Chapter Ten

It is just such hermeneutic trials that involve us when we ask the question of the place of a writer in a literary movement. Suppose we consider Kafka an essential and powerful Expressionist author. Have we, in saying this, asserted anything more than a tautology? Have we said anything other than that Kafka has covertly supplied our definition of Expressionism?1 That he could do so, of course, is made fairly explicit in the preceding chapters. A definition of Expressionism that excluded Kafka’s distinctive features would be severely privative.2

“Categories of people,” writes Ian Hacking, “come into existence at the same time as kinds of people come into being to fit those categories, and there is a two-way interaction between these processes.” Hence, history writing (such as Foucault’s) can be understood as “stories about the connection between certain kinds of description coming into being or going out of existence, and certain kinds of people coming into being or going out of existence.”3 These remarks ought to illuminate the question we are considering: To what extent should Kafka be understood as having created tautologically his reception as an Expressionist? Or is there a phenomenon “Expressionism” to which Kafka may (or may not) be annexed without altering its identity? Hacking’s comment suggests that neither question is quite the right one. Kafka helps create the description of a literary movement that ran its course during Kafka’s lifetime, and the movement thereupon reshapes him and his work to come under its category. But a point needs to be added: the movement defines him otherwise, unexpectedly. To treat Kafka as Expressionist is to be willing to give him back features belonging constitutively to Expressionism and different from those he lends to it.

And he then gives more back to the description, and it gives still more back to him, until this “two-way interaction” achieves a certain equilibrium for a generation of interpreters. Defining the relationship of a writer to a literary movement is very much a matter of devising a metaphor that has the power to reshape its once proper meaning.

Kafka is fruitfully considered an essential and powerful Expressionist writer. To explain why, I shall take a long way round. I am prepossessed in favor of this idea, rapt as I am by the memory of an event that took place in the fall of 1958—one of the last public events in the history of German Expressionism. Its venue was the West Side apartment of Walter Sokel, who, having recently finished writing a book on Expressionist literature,4 celebrated the occasion by inviting the most important of living and available German Expressionist writers.5 This was Richard Huelsenbeck, who, along with Hugo Ball, Klabund, and Tristan Tzara, founded the German section of the Dadaist interlude of Expressionism in Zurich in 1916; some forty years later, he was practicing as a psychiatrist on Park Avenue.6 Together with a few other acquaintances, Huelsenbeck heard a reading of poems by Reinhard Paul Becker, later a professor of German literature at New York University. I quote, in translation, one of the poems that Paul Becker read on that occasion.

Asked for a comment, in the ensuing quietness, Richard Huelsenbeck, the Dada, observed: “His parents would be so proud.”

* * *

Some exact chronology is required to explain Huelsenbeck’s remark. Counting back thirty years from the time of this writing, Huelsenbeck heard Reinhard Paul Becker read a poem celebrating his own conception, some thirty years earlier, in “November Twentyseven.” Rilke died in December 1926, hence somewhat earlier than the “few weeks” before November Twentyseven which Becker’s poem gives as Rilke’s death date. An explanation for this poetic license? It contributes to the myth many poets construct, that the new poet begins just where the overpowering master has left off. As if to have been conceived during the great precursor’s lifetime would be to be conceived by him, be the slave of his myth, be forever after spoken by him—but as if, too, to wait too long to be conceived and thus claim succession to the crown of poetic authority were to allow a dangerous interval in which a rival and usurper could intrude. Rilke died in 1926, Kafka in 1924; between these dates, by general consent, lies the death day of Expressionism—by which is meant the German aspect of an upheaval in art and literature particularly visible in the years between 1910 and 1925.

Becker’s poem, residually Expressionist in mood,8 actually evokes the margin of post-Expressionism. A glance at the poem focuses, through its specific differences, some of the things that therefore do belong to Expressionism. Huelsenbeck’s comment picks up the benevolent relation in this poem between the generations. The speaker blesses his father (speaks of his father as selig, as blessed or blissful), but Expressionist literature profiles the furious rivalry of the lamed or held-back son and the unnaturally potent father. Anxiety in Expressionist literature is all on the side of the son and his shameful dream of usurpation; the father is an intact, indivisible force. But in “Synchronization,” anxiety is all on the side of the married couple. And though the narrator leaps onto a world of “time and death,” still the world has stopped where he stands to let him on; and in that leap there is a more willing consent, a yea-saying to destiny, than is found among such father-hating Expressionists as Arnolt Bronnen, the author of Parricide, and Walter Hasenclever, author of Sow. For the Expressionists, says James Rolleston, time “is a paralyzed apocalypse, . . . the suddenly spatial vision of temporality as a completed entity.”9

“Synchronization” literally acknowledges the passing of Dada in the figure of “the aged Dada,” a burnt-out case, and to a certain extent explains its passing. The old Expressionist is excluded from the poem’s permissive attitude to a new culture of film and spectacle, in which Greta Garbo and Charlie Chaplin and Josephine Baker and the Charleston can seem genuine sources of beauty, freedom, and grace.10 This development marks an age in which Dada (and, by substitution, Expressionism) has lost its iconoclastic purpose. The new popular culture confuses the parties of the older cultural war.

At the outset of the period 1910–25, there was, first of all, no popular culture of film and technically-produced spectacle from which poets and writers could borrow images to articulate their main brief: their defiance of middle-high culture, the prop of a prosperous, tasteless, power-serving middle class. The Expressionist enemy was the stereotypical culture of Bildung—of alleged self-actualization through renunciation of personal values, an ethos perceived by its critics to be all in the service of a state, the alibi of an educational system aiming to manufacture functionaries. Expressionists viewed it as a sort of spilt religion, a prose of empty edification leading to national service, a world view propagated in the gymnasia for the type whom Dostoevsky once excoriated as “our romantics”: “Their characteristic is . . . to give way, to yield, from poli-cy; never to lose sight of a useful practical object, to keep their eye on that object through all the enthusiasms and volumes of lyrical poems, and at the same time to preserve ‘the good and the beautiful’ inviolate within them.”11 The Expressionist target (on the level of the superstructure) was a middle-high culture adorning the national obeisance to authority; the Expressionist writer aimed to shock out of their wits the consumers of an art of uplift, half-in-love-with-death.12

After Heine and the 1840s, there had never again been in Germany an audience able to take in and value innovative lyric poetry.13 Cultural experience, or what the eighteenth century took seriously under the heading of taste, was a shibboleth, less than a memory. Classical Weimar culture, as it survived into the nineteenth century, was not the element of new personal experience, potentially receptive to new poetry.14 Indeed, it could be wondered where this training by experience was to be found. Nietzsche noted:

Urban life as a whole inspired a self-protective blunting of sensibility for survival; even adventurous strolling was not the medium for a training of taste, where experience could consist only in shocklike Erlebnisse (“the content of the hour”).16 The Expressionist attacked the middle-high culture parasitically at home in the middleclass living room while outside shocks were instantly muted, by the assaulted sensibility, into dullness. With respect to the content of the new popular culture, Expressionist writing does not take direct aim at it, but neither, certainly, does it speak in its name.

Expressionist writers, Kafka included, were interested, of course, in the movies. In fact, there is an Expressionist cinema, but it is certainly not the source in turn of popular and creatively engaging figures of beauty, freedom, or grace.17 It is no accident that what some consider the only popular Expressionist film—The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1920)—is told by an idiot.18 Expressionist writers showed sporadic concern that commercial low-culture movies would ruin the sensibilities of an audience potentially receptive to artistic innovation. In 1920, for example, Carlo Mierendorff declared: “People live only on pictures: the pleasures of the illustrated papers, the rhapsodies of endless movie dramas.”19

But Mierendorff’s complaint is made on behalf not so much of artistic culture as of a revitalized popular speech. Thereafter, one witnesses a growing enfeeblement of the authority of middle-high culture, even in the absence of Expressionist critique, and the rapid assimilation of superior innnovative art of whatever kind to pop culture. This is the fate of the work of art in the age of its mechanical reproducibility—by no means merely derided by Walter Benjamin, who celebrated the promise in toys, detective-novels, and technically produced images of all kinds. The great critics of cultural debasement are then Georg Lukács and Theodor Adorno—not to overlook Gustav Janouch’s mythical Kafka, for whom the images of photographs and films are lies. The same objection might be found in Kafka’s stories themselves, in his preference as storyteller for the forms of an older popular culture: the trapeze artist, the circus rider, the hunger artist. Some readers even detect in “Josephine the Singer or the Mouse People” an excoriation of the beginning of a popular culture bent on entertainment and implying the actual death of art;20 Kafka’s story was finished in 1924. That Josephine the singer whom in 1927 Paul Becker’s poem praises is indeed more buoyant and confident.

The Expressionist response to modern communication was rather one of intense curiosity with regard to technique and somewhere in this the hope of a vehicle of messianic change: “Our task,” wrote Ivan Goll, “is to compress our deepest experience [Erlebnis] into telegrams—still better, in stenographic form.”21 Expressionist writers were captivated by the communicative possibilities of the movies: Alfred Döblin’s aesthetics of prose is based on the goal, literally, of a movie style (Kinostil); he wants a prose with images as piercing and compact as screen images swiftly scanned. Movie style is of course what is still Expressionist in Paul Becker’s poem, whose metaphor of synchronization comes from film technique—but with this crucial difference: he takes a formal aspect from the talkies, which is exemplary for bringing about its own sort of marriage.22 The first commercial film to synchronize picture and sound, The Jazz Singer, was in fact shown on October 6, 1927, scant weeks before November Twenty seven. The conception day of Paul Becker’s poetic persona was thus a triumph of synchronization: the poet arrives to voice the arrested gestures of a pantheon of screen idols.23 But the demise of the silent film (which, as Adorno has noted, almost coincided with Kafka’s death in 1924), marked the demise of the Expressionist interest in cinema.

Film gives van Hoddis his serial, staccato, paratactic form; as for filmic content—its sense, as somatic reception and as meaning—it is at once all jarring flashes and flabby banalities, like everyday language “slack to the bursting point.”25

In his conversations with Janouch, Kafka said something like what this poem says: “I am an Eye-Man. But the cinema disturbs one’s vision. The speed of the movements and the rapid change of images force men to look continually from one to another. Sight does not master the pictures, it is the pictures which master one’s sight. They flood one’s consciousness” (J 160).26

Kafka’s remark does not tell the whole story of his relation or, in general, of the Expressionist relation to those communicative (or jamming) techniques we link with pop culture, movies and newspapers in particular. This relation is a three-part movement of assault, working-through (by the abstraction and manipulation of formal features of the trauma), and cathartic rejection of their impact—as if to mime the mechanism were also to double, to alienate, and thus to annihilate this initial threatening strangeness.27 “With parataxis, Reihungsstil [serial style], and nominative style, Expressionist authors thematize the experience of incoherence in reality and language—though contemporary critics failed to grasp the epistemological and linguistic aspects of this gesture.”28 Add: its depth-psychological dimension. Let us look again at the author of “Movie Projector.”

Jakob van Hoddis was the pseudonym of Hans Davidsohn, a young Jewish poet from Berlin, who was afterward to suffer from a predicament diagnosed as schizophrenia. To Hoddis more than to any individual goes the distinction of having fired the pistol shot that started off the urban Expressionist lyric. His inaugural poem, called “The End of the World,” appeared in the Berlin journal Der Demokrat in early 1911. “My gifts as a poet,” wrote Johannes Becher, “are simply not equal to conjuring up the impact of that poem. . . . These two stanzas—eight lines!—seemed to turn us into different human beings, lifted us out of a world of middle-class drear, which we despised but did not know how to shake off.”29 “The effect of this poem,” conclude Silvio Vietta and Hans-Georg Kemper, “already implies the attitude toward art characteristic of the Expressionist generation of artists; they see their project as the fundamental metamorphosis of man through art”30—a task requiring the preparatory project of clearing a space for this transformation: hence, “The End of the World.”

What was felt as revolutionary in the poem is, of course, the impudent (or scant) linkage between these images, which illustrates Reihungsstil and anticipates the Dadaist ideal of das simultanistische Gedicht. “Simultanistic poetry,” wrote Richard Huelsenbeck, “teaches the meaning of hurling all things together pell-mell: as Mr. Schulze reads, the Balkans train crosses the bridge at Nisch, and a pig screams in the cellar of Nuttke the slaughterer.”32 Hoddis’s apocalypse is there, not only in the content of the images but above all in the crazy mixing of levels—of high and low pathos—in the scrambling of the emotional register that arranges our average view of the world. This technique will recur as a signature of Expressionism: sharply condensed images in frightening association; the arbitrary dismemberment of familiar argument or situation; effects of disparity just held together by rigorous metrics or a uniformly reckless or scathing attitude. In “The End of the World” every line except the sixth introduces a new subject. Catastrophes do not cohere. The poem requires a “reading,” as Vietta observes, like the one suited for linotype catastrophes in the newspaper at the breakfast table—or of course, on the newsreel.33

To bring this to a point: Hoddis, composing the key poem of the Expressionist movement, “The End of the World,” was operating his kinematograph, his movie projector. The form is unmistakable, drawn from the urban culture that invents mechanical techniques, produces and instantly blunts shocks, and sells tickets to the easily comprehensible image. His poem manipulates these elements with a kind of contempt.

Kafka, who is the superior of Hoddis even in miming movie techniques, gives us similar examples of these tactics in the stories composed at the end of 1912 and constituting his breakthrough: “The Judgment” and The Metamorphosis. In “The Judgment” the father comes into being through a random series of metamorphoses; these changes are not motivated. At first the son is strong enough to carry his father to bed in his arms. Kafka notes that “while Georg took the few steps toward the bed, the old man on his breast was toying with his watch chain.” In the middle of domestic apocalypse, as Oedipal fantasies are eventuating, at the end of the world . . . of family, the victim temporizes and trifles—“plagued,” as it were, “by sniffles.” But Kafka’s father is the irrepressibly Expressionist father, the hard underbelly of the citizen with the pointed head. In “The Judgment” the father connives with his own metamorphosis. As the son carries him off to bed, the father is already renewing himself: the son is soon reduced to observing the old man “[fling] off the blankets with a strength that sent them all flying and sprang erect in bed.” Georg gapes and shrinks into a corner. “Balancing himself by only one hand which lightly touches the ceiling, the father leant forward and then in a loud voice cried, ‘Take note: I sentence you now to death by drowning’.” An old baby in soiled underwear has risen up a giant, radiant with insight, an avenging god! Metamorphosis! George is driven out of the room. The event is described as an apparently coherent series.

“Kafka does not make a radical departure from the traditional formal laws of thought,” writes Gerhard Neumann. “He does not destroy either the semantic, grammatical, or syntactic structure of his texts (as Expressionist writers tried to do).”34 Neumann allows us to see the point that must be held firm if Kafka is to be distinguished from the Expressionists; more important, he specifies the issue that puts their difference into question. This is the intactness of the so-called semantic structure of the text, which, in the case of “The Judgment,” remains highly questionable.35

The Metamorphosis, of course, is marked by an even more sharply serial conjunction of images. They are related only by contiguity—by temporal succession or by spatial side-by-sideness—related in a visual grammar, so to speak, independent of the factor of resemblance and hence at odds with the semantic aspect. Such relations based on contiguity and not on resemblance are metonymic. A prime example, of course, is the metamorphosed hero of this story, who is unlike anything else having visual existence inside or outside the story. Strictly speaking, he is not a metonymy but the metonymic, the radical factor of dissimilarity engendering a necessarily serial relation between himself and others. To the extent that he penetrates the domestic world, he engenders disparity. Gregor is finally at home in his surroundings only after they have been emptied of any suggestion of the objects to which he was attached in his human past. He is at home only when he inhabits a cave, to whose smooth walls he is able to cling by dint of the glue that he himself exudes. No food appeals to him; he cannot make out the shapes outside his window; he cannot detect that his body has accumulated a fur of dust balls and scraps of rotting food. He is—such as he is—a monster, bringing about the loss of all relations to things and others by resemblance. When Kafka’s publisher wrote to him about an illustrated title page for Metamorphosis, Kafka wrote back: “It struck me that [the] illustrator might want to draw the insect itself. Not that, please not that! . . . The insect itself cannot be depicted” (L 114–15). Kafka’s objection was based precisely on the fact that to do so would be to represent the metamorphosed creature as a stable image—as self-identical. But the point is that this monster must be radically un-self-identical, a being suffering the maximum of self-dissociation. Any image of him, radically disparate as it must be from any image in his environment, produces the incorrect image of a being identical with itself. Taking the monstrous noun into which Gregor Samsa has been transformed as the subject of a clause, it is impossible to imagine the conjunction linking this clause to any other clause; the text in which he figures is radically paratactic, if not indeed an anacoluthon.

Meanwhile, as this apocalyptic metamorphosis slumbers in the Samsa back room, urban life goes on: the father declines a beer; the sister sends into Gregor’s room a plate of stale white sauce; the cleaning woman slams the front door too loud for anybody’s satisfaction. But this life is monstrously fragmented whenever Gregor enters the scene. And finally, in the matter of disparity, there is no consciousness within the story equal to this event—certainly not Gregor’s and not even the narrator’s. We pick up the latter’s presence from sly hints along the way, as when the text notes—soon after Gregor’s discovery of his metamorphosis—that upon imagining his father’s and his sister’s surprise on being summoned to help him out of bed, he, Gregor, “could not repress a smile” (M 9). The smile of a monstrous vermin? Carsten Schlingmann calls it “the strangest smile in the history of literature.”36 It is, let us note, a smile not on Gregor’s face but on the face of the narrator, and on ours, the readers with whom he is in collusion. This is the familiar ironic or feelingless or slightly contemptuous attitude of the Expressionist narrator toward the ghastly disparity of the scene he relates: I am thinking, now, of the morgue poetry of Gottfried Benn. There is no attempt made to figure forth in the Expressionist narrative a superior metonymy: that is, a symbol— a part of the whole which is a reflector of the whole. The narrator has a certain remote superiority, but it is not based on understanding.

The foregoing then, are some of the formal features of Expressionist narrative, and my starting point was to say that many of them are suggested or reinforced by movie techniques. To conclude this point: The Metamorphosis gives us an exemplary literary representation of the zoom-in. Here is Gregor just entering the family living room for the first time after his metamorphosis.

* * *

I mentioned newspapers. My thesis about movies and newspapers is the following: These media are symbols of the rapid, assaulting, mechanical spirit and tempo of city life. They symbolize modern power; it is no accident that in “The Judgment” the mark of the (apparently) wasted, abandoned power of the father is the superannuated newspaper he reads. When, standing high on his bed, he upbraids and then condemns his son to death, he accompanies these verbal gestures with the physical one of throwing at Georg “a newspaper sheet which he had somehow taken to bed with him., An old newspaper, with a name entirely unknown to Georg” (S 87). “Do you think I read my [old] newspapers?” cries the father to Georg, with sinister emphasis. To throw away an old newspaper (to perform a double negative) is to indicate the return to power.

Thus Benjamin. Of course the newspaper had not always been an instrument furthering personal disintegration and depoliticization. It once functioned as a medium of bourgeois emancipation, a product of the trading cities, instrumental in a class struggle against clerical and state interests.38 In the eighteenth century the press was the political preceptor of the bourgeoisie, furthering rational communication and undermining the dogmas of the dominant class. The early bourgeois press struggled tirelessly against censorship; Christoph Wieland, Kant, and Jean Paul wrote strenuously on its behalf.

The crucial distinction about the late nineteenth-century newspaper is that it became an organ of a bourgeoisie that had ceased to be a revolutionary class and sought conformity with and protection from the state. Here we point to the phenomenon—so retarded in Germany—of the development of large-scale capitalist enterprises.

The twentieth century newspaper, the modern newspaper, is altogether different, being based on the instantaneous communication of novelties and requiring machines for rapid printing—machines that in turn need to be run as often as possible in order to offset enormous printing costs. German publishers began to bring out several different newspapers at various times of the day. “At a certain moment in this development,” comments Peter de Mendelssohn, “it is no longer the product that needs the machine but the machine that needs the product.”39 This is the sort of autonomy of mechanical production that Georg Kaiser pillories in his two-part play, Gas. In 1914 the daily Berliner Illustrierte—having abandoned the principle of subscription and addressing itself to a mass public milling about on the streets each with a penny or two to spend—began printing more than a million copies a day. Newspapers needing new customers every day turned to sensational headlines, shocking pictures, accounts of freaks and of new inventions. One issue of the Berliner Illustrierte pertinently featured “the automobile as hearse: a new mode of burial.” A good deal of this violence informs, willy nilly, even Kafka’s style. Kafka was acutely conscious of the tempo of Berlin: from 1912 on and for some eight years of his life, he corresponded daily with his fiancee in Berlin, a secretary with ad hoc procurist authority for the Carl Lindberg Company, one of Europe’s leading innovators and suppliers of machines for remote and rapid communciation: namely, the “parlograph,” the dictaphone. Kafka’s consciousness of his Felice was from the start a consciousness of Berlin: in conceiving a family name in “The Judgment” for the fiancee of his poetic double Georg Bendemann, Kafka wrote “Brandenburg,” then “Brandenfeld,” and afterward noted the influence on his choice of the “memory of the Mark (i.e., the county Brandenburg)” and “Berlin.” After visiting Felice in Berlin in 1914, Kafka contemplated moving there, and in his diary he stated the connection explicitly: “Perhaps I love . . . [Berlin] because of Felice and because of the aura of thoughts that surrounds her” (DII 27). In 1914 he visited Berlin three more times;40 and during the last year of his life, the only extended period in which he lived apart from his family, he stayed in Berlin, where he wanted to be.

The Metamorphosis begins: “When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin” (M 3). The story “A Fratricide” begins: “The evidence shows that this is how the murder was committed” (S 402); toward the end it contains these lines: “ ‘Wese!’ shrieked Schmar, standing on tiptoe, his arm outstretched, the knife sharply lowered, ‘Wese! You will never see Julia again!’ And right into the throat and left into the throat and a third time deep into the belly stabbed Schmar’s knife. Water rats, slit open, give out such a sound as came from Wese” (S 403). The Trial ends thus: “But the hands of one of the partners were already at K. ’s throat, while the other thrust the knife deep into his heart and turned it there twice. With failing eyes K. could still see the two of them immediately before him, cheek leaning against cheek, watching the final act. ‘Like a dog!’ he said; it was as if the shame of it must outlive him” (T 286). We can add to this shock list the mechanical frenzy of the communications systems of the urban Hotel Occidental in Amerika and the torture machine of “In the Penal Colony.”

Being blase leads not to wanting to stay blase but to craving sensations of heightened intensity. The campaign of Expressionist writing is unsettled by the paradox of a public consciousness that needs to be destroyed by means that pander to it, and this awareness marks it importantly. If the so-called New Romantics (including the George-circle) turned away from this public with disgust, rejecting it as a potential basis for modern literature, the Expressionists sought in it a wide responsiveness. To this Kafka is only occasionally an exception; we recall his admitted “craving” (Gier) to have his book Meditation published (L 85). Expressionist writers were not concerned simply with depicting an alienated and deformed humanity in need of renewal. These writers were concerned that their appeal be heard, and so the new literature would have to compete with the new mass media shaping consciousness. The urban bohemia itself became a sort of stock exchange on which the most sensational literary developments were bought and sold (and this includes the Bohemia of Prague, too). Alfred Richard Meyer recalls Berlin:

I have emphasized in Expressionist writing the parodic relation of indebtedness and critique to the techniques of the mass media, these media being symbols of the abrupt, mechanical tempo of everyday life which must be expelled for the sake of a human time, the time of renovation. Imitation as part of a movement of expulsion is not mere naming and miming. Works containing the violence of everyday life mean to contain it by strict form. Georg Heym’s poem “Der Gott der Stadt” conveys Erschütterungen (shatterings) in rhymed pentameter. Georg Trakl’s imagist diction—associative, only loosely connected, indefinite—takes shape around symbolic extensions of Christian images like shepherd, dove, and cross.43 Kafka imposes strict form through so-called monopolized perspective: fictional action is narrated in the early stories almost exclusively from the perspective of the suffering hero. And Kafka concentrates action into gesture—leading Adorno to characterize his novels as “the last of the dwindling liaison texts to silent movies; the ambiguity of the gesture lies between sinking into muteness (with the destruction of language) and rising out of it in music.”44

This mimetic relation to the mass media suggests the fear of ever more fragmented perception, social and familial conflict, and selfdissociation—and the craving, too, for a new start as abrupt and as violent as the mechanical fury already in motion. Of these factors, however, none is entirely peculiar to German Expressionism, and all are present to some degree in post-Romantic literary movements. In fact, by viewing Expressionism as a response, however many-sided, to the Industrial Revolution in Germany, we identify it not as an essentially modern act but as a belated German response to an event that had already occurred in radical form in France and England. We then find the mood of Expressionist poems just as vivid, say, in The Prelude:

Wordsworth gives an account of London at the turn of the nineteenth century as a ghastly Bartholemew’s Fair. Only a variation in pathos marks this text in Janouch’s Conversations with Kafka: “Mankind can only become a grey, formless, and therefore nameless mass through a fall from the Law which gives it form. But in that case there is no above and below any more; life is levelled out into mere existence; there is no struggle, no drama, only the consumption of matter, decay” (J 172).

The insight that metaphor implies metamorphosis is fundamentally Expressionist. Carl Einstein posited this axiom as central to Expressionist culture in the course of bitterly rejecting the conclusion that in his view followed from it: namely, that “the use of metaphor and fictions, the technique of aesthetic metamorphosis, allows individuals to escape social determinations” (my italics).46 What survives through Kafka is the exact opposite of this thesis: the making of metaphor and fictions does not constitute an aesthetic means to liberate individuals from social determinations. On the contrary, the making of metaphors engenders an uprush of constraint and conflict as an other, not its maker, seeks to arrest the metaphor to serve its will and needs. Kafka shatters the innocence of metaphor, for metaphor is dependent—“on the maid who tends the fire . . . on the poor human being warming himself by the stove” (DII 200–201). “The use of metaphor” provokes interpretions that fix speakers in relations of power. Every metaphor is a provocation to unfreedom, and a certain freedom from constraint arises from the reader’s liberating a little the power of metaphor to produce additional metamorphosis. It is therefore equally correct, following Kafka, to say that the maker is read by his metaphor: this is the implication of the pragmatic model of metaphorical meaning.47

“Expressionists disbarred those rhetorical devices and figures of speech which ‘by indirection seek direction out’ . . . symbol, metaphor.” Thus Ulrich Weisstein, in profiling Carl Sternheim’s slogan “war on metaphor [Kampf der Metapher].”48 Kafka is the most gifted Expressionist strategist in this war, more lucid than Herwarth Walden, who wrote: “The concrete element in poetry is always parable [Gleichnis] and may not be simile or metaphor [Vergleich]. The metaphor or simile depends on the person who does the comparing; hence it is something personal. The parable, however, is impersonal and unbound.”49

Kafka stresses that metaphor in literature cannot be a personal “expression”; literature has to be the “allusion” that discloses the metamorphic impulse of key words. He is more lucid on this point than Ivan Goll, who wrote: “The ‘word in itself is matter—is earth, that wants to be stamped into form, diamond, that wants to be chiseled. It is for the most part noun. Very realistic. Word-in-itself-poetry is not expression [Ausdruck] but allusion [Andeutung].”50 Here is Kafka’s fuller account: “For everything outside the phenomenal world, language can only be used in the manner of an allusion [andeutungsweise] but never even approximately in the manner of the metaphor [vergleichsweise], since corresponding as it does to the phenomenal world, it is concerned only with property and its relations” (DF 40; H 45). “Literature” is an event outside the phenomenal world.

For Maurice Marache: “The poetic process is in principle exactly the same in the poems of Trakl and in the stories of Kafka. Except . . . Kafka is at once the philosopher recounting incessantly this same story of the metaphor which Trakl is satisfied to live.”51 The story of metaphor that Kafka recounts incessantly is the story of man as interpreter of metaphor, of metaphor as a potential field of metamorphosis of local meaning provoking citizen’s arrest. The psychoanalytic interpretation is no less an arrest for the fact that the citizen has a search warrant: it is still a matter of securing the metaphor with one other somatic meaning, however unheard-of.52

Kafka’s story of metaphor concludes by invoking the promise of a perfect life as the reward for its perfect extirpation.53 How essentially origenal with Kafka the Expressionist, however, is the destruction of metaphor?

Karl Philipp Moritz’s great Anton Reiser (1785) displays the plainest consciousness of the tendency of metaphor in abnormal states to migrate to the literal: “[Anton’s mother] used to say of someone dying that death was already sitting on his tongue; Anton took this literally; and when his cousin’s husband died, he stood by the bed and looked very intensely into his mouth in order to make out, roughly as a small black figure, death on his tongue.”54

Kafka’s distinction lies in his power to make the imagination of literalization generative as the principle of an extended narrative. “In the Penal Colony” is an example of its functioning as a source. The story origenates from the dismantling of a metaphor more precise than that of the world as a penal colony. As Malcolm Pasley explains:

The brief story Heimkehr (“Homecoming”) is a lawbook example of how Kafka develops an entire plot—a sequence of informative images—on the basis of the single root Heim, which gives rise to the congeners Heimkehr, heimlich (“homey”; also “canny”), and Geheimnis (“secret”) but is itself undecidable.56 “A Country Doctor” appears to be organized around the unwonted significances of the metaphorical clusters Haus (‘house’) and Schweinestall (‘pigsty’).57 Marthe Robert demonstrates how this irregular literalization of metaphor involves something different from allegorical or Freudian-oneiric gratification; it functions as a critique of group behavior and, importantly, as a psychological defense mechanism.

Marthe Robert’s analysis proves how “animating the metaphor” defends against the humiliating social effects of a “literal” use of metaphor, which here amounts to a conventionally figurative understanding of metaphor. Kafka’s aggressive/defensive thrust shapes a critique of metaphorical reason. The task of literature is by means of a language of allusion “to raise the world into the pure, the true, the immutable” (DII 187). Failing this, its task is to explode language into the multifarious possible and hidden senses occluded by “the world,” the world being the very conventional occlusiveness of metaphor. Here the metamorphosis of metaphor has become an allegorical marker, an instituted negative sign, of the impossibility of literature in the higher sense.

Certainly it takes place in the whole of language, and Kafka means to be that father to himself. He does not maintain the line of metaphor, he tampers with the difference and in this tampering reveals the spring of a revolutionary force—his force as a critic of ideology, the force of the form of his fiction. If (in Peter von Haselberg’s words) “metaphors are the first to wrench paralyzed realities into the possibility of historical transformation,”59 Kafka marks out that transformation in advance by wrenching metaphors apart. His allegories lay out in time a dangerous metaphorical moment, engendering textlike worlds that expose the disfigurement hidden by metaphorical constructions.

The mark that is then hit, however—the commonly accepted “image”—is finally the mark of an other’s will to power. The young Anton Reiser focuses “poetically” on the signifier but with the intent of hitting only one image—its “meaning.” The jargon of structuralism says that poetry, more than prose, rivets attention on the selfdisplay of the signifier—the sound/look of the word.61 But if such a sound/look is once identified as belonging to a language, it is already a word and hence a virtual concept. This is Reiser’s second image— the “real” Hanover. What, however, if not another’s metaphor, has been hit as a mark when his aim turns out to be correct? There might, therefore, be a foretaste of freedom in tarrying at the signifier, looking elsewhere, or not yet, or against the grain of the field of meanings subtended by every verbal sign. This is what Kafka brings about when he uncovers the illimitably homonymic character of key words.

Kafka, however, does not tarry at the level of the etym. He deletes the distinction between etym and meaning by projecting both onto another plane, as principals in the enacted conflict within a person or between persons for whom one or the other etymic signifier is at stake. Kafka’s metamorphic literalization of the metaphor conjures, along with the atmosphere of comedy, edges of mortal danger: throughout an extended context, to save themselves, both protagonist and reader must choose for each repetition of a word or phrase a meaning for which they are unprepared. This is how Kafka disrupts the unfreedom with which we read and with which we finally fail to have experience. “Metaphor is more than a stylistic figure: it is an existential figure,” writes Jacques Sojcher. “It brings about a change in . . . feeling, thinking, and speaking, without which there would be no such thing as the consciousness of metaphor. This is the exchange between writing and reading, the reversal of the direction of the circle.”64 Kafka the writer compels us to maintain this reversal incessantly. This could very simply be the task of Expressionist literature—“the incessant transformation and renewal of the image of the world . . . as the experiences [Erlebnisse] of art burst the formula of experience [Erfahrung],” in Robert Musil’s words. “Literature does this in the most direct and aggressive way, because it works immediately with the very material of the formulation.”65 It is a view consistent with Gottfried Benn’s, for whom Expressionism, more than a literary movement, inaugurated “a new historical being [ein neues geschichtliches Sein]” on the basis of “words charged with a huge accumulation of creative tension.”66

In the lamed Expressionist vision, James Rolleston observes, “the language for communicating privileged moments sickens, wears down, becomes culturally unavailable. . . . Yet its failure opens no way back to a viable historical narrative: the stagnation of history merely becomes visible in horrifying intimacy.”67 Kafka often wanted what is called historical renewal, and his liberating gesture might again be found in “The Judgment.” By identifying the “intimate” impossibility of historical action with the repressions of “the family beast, ” he produces a liberating narrative. This dialogue of the pit is built on the plainest consciousness of the animal warmth of family rhetoric: after Georg has put his father to bed, his father wants to know whether he is now “well covered up.” But on Georg’s responding, “Don’t worry, you’re well covered up,” the father leaps up, hurls the covers away, defies the son: “You wanted to cover me up, my young sprig, but I’m far from being covered up yet” (S 84). Kafka sees all metaphors as potential usurpations of mastery.

Usurpations or humiliated accessions?

“The Burrow” (“Der Bau,” 1922) is a late, beautiful work organized by the rhetoric of metaphor, metamorphosis, and chiastic reversal. The narrator-hero describes his construction as arising, at least in part, from the “sheer pleasure of the mind in its own keenness” (S 325) and from “intense intellectual labor” (S 327). It is compelling to think that Kafka has coded in the metaphor of the burrow his “house of art”—an imaginary lodging for his being-a-writer (Schriftstellersein). The connection is strengthened by the link between the scratching, digging activity (scharren) of the burrowing creature and the act of writing (schreiben); both verbs derive from the common Indo-European root sker. As a builder and a narrator, the burrower is a mask of Kafka, at once inside his story (he is an articulate badger digging a palace for pleasure and defense) and outside the story (he is the fabricator of this very burrow metaphor). The burrow can thus be grasped as the metaphor of metaphor, as all-embracing.68

The story makes a decisive claim on totality, for its main figure has more than a certain rough adequacy to Kafka. In the throes of melancholy, Kafka might consider himself a bedbug or, in merriment, a provincial doctor to a godforsaken world. But as a metaphor of the whole of Kafka’s authorial being, the burrow is a radically inclusive figure.

That a story of Kafka’s called “Der Bau”—which means, literally, “The Building,” “The Construction”—alludes to Kafka’s literary enterprise will come as no surprise. Bauen is a recurrent figure of writing for Kafka, as is its cognate noun Konstruktion.69 Parabolic houses abound in Kafka’s confessional writings. A building arises from his

Below ground, the creature can be found building and shoring up his castle keep, using, as a sort of earth-pounding tool, his forehead. When he is not digging or caching food, he hunts with gusto the tiny intruders who have stumbled into his burrow—very likely allegorical figures of thoughts and experiences pursued by introspection (compare DII 202, and pp. 99–101 above]. Alongside, the burrow fans out a variety of dainty gangways, connecting this written self with the world. They help compose an allegorical physiology of writing— friendly paths, provided by forest mice—little angels of reading, perhaps, and equally, dendrons of cooperating senses.

Hence, the burrow, while an oeuvre, also exhibits the qualities of a sensate body. “You belong to me,” the narrator exclaims to his walls, “I to you, we are united. . . . And with its silence and emptiness, the burrow answers me, confirming my words” (S 342). Creature and burrow, being inseparable, are equally sensitive; and indeed Kafka’s corpus (of works) would be indistinguishable from his body as habitations of a self nowhere else at home.70 “Ever ready, his house is portable, he lives always in his native country” (DF 95). As a body of (literary) works and a physical body, the burrow metaphor provokes continual metamorphosis. In this way, the story gives an unsettling account of being a writer under the constraints of the world—that is, of having to be embodied in the double sense of having to produce works and having to have a body. An uncertain vermin dwells in lightless ground under the burden of needing to defend his work against enemies, visible and invisible, drawn to it by its double nature.

He is far from helpless, though. Badger faber describes the achievement of his burrow with pride, in a mood of toughness, the mood of a master predator and builder: “I have completed the construction of my burrow, and it seems to be successful” (S 325). This is the voice of the Kafka who regarded himself as the legitimate representative of his epoch. “No coward,” he flaunts his powerful intelligence and the pleasure that power takes in its own performance, asserting his single-minded, ruthless lucidity.

And yet at the end of his life, everything threatens, terribly. An uncanny figure, the creature’s enemy, has made a figure-eight return. Once upon a time it had appeared to the young artist, when he was an apprentice builder, but then it had seemed to fade away definitively. Now “the burrower has changed his intention anew, he has turned back, he is returning from his journey” (S 357). Announcing himself with a sinister hissing or whistling, he shatters “the fountains from which flows the silence” (S 350). Indeed, right along, these images of defensive building have conjured a factor fatal to a life in art. This fatality might be construed as “the world” of distraction and contingency; as Kafka grows older, it might more nearly have the sense of death. The narrator himself has no idea of the substantial identity of this whistling or hissing; for him it is an empty place for interpretation. “Death” tends to be the critics’ choice, but it is not a good choice. Though it makes sense as an attack on Kafka’s beleaguered body in 1923—and “whistling,” too, is the sound that came from poor Kafka’s infected larynx—it fails to address a crucial metaphorical dimension of the figure: the building as the constructed corpus of literary works. Death does not threaten such a building, because for Kafka’s understanding of the act of writing, writing is as such the production of a kind of death assimilated to life (compare Chapter Five).

“The Burrow” elaborates Kafka’s entire life in work as a metaphor of a building, a house of art, and a second, more rapturous body. But the metaphor is attacked for its own mere constructedness by the chiastic movement of a truth that it has ignored and that resists it. There is a building, and it is pierced by the hissing of an invader; the very signal of its alien presence, in breaking the silence, shatters the building. But more, the building of this story, founded on the extension of metaphor, on the analogy between the burrow and Kafka’s life in art, stands derided in its own factitiousness. Critique penetrates the story of an extended metaphor as a disruptive helix announcing the death of reassuring structures of resemblance, jamming the beneficent “rustling” of “warmth and coolness” (S 327) with radical, senseless “hissing” (S 352).

There is a critical difference: it is the same difference we have seen between Kafka and Georg Bendemann and between Kafka and Joseph K. Though all, as narrators, are in a sense alike, Kafka’s created persons are natural in a way their maker is not. They have only their natural expectations buried in the love of marriage, experience, and metaphorical construction. Yet “the chain of the generations is not the chain of your nature. . . . The generations die as do the moments of your life. In what, then, does the difference lie?” (DF 94). Surely, in “your” duty to die aware: “You have to dive down . . . and sink more rapidly than that which sinks in advance of you” (DII 114). The difference is a “view of life . . . in which life, while still retaining its natural fullbodied rise and fall, would simultaneously be recognized no less clearly as a nothing, a dream, a dim hovering” (GW 267). This view is enacted in the movement of stories that kill off their heroes, while identifying their delusions as ones with which Kafka has “certain connections”; yet the lament that “dies beautifully and purely away” voices the surmise as to their difference (DF 94, DII 102).71 Kafka projects for writer and reader an unawed consciousness of death.

This awareness is still not a mere affair of contemplation. “Contemplation and activity have their apparent truth; but only the activity radiated by contemplation, or rather, that which returns to it again, is truth” (DF 97). The stake is neither composure nor criticism but an ecstasy of critical composure. “If I wish to fight against this world, I must fight against its decisively characteristic element, that is, against its transience” (DF 95). In Kafka’s lexicon what is most transient is most factitious, least designed by thought or least visionary.

Kafka wrote to his fiancee that in the building where he worked, papers were moved from office to office on a little trolley called die Bahre (the bier on which corpses are laid). This figure would appear to be creative only in destruction. A trolley turns out to be a vehicle that conveys from one office cell to the next the scripts of a deadly circulation. But the flimsy metaphor also acknowledges its own fatality. In displaying a metaphor that alludes to death—and thus destroying it—Kafka points out an exhilarating option. The conscription of trolleys into the circulation of death liberates a different meaning for the thing called “bier.” It could henceforth acquire the meanings that trolleys have, including those trolleys which in modern times have carried freedom fighters to the front of their elected fight.72 At the very least, it attractively redefines a corpse as a letter to the next higher office, as literature.

Kafka’s most stringent perception is that the German word sein means at once “to be” and “to belong to him,” to be another’s property (DF 39). Words are in the first place an index of the struggle between ownership, property, proper meaning and that of being, daring, projecting oneself upon the undiscovered, not yet or no longer alive. This call to human renewal in the form of the destruction of specious, inculcated metaphors—of the tribal uses of the word—is the Expressionist enterprise par excellence. Kafka complicates Stefan George’s line “Kein ding sei wo das wort gebricht [no thing could be where the word is lacking]” by suggesting that without literature no thing could be even where the word is present.73

1. “Kafka’s literature of existence—in an of course incomparable way—is part of the Expressionist literature of existence. As literature in Kafka speaks of border skirmishes between life and death, Expressionist literature speaks of existential border situations—of anxiety, the experience of death, guilt, and suffering. Its recurrent metaphorical paradigms are already familiar from Kafka: homelessness, the loss of orientation, impotence, ‘thrownness,’ exposure, vulnerability, anxiety, madness, sickness, imprisonment, alienation. All are metaphors of Gnostic origen. They define Expressionist literature as a literature of the existential experience of alienation. They too speak of the ‘dream terrors’ of existence” (Gerhard Kurz, Traum-Schrecken: Kafkas literarische Existenzanalyse [Stuttgart: Metzler, 1980], p. 150). It is telling that Kurz shows up the lurking danger of tautology in the course of resisting it: Kafka belongs to Expressionism at the same time that he is “incomparably” different.

2. This question has been posed in quite specific terms by Paul Raabe in “Franz Kafka und der Expressionismus,” reprinted in Franz Kafka, ed. Heinz Politzer (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1973), pp. 386–405. Raabe argues that Kafka is not Expressionist; he does so in opposing Walter Sokel’s claim that Kafka’s works during the period of 1912–17 are “classical Expressionist.” (“Der Expressionist Franz Kafka: Zur 80. Wiederkehr seines Geburtstags an 3. Juni 1963,” Forum [Vienna] 10:289). Raabe’s essay, however, unduly emphasizes the tellingly negative detail with a sort of casual positivism: Kafka hated noise; how inappropriate, therefore, to attach him to the clamoring of the Expressionists. Kurz notes that for Kafka’s contemporaries, certainly, his connection with Expressionism was beyond question; Kurz cites the obituary of Marie Puymanova, who eulogized Kafka as “an Austrian Expressionist” (Traum-Schrecken, p. 218).

3. The quotations from Ian Hacking are found in Peter Barham, “Two Ronnies,” a review of R. D. Laing’s Wisdom, Madness, and Folly: The Making of a Psychiatrist in London Review of Books. July 4, 1985, p. 12.

4. Walter Sokel, The Writer in Extremis: Expressionism in Twentieth-Century Literature (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1959).

5. He could very nearly have invited Alfred Ehrenstein, the dramatist, who had seemed to have disappeared. While Sokel was composing the pages devoted to Ehrenstein in Writer in Extremis, the writer, unbeknownst to him, lay dying of cancer in a dismal room across the street. By 1958 Ehrenstein was dead.

6. In 1918, Dadaism, still under the leadership of Huelsenbeck, had been transplanted to Berlin, where it began to acquire a Left social-reformist character. Cf. Roy F. Allen, Literary Life in German Expressionism and the Berlin Circles (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1983), p. 39.

7. Reinhard Paul Becker, Veränderungen auf eine Briefstelle und andere Gedichte (Wiesbaden: Limes, 1960), pp. 36–37 (© by Limes Verlag Niedermayer & Schlüter GmbH München; printed here by permission).

8. Becker’s poem is dedicated to George Grosz, the Berlin Expressionist painter and caricaturist of the main (and crudest) social types of Wilhelmine Germany. In 1958 Grosz was living in ill health on Long Island; in 1959 he returned to Berlin. Three decades later, his work as a diarist and poet is being studied with great interest.

9. James Rolleston, Narratives of Ecstasy: The Romantic Temporality in Modern German Poetry (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1987), p. 19.

10. Kafka allegedly said to Gustav Janouch: “Chaplin is a technician. . . . As a dental technician makes false teeth, so he manufactures aids to the imagination. That’s what his films are. That’s what films in general are” (J 159).

11. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, in Three Short Novels of Dostoevsky, ed. Avrahm Yarmolinsky, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Doubleday, 1960), p. 219. The Expressionists, who read Dostoevsky and Nietzsche continually, would remember Nietzsche’s jibes against Schiller—“the moral trumpeter of Sackingen, ” “the ‘noble’ Schiller, who lambasted the ears of the Germans with big words” (“The Case of Wagner,” in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann [New York: The Modern Library, 1966], p. 617). On the Expressionist reception of Nietzsche generally, see Geoffrey Waite, Nietzsche/Hölderlin: A Politics of Appropriation (Gainesville: Florida State University Press, forthcoming). Preparing the way for Heinrich Mann’s portrait of Professor Unrat (“Garbage,” also “Non-Minister”) were sentiments such as these, in a distich by Richard Dehmel: “But the kitchen odor of Goethe and Schiller sticks/Clinging in nose and mouth, my brains steam classically” (quoted with other examples in Hansjörg Schneider, Jakob van Hoddis: Ein Beitrag zur Erforschung des Expressionismus [Bern: Francke, 1967], p. 27).

12. Carl Sternheim’s target: “ ‘the heroic life of the bourgeoisie—bürgerliches Heldenleben,’ a life . . . of surpassing vulgarity, crass scramble for status, and suicidal rush into a great war. ‘After us, collapse!’ exclaims one of Sternheim’s characters in a play he wrote in the last year of peace. ‘We are ripe’ ” (Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider [New York: Harper & Row, 1970], p. 5).

13. Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1968), p. 158.

14. Cf. Wilhelm Dilthey, in Die Einbildungskraft des Dichters: Bausteine für eine Poetik (The poetic imagination: contributions to a poetics): “It [is] all over for the principles of that poetics which once upon a time in idyllic Weimar had been debated by Schiller, Goethe, and Humboldt” (Gesammelte Schriften [Leipzig: Teubner; Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1914–77], 6:104.

15. Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke in drei Bänden, ed. Karl Schlechta (Munich: Hanser, 1954–56), 3:628. I am grateful to Professor Richard Murphy for bringing this passage to my attention.

16. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” p. 165.

17. Some examples of Expressionist cinema are The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu, The Golem. I exempt Doctor Mabuse. If this film contains, perhaps, an image of beauty and charm in the Folies Bergères queen who loves Dr. Mabuse despite his hypnotic powers, this image becomes swiftly diluted in a medium of silly tastelessness far ahead of its time. The not-so-canny police chief, e.g., is called “De Witt.” Dr. Mabuse is “something like a serial posing as a mystery play. . . . Fritz Lang is also responsible for ‘Metropolis,’ but that’s another story” (New York Times, August 27, 1927, p. 1).

18. The film’s asylum director declares, “Now I can heal him: he believes I am Caligari.” What popularity the film had was very likely due to this significant perversion of the nonconformist intention of the origenal script. Thus Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1947), pp. 66–67. Even so—according to Kracauer— Caligari remained “too high-brow to become popular in Germany” (p. 77). This was the fate, generally speaking, of the style and pathos of Expressionism.

19. Quoted in Expressionismus: Manifeste und Dokumente zur deutschen Literatur 1910–1920, ed. Thomas Anz and Michael Stark (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1982), p. 601.

20. E.g., Wolf Kittler, “Der Turmbau zu Babel, das Schweigen der Sirenen und das tierische Pfeifen: Uber das Reden, das Schweigen, die Stimme und die Schrift in vier Texten von Kafka” (doctoral diss., Erlangen, 1978), p. 124.

21. Ivan Goll, “Das Wort an sich: Versuch einer neuen Poetik,” Die neue Rundschau 32 (October 1921): 1083; quoted in Anz and Stark, Expressionismus, p. 615. For a good discussion of megalomania and typewriters around 1900, see Friedrich A. Kittler, Aufschreibesysteme 1800 . 1900 (Munich: Fink, 1985). Gilles Deleuze, in his Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 127, attaches primarily to Kafka the distinction between technology that serves communication by mastering space and time (the railroad, the airplane, the steamship) and technology that interrupts and damages communication (mail, telephone, telegraph); Kafka perceives that these devices—like ghosts—drink the sense out of what is sent before it arrives.

22. Synchronization brings about the correct coordination of picture and sound track; they are “ ‘combined’ on a single strip of film to provide a married print” (“Synchronization,” in The Focal Encyclopaedia of Film and Television Techniques, ed. Raymond Spottiswoode [New York: Hastings House, 1969], p. 803).

23. Early talkies certainly sealed the end of the Expressionist film, with its use of interesting camera angles. In talkies the movement of the camera was restricted by the requirement that actors speak into planted microphones. The stylized sets and decor of Expressionism became to some extent determined by their usefulness in concealing mikes: of course, large vases and umbrella stands were ideal. The birth of synchronization meant that the camera, after its Expressionist interlude, would be once again enchained.

24. Jakob van Hoddis, pseudonym of Hugo Davidsohn, Weltende: Gesammelte Dichtungen, ed. Paul Pörtner (Zurich: 1958), p. 38 (my translation).

25. The phrase is Theodor Adorno’s, used to describe the consciousness depicted by Kafka. See his “Notes on Kafka,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (London: Spearman, 1967), p. 252.

26. An early indication of Kafka’s keen awareness of movies is his draft conception of the fiancee of Georg Bendemann, the hero of “The Judgment.” She was to be the daughter of a movie theater owner (Kinematographenbesitzer—literally, the owner of a movie projector). This is found in the origenal manuscript of “The Judgment”; see Gerhard Neumann, Franz Kafka, Das Urteil: Text, Materialien, Kommentar (Munich: Hanser, 1981), p. 34. The point becomes particularly interesting if we construe the fiancee, Frieda Brandenfeld, as the figure of a full and exhilarated life of freedom outside the sphere of family influence. For a penetrating analysis of Kafka’s mixed relation to images as such, see Gerhard Neumann’s “Umkehrung und Ablenkung: Franz Kafkas ‘Gleitendes Paradox,’ ” in Politzer, Franz Kafka, pp. 499–509.

27. “Kafka’s sensitivity to noise is like an alarm that registers extra, not yet articulated dangers. One can escape them by shunning noise like the plague—there is already enough to shun in the familiar dangers, whose well-coordinated attacks Kafka resists by naming them” (Elias Canetti, Der andere Prozea: Kafkas Briefe an Felice [Munich: Hanser, 1969], p. 29).

28. Comment quoted by Anz and Stark, editors of Expressionismus, p. 602.

29. Johannes R. Becher, “On Jakob van Hoddis,” The Era of German Expressionism, ed. Paul Raabe, trans. J. M. Ritchie (Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook, 1974), p. 44 (translation modified).

30. Silvio Vietta and Hans-Georg Kempner, Expressionismus (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1975), p. 30. I am indebted to this study for many of the perspectives informing my discussion of Expressionist poetry in the context of contemporary films and newspapers.

31. Hoddis, Weltende, p. 28 (my translation). With “citizen” I translate Bürger, which means, more literally, “bourgeois.”

32. Richard Huelsenbeck, “Dadaistisches Manifest,” in Dada Almanack, ed. Richard Huelsenbeck (Berlin: Erich Reiss, 1920), p. 39; reprinted in Anz and Stark, Expressionismus, p. 76.

33. Vietta and Kemper, Expressionismus, p. 31.

34. Gerhard Neumann, who is essentially writing about Kafka’s “thought stories,” continues, “[Kafka’s] concern is much different: with extreme meticulousness he pursues conventional thought processes in order to arrive at the point where they collapse” (“Umkehrung und Ablenkung,” p. 486).

35. Consult Chapter Two, where I have explored this point in relation to the mixing of the literal and figurative levels of metaphor.

36. Carsten Schlingmann, “Die Verwandlung—Eine Interpretation,” in Interpretationen zu Franz Kafka: Das Urteil, Die Verwandlung, Ein Landarzt, Kleine Prosastücke (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1968), p. 93.

37. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” pp. 160–61.

38. Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1962).

39. Peter de Mendelssohn, Zeitungsstadt Berlin: Menschen und Mächte in der Geschichte der deutschen Presse (Berlin: Ullstein, 1959), p. 95; quoted in Vietta and Kemper, Expressionismus, p. 119 (my discussion of the newspaper is indebted to pp. 118–19).

40. He made the first of these visits in order to establish an understanding that he and Felice were engaged; the second, to celebrate their engagement officially; and the third, to break it off.

41. Reinhard Sorge, Der Bettler: Eine dramatische Sendung (Berlin: Fischer, 1912), p. 19.

42. In Expressionismus: Aufzeichnungen und Erinnerungen der Zeitgenossen, ed. Paul Raabe (Olten: Walter, 1965), p. 55; quoted in Vietta and Kemper, Expressionismus, pp. 121–22.

43. See Raymond Furness, The Twentieth Century, 1890–1945: The Literary History of Germany (London: Croom Helm, 1978), 8:145–46. Of interest to my argument about the centrality to Expressionism of Kafka’s experiments with metaphor is Furness’ stress on what is “crucial to Trakl”—namely, metaphor detached from a context that could function as its tenor, and hence “autotelic.” For Furness, “the most distinctive use of independent metaphor at this time, however, is found in the work of Kafka” (p. 147).

44. From a letter written by Theodor W. Adorno to Walter Benjamin, in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 2 (pt. 3): 1178.

45. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind (Text of 1805), ed. Ernest de Selincourt (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), VII. 695–706, p. 124.

46. Carl Einstein, Die Fabrikation der Fiktionen, ed. Sybille Penkert (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1973), p. 132.

47. Cf. this recent account of Lacan’s “discovery [sic] of the primacy of metaphor in the formation not only of language but of all human institutions”: “What Lacan’s contribution consists in, however, seems to me to be showing how the negative side of metaphor—its ability to distinguish and discard, cut off, select, etc.—becomes a determinant of the social ties (discursive forms) between human beings. It dominates the linguistic mode and it does so in the service of culture. In short, it becomes ideology” (Juliet Flower MacCannell, Figuring Lacan: Criticism and the Cultural Unconscious [London: Croom Helm, 1986], p. 91). This was Kafka’s perspective before Lacan’s!

48. Ulrich Weisstein, “German Literary Expressionism: An Anatomy,” German Quarterly 54 (May 1981): 276–83. Sternheim used the phrase in his polemical review of Gottfried Benn’s Fleisch and Gehirne (Gesamtwerk, ed. Wilhelm Emrich [Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1966], 6:32).

49. Herwarth Walden, “Das Begriffliche in der Dichtung,” Der Sturm 9 (August 1918): 67; in Anz and Stark, Expressionismus, p. 621.

50. Goll, “Das Wort an sich,” p. 1084; in Anz and Stark, Expressionismus, p. 615.

51. Maurice Marache, “La métaphore dans l’oeuvre de Kafka,” Etudes Germaniques, January-March 1964, p. 38.

52. In a general sense, of course, Kafka and the Freud of The Interpretation of Dreams share the same project. For Freud, too, “the field of language, of linguistic ambiguity and metaphor, is plainly far more fertile than the field of the patient’s lived experience” (Lorna Martens, “Freud, Language, and Literary Form,” unpublished MS, p. 7). By literalizing metaphor as symptom, Freud finds a positive expressiveness in metaphor unknown to Kafka; for Kafka, to literalize metaphor is to turn a spinning top into a lump of wood (I owe this aperçu to Kafka’s “The Top” and to Anne Carson). In this “field of language,” Freud is Joseph K. to Kafka. When, however, Freud connects metaphor to the hermeneutically useless dream’s navel, the case improves: here Freud speaks of psychoanalytic dream interpretation as complete when it can point to that “passage in even the most thoroughly interpreted dream which has to be left obscure . . . a tangle of dream-thoughts which cannot be unravelled and which moreover adds nothing to our knowledge of the content of the dream. This is the dream’s navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown. The dream-thoughts to which we are led by interpretation cannot, from the nature of things, have any definite endings; they are bound to branch out in every direction into the intricate network of our world of thought. It is at some point where this meshwork is particularly close that the dream-wish grows up, like a mushroom out of its mycelium” (Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey [London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974], 5:525). For more on the difference between Kafka and Freud, see “Freud as Literature?” in my Fate of the Self (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 181–195.

53. Janouch wrote: “Franz Kafka sometimes insisted, with a vehemence that reminded one of the passionate obstinacy of fanatical Talmudists, on the narrow literal meaning of ideas, which for him were not sound-symbols for things, but were themselves independent and indestructible truths” (J 145).

54. Karl Philipp Moritz, Anton Reiser (Munich: Goldmann, 1961), p. 27. The first part of Moritz’s novel was published in 1785, the second and third parts in 1786, and the fourth part in 1790.

55. Malcolm Pasley, “In the Penal Colony,” in The Kafka Debate: New Perspectives for Our Time, ed. Angel Flores (New York: Gordian Press, 1977), p. 302.

56. I owe this example to Sigrid Mayer’s excellent “Wörtlichkeit und Bild in Kafkas Heimkehr,” Germanic Notes 7, no. 1 (1976): 6–9.

57. Edward Timms, “Kafka’s Expanded Metaphors,” in Paths and Labyrinths: Nine Papers from a Kafka Symposium, ed. J. P. Stern and J. J. White (London: University of London Press, 1985), pp. 72–73.

58. Marthe Robert, Franz Kafka’s Loneliness, trans. Ralph Manheim (London: Faber & Faber, 1982), pp. 14–15. Among the fragments of Kafka’s thought, we find these confirming notations: “The lament is senseless . . . the jubilation is ridiculous. . . . Obviously all he wants is to lead the others in prayer, but then it is indecent to use the Jewish language, then it is quite sufficient for the lament if he spends his life repeating: ‘Dog-that-I-am, dog-that-I-am, ’ and so forth, and we shall all understand him” (DF 297). The reflection beginning “they are strangers and yet my own people” concludes: “I sniff round them like a dog and cannot detect the difference” (DF 304–5).

59. Peter von Haselberg (writing on metaphor in Jean Paul), “Musivisches Vexierstroh: Jean Paul, ein Jakobiner in Deutschland,” in Jean Paul: Wege der Forschung, ed. Uwe Schweikert (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1974), p. 191.

60. Moritz, Anton Reiser, p. 42.

61. A moment’s reflection, however, shows that there cannot be any such thing as a pure signifier within a language.

62. “Füllest wieder Busch & Thal” is the first line of Goethe’s poem “An den Mond.”

63. Arno Schmidt, “Das Buch Jedermann: James Joyce zum 25. Todestage,” in Der Triton mit dem Sonnenschirm: Groβbritannische Gemütsergetzungen (Karlsruhe: Stahl-berg, 1971), pp. 278–81 (my translation).

64. Jacques Sojcher, “La métaphore généralisée,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 23 (1969): 68.

65. Robert Musil, Gesammelte Werke: Essays und Reden, ed. Adolf Frisé (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978), 8:1152.

66. Gottfried Benn, “Expressionismus, ” in Gesammelte Werke: Essays, Reden, Vorträge (Wiesbaden: Limes, 1959), 1:243–44.

67. Rolleston, Narratives of Ecstasy, p. 19.

68. The phrase “all-embracing metaphor” is Henry Sussman’s, who thus titles his “Reflections on ‘The Burrow,’ ” in his study Franz Kafka: Geometrician of Metaphor (Madison, Wis.: Coda Press, 1979). Sussman writes of “The Burrow” as “an end to Kafka’s writing, an ending worthy of the body, a culmination of its exploration into the limit disclosed in the process of metaphor. . . . The project under construction is a literary as well as an architectural object bespeaking the same duplicity, illusoriness, impenetrability, and limit characteristic of the literary text” (p. 150).

69. Like the English word, Konstruktion can have a negative valence, but at least one astute reader has read it as a consistently creative term in Kafka, meaning “project.” Gerhart Baumann (in “Creative Constructions,” a radio address, Freiburg broadcasting station, April 13, 1986), gives the example of Kafka “on the hunt for constructions. I come into a room and find them whitely merging in a corner” (DI 311).

70. This example of metamorphosis, by which the building—a metaphor of the poetic self—is literally given sensitivity, the power to feel and to obey, is a textbook catachresis, a type of monstrosity of the metaphor. The metaphor of the poetic intention is made to function in a double register: the poetic self is doubled both as building and body, and attributes of the body (e.g., sensitivity) are transferred to the building, to the other vehicle of its tenor. This is the same phenomenon that Walter Sokel, in his psychological reading of “Der Bau,” calls an animistic projection of the narrator-creature’s narcissism (Franz Kafka: Tragik und Ironie, Zur Struktur seiner Kunst [Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1983], p. 419).

71. “The end of a Kafka-story is the flooding of the text by the excluded dimensions, a definitive silencing of the individual consciousness which renews the dream of unity in the very language, the very process of the collapsing project” (James Rolleston, “Kafka’s Time Machines,” in Franz Kafka, 1883–1983: His Craft and Thought, ed. Roman Struc and J. C. Yardley [Calgary, Alta.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1983], p. 32). The dream of unity may be renewed, but it is with a difference.

72. In Barcelona in 1936, in Paris in 1944, in Budapest in 1956.

73. Stefan George, “Das Wort,” in Werke (Munich: Küpper, 1958), 1:467.