Before the altar: a Kafkan study in analytic iconology

Abstract

This article reads Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial in parallel with Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece (1512–16). It sets the novel within the context of the Grünewald revival in France and Germany during the first part of the twentieth century. The revival culminated in a wave of veneration that turned the altarpiece into a symbol of national suffering in the closing days of World War I. Against this background, the article argues for a connection between the intense focus on Christ’s “splayed hands” and the repertoire of manual gestures that Kafka scatters throughout his novel. Borrowing critical language from Bruno Latour and Joseph Koerner, the article argues that Kafka’s hands can be read as an iconoclastic analysis of Grünewald’s altarpiece. In the novel’s final scene, K.’s own splayed hands mark an attempt to turn himself into a living icon and transform his executioners into the iconoclastic breakers of his Christ-like image. The final section of the article uses this tableau as a means of rethinking current debates about the relationship between Christianity and secularism. Latour’s and Koerner’s work on iconoclash, the article suggests, makes Kafka’s image destruction a creative moment in a longer history of Christian iconoclasm.