Franz Kafka

The Necessity of Form

Stanley Corngold

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780801421990
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501722820
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: German Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In Stanley Corngold's view, the themes and strategies of Kafka's fiction are generated by a tension between his concern for writing and his growing sense of its arbitrary character. Analyzing Kafka's work in light of "the necessity of form," which is also a merely formal necessity, Corngold uncovers the fundamental paradox of Kafka's art and life. The first section of the book shows how Kafka's rhetoric may be understood as the daring project of a man compelled to live his life as literature. In the central part of the book, Corngold reflects on the place of Kafka within the modern tradition, discussing such influential precursors of Cervantes, Flaubert, and Nietzsche, whose works display a comparable narrative disruption. Kafka's distinctive narrative strategies, Corngold points out, demand interpretation at the same time they resist it. Critics of Kafka, he says, must be aware that their approaches are guided by the principles that Kafka's fiction identifies, dramatizes, and rejects.

PART I

Kafka’s Career

Chapter One

“ ‘You,’ I Said . . .”: Kafka Early and Late

If Kafka was to such an extent entirely himself, even in the monotonous sense of having nothing in common with himself, this is even truer of the writer of the Diaries.1 His language there neither develops nor declines: from the start it has found its voice, an elegant, otherworldly literalism; from the start it has closed with its own great themes, so that the relation of early to later parts of the Diaries is not the serial relation of beginning and end in narrative but the prefigurative relation of part to whole in the hermeneutic circle.

Kafka’s intensity is present in an early diary entry, which reveals powers of analysis (especially the analysis of the inner life of writing) of so formidable a moral and metaphysical tendency that they can be assumed to inform the novels as well, although they are occulted there by different feats of social invention and rhetoric.2 The entry, written sometime between July 19 and November 6, 1910, when Kafka was twenty-seven, is found on the seventh page of Kafka’s German diaries (DI 22). It begins “ ‘You,’ I said” and consists mainly of a dialogue between speakers called “I” and “he” (“he” is later termed “this bachelor”). The venue is an open city street or alley, and the time, “really very late.” Despite the fact that these voices issue out of human bodies, it is hard to conceive of the speakers as empirical personalities; the relation of intention to bodily gesture is too odd or incoherent.

“You,” I said and gave him a little shove with my knee (at this sudden utterance some saliva flew from my mouth as an evil omen), “don’t fall asleep!”

“I’m not falling asleep,” he answered, and shook his head while opening his eyes. . . .

“It’s really very late,” I said. I had to smile a little and in order to conceal it I looked intently into the house. [DI 22–23]

This house will be crucial: there a gathering is taking place which “I” wishes to join. The possibility of his “ascending” is the first important subject of the conversation. The bachelor declares that “I” could try to go up the stairs, but it is pointless; if he does go up, he will soon enough find himself back on the street. On the other hand, he says that “I” should not hesitate on his account.

“I” does, however, hesitate; it matters enormously to him whether or not the bachelor is telling the truth. The bachelor has specified the danger of the ascent, and “I” may be identified and rejected from a place of ineffable splendor. When the bachelor next reveals that, indeed, he has not been telling the truth, “I” finds his voice. He speaks the speech that dominates the entire dialogue—an articulation of the differences between the bachelor and himself, elaborated in a web of images and categories powerfully prefiguring the discourse of existential thought.3 To this harangue the bachelor replies with a feeble complaint about his solitude. “I” thereupon withdraws from the dialogue. At the close, his words appear without quotation marks; the I has become a persona virtually identical with the narrator. And it is this persona that plainly declares the bachelor to be a menace to life.

What is the light that glances off this grimacing text?4 What can it be if not, in part, rays scattered from the source of Kafka’s greatest concern in 1910: the possibility—indeed, the necessity—of his destiny as a writer, his great intimation, his hope?5 For in 1910 Kafka could look back on at least a dozen years of literary activity that had not gone entirely without recognition. In 1907 he had written the novel-fragment “Wedding Preparations in the Country”; and before 1908 he had composed various prose sketches, several of which appeared in the magazine Hyperion in 1908 and were subsequently to appear in the volume Meditation in 1912. Some pieces mentioned in his diaries as part of a “mountain,” a “mass,” were avowedly destroyed by Kafka, and others have been lost. But enough of his literary ambition had been realized for Max Brod to assign Kafka in 1907—before he had published a line, yet not as a joke—that “sacred” place alongside Heinrich Mann, Wedekind, Meyrink, and Blei.

For Kafka, however, writing was always an ordeal. Not to write was to risk going mad from the vapidness of experience, but to write was perhaps to discover that here too lay only a devilish seduction. It was crucial to contend with literature. Thus, in 1910, after “five months of my life during which I could write nothing that would have satisfied me . . . it occurs to me to talk to myself again” (DI 12). With these words (preceded by a few paragraphs) Kafka begins the Diaries. The purpose of his diaries is therefore marked out from the start: to articulate a self in order to liberate writing, but only that self and as much of that self fitted to the purpose of liberating writing. “My condition is not unhappiness . . . not weakness, not fatigue, not another interest—so what is it then? That I do not know this is probably connected with my inability to write.” To get to the bottom of it, Kafka determines that “every day at least one line should be trained on me, as they now train telescopes on comets. And if then I should appear before that sentence once, lured by that sentence . . .” (DI 12).

These passages constitute a starting point. In one sense Kafka—an “I”—already possesses himself (he identifies the “I” as perplexed, as ignorant of its state). But in a more important sense, he does not possess himself (he does not know what this state is). Now it is at “me”—the unknown state—that lines shall be aimed; and as aiming implies an aimer, the initial division is repeated: at an obscure astral referent a detective authorial consciousness aims sentences. Its purpose is to draw into existence a new modality of itself as a reader, a watcher of the skies, which will instantly vanish into the writer.

These sentences, it is important to stress, do originate from an “I.” The subject exists apart from the writing self if only as the consciousness of a lack—of an empirical state that is not yet evident. It exists practically as the intention to deploy words to shape this lack or lure shape into it. The purposive character of this language distinguishes it from the language that is supposed to arise after this need has been filled in. This first language, the psychological language of the ego, has a purely instrumental value. The literary language that this tool means to liberate has no assigned use value except to attest unavoidably to the history that precedes it—namely, to the merely instrumental and incomplete character of its precondition of empirical self-possession. Literary language here asserts the insufficiency of the existential (existentiell) project, never mind that the project is successful in luring hither the empirical personality and even in incorporating it.6 On the other hand, the state of mind Kafka suffers or enjoys in poetic activity has a nonintentional character: in a word that he will invent later, it is a state of being, Schriftstellersein, being as a writer; but it falls out of an order of uses. The diary text cited above, which just precedes the story “ ‘You,’ I said . . . ,” is exemplary: it shows Kafka wishing to be cured of his “neurasthenia” in order to write; he does not write stories for self-help.

It therefore becomes inevitable to connect the “I” of the story “ ‘You,’ I said . . .” to the subject that, knowing its ignorance of its hidden side, employs dialogical language in order to precipitate a language of fiction meant to exceed itself. Its task is metamorphosis. The genre of the story is therefore mixed—and modern: via the act of writing it enacts in fact and in its topic fictively reenacts the difficulty of a subject cut off from knowledge of its state—a self that then gradually identifies its state and frees itself to write. I connect the “you” or bachelor figure to the unknown factor, a negative hidden possibility of the “I.” Certainly, the “I” of the story does consistently project its interlocutor as unknown. Thus “I” says to the bachelor: “If I just knew definitely that you were being sincere with me [were telling me the truth, daβ du aufrichtig zu mix bist]. . . . But how could I even tell whether you were sincere with me [were telling me the truth, ob du aufrichtig zu mir bist]?” (DI 24; Ta 18). Furthermore, since the “I” aims to liberate writing by overcoming the resistance of its anti-self, it follows that the basic sense of the bachelor must be that mode of the self which hinders (genuine) writing, whose being is resistant to articulation.7 He cannot literally be part of writing, even of the language of introspection; he might be glimpsed through the telescope, but he is not part of the telescope. The bachelor can thus enter writing only as a paradox or a lie, as something basically unintelligible. And indeed these characteristics of the bachelor are evident in the piece: the bachelor is defined as a being frozen in the obliviousness of an early event—an experience of his “depth”—and the persistence with which he remains unconscious of his depth defines him as a “patched-up existence, ” as “no better than some sort of vermin” (DI 25, 23).

These images define the bachelor—but of course they do so only elliptically and allusively. For, as Kafka wrote, nothing outside the phenomenal world can be named even approximately by metaphors (vergleichsweise; H 40). The obstacle to writing precedes phenomenality, is intrinsically hidden, and hence cannot come to light except as what it is not. It appears as an excessively distorted figure. Thus the “I” hastens to add: “But forgetting [or oblivousness] is not the right word here” (DI 26), conjuring, then, other qualities of the bachelor. These images, however, together with earlier ones, all converge on the meaning of radical isolation, heterogeneousness, and obscurity. The man who without any choice in the matter “lie[s] here in the gutter . . . stowing away the rain water” (DI 23), “avoid[ing] the influence of other people,” with “teeth only for his own flesh and flesh only for his own teeth” (DI 24), is finally proscribed; he is declared to stand “once and for all outside our people, outside our humanity . . . he has only the moment, the everlasting moment of torment” (DI 26). By the end of the piece he has become a “parasite” and then, finally, a “corpse” (DI 28).

Consider again this identification of the bachelor as the opaque obstacle to the life of writing. One is at once reminded of the kindred nonbeings who will afterward figure in Kafka’s stories—the crossbred lambcat and Odradek and especially the “monstrous vermin” of The Metamorphosis. The latter is indeed radically unintelligible: he is not meant to conjure a creature of some definite kind. This would be to experience the vermin the way the cleaning woman does who calls him “old dung beetle” But “to forms of address like these Gregor would not respond; they do not reflect his uncanny identity, which cannot be grasped in an image” (M 45). Indeed, the bachelor of “ ‘You,’ I said . . .” is a prefiguration of the transmogrified Gregor Samsa; he too is described as requiring for his existence certain “ceremonies amid which I can barely keep on crawling,” again, “no better than some sort of vermin” (DI 23).

Other details of the piece confirm this analysis. Interesting evidence comes from the text that Max Brod prints as a variant of this diary entry (Ta 691–92). The variant distributes differently the characteristics of the speakers. To the bachelor’s question, “How long have you been in the city?” “I” replies, “Five months” (DI 29; my italics). Now it is not incidental that it has also been for five months that Kafka has existed as his anti-self, the nonwriter (this fact, we recall, prompted him to begin his journal). Thus the “I,” an explicit projection of Kafka’s will to liberate writing, has spent five months in the city, the habitat of the bachelor, where writing cannot survive.

What emerges is that the bachelor—and by implication the bachelor figure abounding in Kafka’s work around this period—is by no means an immediate portrait of Kafka’s social personality, the alleged futile outcast from the joys of family. The bachelor is a figurative constellation, born out of anxiety and steeped in anxiety, a monster produced from the copulation of writing and nonwriting. It can be understood only as part of a general structure necessarily entailing anxiety—the existence of literature as a domain altogether different from life, inscribing into resistant nature the hollow cipher of its itinerary: signature, womb, or wound. Literature gives birth to a new mode of being and—more visibly in this story—to a new mode of nonbeing, its own intrusive negation, the horrible complement of Schriftstellersein: namely, Nicht-Schriftstellersein-können.

Strange and mostly negative as these formulations may sound, they are compelled by the imagery with which in “ ‘You,’ I Said . . .” Kafka describes the genesis of the bachelor. This genesis is not to be understood as the metaphor of an empirical event but as the narrative of a structure of relations. The bachelor is defined by his blockage of a primordial situation corresponding to the origin of literature. ...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations for Kafka Citations
• Introduction
• PART I KAFKA’S CAREER
• PART II KAFKA’S CONTEXT
• EXCURSUS ON METHOD
• Index