem doch in dieser deutsch-jüdischen Welt kaum jemand etwas anderes als mauscheln kann, das Mauscheln im weitesten Sinn genommen…, nämlich als die laute oder stillschweigende Anmaßung eines fremden Besitzes, den man nicht erworben, sondern durch einen (verhältnismäßig) flüchtigen Griff gestohlen hat und der fremder Besitz bleibt, auch wenn nicht der einzigste Sprachfehler nachgewiesen werden könnte, denn hier kann ja alles nachgewiesen werden durch den leisesten Anruf des Gewissens in einer reuigen Stunde. (Br 336)
We shall see that, characteristically, Kafka reverses this argument as he pursues it, suggesting that German is a dead or dying language which only “überlebendige Judenhände” can bring back to life. If this third claim seems weak (would not most committed writers reflect on language?), one might then add specifically that Kafka turns this ambivalent relation to language into a virtue, as described somewhat enigmatically in a passage towards the end of the letter to Brod, which I hope to illuminate by my discussions of Kafka’s use of language later in this chapter:
Weg vom Judentum…wollten die meisten, die deutsch zu schreiben anfingen, sie wollten es, aber mit den Hinterbeinchen klebten sie noch am Judentum des Vaters und mit den Vorderbeinchen fanden sie keinen neuen Boden. Die Verzweiflung darüber war ihre Inspiration. (Br 337)
This completes our initial survey of “the referential Kafka.” Having seen that the experience of capitalist hegemony does concretely enter into Kafka’s texts, we are now ready to investigate the claim that in Der Prozeß and Das Schloß Kafka provides models of hegemony, and investigates the possibility of resistance to it—and thereby also to support the claims made in the previous three paragraphs about Kafka’s perspective on hegemony.
Kafka and Hegemony
In Der Prozeß, the “saturation of the whole process of living by the dominant cultural and political system” described by the concept of hegemony is represented quite literally by the pervasive presence of the Law, which enters K.’s bedroom at the very beginning of the novel in the form of the guards, and remains with him until his death. In Das Schloß, the Castle’s records office attempts to record and regulate even the tiniest details of village life. Thus, although the K.s never manage to reach a court or an official who can competently address their concerns, the authorities are not “absent,” but rather penetrate their lives disturbingly intimately. In the course of their struggles, the K.s consistently encounter the “common sense” knowledge that the authorities form an unfathomable, infallible hierarchy, and that it is folly to question them in any way. But in accordance with Williams’ and Gramsci’s arguments about the contradictions and imperfections inevitably concealed beneath the common sense acceptance of any hegemonic order, the perfection claimed for the authorities is not at all evident in practice. Thus, although the K.s are not revolutionaries—they only want justice for themselves—it is hard for them not to question this common sense when they discover the ludicrous corruption and incompetence of the authorities time and again.
Throughout Der Prozeß, K. struggles to find the court that can settle his case definitively and fairly, but of course he never even discovers what he has been accused of, not even after he has apparently been sentenced to death. In the first chapter, K. is told by one of the guards about the supposedly infallible working of the Law:
Es gibt darin keinen Irrtum. Unsere Behörde, soweit ich sie kenne, und ich kenne nur die niedrigsten Grade, sucht doch nicht etwa die Schuld in der Bevölkerung, sondern wird wie es im Gesetz heißt von der Schuld angezogen und muß uns Wächter ausschicken. Das ist Gesetz. Wo gäbe es da einen Irrtum? (14)
As he attempts to approach this infallible Law, what K. finds is more like the combination of sloppiness and immorality suggested by the term "lüderlich" (“liederlich” in standard German—but “lüderlich” retains a closer connection to words like “Luder” (“hussy”)), which he uses to describe the proceedings against him in his speech to the unruly court at his only official hearing (62). Thus I will argue that, in accordance with our earlier claim that any hegemonic order is necessarily repressive and contradictory, the operation of the Law does not live up to the perfection claimed for it. The (inseparable) combination of the Law’s pervasiveness and “Lüderlichkeit” is experienced by K. as an intolerable agony.
What the guard describes as the Law's attraction towards guilt is revealed as an obscene violation of the privacy of its victims: on the very first page of the novel, the Law, in the form of the guards sent to “arrest” K., has already penetrated K.'s bedroom, and is soon eating his breakfast and fingering the nightshirt he is wearing, laying claim to his undergarments (Wäsche) and rubbing its belly against him: "immer wieder stieß der Bauch des zweiten Wächters…förmlich freundschaftlich an ihn" (11). The Law maintains this intimate presence until the moment of K.'s death:
Mit brechenden Augen sah noch K., wie nahe vor seinem Gesicht die Herren Wange an Wange aneinandergelehnt die Entscheidung beobachteten (312).
This pervasive presence of the Law is repeatedly associated with a sordid sexuality. We have discussed the association of the court with “Wäsche.” More directly, the law student assaults the washerwoman during K.’s court appearance, and later carries her to the examining magistrate—“Sehen Sie, … immer trägt man sie mir weg,” is her husband’s tragicomic lament (89); the “law books” on the examining magistrate’s desk turn out to be pornographic; Titorelli, the court’s painter, is surrounded by an eerily debauched group of little girls, etc. The situation is amusingly summed up by K. in his conversation with the chaplain in the cathedral: “Zeig dem Untersuchungsrichter eine Frau aus der Ferne und er überrennt um nur rechtzeitig hinzukommen, den Gerichtstisch und den Angeklagten” (P 290).
The “grenzenlose Korrumpierbarkeit” (Benjamin 12) of the officials associated with the Law is not restricted to the sexual sphere. At the lowest level, payment and oversight of the “guards” is so inadequate, that K. recognizes their corruption is hardly their fault: “schuldig ist die Organisation, schuldig sind die hohen Beamten” (112). The judges can be vengeful, irritable (Huld tells the story of one exhasperated judge who spends an entire day just throwing lawyers down the stairs… (158-9)), or childish, and are exceedingly vain, so that Titorelli is forced to paint portraits of them that are so absurdly flattering that no resemblance to the actual official remains. Their judgments are susceptible to manipulation: the lower levels of the court are corrupt, but also ineffectual, according to Huld; Huld’s activities as a lawyer are based on his ability to flatter the (higher) judges in proportion as he abases his clients, but he acknowledges that even at these levels, the judges’ words are not to be trusted; the help Titorelli offers K. is based on an “institutionalized” interference with what can hardly be called the “due process” of this Law.
The above arguments apply almost verbatim to Das Schloß. The Castle is equally intrusive. Its first confrontation with K. also comes when he is asleep; the Gehilfen it has sent out seem impossible to budge from K.’s side, so that they are there all night watching, for example, while Frieda and K. make love in the Herrenhof. At one point, K. wonders, “Nirgends noch hatte K. Amt und Leben so verflochten gesehen wie hier, so verflochten, daß es manchmal scheinen konnte, Amt und Leben hätten ihre Plätze gewechselt. Was bedeutete z.B. die bis jetzt nur formelle Macht welche Klamm über K.’s Dienst ausübte, verglichen mit der Macht die Klamm in K.’s Schlafkammer in aller Wirklichkeit hatte” (94). This already suggests how the Castle’s presence, like the Law’s, is associated with a disturbing sexuality. Thus the teacher chides K. for speaking of the Castle in front of innocent children. We are told that the disgusting note written by Sortini to Amalia is the norm for the officials’ interactions with women: “Wenn die Herren vom Schreibtisch aufstehen, sind sie so; sie finden sich in der Welt nicht zurecht; sie sagen dann in der Zerstreutheit das Allergröbste, nicht alle, aber viele…. Von Klamm ist es bekannt, daß er sehr grob ist, er spricht angeblich stundenlang nichts und dann sagt er plötzlich eine derartige Grobheit, daß es einen schaudert…. Wenn Klamm einen zarten Brief schreibt, ist es peinlicher als der gröbste Brief Sortinis” (308-9). Again like the officials associated with the Law, the Castle officials are vain (we see more flattering portraits), corrupt (they take bribes “der Einfachheit halber,” but these bribes achieve nothing (336-7)), irritable, and childish; the callousness with which they allow Amalia’s father to destroy himself with useless petitioning is particularly repulsive.
The only superficially paradoxical inefficiency and unpredictability of the supposedly infallible and all-encompassing Law and Castle goes beyond the corruption of the judges and officials. This is most vividly and humorously evident in Das Schloß. Even though it penetrates so thoroughly into the lives of its subjects—or more accurately because it accumulates more information than it could possibly process efficiently—the Castle never lives up to the infallibility claimed for it by the Gemeindevorsteher. The Castle bureaucracy’s attempt to keep track of every single movement in the town results in a laughable mess of files and papers —so that despite the unlimited confidence of all the villagers in the efficiency of the Castle, the reader is quite amazed when a communication from the Castle does occasionally seem to be accurate. We first see this directly when the Gemeindevorsteher’s closet, in which he has kept only the documents from his first years in office, emits stacks of them, helter-skelter, amid which his wife and the Gehilfen search in vain for the documents pertaining to K.s appointment. More such scenes abound, notably Barnabas’ experience of the chaotic activity in the Castle offices (Kanzleien), and K.’s experience of the cataclysmically incongruous distribution of files at the Herrenhof (for which K.’s presence is later made responsible). Perhaps the most grotesque moment is the description, two pages after the Gemeindevorsteher’s contradictory assertions that (1) the Castle operates on the principle that errors on its part are impossible, and that (2) “es gibt nur Kontrollbehörden” (104), of the towers of files that incessantly come crashing down in the bustle of Sordini’s office: “dieses fortwährende kurz aufeinanderfolgende Krachen ist für Sordinis Arbeitszimmer bezeichnend geworden” (106). The Law is equally inefficient. It is never exactly clear whether and in what sense K. is arrested; no one can tell him what he is actually charged with; and as we have seen, bribery and flattery are essential elements of the proceedings. When K. appears before the court, the judge arouses his contempt by asking him if he is a painter, based on information he finds in a tattered exercise book. Huld’s, and even more Titorelli’s accounts of the hierarchical mode of operation of the court raise the suspicion that the exhaustive collection of information carried out mysteriously by the court will eventually be lost in bureaucratic muddles similar to those so amusingly represented in Das Schloß. Huld describes how his “crucial” first depositions are usually either misplaced or lost, and certainly barely read (151). The ominous painting in Titorelli’s studio in which the goddess of justice seems at the same time to be the goddesses of victory and of the hunt does not speak for the objectivity of these trials; K. observes, “die Gerechtigkeit muß ruhen, sonst schwankt die Wage und es ist kein gerechtes Urteil möglich” (196), and Titorelli confirms his doubts by informing him that the court can never be persuaded of the innocence of someone it has once accused (201).
Neither the Law nor the Castle is “purely” imperfect, however—and a “purely” imperfect hegemony would of course be impossible. On some occasions, we see or hear about the court or castle officials actually working hard and late into the night, instead of dozing off or callously chasing women—Bürgel speaks of them working so hard, that the only time they have a chance to sleep is when they are in bed dealing with “Parteienverkehr” (407). There are moments where the authorities’ efficiency is uncanny. Thus in Der Prozeß, K., unsure as to when he is to appear for his first court hearing, decides to be there at 9:00 (51-2), and when he arrives a little after 10:00, the magistrate informs him that he should have appeared an hour and five minutes ago (59). Of course, the court would not have had occasion to demonstrate this uncanny knowledge if K.’s court appearance had not been scheduled without the mention of a specific time, and he would not have been as late if the court’s unlikely location had been described to him reasonably precisely. Analogously, Williams might perhaps say that the (imperfect) “magic” of supply and demand would not be needed in a society whose economic organization is not merely based on self-interest—by which I do not, of course, mean to say that Kafka is here teaching us this veiled economic lesson!
The products of the hegemony of the Law and the Castle are miserable worlds. Perhaps the most direct indication of this are the squalid surroundings in which the ramshackle court offices are located, and when K. discovers more such offices adjacent to Titorelli’s studio in a suburb all the way across town from the the court premises to which he was originally summoned, and is informed by Titorelli that the court occupies almost every attic in town, we can conclude that such squalor is omnipresent in K.’s city. In Das Schloß, misery has become inscribed on the physiognomies of the village inhabitants: “die Bauern…mit ihren förmlich gequälten Gesichtern—der Schädel sah aus als sei er oben platt geschlagen worden und die Gesichtszüge hätten sich im Schmerz des Geschlagenwerdens gebildet—ihren wulstigen Lippen, ihren offenen Mündern…” (39).
Integral to this misery is the way in which people treat each other and themselves in these novels. This is most evident in the behavior of the K.s themselves, which, despite their struggle with the authorities, turns out to be remarkably complicitous with the hegemonic order. Beginning with Brod (218n), more critics point this out with reference to Der Prozeß than for Das Schloß, but I would argue that it applies in both cases.
For Der Prozeß, the argument is easily made. We have already observed that Josef K.’s life is “swallowed up” by his profession: even his social life revolves around building connections to help him in his obsessive competition with the Direktor-Stellvertreter. He analyzes each new development in terms of how it will affect the power relations between him and the Direktor-Stellvertreter, and carries this habit over into his dealings with the Law. This is already evident in his first appearance before the court, when he continuously analyzes the impact his statements are having on the audience, in order to better manipulate his listeners. He is distant from his family (he has not seen his mother for three years (351), and forgets his cousin Erna’s birthday); the mention of his weekly visits to Elsa suggests a mechanical routine. He is quick to condemn others for minor or imagined transgressions (recall, for example, his quick condemnations of the “Waschfrau” who is pursued by the Law student and the examining magistrate ). Other people interest him only insofar as they are useful to him. He considers a relationship with this “Waschfrau,” thinking,
es gab vielleicht keine bessere Rache an dem Untersuchungsrichter und seinem Anhang, als daß er ihnen diese Frau entzog und an sich nahm. Es könnte sich dann einmal der Fall ereignen, daß der Untersuchungsrichter nach mühevoller Arbeit an Lügenberichten über K. in später Nacht das Bett der Frau leer fand. Und leer deshalb, weil sie K. gehörte, weil diese Frau am Fenster, dieser üppige gelenkige warme Körper im dunklen Kleid aus grobem schweren Stoff durchaus nur K. gehörte. (83)
After assaulting and terrifying Fräulein Bürstner in her room, he thinks for a while about his behavior: “er war damit zufrieden, wunderte sich aber, daß er nicht noch zufriedener war” (48); at another point he tells Fräulein Grubach’s friend, “er wußte, daß Fräulein Bürstner ein kleines Schreibmaschinenfräulein war, das ihm nicht lange Widerstand leisten sollte” (324). Leni is attractive to him for her possible influence with the court: “Ich werbe Helferinnen, dachte er fast verwundert, zuerst Fräulein Bürstner, dann die Frau des Gerichtsdieners und endlich diese kleine Pflegerin…” (143). Even K.’s moments of compassion are tainted. His plans to fight the corruption of the Law in the early stages of his trial are motivated by self-interest. More revealingly, in the “Prügler” episode, K. is willing to help Franz and Willem only until Franz’s screams as he is being beaten make K. fear that his secret will be discovered by the other bank employees:
Und K. hätte nicht gespart, es lag ihm wirklich daran die Wächter zu befreien; wenn er nun schon angefangen hatte die Verderbnis dieses Gerichtswesens zu bekämpfen, so war es selbstverständlich, daß er auch von dieser Seite eingriff. Aber in dem Augenblick, wo Franz zu schreien angefangen hatte, war natürlich alles zuende. K. konnte nicht zulassen, daß die Diener und vielleicht noch alle möglichen Leute kämen und ihn in Unterhandlungen mit der Gesellschaft in der Rumpelkammer überraschten. (115)
Thus, his treatment of people as instruments and his obsession with power reveal him to be entirely complicitous with the alienating, reifying system he is fighting. As Ernst Fischer points out, the intriguing description of Josef K. walking with his executioners is the ultimate image of his complicity in this order; “als Lebloses, als fast schon Abgestorbenes sieht Kafka die Bürgerwelt und die von ihr Ergriffenen, nur individuell protestierenden” (166):
Gleich aber vor dem Tor hängten sie sich in ihn in eine Weise ein, wie K. noch niemals mit einem Menschen gegangen war. Sie hielten die Schultern eng hinter den seinen, knickten die Arme nicht ein, sondern benützten sie, um K.’s Arme in ihrer ganzen Länge zu umschlingen, unten erfaßten sie K.’s Hände mit einem schulmäßigen, eingeübten, unwiderstehlichen Griff. K. gieng straff gestreckt zwischen ihnen, sie bildeten jetzt alle drei eine solche Einheit, daß wenn man einen von ihnen zerschlagen hätte, alle zerschlagen gewesen wären. Es war eine Einheit, wie sie fast nur Lebloses bilden kann. (306)
I will argue in the next section that the K. of Das Schloß seeks out the conflict with the Castle, but despite this challenge his behavior remains complicitous with the hegemonic order he is challenging. Like Josef K., the K. of Das Schloß obsessively examines each new development and each potential course of action in terms of how it affects his power relative to the Castle and to those around him. He “likes to menace and punish whenever he can” (Deleuze and Guattari 46). He is a ruthlessly cruel master for the Gehilfen. If we can believe his claim that he has left his wife and child behind in order to confront the Castle (13), then like Josef K., he cannot be very close to his family—especially as we see him pursue his involvement with Frieda and even consider marriage. Like Josef K., he forms his attachments with Frieda, with Barnabas and his family, with Pepi, and with little Hans on the basis of the value these “connections” can have for him. Adorno observes of Kafka’s work, “Frauen sind verdinglicht als bloßes Mittel zum Zweck: als Sexualobjekte und als Konnexionen” (Aufzeichnungen 345). This is indeed how the authorities treat women, as we have seen, and it is how the K.s treat women. (Predictably, Lukács takes this at face value and accuses Kafka of “Verrat an der Frau” (83).) Much more than in Der Prozeß, however, it is suggested in Das Schloß that beneath, or in addition to, his utilitarian motivations, K. feels a more “human” attraction, for example, to Barnabas’s grace, little Hans’s poise, Pepi’s simplicity. Most importantly, his relations with Frieda are more than a “reification” of her as sexual object and connection to Power. The intensity of their first lovemaking suggests this, but even more so, the sense of loss the second time:
Dort lagen sie, aber nicht so hingegeben wie damals in der Nacht. Sie suchte etwas und er suchte etwas, wütend, Grimmassen schneidend, sich mit dem Kopf einbohrend in die Brust des andern suchten sie und ihre Umarmungen und ihre sich aufwerfenden Körper machten sie nicht vergessen, sondern erinnerten sie an die Pflicht zu suchen, wie Hunde verzweifelt im Boden scharren so scharrten sie an ihren Körpern und hilflos enttäuscht, um noch letztes Glück zu holen, fuhren manchmal ihre Zungen breit über des andern Gesicht. Erst die Müdigkeit ließ sie still und einander dankbar werden. (75)
K.’s complicity with the hegemonic order in Das Schloß is thus more ambiguous than that of Josef K. in Der Prozeß—but this very ambiguity draws our attention to the elements of complicity by contrast with K.’s more “human” emotions and actions.
An interesting difference between the two novels is that whereas K.’s domineering and inconsiderate uncle and the merchant Block (in particular, in his pretence of abject deference to Huld) seem to be the only characters in Der Prozeß whose behavior might be compared to Josef K.’s manipulativeness (largely because only Josef K.’s behavior is explored in any depth by the text), everyone in Das Schloß seems to operate at least in part on this principle of self-interested manipulation: towards the end, it is impossible to keep track anymore of who has been manipulating whom as we see everyone, K. above all of course, articulate elaborate suspicions about everyone else to this effect (this includes Frieda, K.’s assistants, Pepi, Amalia, Olga, even little Hans). In Josef K.’s terms, one could say, “Die Manipulation wird zur Weltordnung gemacht.” Thus, while K.’s manipulativeness in Das Schloß is less unmitigated than Josef K.’s similar behavior in Der Prozeß, the commonness of such behavior in the latter novel makes the pervasiveness of the alienating, instrumentalizing hegemonic order more evident. Ernst Fischer writes that
Das Erschreckende an dieser Satire, das über sie Hinausgreifende ist, daß der jeweils die Welt Erlebende ihr nicht gegenübersteht wie Gulliver, sondern sich als von ihr infiziert, als Mitschuldiger erkennt. (161)
Despite all the evidence to the contrary which we have amassed in this section, the infallibility and benevolence of the Law and the Castle are “common sense knowledge” in the world of both novels, in accordance with Williams’ and Gramsci’s theories of hegemony. Thus, in his description, quoted above, of the infallibility of the Law, the guard is appealing to common sense knowledge, as can be seen from his use of the particle "doch," implying that “everybody knows” ("Unsere Behörde…sucht doch nicht etwa die Schuld in der Bevölkerung…"), and from his final rhetorical question: "Wo gäbe es da einen Irrtum?" In Das Schloß, K. observes, “Die Ehrfurcht vor der Behörde ist Euch hier eingeboren, wird Euch weiter während des ganzen Lebens auf die verschiedensten Arten und von allen Seiten eingeflößt und Ihr selbst helft dabei mit, wie ihr nur könnt” (288). Whenever they question the Law or the Castle, the K.s are accused of acting absurdly and childishly. They are consistently advised that if they compromise and stop drawing attention to themselves, everything will be all right. But in accordance with Gramsci’s and Williams’ theories, this common sense is itself full of contradictions—this is how it can coexist with the plentiful evidence of the “Lüderlichkeit” of Law and Castle, and of the misery they inflict on their subjects, evidence which is also known to and part of common sense. These contradictions explain the expedients which people use to deal with the authorities, such as the “ostensible acquittal” and “indefinite deferral” described by Titorelli, or Huld’s sycophantic procedures for cajoling the court, which are entirely incompatible with an unequivocal belief in the authorities’ perfection. Anders writes,
The face of Kafka’s world appears distorted to the point of madness. Yet with him the madness lies not in the distortion, but in the world itself; the distortion is needed in order to make visible the madness which so often appears and passes for normal. By continuing to treat this madly distorted world as normal, Kafka conveys his sense of the even madder fact that madness itself is not recognized. (Anders, 9)
In our terms, the absurdly contradictory common sense in Kafka’s world alerts us to the contradictions in our own common sense, as we will be discussing in the following section.
We discussed in the Introduction the role of language as a particularly “innocuous” component of the production of common sense. In Kafka’s model of hegemony, language can indeed be seen to function in this way. In order to see this, let us begin with a note about Kafka’s characteristic use of everyday language in presenting his extraordinary fictional worlds. Mark Anderson carefully traces the process by which Kafka progressively strove to eliminate from his writing the hackneyed effusiveness typical of German-speaking Prague writers of his time (including Meyrink, Brod, and even the early Rilke). Pavel Trost concludes an examination of Kafka’s language by remarking:
So handelt es sich bei Kafka im Grunde um eine alltägliche Sprache, die selbst ein Stück der alltäglichen Wirklichkeit ist. Die alltägliche Sprache dient also dazu, die “Kafka-Welt” zu enthüllen. Das ist Ironie von einem Standpunkt, wonach diese Welt mit der alltäglichen Welt nichts gemein hat. Aber das Werk tritt diesem Standpunkt entgegen, gerade auch die Sprache schlägt eine Verbindung und sucht anzudeuten, daß die “Kafka-Welt” inmitten der alltäglichen Wirklichkeit ihren Ort hat. (36)
Thus the everyday language that can effortlessly convey the horrors Kafka represents appears somehow to be complicitous with them—but this association takes place at a rather abstract level. Let us now see how Kafka makes it more concrete.
A crucial aspect of the hegemony of language on which I focussed in the Introduction is its capacity to conceal complexity, contradictions and instability beneath the apparent transparency and fixity of the signifier—we discussed Williams’ analyses of the work done by terms such as “nation” and “literature,” for example, and more generally, the way in which the rhetoric and institutions of “parliamentary democracy” combine to produce a remarkably undemocratic political system as “democratic.” An example of this in Kafka is the word “freedom.” In this regard, Kafka makes a memorable early statement in Der Verschollene, where Karl Rossmann’s first vision of America is of the Statue of Liberty holding aloft not a torch, but a sword (V 9). Goldstücker argues convincingly that, intentional or not, this switch is meaningful in the context of the novel:
Kann man doch als Leitmotiv des ganzen Romans die Darstellung der Falschheit und Hohlheit der Freiheitslosung in jener entmenschten Welt ansehen, in die er eintritt…. das Schwert der Gewalt anstelle der Fackel der Freiheit in der Hand der Freiheitsstatue ist eine Fehlleistung (Kafkas oder Karls?) von großem symbolischem Wert, die ominös alles vorwegnimmt, was folgen wird. (Heizer 53-4)
The claim that the United States is a “free” country turns out to be a deceptive simplification. The complexity concealed by the word “freedom” is revealed in another way in Der Prozeß, where K.’s “Verhaftung” turns out to produce a situation that is “phenomenologically” indistinguishable from “freedom.” “Noch war er frei” (12), we read as K. decides to look for his identity papers, but it turns out that his arrest leaves him such freedom until he is finally picked up to be executed (and even on this final route, he picks the direction, can choose to stop or go, and is expected to “freely” kill himself with the executioners’ knife). K. is most confused when he is encouraged to go to the bank after his arrest, and the supervisor has to explain:
“Sie sind verhaftet, gewiß, aber das soll Sie nicht hindern Ihren Beruf zu erfüllen. Sie sollen auch in Ihrer gewöhnlichen Lebensweise nicht gehindert sein.” “Dann ist das Verhaftetsein nicht sehr schlimm”, sagte K…. (26)
Having lost his freedom, K. is “free” to live just as he did before—and so we begin to question the nature of this “freedom,” and to notice the ways in which K.’s life is caught pathetically within the limits of his profession, as we observed at the beginning of this chapter. The “lesson” is summed up in a frequently quoted passage from “Ein Bericht für eine Akademie,” in which Rotpeter explains his “conversion” as the only “way out” (“Ausweg”) he could see from his cage:
Ich sage absichtlich nicht Freiheit. Ich meine nicht dieses große Gefühl der Freiheit nach allen Seiten. Als Affe kannte ich es vielleicht und ich habe Menschen kennengelernt, die sich danach sehnen…. mit Freiheit betrügt man sich unter Menschen allzuoft…. Oft habe ich in den Varietés vor meinen Auftritten irgendein Künstlerpaar oben an der Decke an Trapezen hantieren sehen…. “Auch das ist Menschenfreiheit”, dachte ich “selbstherrliche Bewegung.” Du Verspottung der heiligen Natur! Kein Bau würde standhalten vor dem Gelächter des Affentums bei diesem Anblick. (142)
A different aspect of the problematic of freedom is indicated in another frequently quoted passage, this time from Das Schloß. K. comes close to what Rotpeter means by “Freiheit” when his attempt to force a conversation with Klamm by waiting for him to leave the Herrenhof in his carriage results in Klamm’s retreat. We read:
…da schien es K. als habe man nun alle Verbindung mit ihm abgebrochen und als sei er nun freilich freier als jemals und könne hier auf dem ihm sonst verbotenen Ort warten solange er wolle und habe sich diese Freiheit erkämpft wie kaum ein anderer es könnte und niemand dürfe ihn anrühren oder vertreiben, ja kaum ansprechen, aber—diese Überzeugung war zumindest ebenso stark—als gäbe es gleichzeitig nichts Sinnloseres, nichts Verzweifelteres als diese Freiheit, dieses Warten, diese Unverletzlichkeit. (169)
Here we see K. coming face to face with the vertigo that I will be discussing at greater length in the chapter on Handke: as he feels the hegemonic system return to him his “freedom,” he is left disoriented, without a point of reference; the step outside the system (“als habe man nun alle Verbindung mit ihm abgebrochen”) is a step into Nothingness, a step outside of the struggle that defines him. We will see Handke’s Keuschnig find an apparent response to this dilemma—but in Kafka, it is the meaninglessness of this moment that explains the continued struggle of the K.s within the systems of the Law and the Castle--they can conceive of nothing else.
Left unexamined, then, the word “freedom” prevents important questions from being asked: it is “common sense” that America is “the land of the free,” that people are free to lead their lives as they wish, that, unless like Josef K. one has somehow violated “the system” excessively, then if one does not like this system, one can simply step outside it—thus the residents of the castle village fervently implore K. just to leave. Kafka’s fictions reveal the wide field covered, and covered over, by the word “freedom.” Beginning with Anders, many critics point out the extent to which Kafka’s fictions can in fact be seen to be generated out of an examination of the possibilities of meaning contained within words, metaphors, and expressions--Clayton Koelb refers to this as Kafka’s “rhetorical imagination.” Thus, Koelb sees “Die Verwandlung” as arising out of the tension between the literal and metaphorical interpretations of the claim that Gregor Samsa is an “ungeheures Ungeziefer.” I see this as the “constructive” or “hopeful” counterpart to Kafka’s critique of the ideological work done by the imprecision of language: in Kafka’s ability to generate his texts out of the tensions between various possible meanings of words, metaphors, and expressions, we see the productive potential of linguistic imprecision. “An der ungeahnten Fülle, die sich aus dem Wörtlichnehmen der sprachlichen Einzelerscheinungen ergab, hatten die Prager in krankhafter Originalitätssucht konsequent vorbeigesehen,” writes Wagenbach (96). I will discuss Kafka’s “rhetorical imagination” at length in the following section, but want to end this section with one of Kafka’s aphorisms, which describes the inadequacy and “blindness” of language directly in terms of its implication in capitalist hegemony:
Die Sprache kann für alles außerhalb der sinnlichen Welt nur andeutungsweise aber niemals auch nur annähernd vergleichsweise gebraucht werden, da sie, entsprechend der sinnlichen Welt, nur vom Besitz und seinen Beziehungen handelt. (H 34)
No Exit?
For anyone wanting to argue that Kafka’s vision of the world is irremediably hopeless, a plot summary of Der Prozeß or Das Schloß would be a natural place to begin. What could be more hopeless than the story of a stranger who meets with little else than an absurd hostility as he goes from defeat to defeat in his struggle to make the authorities who supposedly hired him recognize his right to stay and work, who finds out always too late about the rules by which these ludicrously incompetent and corrupt, yet revered authorities operate, who exhausts himself in this struggle for minimal recognition so that he falls asleep when an absurd and improbable opportunity for success finally appears, and who is (according to Max Brod’s reports of Kafka’s planned ending for the novel) on his death bed when the news at last arrives that as a special favor he may live and work in this miserable and vicious village? Well, perhaps more hopeless is the story of a man arrested in his bed one morning and informed that he is only making things worse when he asks what he is accused of, who is perpetually frustrated in his attempts to gain access to the court, nevertheless continues to try desperately to defend himself before the unknown court against the unknown accusation despite all evidence of the absurdity of this court and its Law, and is finally executed ignominiously “like a dog”….
In the light of this, it is not surprising that many critics, in particular many Marxist critics, see in Kafka’s texts a capitulation before the horrors of capitalist hegemony. Helmut Richter is representative of this tendency when he complains of “diese Atmosphäre niederdrückender Ausweglosigkeit” in Kafka’s work (Richter, 183). Kafka’s analysis is said not to have penetrated sufficiently deeply in order to perceive and reveal the forces working for change in his gloomy capitalistic present. “Der Verzweiflung über die kapitalistische Gegenwart, der Kafka erlag, stellen wir unsere optimistische Einsicht in die glückliche kommunistische Zukunft unseres Landes entgegen,” writes Paul Reimann; Kafka was not “fähig…, sich durch die Vielfalt der widersprechenden Eindrücke, die auf jeden Menschen im 20. Jahrhundert einstürmen, zu einer Synthese, zu einer einheitlichen künstlerischen Erfassung der Wirklichkeit durchzuringen” (14-15).
This kind of criticism is formulated particularly strongly by Lukács. Lukács grants Kafka that
es gibt wenige Schriftsteller, bei denen die Ursprünglichkeit und Elementarität im Erfassen und in der Wiedergabe der Welt, das Staunen vor ihrer Nochniedagewesenheit so gewaltig ausgebildet wäre wie in ihm (86),
and that he reveals capitalist hegemony as “Hölle und Ohnmacht alles Menschlichen” (87), but he declares on the same page that “Franz Kafka ist der Klassiker dieses Stehenbleibens bei der blinden und panischen Angst vor der Wirklichkeit,” which places Kafka on the “avant-garde” side of the distinction Lukács sets out between “(critical) realism” and the avant-garde: “Die Entscheidung in der Grundfrage der Gegenwart: zur Angst oder weg von ihr?” (91). Where realist writers are able to explain how the distorted experience of capitalist hegemony comes about, and reveal it as a distortion (“Verzerrung”) that can and must be moved beyond, avant-garde writers like Kafka represent this distorted experience as a metaphysical absolute; they cannot treat it “mit dem künstlerisch nötigen kritischen Abstand” (53):
die…subjektive Vision [wird] als Wesen der objektiven Wirklichkeit dargestellt. Die Angst, der panische Schrecken vor der restlos verdinglichten Welt des imperialistischen Kapitalismus (mit Vorahnung seiner faschistischen Varianten) schlägt aus dem Subjekt in die Substanz um, welche aber dennoch eine hypostasierte subjektive Pseudosubstanz bleiben muß, und das Abbilden der Verzerrung verwandelt sich deshalb in ein verzerrtes Abbild…die Welt als Allegorie eines transzendenten Nichts. (56)
Kafka’s message according to Lukács is thus that “resistance is futile.” Emblematic for Lukács is Josef K.’s thought as he is led to his execution: “Ihm fielen die Fliegen ein, die mit zerreißenden Beinchen von der Leimrute wegstreben” (307). In accordance with the argument I will make below, I would say that it is hard to imagine a more vivid image of determined resistance against all odds , but Lukács sees it as an image of utter resignation: “Diese Stimmung der vollendeten Unfähigkeit, der Gelähmtheit durch die unübersichtliche und unüberwindliche Macht der Umstände ist das Grundmotiv seiner [Kafkas] ganzen Produktion” (37).
An even stronger version of such a claim is made by Günther Anders, who argues that Kafka is in fact complicitous with the horrors he represents. He arrives at this conclusion via a more concrete version of Lukács’ argument that avant-garde artists are so terrified by the alienated experience of capitalist hegemony that they fail to see it as contingent and changeable, and instead represent this experience as an immutable transcendent reality. Anders identifies such a fear both textually in the situations of Kafka’s protagonists, for which he takes K. from Das Schloß as paradigmatic, and biographically in Kafka’s own life. Like Kafka himself (in the senses discussed previously), Kafka’s heroes are outsiders, Anders argues, confronted with situations in which everyone else seems to be not only familiar with the customs and rules, but also to have full confidence in them, no matter how cruel or absurd they may seem to the K.s’ rational inspection.
…nothing happens which [K.] would have expected, nothing he could have reckoned on. In such a situation, everything is terrifying…. in his desire to belong, he tries religiously to observe the rules. But he fails in this endeavour, precisely because he mistakes the customs for rational decrees….
The possibility that the newcomer might be right in suspecting that the customs are in fact decrees, that the rationalist might in fact have insight into truth, is an idea which Kafka never expresses. For him, the newcomer is always wrong, on principle, for in a way Kafka sees the problem of the alien, the newcomer, the Jew, through the eyes of those who do not accept the alien. Thus, Kafka is a rationalist ashamed of his own position…. (26-8)
Anders concludes that Kafka “is to some extent an apologist of conformism…. His moral message is sacrificium intellectus, and his political message is self-abasement” (30) , and he points out that this sort of attitude “characterizes the efficiency of a totalitarian police state…fear and ritualistic obedience go hand in hand” (77). In a memorable image, Anders compares Kafka to “a man skiing on loose stones; by his somersaults and bruises he wants to prove to those who pretend the stones are snow that they are nothing but stones” (96). Thus, Kafka demonstrates the absurdity of the hegemonic system he represents in his texts—but then he and his interpreters take back this achievement: “those who saw him skiing on the stones thought they saw fresh snow forming beneath his skis. And so did he” (96). Lacking the courage of his convictions, wishing desperately to belong, Anders’ Kafka believes that “might is right. And those who have no rights are guilty” (97)—and he believes this even after he has revealed this might in all its absurdity and viciousness.
I now want to preface a more rigorous attempt to refute such views of Kafka with a “heuristic” assessment of the “spirit” in which Kafka writes. Monolithic indictments of Kafka’s dreary desperation lose some of their plausibility when set against Max Brod’s report in his biography of Kafka that
Wenn Kafka selbst vorlas, wurde [sein] Humor besonders deutlich. So zum Beispiel lachten wir Freunde ganz unbändig, als er uns das erste Kapitel des Prozeß zu Gehör brachte. Und er selbst lachte so sehr, daß er weilchenweise nicht weiterlesen konnte. (217)
This passage serves as a reminder, and occasionally perhaps as a revelation of the pleasure of Kafka’s texts, which derives not only from their generally acknowledged vivid and memorable uncanniness, but also from the humor and irony inherent in their monstrous objectifications of hegemonic misery. Deleuze and Guattari describe Kafka as “an author who laughs with a profound joy, a joie de vivre, in spite of, or because of, his clownish declarations that he offers like a trap or a circus” (41). This brings us back to the observation with which this dissertation began: these books are simply too entertaining to be hopeless in Richter’s or Lukács’ sense, or to be a cynical vindication of a corrupt, potentially totalitarian state of affairs as Anders would have it. Kafka’s irony demands a more careful reading than the superficial caricature of Der Prozeß and Das Schloß with which I began this section. I want to cite two of Kafka’s aphorisms as conveniently brief examples of how this irony undermines statements which seem at a first reading to be grotesquely hopeless:
Der wahre Weg geht über ein Seil, das nicht in der Höhe gespannt ist, sondern knapp über dem Boden. Es scheint mehr bestimmt stolpern zu machen, als begangen zu werden. (H 30)
Er frißt den Abfall vom eigenen Tisch; dadurch wird er zwar ein Weilchen lang satter als alle, verlernt aber, oben vom Tisch zu essen; dadurch hört dann aber auch der Abfall auf. (H 36)
As a final example of a different sort, I want to refer to Paul Reimann, making a claim I agree with about Kafka’s “humanistic relationship to the working class” (Reimann, 16), but basing it on an in my opinion indefensible literal reading of the following hilarious passage from a letter of Kafka’s to Max Brod:
Denn was ich zu tun habe! In meinen vier Bezirkshauptmannschaften fallen—von meinen anderen Arbeiten abgesehn—wie betrunken die Leute von den Gerüsten herunter, in die Maschinen hinein, alle Balken kippen um, alle Böschungen lockern sich, alle Leitern rutschen aus, was man hinauf gibt, das stürzt hinunter, was man herunter gibt, darüber stürzt man selbst. Und man bekommt Kopfschmerzen von diesen jungen Mädchen in den Porzellanfabriken, die unaufhörlich mit Türmen von Geschirr sich auf die Treppe werfen. (Br 73, quoted in Reimann, 16)
By itself, the above passage would, by its irony, seriously undermine Reimann’s claim—and thereby significantly damage my own overall argument! In fact, of course, I agree entirely with Ritchie Robertson that
The humour of this letter does not mean that Kafka failed to take his duties seriously or was callous towards injured workers. His superiors’ reports speak highly of his industry, devotion, and general usefulness. Brod tells us how distressed Kafka was by mutilations suffered by workers, and how amazed he was at the docility with which they requested compensation; and a diary entry…indicates the unease he felt at having to defend publicly an institute whose provision for accident victims he privately knew to be inadequate. (42)
An early letter of Kafka’s to Oskar Pollak will serve to introduce a second part of my “heuristic” argument:
Wenn das Buch, das wir lesen, uns nicht mit einem Faustschlag auf den Schädel weckt, wozu lesen wir dann das Buch?…Wir brauchen…Bücher, die auf uns wirken wie ein Unglück, das uns sehr schmerzt, wie der Tod eines, den wir lieber hatten als uns, wie wenn wir in Wälder verstoßen würden, von allen Menschen weg, wie ein Selbstmord, ein Buch muß die Axt sein für das gefrorene Meer in uns. (Br 27-8)
Clearly, Kafka does not believe that literature is passive entertainment. Kafka wrote this well before he produced any of his mature texts, but it is hard to disagree that his texts have the powerfully unsettling effect he envisions in this passage; this is surely part of their appeal. Even Anders premises his argument on the observation that Kafka
is concerned to undermine the apparently firm structure of those things we unthinkingly accept as real or unreal. This ‘revision’ demands literally that we learn to see things anew, and to this end he has devised a new technique of literary vision. (18)
Kafka’s commitment is therefore not in question when he is criticized as described above. The problem is that, as Geoff Wade points out in his essay “Marxism and Modernist Aesthetics: Reading Kafka and Beckett,” Kafka’s (and Beckett’s) texts are “ideologically ambiguous” (111) in the sense that they do not explicitly spell out a political course of action by which to countenance the hegemonic horrors they represent. This openness accords with the critique of dogmatic political programs in my Introduction, but it does bring with it an ambiguity which Hutcheon, who, as we have seen, herself favors the “open” notion of “local truth,” identifies in a passage also cited by Wade (111):
It is perhaps liberal to believe that any subversion or undermining of a system of thought is healthy and good, but it would also be naive to ignore that art can just as easily confirm as trouble received codes, no matter how radical its surface transgressions. Texts could conceivably work to dismantle meaning and the unified humanist subject in the name of right-wing irrationalism as easily as left-wing defamiliarizing critique: think of the works of Céline, Pound, and others (whose politics tend to get ignored by the French theorists who prize their radical form). (Poet. PM 183)
I will attempt to argue that critics like Lukács and Anders move too quickly from a (salutary) perception of the possibility of certain “fascistic” or at least “hopeless” readings of Kafka’s texts to the conclusion that these are in fact good readings of Kafka.
It is now time for the “more rigorous” argument I have promised, which must demonstrate that to any careful reader, Kafka’s texts do indeed reveal the irony and the constructive commitment that was evident to his friends, and that seems to have been Kafka’s intention.
We have already seen that Kafka’s model of the hegemonic authorities is anything but flattering (forcing commentators like Brod, who want to see the authorities as representative of divine grace, to make the odd, but on its own terms irrefutable claim that the corruption of the authorities “symbolizes” the absolute alterity of the “Welt der Vollkommenheit” (Brod, 224); Robertson similarly speaks of the “(necessarily) inadequate embodiment” of the absolute (107)). Whereas Lukács and Anders argue, as we have seen, that Kafka presents the horrors of hegemony as something immutable to which we must submit, or which is perhaps even to be revered, Adorno, in his “Aufzeichnungen zu Kafka,” uses a similar impression of Kafka—e.g. “Das Ungeheuerliche, zu dem der Kontrast fehlt, wird wie bei Sade zur ganzen Welt, zur Norm” (Aufzeichnungen 347) —to come to an entirely different conclusion:
Er verherrlicht nicht die Welt durch Unterordnung, er widerstrebt ihr durch Gewaltlosigkeit. Vor dieser muß die Macht sich als das bekennen, was sie ist, und darauf allein baut Kafka. Dem eigenen Spiegelbild soll der Mythos erliegen. (352)
Adorno makes the logical observation, “die vollendete Unwahrheit ist der Widerspruch ihrer selbst, darum braucht ihr nicht ausdrücklich widersprochen zu werden” (Aufzeichnungen 338), and argues that any more conventional “realistic” engagement with the hegemonic order would reinscribe and thus unintentionally support the hegemonic “façade” (Aufzeichnungen 340). In Kafka’s words,
ich [habe] das Negative meiner Zeit, die mir ja sehr nahe ist, die ich nie zu bekämpfen, sondern gewissermaßen zu vertreten das Recht habe, kräftig aufgenommen. (H 89)
In his discussion of the differing opinions of Lukács and Adorno regarding Kafka and Beckett, Geoff Wade explains that in Kafka as well as in Beckett,
situations are created—things are said—which provoke their opposites; for instance isolated and helpless figures impel an urge for collective action. The reader—in Brechtian fashion—is “estranged” from what is happening, is forced away from emotional attachment, and searches for alternatives. The texts make Lukács angry; that is the point: they are intended to make us angry…. (112)
The importance of this is not whether Joseph does or does not become some kind of born-again proletarian hero over whom the Soviet Minister of Culture and Georg Lukács may go into rhapsodies, but that we as readers see through the reified processes of life and become aware of the alternatives. (120)
Instead of a soothing fantasy about successful, or at least unyielding resistance to hegemony, Kafka gives us two particularly gruesome accounts of its victories , and along with this motivation to oppose it, he demonstrates that although the hegemonic order wins such victories all the time, not nearly everything has been or is being tried. I will return to this emphasis on the alternative possibilities revealed by Kafka’s texts below when I discuss the “interpretive mania” of the K.s.
In general, the K.s resist even though they are constantly explicitly told not to (although at the same time they are expected to take the authorities seriously), they are “completely audacious” (Deleuze and Guattari 46). Contrary to Anders’ argument, what we see is not a mindless acceptance of authority, no matter how corrupt, but rather an outraged and persistent resistance, which is only gradually beaten down in the course of the novels. In Roman Karst’s words, “Kafka sieht ringsum steinernen, verbrannten Boden, aber er zerwühlt ihn mit blutenden Händen und sucht unter der Oberfläche ein Stückchen fruchtbarer Erde…. Kafka glaubt nicht an den Erfolg des Kampfes, er glaubt an seine Notwendigkeit” (147). The ultimate image of this persistence is K.’s hopefulness even as he is about to be executed at the end of Der Prozeß:
Wer war es? Ein Freund? Ein guter Mensch? Einer, der teilnahm? Einer, der helfen wollte? War es ein einzelner? Waren es alle? War noch Hilfe? Gab es Einwände, die man vergessen hatte? Gewiß gab es solche. Die Logik ist zwar unerschütterlich, aber einem Menschen der Leben will, widersteht sie nicht. Wo war der Richter den er nie gesehen hatte? Wo war das hohe Gericht, bis zu dem er nie gekommen war? Er hob die Hände und spreizte alle Finger. (312)
The less dramatic, but more explicitly hopeful counterpart to this in Das Schloß is K.’s memory of the wall in his childhood that few children could climb, which he one day succeeds in climbing with surprising ease in a place where he had previously failed (49).
As many critics point out, the land surveyor K. in Das Schloß repeatedly appears to be deliberately seeking out the conflict with these authorities, to be deliberately challenging them, so that he bases a certain optimism on the observation that the officials are fighting for their abstract regulations, “während K. für etwas lebendigst Nahes kämpfte, für sich selbst, überdies zumindest in der allerersten Zeit aus eigenem Willen, denn er war der Angreifer” (92-3, italics added). Although the Gemeindevorsteher produces some evidence that the Castle might have summoned a land surveyor (and the instances of the Castle’s provisional acceptance of K. as land surveyor might be examples of its occasional efficiency, rather than its usual incompetence), it is not at all clear that K. was indeed that surveyor. Why, for example, does he pretend to recognize Artur and Jeremias as his old assistants (31-2)? When we read
K. horchte auf. Das Schloß hatte ihn also zum Landvermesser ernannt. Das war einerseits ungünstig für ihn, denn es zeigte, daß man im Schloß alles Nötige über ihn wußte, die Kräfteverhältnisse abgewogen hatte und den Kampf lächelnd aufnahm. Es war aber andererseits auch günstig, denn es bewies seiner Meinung nach, daß man ihn unterschätzte und daß er mehr Freiheit haben würde als er hätte von vornherein hoffen dürfen (12),
it sounds as if the Castle has fallen for a trick on K.’s part, as when later he apparently convinces a Castle official over the phone that he (K.) is “der Gehilfe des Herrn Landvermessers” (37). One gets an even stronger impression that K. has voluntarily chosen to take up the fight against the Castle when K. reads Klamm’s letter welcoming him into the Castle’s service: “Wollte K. Arbeiter werden, so konnte er es werden, aber dann in allem furchtbaren Ernst, ohne jeden Ausblick anderswohin…. mit dieser Gefahr mußte er den Kampf wagen” (43). Goldstücker’s suggestion that one see K.’s situation as “das Problem des Revolutionärs in der Gesellschaft” (Prager Perspektive 40) may overstate the case, but his observations about the similarity of “Landvermesser” and “sich vermessen,” and about the association of land surveying with land reform (Prager Perspektive 43) add support to the argument about K.’s challenge to the Castle.
To a limited extent, a similar argument can be made for Der Prozeß. As Koelb has noted (Koelb 43-6), K. seems to accept the proceedings against him, which are curiously ambiguous. The guards’ utterances about K.’s arrest all suggest that he has been arrested, rather than that he is being placed under arrest: “Sie sind ja gefangen” (9, my italics), and again “Sie sind doch verhaftet” (13, my italics), and then the supervisor’s “Sie sind verhaftet, das ist richtig, mehr weiß ich nicht” (22). K. is only ever actually placed under arrest by the omniscient narrator of the first sentence: “…ohne daß er etwas Böses getan hätte, wurde er eines Morgens verhaftet” (7). Koelb points out that it is curious that K. never asks the guards to clarify whether their ambiguous statements are supposed to constitute his arrest. K. thinks that he could even consider the whole affair a joke, but he decides to take it seriously just in case (“war es eine Komödie, so wollte er mitspielen” (12)); he tells the examining magistrate “es ist ja nur ein Verfahren, wenn ich es als solches anerkenne” (62), but he very soon forgets that he has (or had) any choice in the matter. If one accepts this argument, one can see the parallels between the K.s continuing, in the sense that their initially confident challenge to the Court and the Castle gradually turns into a compulsion, so that Josef K.’s off-handed confidence in the early stages of his trial changes to “Der Gedanke an den Proceß verließ ihn nicht mehr” (P 149), just as it is inconceivable for K. to fulfill Frieda’s wish to emigrate with her to France or Spain (S 215).
We have discussed at length how hegemony is based on consent, and this consent results from the hegemonic order’s ability to produce itself as common sense. The K.s’ experience demonstrates the converse of this: it is because the K.s are forced to become aware of hegemony, and no longer experience it in the background as common sense, but rather consciously as strangers to its functioning, that its intrusiveness and contradictoriness become consumingly intolerable for them. This perception of hegemony makes the K.s dangerous. Adorno writes, “Systeme des Gedankens und der Politik wollen nichts, was ihnen nicht gleicht…. Deshalb gerade wird ihnen die geringste “Abweichung” als Bedrohung des gesamten Prinzips so untragbar, wie den Mächten bei Kafka Fremde und Einzelgänger es sind” (Aufzeichnungen 337). Hence the notable paranoia with which K. is met everywhere in the Castle village: “Gastfreundlichkeit ist bei uns nicht Sitte, wir brauchen keine Gäste” (24); “Leider aber sind Sie doch etwas, ein Fremder, einer der überzählig und überall im Weg ist, einer wegen dessen man immerfort Scherereien hat,… einer dessen Absichten unbekannt sind…” (80). Even as the K.s come to take to heart the constant admonishments they are given to take the authorities seriously, they only multiply their difficulties. Anders explains:
in his desire to belong, [K.] tries religiously to observe the rules. But he fails in this endeavour, precisely because he mistakes the customs for rational decrees. He tries to understand them because, newcomer that he is, he cannot help looking upon the habits of his hosts with the eyes of a rationalist. (27)
This suggests an explanation for the extreme fatigue with which both K.s are notably affected throughout their struggles. The snowy streets of the village in Das Schloß seem to produce this excessive fatigue just as easily as the stuffy court corridors in Der Prozeß. The K.s share this fatigue with the others in the court corridors, and with the “Mädchen aus dem Schloß” (25) (for whom the problem is also “die Luft hier” (230), which is “ganz anders” than “oben auf dem Schloßberg” (231))—and just as the accused in Der Prozeß have a certain beauty, as we hear from Leni, so the “Mädchen aus dem Schloß” appears particularly “fein,” apparently from exhaustion: “freilich, Krankheit und Müdigkeit macht auch Bauern fein” (S 23). Their extreme fatigue prevents the K.s from taking advantage of the opportunities presented to them by Bürgel in Das Schloß, and the “Auskunftgeber” in Der Prozeß. We have discussed the stultifying and demanding conditions of labor in these novels, but this cannot explain the extremity of the K.s’ fatigue—after all, Josef K. had no difficulty coping with his job prior to his arrest. I would suggest that it is the weight of their unrelieved awareness of the hegemonic order that exhausts the K.s: if the ordinary “non-experience” of hegemony can be compared to that of the air we breathe, then it is as if the K.s were suddenly aware of the weight of the atmosphere upon their shoulders.
The reports of the K.s’ submissiveness are thus greatly exaggerated, and to a limited extent, this can also be said of the “ordinary people” around them, whose “identification of power and morality”(Anders 87) is not as absolute as Anders deduces from the Brückenhofwirtin’s devotion to Klamm. In Der Prozeß, the washerwoman supports K.’s complaints about the court, and is disgusted by the law student’s assaults on her, although she does not dare repel them (her sincerity turns out to be dubious, however), and her husband is even more outspoken, vividly fantasizing about one day literally crushing the law student (who, as we also find out, has already been thrown out of five apartments where he attempted similar behavior (P 90))—although he does not dare to act on this, and is soon frightened enough to change the topic. In Das Schloß, K. is told repeatedly that the village’s women are to be honored even by the most obscene and vicious advances made upon them by the officials, but here too, contact with the authorities often appears as something to be shunned, as is most apparent in the apparent ostracism of the “Mädchen aus dem Schloß” in Lasemann’s house, where she is relegated to a corner and shielded from K.’s questions. We have already mentioned some of the expedients by which the pressure of the authorities is alleviated. In Der Prozeß, Huld’s roundabout methods of defending his clients, and the established procedures for evading a sentence by obtaining “ostensible acquittal” or “indefinite deferral” are notable. In Das Schloß, such expedients are most explicitly discussed in the Amalia episode. Amalia’s family’s grovelling before the authorities completely fails to repair their ostracism by the villagers, whereas they could have solved the problem just by ignoring it:
Wenn wir also nur wieder hervorgekommen wären, das Vergangene ruhen gelassen hätten, durch unser Verhalten gezeigt hätten, daß wir die Sache überwunden hatten, gleichgültig auf welche Weise, und die Öffentlichkeit so die Überzeugung gewonnen hätte, daß die Sache, wie immer sie auch beschaffen gewesen sein mag, nicht wieder zur Besprechung kommen werde, auch so wäre alles gut gewesen; überall hätten wir die alte Hilfsbereitschaft gefunden, selbst wenn wir die Sache nur unvollständig vergessen hätten, man hätte es verstanden und hätte uns geholfen, es völlig zu vergessen (199).
That the problem could be solved in this way shows that Amalia’s family is not being ostracized because her behavior offended the villagers’ profound reverence for the dignity of the Castle officials. Indeed, we have seen that an awareness of the “Lüderlichkeit” of the authorities coexists contradictorily with the common-sense belief in their perfection. As with Lasemann’s and Gerstäcker’s vigorous efforts to get K. out of their neighborhood on his first day in the village, the villagers’ paramount concern appears to be not to attract the authorities’ attention.
There is, then, more resistance to the authorities than is admitted by Anders and Lukács. But as predicted by Williams, many of the K.s’ efforts are coopted by the authorities, because the hegemonic order is too complex for them to be able to foresee the effect of their actions—Brod speaks of Kafka’s “Betonung der Unübersichtlichkeit und Kompliziertheit alles Irdischen” (211). The K.s are told countless times that their resistance (even as this resistance is reduced more and more to their efforts to work within the system) is only making things worse. We have just seen how the disgrace of Amalia's family in Das Schloß is perpetuated by their obsessive efforts to obtain forgiveness from the authorities. But ignoring the authorities can obviously also be a sign of guilty disrespect, as we hear most forcefully from Josef K.’s uncle in Der Prozeß, outraged at the offhanded confidence with which K. is at that point approaching his trial. The dilemma is most intensely represented by the creature in "Der Bau," which cannot find security inside or outside its burrow, or in any of the various patterns in which it tries to arrange its burrow and its stores of food. On the other hand, the unoverseeable complexity of the hegemonic system also brings with it random opportunities, such as Josef K.’s encounter with the Auskunftgeber in Der Prozeß, and above all K.’s interview with Bürgel in Das Schloß (although the K.s are too exhausted to take advantage of these opportunities). Deleuze and Guattari approach this dilemma from a broader perspective, arguing that the unoverseeable complexity we have been discussing makes conscious resistance to the hegemonic “machine” futile, and therefore praising “the deliberate absence of social critique in Kafka” (57) (which they identify on the basis of what we have called the K.s’ complicity with the hegemonic order):
Since there is no way to draw a firm distinction between the oppressors and the oppressed or between the different sorts of desire, one has to seize all of them in an all-too-possible future, hoping all the while that this act will also bring out lines of escape, parade lines, even if they are modest, even if they are hesitant, even if—and especially if—they are asignifying. A little bit like the animal that can only accord with the movement that strikes him, push it farther still, in order to make it return to you, against you, and find a way out. (59)
This approach is based on the Marxist-sounding premise that the hegemonic “machine”’s internal contradictions will eventually unravel it, and that what is to be done is to “accelerate” (and prevent “blockages” of) this process: “Since the collective and social machines bring about a massive deterritorialization of man, Kafka will take this process farther, to the point of an absolute molecular deterritorialization. Criticism is completely useless. It is more important to connect to the virtual movement that is already real even though it is not yet in existence (conformists and bureaucrats are always stopping the movement at this or that point)” (58). This “joyful,” “playful” mode of revolution obviously evades the dangers of totalitarianism which we discussed in the Introduction (insofar as any “programme” can do so). It avoids the temptation to fight the hegemonic order on its own terms—as when Robertson observes that “Kafka is trying to imagine ways not of attacking but of eluding his father” (27). I would argue, however, that the abandonment of commited, collective action is too easy. “How will [Kafka] make a revolution? He will act on the German language such as it is in Czechoslovakia,” write Deleuze and Guattari (58). This ignores the problem of how Kafka’s linguistic deterritorialization can be made to spread to the remainder of the hegemonic “machine”; it ignores it so blatantly that I take Deleuze and Guattari’s position to be polemical, directed against stabilizing political reductions of Kafka’s work as much as it is against psychoanalytic or theological reductions. Their goal of “absolute molecular deterritorialization,” in itself a call for a dangerous anarchic meaninglessness (which we will see more of in the chapter on Handke), could then be matched with our discussion in the Introduction of the need to emphasize the “constructedness” of our representations of the world, in order to keep these representations, and language in particular, flexible and open at all times to new interconnections. Their emphasis on keeping the “machine” moving (rather than on “resistance”) could similarly be matched with our discussion of the need for a constant reexamination of one’s “committed” course of action to prevent its “blockage” by hegemonic (and in particular totalitarian) cooptation.
We have discussed at length how the K.s are complicit with the hegemonic order they are fighting. Obviously this again demonstrates the need for self-awareness in the struggle against hegemony, and makes Kafka’s texts more useful than a simplistic account of perfect heroes battling an evil system. The K.s’ complicity in the hegemonic order prevents them, in particular, from devoting their tremendous energy effectively to an attempt to organize a collective resistance to the Law or the Castle—not that this would be easy under any circumstances, of course, given the common-sense acceptance of these authorities in spite of their oppressiveness and “Lüderlichkeit.” This does not mean, as is sometimes claimed, that Kafka was blind to the necessity of collective action. We have discussed Kafka’s socialist sympathies, and his attraction to the religious community he saw among Eastern Jews. It is frequently noted that in Das Schloß, Kafka finally exhibits a protagonist who sees the success of his struggle as contingent on his ability to become part of the community, and thus mobilize its resources:
Nur als Dorfarbeiter, möglichst weit den Herren vom Schloß entrückt, war er imstande etwas im Schloß zu erreichen, diese Leute im Dorf, die noch so mißtrauisch gegen ihn waren, würden zu sprechen anfangen, wenn er, wo nicht ihr Freund, so doch ihr Mitbürger geworden war, und war er einmal ununterscheidbar von etwa Gerstäcker oder Lasemann…dann erschlossen sich ihm gewiß mit einem Schlage alle Wege, die ihm wenn es nur auf die Herren oben und ihre Gnade angekommen wäre, für immer nicht nur versperrt sondern unsichtbar geblieben wären. (42)
Although his efforts in this direction fail, this attitude is another way in which the complicity of the K. of Das Schloß is mitigated with respect to that of his counterpart Josef K., who never conceives of such an idea. Josef K. does tell the court that he is fighting it in the name of the many others subjected to similar proceedings, “Für diese stehe ich hier ein, nicht für mich” (64), but despite his subsequent claims (“Ich will nicht Rednererfolg” (65)), he seems at this moment to be speaking for rhetorical effect: “K. [fuhr] etwas leiser [fort] als früher und suchte immer wieder die Gesichter der ersten Reihe ab…” (64). These plans do not last long, and while they do, they are based on K.’s confidence in his individual power relative to the court , not on any vision of collective action. The possibility of collective action is most explicitly discussed in Der Prozeß when the merchant Block tells K.,
Im allgemeinen verkehren [die Angeklagten] nicht miteinander…das wäre nicht möglich, es sind ja so viele. Es gibt auch wenig gemeinsame Interessen. Wenn manchmal in einer Gruppe der Glaube an ein gemeinsames Interesse auftaucht, so erweist er sich bald als ein Irrtum. Gemeinsam läßt sich gegen das Gericht nichts durchsetzen…. nur ein einzelner erreicht manchmal etwas im Geheimen. (238)
There are two immediate reasons to distrust Block’s argument: it sounds like a parody of arguments against socialism or trade unionism (such a reading is encouraged by the absurd logic of the first sentence: that the accused cannot get together because there are too many of them!); and the speaker, Block, hardly appears as an authoritative source in the light of his abject submission to the constant, arbitrary humiliations imposed upon him by Huld. By the very implausibility of Block’s assertion, the text is thus drawing attention to collective action as a promising alternative not explored by the protagonist (an example of the text’s emphasis on alternative possibilities, as described by Adorno and Wade). Ernst Fischer (164-5) reads the parable “Vor dem Gesetz” as more directly demonstrating the impotence of individualism and thus the need for collective action: the individual is powerless against the hierarchy of guards, and the guard claims that each door to the Law is reserved for just one person, but again, the text urges us to distrust both the guard (by the priest’s exegesis), and the priest’s claim that one must take the guard’s words not as true, but as necessay (by K.’s protest, “die Lüge wird zur Weltordnung gemacht”). Thus, Lukács’ criticism that modernist art effaces mankind’s social potential by representing “man” as essentially alone (“für sie ist ‘der’ Mensch: das von Ewigkeit her, seinem Wesen nach einsame, aus allen menschlichen und erst recht aus allen gesellschaftlichen Beziehungen herausgelöste—ontologisch—von ihnen unabhängig existierende Individuum” (16)) cannot be applied to Kafka. Instead, I would adopt the formulation of Ernst Fischer: “Allein-Sein in jedem entscheidenden Augenblick ist nicht nur Schicksal, sondern auch Schuld. So hat es Kafka empfunden und bestürzend dargestellt” (167).
I now want to discuss more “formal” elements of Kafka’s texts. It will immediately be obvious that the location I have chosen for the boundary between “form” and “content” is entirely arbitrary. I view the “interpretive mania” of Kafka’s protagonists as a striking formal aspect of Kafka’s texts, but my argument about this begins with a discussion of how this “interpretive mania” naturally (inseparably) follows from the situation of the K.s in the plot of Der Prozeß and Das Schloß; a very similar argument then follows regarding the perceptiveness and attention to detail of the K.s. I am thus using the distinction between form and content quite informally for organizational purposes to determine the order in which to proceed, but I hope that my argument will make it clear that the inseparability of form and content is natural in a text representing the pervasiveness of hegemony, the way in which a political and social order penetrates even into language.
We have discussed above Adorno’s and Wade’s arguments that Kafka’s gruesome model of hegemony evokes in the reader a desire for and a consideration of the alternatives to it. In fact, Der Prozeß and Das Schloß obsessively enact such a search for alternatives, most obviously in the “interpretive mania” of the K.s. One cannot be too careful in a world in which a supposedly perfect, but in practice incompetent, decadent and incomprehensible authority is present everywhere and all the time, a world in which one cannot know when the Law might come into one’s bedroom, supposedly attracted by one’s guilt. This explains the characteristic thoroughness with which Kafka's protagonists always attempt to consider all the alternatives in any situation, no matter how trivial. One must match the thoroughness of the authorities; one must try to attain one's ends by being as thorough as the authorities claim to be. Furthermore, this kind of pedantic thoroughness in considering all possible courses of action is a natural response when one is confronted with paradoxical demands or accusations from those in a position of power: one seeks to find the minute piece of evidence one had not yet considered that might resolve the paradox, and/or one seeks to find the tiny loophole that will permit a reconciliation with the authorities.
Anders proceeds from such a premise to interpret the K.s’ “mania for interpretation” (51) as “the most striking expression of that syntax of unfreedom which is the groundwork of all [Kafka’s] prose” (53):
the only real action of which Kafka’s heroes are capable is to ponder ceaselessly upon the thousand possibilities emerging like divergent rays of light from each point in the succession of events (Anders, 37).
In another of his striking analogies, Anders compares Kafka to a man locked in a dark cell, incessantly searching everywhere for a way out: “His hithering and thithering, the confusing multiplicity of his attempts, proves simply that he has no idea whether or not there is a way out. The only thing which is entirely clear is his desperate desire to escape” (84). The analogy is useful, I think, but I would apply it to Kafka’s protagonists rather than to Kafka, and I would interpret it differently. I have already argued that the “desperate desire to escape” is in itself a hopeful, encouraging aspect of Kafka’s texts, and that it undermines Anders’ more extreme claims that Kafka is advocating a proto-fascist, irrational submission to power, regardless of its corruption. I agree with Anders that one can come to expect as a reader of Kafka that the man in the cell will not find a hole. But we are shown that despite all claims to the contrary, the cell’s construction is shoddy beyond belief (but also elaborate and confusing), and that there are lots of places where the man in the cell might have looked (and thinks of looking) but does not. In this sense one might see Kafka’s writing as a lamp that helps illuminate such cells. We have seen Koelb’s discussion of Josef K.’s “acceptance” of his trial; Wade interprets the moment at which K. tells the court that “es ist ja nur ein Verfahren, wenn ich es als solches anerkenne” (62) as an example of how “alternatives…are foregrounded” in Der Prozeß: “The spell of reification is blasted…. And Joseph aggressively informs the Court that he will not attend a further hearing; this must register with the Bench, for when he does return the court-room is empty” (119). Most obviously, alternatives are “foregrounded” in the exegesis of “Vor dem Gesetz,” which opens up an unlimited field of interpretations of the Law, from adulation to K.’s depressed observation “Die Lüge wird zur Weltordnung gemacht” (303). In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, if interpretation is the stabilizing movement of “reterritorialization,” then the “interpretive mania” in Kafka’s texts is the movement of “deterritorialization,” of making new and unexpected connections, and of refuting the possibility of singular right answers.
Another characteristic aspect of Kafka’s texts is the precision of his descriptions, despite both the absurdity and the “fluidity” of much of what he describes. Kafka insisted that there must not be a drawing of Gregor Samsa on the cover of “Die Verwandlung”; Gregor is sometimes too heavy to get out of bed, sometimes light enough to crawl on the ceiling—yet we can follow how he gains control of his little sticky legs, and see him dragging one limply behind him after his first confrontation with his father, we see the little white spots itching on his belly, and feel the “Kälteschauer” when he touches them, we know he has no teeth, but strong jaws, from which oozes a brown liquid when they are hurt, we know how this “Ungeziefer” feels about fresh food, and we see the apple lodge in his shell and gradually rot away…. Characteristic in this respect are also the precisely described gestures to which Benjamin first drew attention in Kafka’s work. Kafka’s own attention to detail is described by Brod: “in seiner Gegenwart veränderte sich der Alltag, alles wirkte wie zum erstenmal gesehen, war neu, oft auf eine sehr traurige, ja niederschmetternde Art neu, die aber…nie uninteressant, nie flach wurde” (85); “für alles Neue, Aktuelle, Technische interessierte er sich, so zum Beispiel auch für die Anfänge des Films” (126). In the sense that the narrative perspective is provided largely by the protagonists, the availability of this detail implies that the K.s are precise observers, and this can again be attributed, like their “interpretive mania,” to their need to pay attention to every aspect of their situation, in the hope of finding something helpful. And like the “interpretive mania,” this attention to detail is an essential component of the fight against hegemony, exposing contradictions, and providing raw material out of which the “interpretive mania” can generate alternatives.
In the previous chapter, we discussed Linda Hutcheon’s view of the critique of “representation” constituted by postmodern art’s violations of the narrative conventions of “realism”: such art demonstrates that our representations of reality are not natural and accurate “reflections,” but rather constructions which constitute our view of reality, and thus it presents a challenge to hegemonic “common sense.” Without wanting to enter into a discussion of whether Hutcheon should consider Kafka “postmodern,” I want to make the obvious point that Kafka’s texts present this sort of challenge. Adorno has made a similar point:
Kafka, Adorno says, presents a kind of copy of an alienated or reified totality…. But he also uses formal devices in his text, disruptions of conventional narrative time for instance, which show that this alienated reality has weak points and cracks in it. By both reproducing and exposing the way reality is, Kafka’s books work to give a negative knowledge of it, to negate it. (Forgacs 190, quoted in Wade 112)
Forgacs and Wade are referring in particular to the following passage:
Immer wieder wird das Raum-Zeit Kontinuum des “empirischen Realismus” durch kleine Sabotageakte lädiert wie die Perspektive in der zeitgenössischen Malerei; etwa wenn der umherwandernde Landvermesser vom viel zu frühen Einbruch der Nacht überrascht wird. (Aufzeichnungen 343)
Kafka goes beyond “small acts of sabotage”: the K.s constantly find themselves disoriented in Kafka’s space, where identical court corridors can suddenly appear at the other end of town, where the street to the Castle never reaches the Castle. Perhaps the most gruesome “act of sabotage” is the uncanny identical repetition of the already bizarre Prügler scene on the following day, marked, as Adorno points out (Aufzeichnungen 333), by K.’s reaction, in which he for once abandons the equanimity typical of Kafka’s protagonists in other extreme and absurd situations: “Sofort warf K. die Tür zu und schlug noch mit den Fäusten gegen sie, als sei sie dann fester verschlossen. Fast weinend lief er zu den Dienern…. ‘Räumt doch endlich die Rumpelkammer aus’, rief er. ‘Wir versinken ja im Schmutz’” (P 117). In general, Mark Anderson distinguishes Kafka’s “deterritorializing” “travelling naratives” from traditional nineteenth century “property narratives,” which work
to establish the identity of its protagonists, as well as the stability of those narrative structures through which that identity is apprehended, by encircling its protagonists in a network of property relations. Property is not just land or economic wealth, but all the advantages and attributes that generally accompany it…. Situated in a precise historical and geographical space, the property narrative is concerned with determining the origins of its protagonists, the motives for their behavior, the consequences of their decisions. The persons and places it represents are offered to the reader as stable, ultimately knowable objects of perception; are offered to us as a form of narrative property that we can acquire and make our own. (KC 114)
Kafka’s novels utterly abandon this stability, to the detriment of the common sense which “territorializing” property narratives reinforce (and on which such narratives are based).
Kafka thus questions our “common sense” representations of the world, and suggests alternatives, by his critique of the conventions of representation, and he does this even more fundamentally by his treatment of language. Günther Anders initiated a productive line of inquiry in this direction with his observation under the heading “The Literal Metaphor” that Kafka “draws on the inherent resources of language, on its figurative and associative character, and insists, as it were, upon its face value in the world” (43), usually with unsettling results: “the commonest metaphor is suddenly discovered to contain such monstrous detail that its elaboration takes on a horrifying reality” (45). Anders cites various examples: Kafka’s dogs who are “uplifted” by their music, the punishment of criminals in “In der Strafkolonie,” according to the saying “etwas am eigenen Leibe erfahren,” or Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis, in accordance with his artistic aspirations and the bourgeois perception of artists as “Luftmenschen” and useless “Ungeziefer.” The variety of these examples reflects Anders’ observation that “even the smallest and apparently abstract parts of everyday speech consist of metaphors” (44). Anders argues for the relevance of Kafka’s procedure in terms reminiscent of Gramsci’s and Williams’ discussions of the material importance of language:
man’s conscious life is from the beginning interpreted and indeed identified with language. When a man says that he could “die of shame”, or that he is “attached to someone”, or “uplifted” by a song, he has said something significant about human reality…. None of [Kafka’s] images, no matter how absurd it may appear, is without some inherent relevance to the conditions of human existence, which were realized in the earliest reflections of language…. (44)
A particularly comprehensive refinement and expansion of Anders’ ideas is given by Koelb, who devotes an entire book to Kafka’s “rhetorical imagination.” Koelb proposes an idiosyncratically wide definition of “rhetoric” “to refer to…language understood as readable under more than one interpretive convention, as well as to the activity of ‘reading’ or ‘writing’ such language. ‘Rhetoricity’ will refer to a discourse’s openness to radically divergent interpretations” (9-10). Koelb argues that much of Kafka’s writing arises out of the tension between the divergent interpretations of discourse that is “rhetorical” in this sense, and thus speaks of Kafka’s “rhetorical imagination.” For example, the short text “Gibs auf” which we examined at the beginning of this chapter depends on the rhetoricity of the phrase “fragte atemlos nach dem Weg,” which one assumes to be a report of a question about the way to the station, but which could also simply report a question asking about the way. Koelb discusses at length the rhetoricity of the phrase “Sie sind verhaftet,” which never quite appears as a genuine “performative” utterance in Der Prozeß, thus generating the ambiguity of Josef K.’s status, which is never explicitly resolved. Comparable to this is the explicit insistence of Das Schloß on the “absolute” rhetoricity of Klamm’s letters and utterances, which we have discussed previously. Similarly, “Die Verwandlung” relies on the tension between the literal and figural interpretation of Gregor’s metamorphosis. This involves an important qualification, which Koelb takes from Corngold, of Anders’ concept of “literalized metaphor.” Corngold points out that if the metaphor was indeed fully “literalized,” there would be no story: “then we should have not an indefinite monster but simply a bug.” Corngold continues:
Indeed, the continual alteration of Gregor’s body suggests ongoing metamorphosis, the process of literalization in various directions and not its end state…. Only the alien cleaning woman gives Gregor Samsa the factual, entomological identity of a “dung beetle,” but precisely “to forms of address like these Gregor would not respond.” The cleaning woman does not know that a metamorphosis has occurred, that within this insect shape there is a human consciousness—one superior at times to the ordinary consciousness of Gregor Samsa. It appears, then, that the metamorphosis in the Samsa household of man into vermin is unsettling not only because vermin are disturbing, or because the vivid representation of a human “louse” is disturbing, but because the indeterminate, fluid crossing of a human tenor and a material vehicle is itself unsettling. Gregor is at one moment pure rapture and at another very nearly pure dung beetle, at times grossly human and at times airily buglike. In shifting incessantly the relation of Gregor’s mind and body, Kafka shatters the suppositious unity of ideal tenor and bodily vehicle within the metaphor. This destruction must distress common sense, which defines itself by such “genuine” relations, such natural assertions of analogues between consciousness and matter, and in this way masks the knowledge of its own strangeness. (Corngold 56)
Koelb and Corngold both emphasize the challenge to common sense posed by Kafka’s “rhetorical imagination.” But where Corngold focuses on the negative implications of his argument “in order to suggest the relation of Kafka’s narrative art to his distrust of figuration and to stress the self-destructive nature of his form of writing” (Koelb 14), Koelb focuses on Kafka’s ability to generate narratives out of the tensions between alternative interpretations, and thereby, in the terms of our earlier discussions of language, to reveal the complexities, contradictions and instabilities concealed by ordinary language. Thus, Corngold discusses a quotation from Kafka reported by Urzidil: “To be a poet means to be strong in metaphors. The greatest poets were always the most metaphorical ones. They were those who recognized the deep mutual concern, yes, even the identity of things between which nobody noticed the slightest connection before. It is the range and scope of the metaphor which make one a poet” (Urzidil 25, quoted in Corngold 51). Corngold argues convincingly that “the genuine importance of Kafka’s remarks to Urzidil stands revealed through their irony” (51), citing evidence ranging from the narrator’s (fat man’s) reproach of the supplicant for his wanton overuse of metaphor in “Beschreibung eines Kampfes,” to the late diary entry “Die Metaphern sind eines in dem Vielen, was mich am Schreiben verzweifeln läßt” (T 875). Koelb does not discuss Urzidil’s quotation, but his emphasis on the generative potential of Kafka’s rhetorical imagination would again suggest a more “constructive” conclusion: that Kafka uses language to inspire concrete investigations into the similarity “of things between which nobody noticed the slightest connection before” (language might suggest such a connection by a pun, for example ) or of things between which language has created too easy a connection (as with commonplace metaphors and expressions).
Koelb and Corngold both emphasize the wide applicability of Kafka’s rhetorical “investigations.” Koelb observes that texts are more or less “rhetorical” depending on how much context is supplied, and cites Derrida’s observation that context can never be completely specified (Koelb 10-11, 46). Corngold similarly quotes Derrida’s observation that “language is fundamentally metaphorical” (Corngold 52), but such ideas were available before poststructuralism. Nietzsche argues radically for the metaphorical nature of language, and hence the illusoriness of ideas about “fixed” meanings of words, in “Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinne.” Corngold cites Fritz Mauthner, whom Kafka read, who approaches the metaphoricity of language from another direction: “The two or the hundred ‘meanings’ [Bedeutungen] of a word or concept are only so many metaphors or images, and as we no longer know the ur-meaning of any word, since the first etymology infinitely precedes our knowledge of it, no word ever has any but metaphorical meanings.” As we have seen in the Introduction, the meanings of words are thus inherently fluid, and the perpetuation of the hegemonic order involves a constant struggle to regulate these meanings and give them an illusory fixity. Corngold writes,
Kafka perceives that the apparent harmlessness of metaphors in common usage conceals the struggle of wills to make words mean one thing rather than another. In organizing stories around the effort to interpret image-words and concept-words advantageously, in making culpability and even death the cost of failure in this effort, Kafka dramatizes the severity of the struggle. (95)
We have seen that language is a crucial component of hegemony, but like the nomads discovered in the heart of the empire in “Ein altes Blatt,” language’s potential for fluidity and play reveals it to be a source of potential anarchy at the heart of the hegemonic order, and Kafka’s “rhetorical imagination” can thus be seen to liberate and draw attention to this anarchy, to subvert the “common sense” that fixes meanings, and to suggest alternative possibilities.
This leads naturally to a discussion of Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka. Toward a Minor Literature. The “eruption” of the signifying potential concealed by language recalls Deleuze and Guattari’s description of the form of music in which Kafka is interested, a “pure sonorous material” (5) that contains within itself an unlimited potential of possible sonorous “actualities.” In general, their notions of “deterritorialization” and of a necessarily political “minor literature” summarize much of this chapter. We have already had repeated occasion to speak of “deterritorialization.” Here I would only want to clarify again that as against Deleuze and Guattari’s (polemical) emphasis on “liberat[ing] a living and expressive material that speaks for itself and has no need of being put into a form” (21, italics added), I see the deterritorialization of forms of representation as an undoing of hegemonic common sense which makes the creation of new forms possible , and simultaneously warns against the temptation to allow these new forms to rigidify. Hence my emphasis throughout on the alternative possibilities and new connections opened up by Kafka.
The title of Deleuze and Guattari’s study derives from Kafka’s diary entry on “minor literatures.” What interests them particularly about his concept of “minor literature” is its view of the necessarily political nature of writing produced in the small space of the minor literature: “its cramped space forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics” (Deleuze and Guattari 17). Within the small space of a minor literature, everything is interconnected, so that in particular, all writing is immediately connected to the political realm. As an example, Robertson mentions that two months prior to the entry on minor literatures, Kafka “had noted in his diary that Smetana’s The Bartered Bride, though composed without any relevance to the struggle for independence, had subsequently become a symbol of Czech nationalism” (21). Robertson adds, “the insecure position of a nation which has to defend, if not its political independence, then at any rate its cultural integrity against the encroachments of powerful neighbors provides literature with a central role in society” (22). The multiplicity of connections opened up within the “rhizome”-like space of the minor literature is opposed to the clearly mapped out, territorialized space of the major literature, where definite interpretations and evaluations and mappings of connections are the norm. “In this way, the family triangle connects to other triangles—commercial, economic, bureaucratic, juridical—that determine its values” (17). In our terms, what we have in the minor literature is an awareness of the pervasiveness of hegemony, of the hegemonic interconnectedness of all aspects of the social process, and consequently of the material importance of literature, and more generally of conventions of representation, within this process.
Older readings of Kafka’s diary entry on minor literature point out that he was writing about Yiddish and Czech literature, and that he felt that his conclusions could not apply to his own writing. Thus, Kautman and Hermsdorf both point out in their contributions to Aus Prager Sicht that Kafka concludes his “Schema zur Charakteristik kleiner Literaturen” by lamenting “Es ist schwer sich umzustimmen, wenn man dieses nützliche fröhliche Leben in allen Gliedern gefühlt hat” (T 326). As if he were polemicizing against Deleuze and Guattari’s yet-to-be-written text, Hermsdorf writes that
in der deutschen Literatur, der sich Kafka selbstverständlich zugehörig fühlte, lagen die Verhältnisse anders und sehr viel problematischer. In der Tat stand Kafka ja gerade außerhalb der historischen und gesellschaftlichen Bedingungen, deren günstige kulturelle Auswirkungen er an der tschechischen und jüdischen Literatur seiner Zeit beobachtete, und diese Bedingungen waren für ihn auch nicht herstellbar. (96-7).
But Franz Kempf, who points out that Deleuze and Guattari “read [Kafka] in (poor) French translation, and…read him falsely” nevertheless describes this misunderstanding as “productive” (Kempf 81-2) , as I hope we have already seen it to be. And even returning to the literal level, one can oppose to Hermsdorf’s simple categorization of Kafka’s writing as part of German literature a categorization of it as part of the literature of German-speaking Jews in Prague, as part of Czech literature , as part of Jewish literature. In these senses, the category of minor literature becomes literally applicable to Kafka’s writing. Kafka’s last story, “Josefine, die Sängerin oder das Volk der Mäuse,” is the most obvious “literary” support for such a categorization. Josefine and her art can be taken as an ironic self-portrait (her desire to be liberated from regular work, her “ordinary” whistling, like Kafka’s unadorned prose…), and the hard-working, incessantly persecuted “Volk der Mäuse” can be taken to represent the exiled Jewish people. To the extent that such a reading is accepted, Deleuze and Guattari are vindicated, at least as regards the later Kafka’s view of his art, for as Hermsdorf himself points out, Josefine’s art corresponds quite closely to the role of art in Kafka’s meditations on minor literature. Josefine’s status rests not on the inherent quality of her art, but “vielmehr auf der Sichtbarmachung der Lebensäußerungen des Volkes, darauf, daß sie diese…zum Bewußtsein bringt” (99); her exceedingly limited artistic talent thus achieves a remarkable importance among the small “Volk der Mäuse.”
In order to apply Kafka’s concept of minor literature to his own writings, Deleuze and Guattari thus modify the concept to that of “setting up a minor practice of major language from within”: “minor no longer designates specific literatures but the revolutionary conditions for every literature within the heart of what is called great (or established) literature” (18). They repeat Wagenbach’s claims about the “rootlessness” and impoverishment of Prague German , and his suggestion that this facilitated Kafka’s minor “practice” of German, developing “a new sobriety, a new expressivity, a new flexibility, a new intensity” (23). They cite Kafka’s description of Yiddish, as expressed in his “Rede über die jiddische Sprache”:
he sees it less as a sort of linguistic territoriality for the Jews than as a nomadic movement of deterritorialization that reworks German language…. it is a language that is lacking a grammar and that is filled with vocables that are fleeting, mobilized, emigrating, and turned into nomads that interiorize “relations of force.” It is a language that is grafted onto Middle High German and that so reworks the German language from within that one cannot translate it into German without destroying it; one can understand Yiddish only by “feeling it” in the heart. (Deleuze and Guattari 25)
I see this relation of Yiddish to German as an ideal for the relation of Kafka’s language to German. Kafka tells his audience that once they have overcome their fear of Yiddish and come to intuitively understand it, they will come to fear themselves—for they will have been cut loose from the secure territoriality of their German into a fluid, uncertain, deterritorialized language. But this fluidity allows Yiddish to transcend the expressive limitations of ordinary language: as opposed to the language described by Kafka’s aphorism (quoted earlier), “Die Sprache kann für alles außerhalb der sinnlichen Welt nur andeutungsweise aber niemals auch nur annähernd vergleichsweise gebraucht werden, da sie, entsprechend der sinnlichen Welt, nur vom Besitz und seinen Beziehungen handelt” (H 34), Kafka writes of Yiddish, “Jargon ist alles, Wort, chassidische Melodie und das Wesen dieses ostjüdischen Schauspielers selbst” (H 309).
The formal devices of Kafka’s texts thus provide a plurality of perspectives beyond hegemonic common sense. But what distinguishes Kafka’s protagonists from those of Beckett and Handke is that although they perceive and suffer from the contradictions and paradoxes of the hegemonic order represented by the Law and the Castle, they nevertheless do not question this order. Instead, they seek to resolve those contradictions within that order, an impossible undertaking, as is evident from our analysis of the authorities’ irredeemable viciousness and corruption. In Der Prozeß, K. is quite aware of the obscene invasiveness of the Law, and of the sloppiness of the proceedings against him, so that, as we have seen, he himself describes these proceedings as "lüderlich.” Nevertheless, he believes to the very end in the existence of a “pure” representative of the Law, someone who will judge his case fairly and finally (as opposed to “scheinbare Freisprechung” and “Verschleppung,” for example). Even as he is about to be killed “like a dog” by the bizarre pair of executioners who remind him of “alte untergeordnete Schauspieler” (305-6) (even at this late stage he is once again surprised by the Law’s sloppiness), K. sees a light come on in a nearby house, and thinks (in a passage we have already quoted):
Wer war es? Ein Freund? Ein guter Mensch? Einer, der teilnahm? Einer, der helfen wollte? War es ein einzelner? Waren es alle? War noch Hilfe? Gab es Einwände, die man vergessen hatte? Gewiß gab es solche. Die Logik ist zwar unerschütterlich, aber einem Menschen der Leben will, widersteht sie nicht. Wo war der Richter den er nie gesehen hatte? Wo war das hohe Gericht, bis zu dem er nie gekommen war? Er hob die Hände und spreizte alle Finger. (312)
This is the (in my opinion inadequate) basis for Max Brod’s religious reading of Kafka: despite the procession of corrupt intermediaries he has encountered in the course of his ordeal, K. still has faith in the existence of “das hohe Gericht,” and believes that it would judge him fairly if he could just reach it. We have seen that the K. of Das Schloß seems initially to be deliberately challenging and attempting to deceive the Castle officials, but he too becomes increasingly docile in the course of the action, hoping to impress the Castle by his dutiful performance of even menial duties, and always confident that contact with Klamm or some other higher official will eventually gain him legitimate acceptance by the Castle. Inevitably, the K.s’ struggles within the system fail, and they pay for this failure with their lives. This is why critics like Lukács and Anders accuse Kafka of defeatism: for them the K.s’ faith in the highest levels of these hierarchies obscures all the evidence I have tried to adduce that Kafka’s texts demonstrate both by their content and by their form the possibility and the urgency of resisting the hegemonic order they model. The K.s’ faith in “the system” is shown to be as absurd and as natural as common sense. Adorno writes, “Schuldig waren die Helden von Prozeß und Schloß nicht durch ihre Schuld—sie haben keine—, sondern weil sie versuchen, das Recht auf ihre Seite zu bringen” (Aufzeichnungen 352). This understates the profundity of the K.s’ complicity with the hegemony of the Law and the Castle, but captures the essential distinction between Kafka’s texts and Kafka’s protagonists, which makes Adorno’s insight possible. In the following two chapters, we will encounter protagonists who have learned the lesson of Kafka’s texts and no longer seek their salvation within “the system,” beginning with Beckett’s miserable heroes, who seem all the more miserable for their insight.
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