Introduction: The persistence of Kafka in a metamorphosing world

Abstract

“Vor dem Gesetz steht ein Türhüter“ (Drucke 267). The famous first sentence of Kafka's parable “Vor dem Gesetz” appears on the page as a literal Feststellung, a frozen constellation that will expand into an eternal present for the Mann vom Lande who approaches the Türhüter to ask for entry into the law. The Mann vom Lande is not granted entry and will spend year after year, the remainder of his life, waiting for a change in the situation—which, of course, will never occur. In a cruel irony, as the dying man's consciousness fades away, the Türhüter tells him that “dieser Eingang [zum Gesetz] war nur für Dich bestimmt. Ich gehe jetzt und schließe ihn” (Drucke 269). The first sentence of Kafka's parable, then, turns out to be as much of a foreclosure of narrative development as it is an opening of the text itself.

The situation into which we as readers are thrown when we encounter the parable's first sentence is not dissimilar from that experienced by the Mann vom Lande. The sentence seemingly opens a path into the text, and yet it also forecloses access: how can we read beyond a sentence that states the opposite of what it shows us? “Before the law there stands a gatekeeper”—and yet, in the word order of the sentence itself, we see that it is not the gatekeeper who stands before the law; rather, the law is quite literally placed before the gatekeeper: ein Türhüter actually stands behind the Gesetz. The sentence's meaning continues to oscillate; it vexes us, and if we decide to read on regardless, we proceed at our own risk. And what we experience if we do read on is not a gradual lifting of our vexed state, but rather what Benjamin termed “die wolkige Stelle i[m] Innern” of the parable (420). Reflecting on Benjamin's reading of Kafka's prose, Adorno observes that what we encounter in Kafka's writing “ist eine Parabolik, zu der der Schlüssel entwendet ward […] Jeder Satz spricht: deute mich, und keiner will es dulden“ (251).

One hundred years after his death on June 3, 1924, Kafka's texts are as alive as ever. His works continue to disquiet us. Just as the dog in Kafka's “Forschungen eines Hundes” seeks in vain to “restlos durch Untersuchung auflösen“ the puzzle of his encounter with the seven dancing dogs “um den Blick endlich wieder freizubekommen für das gewöhnliche ruhige glückliche Leben des Tages“ (Nachgelassene Schriften 435), we seek in vain to regain our countenance in the face of Kafka's texts. On the morning after his transformation, Gregor Samsa, in Die Verwandlung, keeps hoping for “die Wiederkehr der wirklichen und selbstverständlichen Verhältnisse“ (Drucke 123). We know, of course, that Gregor will never experience such a Wiederkehr and that whatever may have seemed selbstverständlich was in fact missverständlich and may never have been wirklich to begin with. We should also know, though, that like Gregor, we have been stirred “aus unruhigen Träumen” (Drucke 113) by our encounter with Kafka, and that as long as we hear his voice, we ought never to expect to have our perception of the world restored to whatever we may have considered “die wirklichen und selbstverständlichen Verhältnisse.” The metamorphoses Kafka's texts set in motion in those who encounter them are irreversible.

Countless readers’ voices have testified to such metamorphoses over the course of the last 100 years. This forum on the centenary of Kafka's death provides the space to highlight but a few of these voices. It is, of course, impossible to capture the full breadth and diversity of contemporary Kafka scholarship in these pages. But the contributions that follow include tributes to Kafka from different generations of scholars, and they reflect a variety of exciting approaches to Kafka's work. The forum opens with Anette Schwarz's reflections on the “wolkige Stelle” in Kafka's works already mentioned above, and specifically on Benjamin's remarks on Kafka ten years after his death. Like Benjamin, Schwarz is interested in particular in representations of children in Kafka's Betrachtung, who, like so many of Kafka's characters, are looking for an Ausweg. These children, Schwarz suggests, may have been Kafka's own Ausweg from his family, offering him a literary home instead. Stanley Corngold wittily posits that this year's centenary might be the perfect occasion to embark on a recovery of Kafka's rhetorical unconscious. Reflecting on “pockets” in Kafka's texts, Corngold offers his own elegant Taschenspielertrick, slipping into or rather, as the case may be, pulling out of our own scholarly pockets a possibly repressed memory of a literary Kafka. Such a literary Kafka is at the center of Erica Weitzman's reflections, which advance a reading of Das Schloß as a Bildungsroman and allow us to understand the novel fragment as an incisive critique of and ironic meditation upon the literary ruins of realism. Nadjib Sadikou approaches Kafka's Schloß from an intercultural angle. Framing his observations on the reception of Kafka by African writers with reflections on postcolonial critiques of the toxic cultural legacies of French colonialism, Sadikou advances his reading of Guinean author Camara Laye‘s Le regard du Roi (The Radiance of the King) as a rewriting of Kafka's Schloß that generates an awareness of an histoire croisée between the Global North and the Global South.

The Global North and the Global South also figure in Heather Sullivan's reflection on the Anthropocene through the lens of Kafka's representations of bodies, machines, and agency. Sullivan reminds us that Kafka's texts confront us with representations of bodies and ecosystems affected and injured by machines; and that agency, for Kafka, is something that is always already in doubt, contested, and dispersed. Ruth Gross contributes a reflection on Kafka in the age of AI that is at turns humorous, melancholy, and hopeful: Would AI have helped Kafka's Poseidon get out from under the burdens of his bureaucratic duties; or does AI spell the ultimate dissolution of the canon into the ocean that is a Large Language Model (LLM)? Has literature been turned into fodder for ChatGPT, into a digital Steinbruch much more prosaic than the one where Josef K. meets his end? Gross ends her reflection on a hopeful note, and we, too, may prefer to think of Kafka's voice as one that is aufgehoben even in an LLM. Kata Gellen, approaching Kafka via narratology, argues that moments of metalepsis in his texts reveal to us an entanglement of only seemingly separate species worlds. The “epistemological doubt and confusion” such moments create, Gellen argues, might in fact also be the very instances that hold the potential to point toward worlds we had not previously imagined, even the multiverse. John Hamilton discusses the inflammatory post-World War II suggestion of some French intellectuals that Kafka's works, running counter as they do to the tenets of socialist realism, ought to be burned. Efforts to ban literature, Hamilton reminds us, seek to put out the burning questions with which it confronts us. Asking Max Brod to burn his papers, Hamilton suggests, may have been Kafka's way to “consign them to the uselessness that constitutes literature itself”: Kafka knew his texts were flammable, and it is their incendiary nature that makes them as powerful as they are. In John Zilcosky's concluding piece, it is “the world [that] is one match stroke away from conflagration,” and the path to political resistance that Kafka may be offering us, Zilcosky suggests, is radical love. Interweaving his reading of Das Schloß with his observations on Kafka's relationships with Felice Bauer and Dora Diamant, Zilcosky argues that in Kafka's writing shared intimacies and amorous glances can release revolutionary energies and transformative powers—powers of which we can partake if we meet Kafka with an open gaze.

100 years after Kafka's death, our world is in a precarious state. This fact has left its imprint on the ways in which we read Kafka's works today. We do not know where our world—or we—will end up. As the man of the cloth puts it in his conversation with Josef K. in the Dom chapter of Der Proceß, “’Das Urteil kommt nicht mit einemmal, das Verfahren geht allmählich ins Urteil über‘“ (289). We do know, looking back at 100 years of Kafka reception, that Kafka will continue to speak to us if we decide to listen.