Manual Gesture in Kafka's ProzeSS

Abstract

Das erste, was ich lernte, war: den Handschlag geben; Handschlag bezeugt Offenheit; mag nun heute, wo ich auf dem Hohepunkte meiner Laufbahn stehe, zu jenem ersten Handschlag auch das offne Wort hinzukommen.' These words, spoken by the civilized ape at the beginning of Kafka's Bericht an eine Akadamie, evince a successful social adjustment rarely found in Kafka's works. The handshake as a universal gesture of goodwill and bond of agreement is of primary importance in establishing human contact and security. Kafka's ape has been initiated into the requisites of proper comportment after a swift but painful process of evolutionary development. To remain outside his cage and play his part well in the world of men, he has learned to seize and reproduce the gestures and signs that others have addressed to him. The ape's use of his hand, his first acquired human gesture, becomes emblematic of the importance which Kafka places on gestures throughout his works. Several commentators have alluded to this aspect of Kafka's fiction in their more comprehensive studies of the writer. Theodor Adorno, for example, has recognized Kafka's use of gesture as a universal language which encourages scrutiny. According to Adorno, the reader who succeeds in solving the rebuses of body movements will comprehend more of Kafka than all those who find in him submerged ontological truths.2 Similarly, Walter Benjamin asserts that Kafka's works collectively represent a codex of gestures which theatrically act out the author's own inner life.3 For Walter H. Sokel gestures in Kafka represent dream manifestations which anticipate the occurrence of real events in his fiction.' Additionally, J6rgen Kob's analysis of Kafka's structure of consciousness claims that body movements are a prime factor in the breakdown of communication and consequent alienation of his protagonists.5 In a recent commentary on gestures in Kafka, Hartmut Binder also acknowledges that Handbewegungen bei Kafka werden auf sehr differenzierte Weise als Ausdruckstrager seelischer Gehalte verwendet.6 Although Binder goes on to elucidate the subtlety of their expression principally in Kafka's diaries and letters and only marginally in his fiction, his study nevertheless does provide a basis upon which the works may be reexamined in terms of their emphasis on the body and its movements. Since Der Prozefl contains perhaps the most compelling and most comprehensive illustration of Kafka's hand imagery, it is well to examine