Kafka's Story Research Articles

The Spectacle, the "Trauerspiel," and the Politics of Resolution: Benjamin Reading the Baroque Reading Weimar

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Spectacle, the "Trauerspiel," and the Politics of Resolution: Benjamin Reading the Baroque Reading WeimarLutz P. KoepnickLutz P. Koepnick Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 22, Number 2Winter, 1996 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/448791 Views: 13Total views on this site Citations: 6Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1994 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Jane O. Newman The “German” Origin of the Birth of Theory, PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 130, no.33 (Oct 2020): 776–786.https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2015.130.3.776Carl Lavery, Deborah P Dixon, Lee Hassall The Future of Ruins: The Baroque Melancholy of Hashima, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 46, no.1111 (Jan 2014): 2569–2584.https://doi.org/10.1068/a46179Robin Vandevoordt Unspeakable resistance, Thesis Eleven 123, no.11 (Aug 2014): 62–79.https://doi.org/10.1177/0725513614544930Larson Powell Die gespenstische Politik der DEFA, (Apr 2013): 27–43.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-531-19076-1_2By Brian Britt The Schmittian Messiah in Agamben's The Time That Remains Brian Britt, Critical Inquiry 36, no.22 (Jul 2015): 262–287.https://doi.org/10.1086/648526Ron Kerr Discourse and leadership: using the paradigm of the permanent state of emergency, Critical Discourse Studies 5, no.33 (Aug 2008): 201–216.https://doi.org/10.1080/17405900802131702

Kafka's Geometry

In Kafka's fiction there are many journeys but few arrivals. A typical example is the protagonist of Ein Landarzt riding naked through the blizzard, insisting, Niemals komme ich so nach Hause (E 205). 1 The abrupt switch to present tense at this point, which suggests that the preceding story is past but the return journey continues even to the present moment, strengthens the impression that the journey truly is unending. Yet this is the same ten mile distance that he had previously travelled in a moment (nur einen Augenblick). He expresses no concern about direction, only about the horses' sluggishness (langsam wie alte Manner). Common sense insists that if the wagon is advancing homeward, however slowly, it must eventually arrive. This apparent paradox may be dismissed by saying that the account is to be interpreted symbolically. But this is not quite satisfactory, for it denies the intense physical realism of Kafka's narrative. If it is symbolic truth that we are to read here, then we still ought not to gloss over the form, which is quite precise and realistic on the small scale, though contradictory on the large. While vaguely described fantastic journeys are common in fairy tales and mystical writings (cf., Jofen 32-33), Kafka's stories are exceptional for the minute care and tenacity with which they explore and flesh out a fairly consistent alternative of distance which underlies the fantasy. It might seem unwarranted to seek motifs of abstract in Kafka's writings. While geometry appears in the titles of important critical works on Kafka (cf., Stoltke; Sussman), it is used only as a general word for logical precision. Kafka is supposed to have been a poor student of mathematics and theoretical science, and to have suffered paralyzing incompetence in the

Deceptive Comfort

FRANZ KAFKA HAD POLITICAL OPINIONS he was, for example, drawn for a time to socialism -and it is likely that these judgnents were based in a larger framework of understanding, in a political theory. This framework did not seem to be of much interest to him. It is not the subject of this essay. Kafka did not write political theory, but perhaps his stories express one? Not if a political theory includes a more or less coherent set of claims about political authority, legitimacy, identification, consent, obligation, dissent, oppression, or freedom. It is difficult to discern a systematic political vision in the stories or at least to rearticulate it outside of them. It is not simply that his texts are amenable to a variety of plausible interpretations; Kafka's writing, as widely noted, resists thematic interpretation per se. Just as one begins to formulate a thesis about its political vision (or any thesis, for that matter), hitherto unthematized elements jump out and confound the effort. Kafka's stories are, I think, relevant to political theory in two ways. First, they evoke experiences of frustration, exhaustion, and interference in a way that challenges the image of power derived from more theoretical approaches. Second, by calling attention to links between contemporary theories of power and certain ideals of self, they offer insight into what I will call the existential function of theory. My tasks in this essay participate in paradox: I try to gather insights about power that I believe to have come to the surface through decentered and decentering stories; I seek to articulate (in theoretical language) just how this

Transforming Franz Kafka's "Metamorphosis"

In 1977 there were already ten thousand works on Franz Kafka in print,1 nearly all of them written by men. The reasons for scholars' interest in Kafka, particularly his short masterpiece, Metamorphosis, reflect a recognition on the part of students of religion, philosophy, psychoanalysis, political and social criticism, Marxism, and literature that Kafka's work is inexhaustible. No single interpretation invalidates or finally delivers the story's significance. Its quality of multivalency (Vieldeutigkeit) keeps us talking to each other, against each other, and to ourselves. For fifty years Kafka's work has been seeding thought and precluding that closure of discourse that would imprison us in our old histories. Yet until 1980, genderbased theories and feminist criticisms were rarely articulated in discussions of Kafka's stories.2 Metamorphosis is an important

The Fate of the Self: German Writers and French Theory (review)

Reviewed by: The Fate of the Self: German Writers and French Theory Clayton Koelb Stanley Corngold . The Fate of the Self: German Writers and French Theory. New York: Columbia UP, 1986. 279 pp. $28.50. Stanley Corngold will be known to many readers of MFS as one of the leading contemporary authorities on Franz Kafka. In The Fate of the Self he brings his thorough knowledge of both modern German literature and contemporary French theory to bear on a question of great theoretical interest and complexity: "If writing against the privilege of literary consciousness becomes more and more the expression of literary consciousness, would not so sustained an attack on the self actually bring about its disappearance?" The attack Corngold refers to is of course most visible in the aggressive critique of the "constitutive subject" by Foucault, Benveniste, Lacan, and others, but now of great importance to American literary criticism through the mediation of Paul de Man. If, as is widely acknowledged, the self has not departed from the scene or been forced into the wings, one would want to know by what means and in what form it survives. The issue is a difficult one and requires patience, subtlety, and intelligence on the part of anyone who would propose to treat it. Fortunately Corngold's work displays these qualities, in addition to the extensive learning necessary to support what could otherwise become an excessively abstract argument. Even so, the reader must devote considerable care and subtlety of his own in order to follow the complex path of the discussion. The book assumes a reader nearly as knowledgeable as Corngold himself in the areas of German literary history and French theory, not to mention modern philosophy. Those who are not already conversant with the main tendencies of discourse in these fields will find the book tough going. It will amply reward, however, those who give it the effort it requires. Corngold deals with seven German writers who have often been cited as exponents of the disappearing subject: Hölderlin, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, and—of special interest to readers of MFS—Thomas Mann and Kafka. [End Page 684] Whereas the chapter on Mann treats mainly a number of his essays about Nietzsche, the essay on Kafka deals with an issue of special importance to students of modern fiction, narrative perspective. Kafka provides a crucial test case for Corngold in that the self of the author really does seem to vanish, to merge so completely with the literature he produces that he seems to become, as he claimed himself, nothing but literature. "If the self were indeed nothing else than literature, there . . . would be no subject tenuously dominant over a body of texts." Is "Kafka" simply the name of a body of texts, or does it refer to an "author" who somehow controls the production of those texts? Corngold's method for answering such difficult and abstract questions is engagingly simple and concrete. He turns to the long-standing critical debate over Kafka's narrative perspective. At times Kafka's stories seem to be composed entirely from the point of view of the chief character, at others, however, from an "omniscient" perspective or at least a perspective unquestionably outside the experience of the protagonist. We therefore find "breaks" in the narrative perspective when the point of view shifts from "inside" to "outside" a character's experience, or vice versa. These breaks appear to have no function within the frame of the fiction and have therefore been ascribed frequently to oversight. Corngold's surprising move is to see these breaks as evidence of an authorial self who, because he views his own act of writing as fundamentally flawed, considers it "right that this false construction should be done violence to, that is to say, randomly perforated and broken, its falsity avenged." Kafka's textual self-destructiveness paradoxically affirms the existence of the self. This brief example will have to serve to demonstrate the kind of problem Corngold is dealing with and how he goes about examining it. Those who continue to nourish an interest in the relation between the fate of literature and the fate of the self will find The Fate...

Parable and Theme: Kafka and American Fiction

N HIS ESSAY on Kafka, Walter Benjamin speaks of Kafka's stories as gestic theater, code of so many acts in the 'Nature Theater of Oklahoma.' These gestures, according to Benjamin, had no definite symbolic meaning for the author from the outset; rather, Kafka divests the human gesture of its traditional supports and then has a subject for reflection without end.' The same profound insight is then put in other terms-in terms of Jewish Haggadah versus Halakha. Kafka's parables, Benjamin says, have

Kafka's Hierogram: The Trauma of the "Landarzt"

Ein Landarzt holds a crucial position among Kafka's stories. It is title piece in a collection published in 1919 and dedicated to author's father, whose reaction when volume appeared was predictable: it on table beside my bed.' This enigmatic tale was probably not intended for comprehension of any earthly father. It is a provocation, an act of defiance or lunacy,2 as if to say, is my world, accept it or reject me. The father depicted in story is hopelessly limited and narrow-minded (in narrator's perception [951]) -if it were destined to be read by his type of receptor, message could not possibly get through. But is it an encoded message, and if so, in what is it written, how does one go about deciphering it? Is it narrative of a dream, or as one critic has put it rather unsympathetically, incoherent . . . literal transcription [of a nightmare], basically unintelligible because Kafka failed to master [its] form?4 This begs question: what is form of story and its genre? It does appear to be a dream-narrative. If it is, will its Deutung have to be deferred to another lifetime? For as Freud was first to insist, dreamer's current stream of associations must supply connections which render dream-text intelligible. Since even everyday life and language is reducible in content to more primary and private processes of signification, skeptic must conclude logically that understanding is impossible -or that it means no more than charade of emission and counteremission of signs in a semiotic ritual, laws of which are unknown and inaccessible to our conscious selves. But this is another question, why the neurotic's individual myth appears to be written in at once most private and most universal of codes.' That is, isn't dream, after all, ultimately interpretable? The dreamer's code changes

The Literary Element in "Mille Plateaux": The New Cartography of Deleuze and Guattari

Twelve years have passed since Gilles Deleuze and F6lix Guattari shocked the French intelligentsia with their provocative assault on the systems of structuralist, psychoanalytic, and political signification in L'Anti-Oedipe: Capitalisme et Schizophrinie I.1 While their subsequent works go virtually untranslated2 and have inevitably been judged as outmoded in Parisian circles, Deleuze and Guattari have continued elaborating the system of schizo-analysis, their most thorough development being the recent second volume of Capitalisme et Schizophrinie, entitled Mille Plateaux. 3 In both volumes of this mammoth project, as well as in the intervening works,4 they have cast literature as an exemplary mode demonstrate systems of functioning; how literature, books, and writing operate in terms of such functioning in terms of the rhizomatic analysis presented in Mille Plateauxconstitutes the focus of this study. While literary works played an important role in Anti-Oedipus, 5 it was not until the subsequent analysis entitled Kafka. Pour une littirature mineure that the works of a single author were considered thoroughly in light of machinic concepts.6 The purpose of this critical work seems double: on the one hand, Deleuze and Guattari continue their anti-oedipal polemic, this time against certain literary and psychoanalytic interpretations of Kafka's works; and on the other hand, the authors seek move beyond the schizo-analytic terms suggested in Anti-Oedipus, situate the functioning in the organic as well. Thus they not only posit minor literature's existence vis-a-vis the great or major literatures, thereby extending their view of literature as locus of desire and of the real; they also advance their terminology in another important direction: the molecules of the expression-machine function as rhizome (Kafka's letters, K, pp. 53-62); as animal-becomings (le devenir-animal) and as lines of flight (Kafka's short stories, K, pp. 63-68); and finally as machine assemblage (l'agencement machinique) (Kafka's novels, K, pp. 69-73). While Kafka represents a limited example of the next step of the schizoanalytic project, to see how, effectively, simultaneously, the various tasks of schizo-analysis proceed (AO, p. 382),7 a year later there appeared a slim

Kafka's Rhetorical Moment

Much of Kafka's fiction exploits language whose performative status is ambiguous–language that Paul de Man calls “rhetorical”–to generate a peculiar and characteristic narrative “space” in which Kafka's stories operate. Speech-act theory helps to clarify the way in which problems arising from language become the central problems that Kafka's characters face. In particular, the distinction between illocutions and perlocutions provides an analytic tool that reveals Kafka's abiding concern with the “gap,” or “aporia,” produced by assertions, requests, commands, and other illocutionary acts that turn out not to assert, request, or command anything the reader or listener can pin down. This tool helps us discover the linguistic sources for the bewilderment and anxiety that characterize Kafka's fictional world.

"In der Strafkolonie": Kafka and the Scene of Reading

The fabulous execution machine that is the center of attention Kafka's der Strafkolonie stands in [einem] tiefen, sandigen, von kahlen Abhangen ringsum abgeschlossenen Tal.' At the time represented by the narration, this natural theater is almost empty: no one is there except the principal performers themselves, the officer, the traveller, the condemned prisoner, and the soldier charge of the prisoner. But such performances as the one about to take place did not always attract so small an audience, the officer explains to the traveller: Wie war die Exekution anders friiherer Zeit! Schon einen Tag vor der Hinrichtung war das Tal von Menschen oberfullt; alle kamen nur zu sehen ... Vor hunderten Augen-alle standen auf den Ful3spitzen bis dort zu den Anhohen-wurde der Verurteilte vom Kommandanten selbst unter die Egge gelegt (p. 111). The theatrical character of the proceeding is clearly stressed, and the Zuschauer are clearly represented as the audience of a kind of performance which the death of the chief performer is the climactic--though not central-action. The central action of a proper execution as described by the officer der Strafkolonie is an act of reading. My reader may protest here that I am surely mistaken; that what is involved Kafka's story is clearly an act of writing, and that the attention of the story's reader is focused on the mechanism whereby the machine writes upon the body of the condemned prisoner. There is some justice to this objection, for the process of inscription gets more verbal space than the process of decipherment. But I will try to show that this inscription is simply the reproduction of an act of writing that had taken place long before the time of the narration and that as such it is the embodiment of the intellectual re-production which we ordinarily call 'reading.' My reader may also protest at my reformulation of Jacques Derrida's famous title. The comparison implied by my borrowing is not, I want to stress, between my essay and Derrida's but between Kafka's myth and Derrida's. The object of attention both Kafka's story and Derrida's essay is a machine involved the process of writing and reading. In and the Scene of Writing2 Derrida is particularly interested an analogy Freud had drawn between the operation of the perceptual apparatus and a device called the Mystic Writing-Pad, familiar to American

Kafka's Writing Machine: Metamorphosis in the Penal Colony

Kafka's In the Penal Colony is a problematic story, largely because of the conflicting interpretations it has received: does its famous machine dispense grace or torture? Is Kafka giving us a parable of Old vs. New Law? How does the liberal explorer or the liberal reader assess the Officer's impassioned pleading for the Machine and the kind of justice it serves? A strange kind of coherence emerges, however, when one focusses on the central unifying motif of the story: understanding. The tale itself is little more than the Officer's desperate effort to make the explorer-reader understand; the machine itself makes its victim understand the nature of justice. Language is, of course, a primary vehicle for understanding, and Kafka's story dramatizes two radically opposed languages: verbal and physical. All efforts to bridge the distance between people, between matter and spirit, seem to fail, at least insofar as spoken language is concerned; the machine's mission is to create physical language, an unmediated script which is the reality of which it speaks. By writing the crime onto and into the flesh of the criminal, the machine offers a sublime and frightening figure of visceral knowledge, of the open self as the opened self. By entering into the machine himself, the Officer undergoes the classic Kafka metamorphosis: he becomes the prisoner, and he thereby suffers knowledge. The entire parable may be seen as an illustration of the writer's yearning for a language so potent that the reader would experience, the flesh, the writer's words. Kafka's own narrative techniques aim at precisely such a metamorphosis in the reader. This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol7/iss1/3 KAFKA'S WRITING MACHINE: METAMORPHOSIS IN THE PENAL COLONY Arnold Weinstein Brown University

Time, Tense and Aspect in Kafka's "The Burrow"

Kafka's story Burrow begins: I have completed construction of my burrow and it seems to be successful.' The position in time of speaker, creature whose has been devoted to building of this perfectly secure hideaway, seems to be clear: he speaks (or writes) from a moment after completion of burrow but not so long after it that final judgment on its success can be given. Further information in next few pages help to situate fictional now of his utterance as belonging to the zenith of my life (p. 325), when he is nevertheless growing old (p. 326), getting on in years (p. 327). The time encompassed by his act of storytelling, beginning at this moment, is not, however, simply time that might be taken to utter thirty-five or so pages of text: although there are no typographical breaks to mark breaks in time of narration, there

Franz Kafka's `Poseidon' Adventure

Meaning in Kafka's works has a way of slipping by us while simultaneously conveying the message that human intelligence is simply unable to cope with the ambiguous nature of his writing. Peter Heller quite justifiably asks us to admit `that, generally, Kafka's fictions do not make sense in the way expected of most literary works, that they do not make up a world which makes sense; that they seem subject to rational elaboration to a degree sufficient only to raise the question: What does this mean?, but insufficient to answer that question.' 1 Kafka, too, offers the idea for our consideration that his stories lead his readers beyond appearances to a hidden world which could not otherwise be explained except by literature: Die Form ist nicht der Ausdruck des Inhaltes, sondern nur sein Anreiz, das Tor und der Weg zum Inhalt. Wirkt er, dann offnet sich auch der verborgene Hintergrund.' 2 Intentionally seizing our curiosity and disappointing our logic, Kafka entices his readers into a process of consciousness which compels them to misconceive his reality again and again, but only to become possessed by a sense of perplexity which lingers on long after the story has ended. But if bewilderment is the inevitable response to Kafka's stories, it is also the mode of awareness and ultimate verity which Kafka wishes to communicate. Literature, like life, Kafka believed, is not something which can be grasped as a truth and held fast; but it can be explored and experienced as the ambiguous and incomprehensible truth which it is. Dichtung ist immer eine Expedition nach der Wahrheit,' Kafka remarked to his young friend Janouch; only to add when asked then what the truth was: Die Wahrheit ist vielleicht das Leben selbst.'3 Life and literature therefore constitute a quest for truth which, because of its inevitable inaccessibility, can only be communicated in terms of ambiguity, puzzling reflections,

The Problem of the Judgment: Eleven Approaches to Kafka's Story

The Problem of the Judgment: Eleven Approaches to Kafka's Story

Franz Kafka--his father's son. A study in literary sexuality.

FRANZ KAFKA wrote some of the most brilliant, disturbing, difficult, harrowing—and prophetic—literature of the twentieth century. Fragmentary though much of his work may be, for many of his fictions are in the form of diaries and reflections, and many of his diaries ask questions about the nature of reality, still his strange genius is imprinted on every page. While all writing is, in a sense, autobiographical, and while literary critics must avoid the biographical fallacy of interpreting a writer's work in relation to his life, Kafka's terrifying novels, stories, and sketches blur the crucial line between personal commentary and literary artifact. And Kafka himself, fearfully private, was well aware how much of his inner being, how much of his tortured relationship with his father, how much of his sexual impotence and anxiety was in his work. Kafka made Max Brod, his literary executor and one real friend, promise to destroy

Kafka's Eternal Present: Narrative Tense in “Ein Landarzt” and Other First-Person Stories

Many of Kafka's stories in the first person either use the present tense throughout or shift from past to present in the course of narration. The stories told entirely in the present render the inner monologue of a speaker caught in a durative psychic struggle; the stories in which the tense changes tell of a past calamity that leads to an everlasting predicament. “Ein Landarzt” is structured on an “einmal-niemals” pattern, and thus belongs to the second of these general types; but in this story Kafka also tries—again by shifting to the present tense—to achieve within the narration of past events the immediacy of present experience. He thereby effaces the demarcation between outer event and inner reflection and eliminates the temporal distance between the narrating and the experiencing self. This use of the present tense results in mutually exclusive verbal gestures and contradictory temporal references. The stylistic incongruities in “Ein Landarzt” thus point up the difficulties of rendering the immediacy of experience in a first-person narrative, and help to explain why Kafka usually preferred to use the third person in his novels and novellas.

Breaks in Perspective in Franz Kafka's Der Prozess

In Der ProzeB, as in Kafka's other novels and stories, one of the most striking and individual features of the author's technique is that he attempts to maintain a single, limited perspective.' If it were merely a question of the maintenance of a single perspective, there would be nothing particularly unusual about Kafka's technique: ever since Henry James wrote The Ambassadors and later discussed the question of perspective in his preface to the novel, third-person narratives in which everything is seen through the eyes of one character only have become quite common. The unique feature of Kafka's technique is not that he limits himself to telling what Josef K. alone of all the characters experiences, thinks and feels, but rather that he limits himself to telling what Josef K. experiences, thinks and feels while in action, in actual situations. Only very rarely is K. allowed to sit and brood and dream, and then his thoughts do not wander back to his childhood and adolescence or out into the world: instead they are concerned exclusively with the immediate problem of his lawsuit or with problems arising from it, such as the maintenance of his position in the bank. In short, Kafka tries to maintain not only the single perspective of Josef K. but also the limited perspective of Josef K.'s present, a present that is filled to the exclusion of all else with the problems of his lawsuit. Obviously it is extremely difficult to maintain throughout a long work a single and rigidly limited perspective of this kind. Even to maintain a single perspective is not easy: The Ambassadors contains sections that are authorial and not from the point of view of Strether.2 To maintain in addition the limited perspective would seem to be an almost impossible task. Kafka comes very close to achieving the seemingly impossible, but there are a number of passages in Der ProzeB--

Turning-Points in Kafka's Stories

Turning-Points in Kafka's Stories