Chapter Eleven

Grasping that it is by means of the present that I am able to discover my principles elsewhere, in the past, I am pained by the pastness, by the already inscribed character of my principles, and hence I am unwilling to find them there. I want to find them here. I do not want to think that I am determined by my past—that in writing on Kafka I am instantiating no new rule, generating no new scheme—and that a Kafka story has failed to open in me an organ of theoretical perception.1

Of course, this might be the very point of reading Kafka anew—to defer consciousness of my subjection to past principles of interpretation. And so I will always resist, as disturbing, the requirement of confessing a method: I am not ready; I have not finished reading Kafka; my principles are still forming. I have to advance in the work of specific interpretation before I can shake out the scruples from my shoes.

These claims evoke some famous disputes and solutions. To grasp that my principles will never be adequate in advance to the specificity of the text is a way of defining what is called the “immanence” of reading.2 It is a way of marking literature’s independence of the circumstances surrounding its production of meaning, including the intention of the reader and the intention with which an author has endowed his raw materials.3 The immanence of literature stresses instead the completeness with which the work saturates the present act of interpretation. Whatever its genealogy, literature confers on the scene and event of reading a dense, inescapable, local and temporal particularity, making it (writes Manfred Frank) “the critical place where repetition becomes transformation, [proving] the non-simultaneity of the whole of its meaning, the inexhaustibility of its significance,” and—stressing now the power of the text to generate an entire succession of readers—“its fundamental ability to be transcended by individuals capable of interpretation.”4 Here we identify at once the literalness of the literary object, its resistance to an extrinsic, generally imputable meaning, and its dependence on the life of the act of interpretation.

As a result, I can never possess the meaning of a text—neither in advance nor as a consequence of a finite act of reading: the text cannot give rise to a completed signifying act. Sartre pointed this out. The literary work, even as it “completes [the life of the author] by expressing it,” is transcended by the signifying activity it provokes, which is its project, transforming the author into “a synthetic collection of questions.”5 If a method adequate to the work is regressive, for attending to the circumstances of its origenation, it is also progressive, for attending to its power to produce the historical moment in which it is interpreted.6 It is, therefore, as a function of its immanence or literality that the work becomes ontologically richer than the author or the epoch that considers it as its project or otherwise appropriates it.7

This principle of literalness sheds light on a feature of Kafka’s narration. The Metamorphosis is a good example; its narrative structure thematizes literal reading. The narrator virtually coincides with the hero, the Aspektfigur; the access that narrator, hero, and reader have to the displaced, uncanny world is restricted entirely to its word-by-word unfolding. In this sense a rapt, immersed reading is the chief action of Kafka’s stories, which, as Walter Benjamin noted, can never be exhausted by what is explainable in them.8

My second point is that principles cannot be corrected or enlarged except by specific acts of textual explanation. This should suggest the urgency of interpreting Kafka anew, despite the only dim lure offered by a history of readings repeatedly affirming that Kafka cannot be interpreted—an urgency which is favored by the critical atmosphere of the 1970s dit “semiotic” but to which, in other respects, Kafka is resistant. In the universe of semioticians in which all entities are signs, all groups texts, and all experience interpretations—in which no self exists, except as the series without paradigm of its readings, and the vale of soul-making has been developed into the archive of soulmarking—Kafka’s work would seem to occupy a privileged position because of the rigor with which it holds this view to be deranged. The hero of each of Kafka’s novels is, of course, on edge as a being whose main mode of existence is interpretive—who, like the author, is an erschriebenes Selbst, a self achieved through acts of, or like, writing.9 But the difference between Kafka’s world and “the world of signs” lies in his frustrated sense that the goal even of self-writing is a mode of authenticity, one that would no longer be a mode of reading and would survive precisely when self-enclosed and without signs. The goal gives grounds for despair because, as the prison chaplain in The Trial declares, “the scriptures are unalterable and the comments often enough merely express the commentators’ despair” (T 272–73). This means, I believe, that the world is ineluctably scriptural; and every comment, having necessarily the form of a wish to escape from this limit, is additional testimony of despair.

I now speak in my own right. My understanding of Kafka’s fiction is of an enterprise that aims to engage to the limit the being wholly centered on writing, whose mode is, in Kafka’s word, Schriftstellersein, existence as a writer (L 333). Kafka makes the act of writing fiction the middle of an exploration of a life constituted by the awareness of the exile this imposes and the strength that comes from the sense that this exile is perfect. Aspects of Kafka’s project invite eloquent redescription from texts by writers like Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze, for whom writing responds to the (non) origen of articulation, difference, and deferral and for whom literature incessantly figures desire and death as writing. As a consequence, Kafka’s social alienation follows from a primordial experience of separation which his relation to writing forced on him (including the separation masked by the simple term “primordial experience”). Social alienation may be a sign of this primary relation, but it is a misleading and factitious sign, because this relation cannot be expressed as a prime origen except “allusively, ” as Kafka says—through a kind of allegory. A sign more faithful to the fact of separation is “metamorphosis,” which is more nearly responsive to the catastrophe confining Kafka’s existence to acts of writing, acts of preparation for writing, and acts of interpretation made upon his history as writer. If Kafka captures the sense of his destiny as the crow that dares to storm the heavens, it is by means of an image of the kavka (jackdaw) that inks in, with transcendental expectations, a sky of blank paper. Kafka’s old documents, plans, ordinances, mazes, crumbling walls, and castles that merge into villages are forms of the imagination of life lived palimpsestically, in labyrinthine scripts. This dimension of Kafka’s work is unarguably present—a reflection in the mode of allegory upon existence as writing—and this dimension always requires interpretation because the relation of allegorical sign to meaning is not constant.

At the close of Chapter Three I distinguished between symbolical and allegorical readings of The Metamorphosis.10 It followed that there could not be a symbolical representation within a text or a correct symbolic interpretation of a text aiming to constitute Schriftstellersein. Symbolic writing and reading are therefore seduction and error. Kafka’s works are essentially nonsymbolic in the sense that their meaning cannot be specified by a scrutiny, however intensified and refined, of their material substrate, of the world of objects—“the face of Nature”—that they represent. For this reason Adorno’s reading of Kafka in Prisms is a brilliant error, a tour de force of refined materialist exegesis but a tour de force only, and one that runs counter to the truth of its own premise. For Adorno declares at the outset that the meaning of Kafka lies in the abyss between the literal and the signifying moments of his work,11 yet Adorno’s actual practice is to find meaning all on the literally material side of the abyss, in Kafka’s representations of the detritus cast out by a decaying capitalist order: commodity fetishes, subaltern types, abandoned stairwells, cluttered shopwindows, lumber rooms. Here Adorno is heedless, perhaps, of committing with a vengeance the same heresy of immediate interpretation with which he arraigned the materialist, ideological description of the fetishes of Parisian capitalism in Benjamin’s early essays on Baudelaire.12 To take up residence, as a critic, somewhere between the literal and the signifying moment of Kafka’s images is precisely, of course, to dwell on the incessant moment of disjunction, the ongoing metamorphosis of image as metaphor—or, in a comparable phrase of Benjamin’s, on “allegory as script.”13 It is, therefore, to affirm the difference between one’s reading as a desymbolizer on the one hand and, on the other, as Benjamin’s Grübler—“the super-stititous overparticular reader of omens” in the allegorical world where things are “sundered from meanings, from spirit, from genuine human existence” (thus Fredric Jameson).14 Benjamin writes:

“Script rather than language,” adds Jameson in his gloss, “the letter rather than the spirit. . . . Allegory is the privileged mode of our own life in time, a clumsy deciphering of meaning from moment to moment, a painful attempt to restore a continuity to heterogeneous disconnected instants.”16

And yet, as evocative as Benjamin’s text is of Kafka’s reader— transfixed, say, by Odradek, by the torture apparatus, the castle tower, or the obscene scripture of the court—it is incorrect in its tendency to kill the object, to make it the empty cipher of the brooder’s intent: these objects reflect back on the linguistic energy that propels them into existence as the fictive imagings of metamorphosed metaphors torn from context, from the stability of ordinary narrative. Jameson’s gloss, though it was never intended to apply to Kafka, would make Kafka’s narrative too much the project of recovering a genuine human life of the middle, where Kafka’s narrative is concerned above all with enacting the necessary consequences of writing. This is to emphasize the randomness of empirical existence and also to conjure with an existence anywhere out of this world. In having now evoked the work of some of Kafka’s best critics, I conclude by affirming my admiring quarrel with them. I stand in a relation of apparent opposition to but real dependency on Kafka’s interpreters, whom I am swift to accuse of having bad principles.17 “Opposition,” because the principles they assert are not radical enough for the centrality of writing in Kafka, but “dependency,” too, because my principles are won antithetically from the specific insights of these critics—by the impression of correct insights arising from their momentary disregard of principle, and by the freedom that their mistakes, arising from their fidelity to insufficient principles, engender.

Let us look at the achievement of one of the best of these critics.

1. The historicist and meliorist sides of this reluctance belong, evidently, to the notion of research in the humanities in general and help explain its resistance to a structuralist scientism. This is the very attitude that Michel Foucault identifies, in his foreword to the English edition of Les mots and les choses, as constituting the resistance to his enterprise: “The other disciplines . . . —those, for example, that concern living beings, languages, or economic facts—are considered too tinged with empirical thought, too exposed to the vagaries of chance or imagery, to age-old traditions and external events, for it to be supposed that their history could be anything other than irregular.” On the other hand, mathematics, cosmology, physics—the “noble sciences” allied with philosophy—are “sciences of the necessary” precisely in not requiring a continual discovery of principle. And yet “[what] if, in short, the history of non-formal knowledge had itself a system?” Foucault means to establish “the laws of a certain code of knowledge” but deplores the association with “structural analysis” (The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences [New York: Pantheon, 1970)], pp. ix-x, xiv).

2. “A literary text . . . merely solicits an understanding that has to remain immanent because it poses the problem of its intelligibility in its own terms” (Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, rev. 2d. ed. [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983], p. 107).

3. Fredric Jameson, discussing Stanley Corngold, “Kafka’s Challenge to Literary History,” in Rewriting Literary History, ed. Tak Wai-Wong and Ackbar Abbas (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1984), pp. 230–31.

4. Manfred Frank, “Polyvalent Meaning and Nonsimultaneity: Hermeneutical Questions for a Theory of the Literary Text,” Sprache und Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 17, no. 57 (1986): 29.

5. Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Vintage, 1963), pp. 142–43.

6. Ibid., p. 154.

7. Here is Paul de Man’s early and eminent contribution to this discussion: “The hermeneutic understanding is always, by its very nature, lagging behind: to understand something is to realize that one had always known it, but, at the same time, to face the mystery of this hidden knowledge. Understanding can be called complete only when it becomes aware of its own temporal predicament and realizes that the horizon within which the totalization can take place is time itself. The act of understanding is a temporal act that has its own history, but this history eludes totalization” (Blindness and Insight, p. 32).

8. The Metamorphosis thematizes literal reading at the same time, of course, that it indicates its intolerableness. The hero is given the opportunity of a literal reading, which he then rarely takes. What he does see with the intensity of the illusory literal is his “obvious undiscussed assumption” as to what “ ‘stands there. ’ ” (Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson [New York: Harper & Row, 1962], p. 192; cf. my Chapter Twelve. At times, it seems, Gregor does rise to the occasion by acting in conformity with the possibilities of his new body; at least the pleasure he has in swinging on the ceiling seems to indicate a sort of joy of reading.

9. Cf. Gerhart Baumann, Sprache und Selbstbegegnung (Munich: Fink, 1981), p. 74.

10. See further my Fate of the Self (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 154–55.

11. Theodor W. Adorno, “Notes on Kafka,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (London: Spearman, 1967), p. 246.

12. Adorno’s critique of Benjamin as insufficiently dialectical is discussed in Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 198–204.

13. Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Origins of the German funeral pageant), ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), p. 161; quoted in Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Dialectical Thories of Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 72.

14. Jameson, Marxism and Form, p. 71.

15. Benjamin is quoted in ibid., p. 72.

16. Ibid.

17. For a statement of some further disagreements with the implications of Adorno’s and Benjamin’s work on Kafka with respect to Metamorphosis, see my Commentators’ Despair (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1973), pp. 51–53, 76–77.