Orientation in pictures: multistable spaces in Kafka and Beckett

Abstract

This article applies insights from picture theory (W. J. T. Mitchell) and the psychology of perception (Ernst Gombrich) in order to examine Franz Kafka’s and Samuel Beckett’s use of multistable pictures in The Trial and Watt. It argues that these pictures—the portrait of a judge and the picture of a circle and displaced center—are significant not as objects of hermeneutical interpretation, but rather as sites where the conditions of spectatorship and perception become visible. As Kafka’s and Beckett’s protagonists “read” these pictures, they experience perceptual inversions and aspect shifts comparable with those involved in classic multistable images such as the duck–rabbit and the Necker cube. The multistability of their readings thwarts the desire for allegorical interpretations and dramatizes, instead, the act of viewing the picture. Scenes of reading pictures thus allow Kafka and Beckett to explore literary spaces that are given shape as an iterative search for orientation. Contextualizing Kafka and Beckett in relation to empirical and Gestalt psychology and to their interests in reversible figures, the article shows how each writer complicates the representation of aspect switches. In Kafka, multiple readings of a picture appear to be simultaneously possible, resulting in an accumulation of aspects that overdetermine the picture. In Beckett, the binary inversion of figure and ground gives way to a series of possible interpretations that display aspect shifts in overdrive. By representing the problem of reading pictures in the medium of literature, Kafka and Beckett offer insights to the literary dimensions of the pictorial turn in modernism studies.