Kafka's Text Research Articles

The Messiah who Comes and Goes: Franz Kafka on Redemption, Conspiracy and Community

The Messiah who Comes and GoesFranz Kafka on Redemption, Conspiracy and Community James Martel (bio) Introduction If we look at Franz Kafka's writings from the perspective of political theory, it seems that the politics he offers us, if any, are those of passivity, failure and doom. When his friend Max Brod asked Kafka if there was any hope, Kafka famously replies "Oh [there is], plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope—but not for us."1 This seems like a grim joke, a typically "Kafkaesque" commentary on the futility of resistance, on the inevitability of defeat. At the end of The Trial, K., the central character, who seems to epitomize the hapless, anxious characters that people a Kafka novel or story, is stabbed in the heart by his tormentors and dies, in his own words, "Like a dog!" ["Wie ein hund!"],2 suggesting the fate of all of us, in the face of obscure and irresistible powers. Many scholars of Kafka have described the way he is supposedly a Zionist or the way he uses psychological or other kinds of symbolism to denote states of despair and the tyrannies of power, but it is not clear that any of this amounts to a political theory or a model for some kind of political resistance.3 Yet, when we read Kafka the way Walter Benjamin read him, a very different thinker emerges. To his credit, Benjamin never tries to unlock the secrets of Kafka's text as so many other commentators have. Instead, I argue that Benjamin seeks to reread Kafka as a fellow conspirator, endowing Kafka with the same sort of conspiratorial strategies that Benjamin espouses in his own work. Towards the end of his life, Benjamin became increasingly interested in conspiracy. He devoted an entire "Konvolute" (section) of the Arcades Project to the question of political conspiracy and wrote broadly about it in his later works on the French poet Charles Baudelaire. During the late 1930s, in the face of the overwhelming defeat of the left, it seems as if Benjamin began to turn away from (relatively) open rebellion and towards conspiracy as a form of resistance. While rebellion is overt, conspiracy is stealthy, a secret. While rebellion must end, one way or another, conspiracy is openended, potentially endless. The conspiracy that he turned to was not a typical sort involving secret plotting and machinations. As we will see further, the kind of conspiracy Benjamin calls for--the trans-temporal conspiracy that he calls Kafka to as well—is one that is so secret that it can function unbeknownst to its own agents; it is a secret that in some ways excludes every one of us. This kind of secrecy and exclusion is required for Benjamin because our intentions, our conscious wishes and actions are highly suspect (something that is also true for Kafka as well, as we'll see). For Benjamin, we are deeply compromised by our place in history, by our relationship to the forces of commodity fetishism, fascism and liberalism (which in Benjamin's view are all versions of more or less the same phenomenon), and by the dynamics of power and authority in our time. Under such circumstances, even the intentionality of the theorist is suspect. Given his mistrust of human intentionality, Benjamin's engagement with conspiracy takes place in a purely literary and textual form (as it does for Kafka as well). Late in life, Benjamin increasingly sought to produce texts that decentered and subverted even his own authorial intent. He also looked for this effect in the texts of other, past authors (like Kafka, Baudelaire, and many others). Yet he always sought for such textual conspiracies to parallel and subvert actual political practices. Thus Benjamin writes that for Baudelaire, "His prosody is like the map of a big city in which one can move about inconspicuously, shielded by blocks of houses, gateways, courtyards. Words are given clearly designated positions, just as conspirators are given designated positions …Baudelaire conspires with language itself."4 Such a "conspiracy with language" works to bypass (at least potentially) the compromises of human intentionality; it engages with the text's "failure" to perfectly convey the meanings...

Der Proceβ in Yiddish, or The Importance of being Humorous

Der Proceß in Yiddish, or the Importance of being Humorous — The article argues for a "humorous" Franz Kafka rather than a kajkaesque one and criticizes the "Kafka myth" which cristallized after WWII and emphasized foremost Kafka's existential anguish. Even before the war Max Brod as well as Walter Benjamin recognized the humorous dimension in Kafka's texts, much of which lies in word plays and gesture; otherwise, the humour in Kafka was largely ignored, especially after WWII. The focus in this article is on English, German and Yiddish cultural contexts and ideologies which have determined different readings/ translations of Kafka's texts. In particular, the article compares the pre-war English translation of Der Proceß by Edwin and Willa Muir, which contributes to the "Kafka myth," with a post-war Yiddish translation by Melech Ravitch, which highlights the novel's humorous qualities. Not only does the Yiddish translation place Kafka's novel within a culturally specific literary genre and suggest an alternate "Jewish" reading of the text; by drawing on both the English translation and the German original, Ravitch also "corrects" the anguish laden "Kafka myth" and constitutes a challenge to the rather humourless genre of the kafkaesque so widespread still in contemporary English and German speaking cultures.

Entre Kafka e Heidegger: reflexões sobre a relação entre literatura e filosofia na era da técnica

Este ensaio está dividido em três partes. A primeira consiste na leitura mais literal possível do conto de Kafka Der Bau, "A construção". A segunda parte é uma crítica à proposta feita por Deleuze e Guattari de uma leitura de Kafka sem filosofia, ou seja, evitando toda hermenêutica interpretativa. A terceira parte, mais extensa, discute a necessidade de uma leitura desse conto de Kafka não evitando a filosofia, mas acolhendo o entre filosofia e literatura, conectando esse conto de Kafka com a colocação de Heidegger sobre a questão da técnica.

OS LEOPARDOS DE KAFKA: INTERTEXTUALIDADE E CONVERGÊNCIA

This study aims to identify and analyze intertextuality in a strict sense (KOCH, 1997) in the book Os leopardos de Kafka (The Kafka's leopards) by Moacyr Scliar, with a passage of the book O processo (The process) by Franz Kafka, in a way in which it is possible to analyze if the retaken of Kafka's text promoted by Scliar performs in a bi-vocal level of the discourse in a convergent or divergent effect (ROMUALDO, 2000). This study considers that this retaken occurs in the following levels: of structure/ content; implicit; of similarities; through other's intertext and that the Scliar's text promotes a convergent effect within the level of the stylization.

Reflections on Kafka's Urban Reader

Like so much else in Kafka, the motif of reading has been discussed hotly and often—from Walter Benjamin's early essay, through seminal studies by Walter Sokel and Heinz Politzer, to poststructuralist analyses of how Kafka foregrounds the instability of language and verbal communication. In this large body of criticism, we find abundant interest in how, for Kafka, certain problems of understanding have a particularly modern character, e.g., in how they are connected to particularly modern conditions. These include the waning metaphysical authority of traditional texts and, most obviously, the rise of bureaucracies that deal programmatically in obfuscation. But Kafka's works engage substantially with what we might call the topos of reading in a modern—and often urban—setting in other ways as well, in ways that have received only passing treatment from scholars. Newspaper reading, for example, has a prominent role in "The Judgment," Kafka's breakthrough text, yet its significance has gone largely unexamined.

Kafka Studies, the Culture Industry, and the Concept of Shame: Improper Remarks between Moral Philosophy and Philosophy of History

The case of Max Brod versus Franz Kafka has been closed for a good while, and the verdict passed in the late twenties of the past century is only vaguely remembered: a kind of acquittal on the grounds of a guilty verdict. A mediocre but highly productive writer and journalist had been stricken, as it were, with the friendship of a producer of completely incommensurable works-whose importance he recognized earlier than everyone else, but whose content he hardly understood, as his many attempts at interpretation demonstrate. Kafka must have taken a diabolical pleasure in leaving his truly monstrous estate to this friend, on condition of having it destroyed after reading. But then something remarkable happened: the man who wrote novels entitled The Woman for Whom One Yearns, The Woman Who Does Not Disappoint, or Living with a Goddess (and which read just like that) rose to the task, refused to follow the testamentary instructions and instead published, in quick succession, The Trial, The Castle, and Missing, a fragment which Brod retitled Amerika-a title as justified as the German title was: Der Verschollene.1 With these editions and other Kafka texts, above all the Collected Works published between 1935 and 1937, Max Brod became one of the great editors of

Dooble Tongue: Scots, Burns, Contradiction by Jeffrey Skoblow (review)

YES, 34, 2004 YES, 34, 2004 (p. I74) in Florida,leaving his 'California'chapter unwrittenand so, in a sense, his book unfinished. The Kafka text which occupies the last sixteen pages of Lostin America - Der Verschollene (TheMan WhoWasNever HeardOfAgain) - looked to have been left unfinished(asthe story 'The Stoker')on its author'sdeath, only to emerge posthumouslyas rathermore finishedthan TheCastle or TheTrial,though Tambling shows that 'nothing in the text can be reduced to a thesis' and that 'the novel plots other labyrinthsthan [Karl Rossman, the stoker]wanders in'. The fact that Kafka never actuallyknew an America other than the one that eitherfiction or theemigre members of his family could offer him underpinsthe point that 'to be lost without trace is possible anywhere' (p. 197), which prompts Tambling to end his book wondering whether the American city may be 'a place for subjectswithout power, who have had [...] a sense of their subjectivitymauled' (p. 198), though he poses, and leaves, this issue as an unansweredquestion. In what is not a long book it has neverthelessbeen a long trip from the unforgettable opening to BleakHouse(pp. i6-23; Tambling deals sensitivelywith this old chestnut)to the Karl Rossman who is forgotten,and forgetshimself,in 'The Nature Theatre of Oklahoma'. The details which are such a crucial part of Tambling's argument are always fascinating,but they come thick and fast and leave the final impressionthat some of the dust stirredup is taking its time to settle. But anyone interestedin these authorsand in the idea of the city will find LostintheAmerican City rewarding and revealing. UNIVERSITYOF READING JOHN PILLING Dooble Tongue: Scots, Burns, Contradiction.By JEFFREY SKOBLOW.Cranbury, NJ: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2001. 268 pp. /35. ISBN:0-87413-728-4. DoobleTongue self-consciouslydeparts from traditionalforms of academic writing. Analytical criticism, the disclosure of findings made in archival research, insights and connections in discussionare all here, but they are decentred by interruptions of style and page layout. Quotations from Adorno, Montaigne, Eavan Boland, Hugh MacDiarmid, or Burns and his contemporaries, appear in small shaded blocks to the side of paragraphsof allusive prose. Sometimes these quotations are directly edged against what the body-text is saying, sometimes they are simply oblique. This technique of juxtaposition is an evident throwback to Marshall McLuhan and if there is an underlyingthesis informingJeffreySkoblow'sbook it is very close to the notion that the medium is the message. Skoblowsets out with a heightened sensitivityto the distanceor rupturebetween scholarlydiscourse and the animated vernacularof the idiom Burns'sScots poems are active in. Yet this distance is arguablyneither so great nor so unbridgeableas Skoblow believes. At times, his wilful insistence upon it seems arch. For example, the book ends like this: 'Poetry(or shouting)cannot overcome, cannot even significantly undermine, the edifices of a centralizing power: so Burns disappears, and disappears,and each time we roll away the stone, a great absence is revealed. Sing tal larietal,tallarietal,tal larie tay' (p. 243). In the 1970s and i980s, academic criticism of James Joyce and particularly Finnegans [Ilake sometimes employed a similar method of pastiche, presumably to undermine traditional critical exegesis with Derridean quarksof significance.The (p. I74) in Florida,leaving his 'California'chapter unwrittenand so, in a sense, his book unfinished. The Kafka text which occupies the last sixteen pages of Lostin America - Der Verschollene (TheMan WhoWasNever HeardOfAgain) - looked to have been left unfinished(asthe story 'The Stoker')on its author'sdeath, only to emerge posthumouslyas rathermore finishedthan TheCastle or TheTrial,though Tambling shows that 'nothing in the text can be reduced to a thesis' and that 'the novel plots other labyrinthsthan [Karl Rossman, the stoker]wanders in'. The fact that Kafka never actuallyknew an America other than the one that eitherfiction or theemigre members of his family could offer him underpinsthe point that 'to be lost without trace is possible anywhere' (p. 197), which prompts Tambling to end his book wondering whether the American city may be 'a place for subjectswithout power, who have had [...] a sense of their subjectivitymauled' (p. 198), though he poses, and leaves, this issue as an unansweredquestion. In what is not a long book it has neverthelessbeen a long trip from...

Lessons of the Cryptograph: Revelation and the Mechanical in Kafka's "In the Penal Colony"

According to a great Rabbi, Walter Benjamin recalls in his essay on Kafka, the coming Messiah "will not wish to change the world by force but will merely make a slight adjustment in it." 1 A slight adjustment of the ordinary--this is indeed what happens everywhere in Kafka's texts in which daily objects, made all but invisible through familiarity, are transformed into enigmatic signs. The archetype of the enigmatic object-sign for Kafka is the door, and it is indeed doors that structure the parabolic and mythic space of his narratives. Opened and shut, locked and unlocked, peeped through and barricaded, they cease to be ordinary doors and become instead architectural elements in a theater of the unsayable. This is of course nowhere more true than with those doors that his heroes regularly confront in their search for truth: it happens to K. in The Castle, to Josef K. in The Trial, and, most famously of all, to the man from the country in the parable "Before the Law." If only they were able to pass through these enigmatic doors and come face to face with what lies behind them, these texts seem to suggest, they would finally be able to grasp the truth they have been seeking, discover the Law of their lives. Kafka's doors, in other words, hold out the promise of revelation.

Erzahlte Psychoanalyse bei Franz Kafka: Die Deutung von Kafkas Erzahlung

Kaus, Rainer J. Erzahlte Psychoanalyse bei Franz Kafka, Die Deutung von Kafkas Erzalung Das Urteil. Heidelberg: Winter, 1998. 78 pp. DM 24.00 hardcover. This slim volume represents the author's Antrittsvorlesung delivered to the Erziehungswissenschaftliche Fakultat of the University of Cologne in February 1998. It was conceived as part of a forthcoming book project with the working title Freud and Kafka: Literatur-Psychologie and Hermeneutik, scheduled to appear with the same publisher in the immediate future. In anticipation of the question why, given its imminent appearance in a larger interpretive context, this interpretation of Das Urteil deserves separate publication as a book unto itself, the author cites the encouragement of the publisher, the significance of Das Urteil as deserving of such an independent interpretation, and his hope that this preliminary taste of what is to come in the larger book will whet his readers' appetites. The receptive history of Das Urteil has known no dearth of psychoanalytic interpretations. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine any interpretation, regardless of its predominant focus, being able to deal with this story without turning in some way to Freud's psychoanalytic apparatus. Kaus, like many interpreters before him, wants to rely solely on psychoanalytic categories; but his aim is to shift the interpretive emphasis away from the exclusive concern with Oedipal rivalry that marks previous psychoanalytic approaches to this text, concentrating instead on the libidinal relations that, to his mind, characterize the tensions among the three male characters, Georg Bendemann, his father, and the mysterious friend in St. Petersburg. Kaus acknowledges that the fundamental configuration of Kafka's characters is structured around the Oedipal triangle; his point, however, is that the relationship between Georg and his father displays such a powerful libidinal charge as to allow one to diagnose an intense homoerotic attachment. This thesis is supported primarily by references to Freud's theory of the so-called Oedipal complex in which the son, instead of identifying with the role of the father and defining the mother as the love-object, identifies with the maternal role, assumes a feminine posture with regard to the father, and hence treats him with exaggerated care and affection. Now Freud, of course, insisted that the negative and positive, the deviant and the normal Oedipal structures, exist side-by-side in all individuals and constitute the enormous complexity of the Oedipal relation. This accounts, according to Freud, for the pronounced ambivalence the child experiences especially toward the father, which in all instances mixes hatred for the rival with a curious libidinal attachment. Kaus's interpretation of this libidinal dimension in the father-son relationship represents a serious short-circuit of the complexity inherent in the Freudian model, since it collapses the Oedipal relationship between Georg and his father into its purely negative form by stressing the homo-erotic component. Moreover, it reinforces this short-circuit by means of a flat reading of the text that plays down ambivalences in order to insist on the accuracy of its own interpretive conclusions. Literary scholars who have come to expect, even to appreciate, the multivalencies of Kafka's text will certainly be put off by Kaus's interpretive arrogance, which brushes aside previous psychoanalytic interpretations as the ublich[e] Banalisierung dieser Meistererzahlung (48) and insists that the correctness of his own interpretation cannot be placed in question (60). …

Paranoia: The quest for the Univocity of the phallic signifier in Kafka's text and its readers

Summary Criticism, writing about a writer and his work, is an interrogation. Interrogations are always undertaken by the court in the name of truth and in the name of knowledge which is power. Günter Mecke builds his deciphering of Kafka on the basis of reading his text as a cipher, as an arbitrarily chosen sign, a secret writing or scrambled text, which he then decodes into a Klartext, an uncoded text. Apart from the fact that such a statement presupposes the self‐knowledge of such an intention by the author, it also presupposes an exceedingly simplistic model of artistic creativity as a straightforward encoding of that intention into a cipher‐text which can be deciphered. However, exposure and avoidance as simultaneous reactions point to a more complex regime of emotions than the metaphor of the cipher allows for. Mecke's approach also assumes a stable definition of the author's identity so that one's personality structure might mark one as a homosexual, even, perhaps, in the absence of any sexual or genital activity at all, and that this identity remains the same over time. What remains troubling is the violence of interpretative uncovery against the narrator, the violence of rendering his closet as spectacle.

The Intellectual Contexts of Kafka's Fiction: Philosophy, Law, Religion (review)

148 SHOFAR Summer 1996 Vol. 14, No.4 reader will find a plethora of often forgotten names. The rich and colorful scene of a literature byJewish writers in German after the Shoah (in Israel, Austria, and Germany) is a chapter of literary history still awaiting critical attention. Thomas Nolden Department of German Wellesley College The Intellectual Contexts of Kafka's Fiction: Philosophy, Law, Religion, by Arnold Heidsieck. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1994. 214 pp. $57.00. Heidsieck's contextual study of Kafka is a break with the more recent trends in Kafka criticism that concentrate on the text itself rather than the discourse surrounding it. Instead, he posits the discourses of perception and cognition, law, and ethics as central to understanding Kafka's texts. In so doing, Heidsieck sees Kafka's works shaped by nonaesthetic, academic, and public discussions of the early twentieth century, suggesting that Kafka's modernism arises as much from the discourses of the day as his own introspective imagination and personality. In this study, issues of perception, description, referential belief, cognition, and consciousness remain the central focus for the understanding and interpretation of Kafka's fiction and style. The non-literary sources he encountered in his formative years as a writer provided the impetus for much of his fantasy world. Heidsieck has researched a vast number of published and unpublished sources-reviews, articles on the law, course transcripts, law texts, religious documents-which up till now have remained unexplored in connection with Kafka criticism. The result is a rigorous study that emphasizes Kafka the thinker rather than Kafka the poet. Heidsieck's introduction explains clearly his goals for the book. As a Germanist heavily influenced by philosophical approaches to literature, he is interested in the "understanding of literary truth" (p. 13). By expanding the purview of investigation to Kafka's intellectual sources, Heidsieck necessarily widens the scope of and explanation ofliterary modernism. His assertion that Kafka's precision in description of thoughts, character dispositions, and actions is illustrative of Kafka's desire to portray reality raises questions about the character of reality, and in many ways breaks Book Reviews 149 away from much of recent Kafka CCtUClsm, presenting a challenging perspective that both Kafka scholars and readers should consider. The first four chapters of the work concentrate on investigating the sources for Kafka's methods of descriptive precision: "... what gets narrated in these fictions is almost exclusively what impinges on the main figures' perceptual fields (vision, hearing, etc.) and whatever else occurs in their minds, such as memories, inferences, beliefs, desires, and the like" (p. 10). It is Heidsieck's contention that many Kafka critics have dismissed philosophical readings that can greatly add to understanding the Kafkan reuvre. In this reader's opinion, however, the major strengths of Heidsieck 's book reside in the later chapters which undertake readings of various Kafka texts in more detail and apply the information rather than focusing so heavily on the sources. This combination of discourse analysis and critical reading of various Kafka texts serves to provide new insights into the often interpreted stories like "The Judgment," "Metamorphosis," "In the Penal Colony," "A Country Doctor," and especially the novels The Castle and The Trial. Heidsieck's last chapter, "Religion, Delusion, and Prejudice," concentrates on a reading of The Castle as a portrayal of a remote Central or Eastern European region before the turn of the century with its ethnically diverse but centrally governed structures. According to Heidsieck , "[t]he novel ... employs an array of religious, ethnic, and legal motifs-the ancient strife between Judaism and nascent Christianity, the competing cultural anthropological assumptions underlying Jewish assimilation and Zionism, and the Jews' threatened legal equality within the German-speaking, increasingly antisemitic environment. These motifs capture the individual anxieties and the collective paranoia ofa community threatened by the social and political transition to modernity" (p. 156). Heidsieck goes on to elucidate the metaphorical allusions to Judaism, but even more interesting is his presentation of the New Testament and Christian allusions with Kafka's text. Fascinating are the accounts ofKafka's readings at the time of the writing of The Castle and how his studies lead Kafka to the "understanding of how firmly ethnic...

Aping the Ape: Kafka's "Report to an Academy"

The "Report to an Academy" narrates a curious situation: an ape presents (or rather, performs) a report to an academy. What he presents is an autobiography. Like so much in Kafka, the "Report" is a parable about writing in general and about the writer's identity in particular. This essay attempts to address these issues through a close reading of Kafka's text against Blanchot's L'espace littéraire. Central to this endeavour is an analysis of the ape's use of the first-person pronoun as someone who fashions himself while, at the same time, presenting a theatrical autobiography featuring the self in question. My reading then moves on to analyze the act of writing as a negotiation of the passage between self and other, framed as it is by the theatrical context of Kafka's parable.

Literature and Sickness (review)

■Sà -Book Reviews rm David Bevan, ed., Literature and Sickness. Rodopi: Amsterdam, 1993. iv + 116 pp. Paperback, $23.50. The editorial principles by which this volume was compiled are none too clear. David Bevan's one-and-a-half-page introduction claims that the essays herein "constitute further interdependent facets of that growing critical mass which seeks new illumination from the black sun of the night-side of life" (p. 4). Of its six essays, two engage the topic of "sickness" only under the loosest construction: one is devoted to melancholia in Franz Kafka's work and another to physical handicaps in Flannery O'Connor's short fiction. The essays range from brief papers to lengthy articles, and their quality fluctuates just as drastically. The only consistent rationale I can discover is an attempt at comparative Uterary breadth: thus, each article approaches a different national literature , with the exception of Kafka's greater Austria, which is touched on twice. In sum, Literature and Sickness is a mediocre volume. One essay, however, is very fine. I wiU describe the others and then concentrate on it. Literary editors engaging literal medical topics should be wary of rhetorical duplicity. Lynne S. Vieth's "From Melancholic to Parabolic Expression: Walter Benjamin and Franz Kafka" is a competent short treatment of the Benjaminian themes of melancholy and allegory in Kafka's texts, but it has nothing to do with sickness and is, thus, unsuited as a lead article. Its focus is rather the melancholic vacillations of allegorical structure, the saturnine complexion, and "the pathology of the family organism" (p. 12). Metaphors of sickness remain metaphors, and one immediately feels shortchanged by such figurative slipperiness. Kathleen A. Patterson's "Negotiating Elevators and Hay Lofts: DisabiUty and Identity in Flannery O'Connor's Short Fiction" is similarly debilitated by an unwarranted stretching of the volume's rubric. Disabled persons in general would probably resent the implication that they are "sick." However, O'Connor's own disabling case of lupus provides Patterson's brief essay with a thin margin of literal cover, and the essay stands out from several of the others by adhering to a coherent thesis: "in these Literature and Medicine 12, no. 2 (Fall 1993) 239-276 © 1993 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 240 BOOK REVIEWS stories, O'Connor rehearses potential solutions that persons with disabilities , like herself, might choose to the problem of imposed identity" (P- 97). The inclusion of Pamela S. Saur's "The Triumph of Sickness in Modern Austrian Literature" cannot be faulted for misrepresentation. A plodding traditional survey, it examines the works of Kafka, Joseph Roth, Arthur Schnitzler, Karl Schönherr, Ernst Weiss, Christine Lavant, Thomas Bernhard, and Gerhard Roth in pursuit of the thesis that the doctors and diseases described by these authors confirm traditional cultural stereotypes of Austrian Uterature as gloomy, melanchoUc, fatalistic, and obsessed with death. Elisabetta Nelsen's "'L'invasione smisurata': The Themes of Neurological Disease and Madness in Elsa Morante's Novels" is a jargon-laden short treatment that gestures toward psychoanalytical , feminist, and structuraUst theory while focusing on Morante's depictions of epileptic and cancerous women as metaphors of social oppression. Steven G. Kellman's "Reading Shilts Reading Camus Reading a Plague" is the third essay, along with Vieth's and Saur's, that focuses on the topic of allegory in relation to sickness. Here, if anywhere, was a chance for the editor to draw some general significance out of the collection. "IUness as Allegory" would be an appropriate update of Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor, extending her treatment of metaphor to include whole structures, allegories, of transposed meanings. In any event, Kellman's essay-review of Randy Shilts's And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic is pleasantly energized by its attentions to Albert Camus's The Plague. However, in Camus's novel the ostensible plague is an allegorical vehicle for the Nazi occupation of France. Kellman mostly jettisons The Plague's poUtical tenor to concentrate on its literal surface details, rather than finding the passageways by which Camus's aUegory of Fascism could interpret the biological pathologies and social dysfunctions of the aids crisis. Jan B. Gordon...

Sounding out the Silence of Gregor Samsa: Kafka's Rhetoric of Dys-Communication

Through his transformation, Gregor Samsa, rather than simply silencing himself, allows his repressed voice to be heard palimpsestically in the language of his family and the boarders. His story is one of inverted—rather than aborted—communication. An analogous inversion governs the relationship between Kafka and his father and Kafka and his interpreters. As a child, Kafka could make little sense of his father's rules and his contradictory actions; later, he reduplicates in his writings this grammar of "dys-communication." Our puzzled and often frustrated reactions to Kafka's texts can therefore be seen to mirror his equally puzzled and frustrated reactions to his father's discourse. Thus a comparison of the basic situation of communication displayed in Kafka's "Letter to his Father," "The Metamorphosis," and Kafka-scholarship discloses a symmetry of responses behind the child's perspective, the Samsas' tale, and our quest for meaning.

Freud, Proust, and Lacan: Theory as Fiction (review)

Reviews391 underestimates the analogy to the Kabbalah, Hans Mayer asserts in "Walter Benjamin and Franz Kafka" (1980) that Benjamin's understanding of Kafkaesque aUegory was gready influenced by Scholem's insistence on the Talmudic plurality of Kafka's texts with their "endless possible interpretations" (p. 197). Since explanation is perpetuaUy postponed in aUegory, Ulumination in Kafka's world becomes purely "prophecy without hope" (p. 208). In "Walter Benjamin's City Portraits" (1962), Peter Szondi suggests that Benjamin 's "language of images" is actuaUy twofold (p. 26): there is indeed the allegorical fragment that destroys mythic analogies, but there is also the reconstructive moment "when the author takes two different objects and reveals their essence by linking them in a metaphor based on common property" (p. 28). In "Walter Benjamin: From Rupture to Shipwreck" (1981), Pierre Missac locates a liminal imagistic category between fragmentand metaphor—theBruchst ückor productofrupture—manifesting what Benjamincalled the "weak Messianic power" through which the past is transmitted to the present (p. 216). Irving Wohlfarth in "Resentment Begins at Home" (1981) is weU aware that this historical interaction requires complex maneuvering on the part of Benjamin's "materialist historian," who must fragment the myths of tradition yet save the significant pieces (p. 226). In "Dialectics at a StandstiU" (1982), RolfTiedemann accordingly demonstrates that "dialectical images" as "configurations ofthe Now and the Then" constitute the central category in the unfinished edifice of Benjamin's Passagen-Werk (p. 284). Two essays undermine the general exceUence of Smith's collection. Hans RobertJauss's "Reflection on the Chapter 'Modernity' in Benjamin's Baudelaire Fragments" (1979) is a virtually uninteUigible excerpt from a longer essay. In "Walter Benjamin's Theory of Myth" (1983), Winfried Menninghaus aU too briefly distinguishes Benjamin's approach to myth from seven venerable theories . If one is going to argue that "Benjamin wants to appropriate the universalizing capacity of a purely formal conception of myth" (p. 295) while avoiding "the radically unhistorical, formal semiohgical concept ofmyth oftwentieth -century structural anthropology" (p. 293), one would be weU advised not to dismiss Lévi-Strauss in two sentences. University of California, BerkeleyLynne Vieth Freud, Proust, and Lacan: Theory as Fiction, by Malcolm Bowie; xii & 225 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, $39.50 cloth, $15.95 paper. This volume consists ofpreviously read papers and lectures loosely organized into an introduction, an epilogue, and five chapters, ofwhich Freud and Proust receive one each and one shared, while Lacan receives two. To what extent 392Philosophy and Literature does the author contribute to our knowledge and understanding of these theorists /fictioneers and their interrelationships? Bowie rejects the stress placed by the most subtle analysts of Proust on the central role of intuition, synthesis, and metaphor, dismissing their views as "misleading" and "absurd" (p. 47), or as "thrusting a false simplicity upon the book" (p. 48). He himself then proceeds to view the whole work through the themes of lying and jealousy, and thus neglects the cruciaUy important first and final volumes to concentrate on La Prisonnière. As for theory, he rejects empirical verification—the only real test of the value of theory for criticism— with heavy irony, and remarks: "Many critics, it seems, are wüling to grant seriousness and coherence to a given social or psychological theory only if they are able to show that theory to be pre-eminendy applicable to novels, plays or poems. . . . The process is not a particularly arduous one. There is no need for the critic to feel exhausted or forlorn. . ." (p. 5). Lacan's Ecrits were published by Le Seuil in 1966, and his brilliant lessons on the analyst-patient relationship were used in the 1970s to radicalize the interpretation of first-person narration. However, Lacan, already notorious for his obscurantism, has gradually been discredited by his association with the selfcontradictory deconstructionism extracted from Derrida by disciples like Paul de Man and Hillis Miller. Bowie seems unaware of this. He discusses Lacan's famous "Séminaire sur la Lettre volée" but fails to grasp the essential fact that Lacan's errorwas to see in Poe's purloined letter a pure empty signifier. Derrida's error (and Bowie's) is to claim that "the mobility of the...

Texts, Textuality, and Silence in Franz Kafka's Das Schloss

The understanding and interpretation of texts, papers, documents, and even of narration are central elements in Franz Kafka's novel Das SchloJJ. Texts and textual interpretation present a problematic in the novel which impacts upon the critical analysis of the novel itself. Texts in Das SchloJ, by this is meant all written items and some narratives, represent the authority of the Castle with its bureaucratic, confusing, and hierarchical structure. In order to exist within this closed system, incorporating the village and the Castle, it appears necessary to understand these written items and narratives. This understanding, K. believes, should be achieved through correct interpretation and evaluation. K. searches for this correct interpretative method because he wishes to become a part of this system. Amalia, on the other hand, presents a possible alternative to the interpretative problem in her refusal to interpret, in the sense that interpretation is a means of gaining an absolute understanding of the Castle. She denies this method of interpretation because it does not question the structures of the system or of interpretation. The events in the novel and Kafka's text demand an active, questioning interpretation. This must be approached on two levels: first, from within the text, the story of K. and his striving to interpret and understand the Castle; and second, from the perspective of the reader, who is confronted with similar problems when attempting to interpret Kafka's text, the novel itself. Texts and textuality will be examined from three aspects: content, what the text

An Imperial Message: The Relays of Desire

Kafka's fiction often confronts its critics with a collapsed or collapsing center of authority, a dead or powerless father, who condemns those in his orbit to a circuitous ruin. No one or nothing is in control; no one has the power to authorize. And yet all the subjects still seem to be controlled and continue to work. This paradox of inertia and ceaseless activity, of masterlessness combined with continued servitude, is the central feature of one of Kafka's most interesting parables, Eine kaiserliche Botschaft. Michel Foucault's description of certain texts as heterotopias is particularly relevant for Kafka's parable, because it names the possibility of a text or system composed of disconnected infrastructures, a text made up of asymmetric parts which can only work or operate provided there is a condition of disorganization or entropy, a mechanics of resistance, frustration, dysfunction.1 Kafka's texts, like the heterotopias Foucault describes, display this kind of perverse operating procedure whose economy is initiated by the collapse of the center, often represented as the death of the father, and having clear Oedipal aspects. It is in the Oedipus complex that we might locate the mechanism of resistance (the machine desirante, to appropriate Deleuze and Guattari's anti-Oedipal term) that at once accounts for the absent father and makes possible the work of his subordinates in the shadow of his absence.' The Oedipal situation is responsible for at once an imposition of its regulatory apparatus over the father, its symbolic content in the Lacanian sense, which results in the slaying of the father, and a suffering of guilt and loss of control that such an absence of the father inaugurates. What we must realize is that such a complex or mechanism of desire does not serve so much to inhibit or limit Kafka's writing to a simple principle, a constellation or dynamic which in itself becomes a substitute for the center effaced within the text, but that such a complex is an entropaic principle of disper-