Franz Kafka (1883-1983): His Craft and Thought

Franz Kafka (1883-1983)

His Craft and Thought

Edited by

Roman Struc and J. C. Yardley

The eight papers in this volume were originally presented at the centennial conference on Franz Kafka held at the University of Calgary in October 1983. As diverse in approach and methodology as these papers are, "the general drift of the volume is away from Germanistik towards ‘state-of-the-art’ methods."

The opening articles by Charles Bernheimer and James Rolleston both deal with the similarities and contrasts between Kafka and Flaubert, with Bernheimer focusing on the I and the dilemma of narration in Kafka’s early story, Wedding Preparation in the Country, and Rolleston on the time-dimensions in Kafka’s work that link him to the Romantics. Other articles in the volume deal with the complex interrelationships between author and narrator, and implied author and implied reader; with Kafka’s place in the European fable tradition and in classic and Romantic religious traditions; with Kafka’s diaries; and with his female protagonists.

Roman Struc is Professor of German at the University of Calgary. J. C. Yardley is Professor of Classics at the University of Calgary.

Franz Kafka (1883-1983)

His Craft and Thought

Edited by

Roman Struc and J. C. Yardley

Essays by

Published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press

for The Calgary Institute for the Humanities

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Main entry under title

Franz Kafka (1883-1983) : his craft and thought

Includes index.

ISBN 0-88920-187-0

1. Kafka, Franz, 1883-1924 – Criticism and

interpretation. I. Struc, Roman, 1927-

II. Yardley, John, 1942- . III. Bernheimer,

Charles, 1942- . IV. Calgary Institute for

the Humanities.

PT2621.A26Z68 1986       833.9’12       C86-093871-9

Copyright © 1986

Wilfrid Laurier University Press

Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

N2L 3C5

86 87 88 89 4 3 2 1

No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system, translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, microfiche, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher.

Printed and bound in Canada

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Editors’ Notes

Introduction

Roman Struc, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta

1. The Splitting of the I and the Dilemma of Narration: Kafka’s Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande

Charles Bernheimer, State University of New York, Buffalo, New York

2. Kafka’s Time Machines

James Rolleston, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

3. The Comedy of Stasis: Narration and Knowledge in Kafka’s Prozess

Patrick O’Neill, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia

4. Kafka’s Animal Tales and the Tradition of the European Fable

Egon Schwarz, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri

5. Kafka’s In the Penal Colony as a Reflection of Classical and Romantic Religious Views

Ernst Loeb, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario

6. Life into Art: Kafka’s Self-Stylization in the Diaries

Mark Harman, Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, Pennsylvania

7. Of Mice and Women: Reflections on a Discourse

Ruth Gross, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York

8. Meeting Kafka

W. G. Kudszus, University of California, Berkeley, California

Index

EDITORS' NOTES

The quotes from The Castle are from: Franz Kafka, Das Schloss, ed. Malcolm Pasley (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1982), p. 7. The diary entries can be found in: Franz Kafka, Tagebücher; 1910-1923, ed. Max Brod (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1954), pp. 552-53 (January 16, 1922), pp. 565-66 (January 29, 1922), pp. 566-67 (January 29, cont.), pp. 563-64 (January 27, arrival day). The quote from pp. 565-66 has been changed according to Franz Kafka, Das Schloss (Apparatband), ed. Malcolm Pasley (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1982), p. 63 (Sp. rather than Spindlermühle). See this new edition also for the letter from March 1922 (to Robert Klopstock), which is mistakenly dated March 1923 in: Franz Kafka, Briefe 1902-1924, ed. Max Brod (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1958), p. 431; Apparat-band, pp. 64-65. For Spindelmühle rather than Spindlermühle cf. Hartmut Binder, Kafka in neuer Sicht: Mimik, Gestik und Personengefuge als Darstellungsformen des Autobiographischen (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1976), p. 366.

INTRODUCTION

A collection of conference papers inevitably contains a certain arbitrariness. One encounters a number of individually conceived propositions and interpretations involving diverse methodologies often based on fundamentally different premises, and approaches ranging from biography to textual analysis. Readers must expect not an integral, synoptic illumination of the subject, but rather a number of imperfect insights enabling them to obtain a more systematic perspective.

In the case of Kafka, attempts at attaining a fuller picture include those classical studies of Kafka’s oeuvre by Wilhelm Emrich, Heinz Politzer, and Walter Sokel which to this day represent unique accomplishments and without which Kafka scholarship would not have progressed to where it is now. They set the tone and the direction for the further studies of this author. Emrich applied the philosophy of existence in his approach to Kafka. Politzer focussed on Kafka as a creator of unresolvable paradoxes, disguised as parables, but concentrated on his artistry as well. And Sokel, using biography, the insights of psychoanalysis, and Nietzsche’s philosophy of the will to power constructed an integral portrait of the writer. This is not the place to present a review of Kafka scholarship; a number of able and critical accounts of its history are available for that purpose. What is important, however, is that Kafka scholarship has, quite deliberately, I think, abandoned grandiose projects in favour of studies devoted to thematics, comparisons, structure, language, narrative techniques, and so on. The days of heady speculation have given way to a new sobriety which has resulted in the critical edition of Kafka’s writings and generally intensified biographical research, at times leading to positivistic scholarship, closely relating biography and writing. Much of this newer research has called into question certain views and speculation, myths and hypotheses advanced by earlier interpreters. It has put him more firmly in his place and time, both as a person and a product of historical forces. We now know a great deal about Kafka’s rather mundane life and about his reading which made some questionable speculations less acceptable. The mysteries of the initial period in the Kafka story have indeed diminished in number, but the limitations inherent in the biographical approach have had to be recognized. What has emerged is the realization of the need for a painstaking study of Kafka’s mode of writing, his art, language, narrative point of view, and other largely formalistic considerations. Such an interpretive method has arisen from research in a number of directions. Structuralism, deconstruction, the doctrine of implied reader and implied author have been applied to Kafka’s writing and doubtless have enhanced our understanding of his craft. Thus, as in all Western literary scholarship, no single commonly accepted theory or methodology exists, but a pluralism of methodologies in constant flux and refinement. It is not unusual now that the diversity and divergencies of approaches have reached a state in which two critical readers of Kafka may appear to be discussing two distinct literary phenomena. I concur with Egon Schwarz who reduces the problem to the two basic premises underlying it. One implicitly or overtly propounds the autonomy of literature or even the individual literary work, while the other assumes a much broader base or matrix from which literary phenomena and other social and cultural manifestations arise. Historically speaking, the present situation of methodological pluralism is, in itself, not new. We also know both that biographism has existed together with the Geistesgeschichte and that in the English-speaking world social and moral criticism, the formalistic New Criticism and the method of close reading have co-existed—perhaps uneasily—in one and the same English department. What, I suspect, is new is the rapidity at which approaches appear and disappear, which makes the seemingly inevitable pluralism even more confusing. I do not doubt that a synthesis is possible. The theoretical truism that a literary work is both—mutatis mutandis—historical and unique still holds true. It derives both from history, including literary tradition, and from the unique imagination of the writer. The readers’ awareness of their own historicity is an indispensable component of reliable hermeneutics.

In making these discriminations, I am aware that the two basic tendencies—historical and formalistic—are rarely manifested in their pure form.

The essays collected in this volume do reflect the pluralism of contemporary criticism. Instead of labelling them according to some Procrustean scheme, I propose, descriptively though not uncritically. to offer my impressions of their thrust, direction, and particular contribution.

Bernheimer, in a close reading of Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande, explores an early story of Kafka’s which can be viewed as a preliminary exercise for more mature works in which the narrating I and the observed I reveal much greater complexity. Raban’s desire to comprehend reality through meticulous recording, Beschreibung, leads to a catalogue of disparate phenomena united in meaning only through the subjective I. Toward the end of his essay, Bernheimer detects in the story the possibility of a fusion in which the recording I and the experiencing I would be reconciled. I believe, however, that the split of the I is permanent and that the synthesis is but a paradoxical dream which Kafka expressed as the ability simultaneously to sleep and be awake. The essay fully acknowledges the similarity with Flaubert, but I am also convinced that the romantic tradition played its part in shaping the complex relationship of the divided I.

In some ways Rolleston’s Kafka’s Time Machines is similar to Bernheimer’s essay, since both assume the overriding importance of Flaubert’s problematic as reflected in Kafka. Briefly but convincingly Rolleston deals with Kafka the realist. Expanding the concept of realism to include Kafka merely magnifies the confusion surrounding the term and does nothing for either Kafka or the concept of realism. No critical reader is unaware of Kafka’s preoccupation with time and its dislocations. This has frequently been related to the dual nature of time as formulated by Bergson or to the insights of psychoanalysis claiming that the unconscious operates outside of time. Rolleston, however, draws on the German Romantics, specifically Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel, and their conception of time. In his essay he examines three pairs of stories embodying self-projection into the future, which he calls prescriptive time, concern with the past— encyclopedic time, and with the present—ecstatic time. Using such time-dimensions categorizes Kafka’s writings, linking them by way of intellectual history to the Romantics.

O’Neill’s contribution, The Comedy of Stasis: Narration and Knowledge in Kafka’s Prozess, explores the complex interrelationship of a whole series of factors, i.e., the author, narrator, implied author, and implied reader. Through discriminating reading, O’Neill arrives at the conclusion that the evolution of the protagonist is an illusion; since the individual episodes in their indeterminacy and ambivalence, i.e., K.’s success or failure, make for stasis rather than genuine progress. This leads O’Neill to assume that anything between the first and last chapters is ultimately interchangeable. This is a contentious issue. Fräulein Montag’s appearance is ultimately predicated on Frl. Burstner’s presence, and the appearance of Uncle Albert makes more sense after Joseph K. decides to get involved in the hearings.

Two essays, Schwarz’s Kafka’s Animal Tales and the Tradition of the European Fable and Loeb’s ‘In the Penal Colony’ as a Reflection of Classical and Romantic Religious Views, are concerned with tradition. In that respect they are more historically oriented than the three already discussed. Schwarz’s thesis is simple and convincing. He pleads for Kafka as a historical phenomenon and, although he does not attempt to place him in the context of general history, he affirms his place in literary history in his discussion of the author’s animal tales and the European fable. I am certain that many critical readers of Kafka believe, as I do, that literary scholarship has not done enough to place Kafka in the general literary process. Schwarz, by considering a limited though important aspect of Kafka’s oeuvre, demystifies him and makes him more accessible to the reader.

Religious interpretations of Kafka are no novelty. Loeb’s contribution, however, is more specific than many. In his interpretation of In the Penal Colony, he uses as a conceptual framework the distinctions introduced by Leo Baeck, those of classical and romantic religious traditions, and applies them, respectively, to the dying regime of the old Commandant and to the liberalizing tendencies of the new generation embodied in the present leader. The outcome of the conflict is, to no one’s surprise, inconclusive. Perhaps one could add that the humanist-explorer, who is opposed throughout to the inhuman old regime, leaves the colony without a word of condemnation, just as the old Commandant’s officer by choosing the very ambivalent admonition Be just! expresses his own doubts at the justice of the system he represents.

Mark Harman’s essay, Life into Art: Kafka’s Self-Stylization in the Diaries, advances the thesis that Kafka’s diaries served not merely as a vehicle for recording his life but as a means of transforming himself into a persona of his fiction. Anyone conversant with Kafka’s records will agree that they differ significantly from the conventional diary. Extensive portions of the former can be said to be on the borderline of a literary exercise and a record of everyday events. This is especially true of those entries in which he comments on himself. The distinction between life and literature is obliterated. In perusing Thomas Mann’s diaries, for example, one never doubts that the author makes that distinction. Kafka’s diaries can therefore be used as an instrument affording the reader insights into the working laboratory of the author.

Availing herself of the insights of feminist criticism, Ruth Cross presents Of Mice and Women: Reflections on a Discourse, an essay in which she purports to expose Kafka’s male bias, specifically in his only story having a female protagonist, Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk. Josephine is interpreted as a second-rate K ., Joseph with a tail, to whom the story ascribes cowardice, duplicity, and dishonesty; in general, she is seen as a parasite on the body politic of the mouse folk, i.e., male and male-oriented society. While it cannot be denied that bias is present in Kafka, such bias must also be seen from a historical perspective. Exposing it in a contemporary writer, having the benefits of the insights of the feminists, would have been more valid than is the case here. One could also add that the male protagonists in Kafka exhibit the same negative traits as Josephine. Further, the reader is aware that Kafka’s K.s do use women as a means to an end, and that not only the reader, but the K.s themselves are aware of it. The unusually perspicacious conversation between K. and Pepi concerning Frieda, in which K. confesses to his betrayal of Frieda’s trust and love, is a good example. I view parts of The Castle as K.’s self-condemnation or at least serious questioning of his own ruthless exploitation of people, especially women in encounters and schemes doomed to failure.

Kudszus’ Meeting Kafka speaks for itself. He presented a paper at the conference, which dealt with the problem of knowledge, or rather the protagonists’ search for knowledge. As his letter explains, in preparing the manuscript he decided to present a very personal and intimate account of his reading of Kafka. As he is well aware, his reading runs counter to the more formal and analytical approaches currently employed in Kafka criticism. As Rolleston noted, the naiveté, with which Kafka was read some years ago, at the same time significantly contributed to our understanding of the writer. At the same time, it is a loss, probably irreversible. The privilege of experiencing the Kafka of Kudszus in Meeting Kafka, is reserved for those fortunate enough to read the haunting opening sentences of The Metamorphosis, The Trial, and The Castle for the first time.

I regret the absence of Milan Dimic’s fine contribution on Kafka’s use of folklore motifs. For unavoidable reasons it could not be included in this collection.

Readers will have to make their own assessments; as always in literature and literary studies, they will have to pronounce judgment. The papers presented here do not fall into easily definable categories. Rather, they represent a spectrum at whose ends the readers might discern views of literature as something autonomous or as a part of the general process of literary and intellectual history. I see these papers as contributions not merely in the common sense of the word, but as a genuine aid to a fuller, more discriminating understanding of the Kafka phenomenon.

Roman Struc     

1

THE SPLITTING OF THE I AND THE DILEMMA OF NARRATION: KAFKA’S HOCHZEITSVORBEREITUNGEN AUF DEM LANDE

Charles Bernheimer

Kafka’s Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande is a fragmentary text of about thirty pages, probably intended to be a novel, written most likely in early 1907, when Kafka was twenty-four, with variants dating to 1908. The title was given by Max Brod, based on his memory of Kafka’s having referred to the text in this manner. The manuscript is divided into two chapters, the second of which breaks off in the middle of a sentence, and there are two different versions of the opening pages. Lacunae of several pages exist in both these versions.

Such a truncated and gap-ridden text obviously presents the critic with major problems of interpretation. The thematic concerns of the narrative can be linked to Kafka’s life-experiences just prior to the time of its writing. This biographical approach finds the genesis for Kafka’s anxious preoccupation with marriage in this story in his erotic encounters of the years 1905 and 1906. At a sanatorium in Zuckmantel in the summer of 1905 he had been erotically intimate, apparently for the first time, with a woman. Like Betty in Hochzeitsvorbereitungen, described by Raban as an oldish pretty girl (23)¹ , this woman was considerably older than Kafka. During the following year he had his first sexual experiences with prostitutes, and that summer he fell in love once again.² Thus the biographically minded critic is likely to interpret Hochzeitsvorbereitungen as the dramatization of Kafka’s fascination with, and fear of, women, of his desire to move forward into marriage countered by his desire to postpone this social bond and regress in fantasy to a more secure position. The fact that the name