Kafka and Realism

Abstract

A curious scene takes place in the middle of Kafka's final novel-fragment, Das Schloß. Having just been upbraided by the headmistress of the school where he has been set up as caretaker, K., now alone with his fiancée Frieda, hears a knock at the door and rushes to open it, thinking it is Barnabas with a message from the Castle. Instead, it turns out to be the young schoolboy Hans Brunswick, the precocious son of the village shoemaker, who tells K. that he was so upset by the headmistress's behavior that he has snuck out of class to childishly offer K. his help. Toward the end of the conversation—which, in its increasingly intricate demands and complications, eventually comes to strangely parallel the intrigues and maneuverings of K.’s own attempts at progress—Frieda, who has been only half listening, asks Hans casually what he would like to be when he grows up. To everyone's surprise, Hans answers without hesitation: “er wolle ein Mann werden wie K.” (236). Given that K. is not only a near total stranger, but also one whose present status hardly seems like something to aspire to, Hans's statement at first appears inexplicable. Upon questioning, however, Hans explains that his wish is not due to K.’s present condition—which, he admits, is “keineswegs beneidenswert, sondern traurig und verächtlich, das sah auch Hans genau” (237)—but rather to the belief that, while “jetzt sei zwar K. noch niedrig und abschrekkend, […] in einer allerdings fast unvorstellbar fernen Zukunft werde er doch alle übertreffen” (237). As the narration continues: “Das besonders kindlich-altkluge dieses Wunsches bestand darin, daß Hans auf K. herabsah wie auf einen Jüngeren, dessen Zukunft sich weiter dehne, als seine eigene, die Zukunft eines kleinen Knaben” (237). For Hans, that is, K.’s story is a tale of the arduous overcoming of present hardships in the service of eventual triumph, a triumph that acquires special value precisely through that overcoming. In other words, it is a Bildungsroman.

In fairness to Hans's interpretation, the Bildungsroman, as the exemplary genre of the emergence of the individual within a society he must learn to navigate, is perhaps not the worst genre choice for Kafka's novel. And like the hero of the typical Bildungsroman, K. is an unripe or indeed blank figure, despite all superficial obduracy strikingly labile in his desires and thus open to any number of possible futures, possible identities, possible outcomes. Nevertheless—even besides the fact that K. is described in the novel as a grown man, thus theoretically already ausgebildet—the usual arc of struggle, development, and social integration that Hans predicts for K. seems, to say the least, unlikely. But this unlikeliness is not only due to the fact of K.’s actual downward progression in the novel—analog to the descending trajectories of Kafka's other two novel protagonists—where K., far from achieving his goals, proves himself consistently willing to demand ever less, to demean himself ever further the longer he stays in the village. It is also due to the fact that the psychological integrity and sequential causality implied in the very notion of Bildung are almost wholly absent from Kafka's novel, whose meager yet baroque plot is largely made up of an unending series of stratagems and hermeneutic hairsplitting that disintegrate in the sheer lack of a stable signifier behind them, a consistent logic to be deciphered, or a concrete order to be struggled against. The novel as biographical unfolding, the story of the chronological progress of an individual life in a particular sociocultural context, is replaced by a potentially infinite series of increasingly futile attempts to fix a sense of identity, place, and time through the telling of stories as such.

Das Schloß is of course not the first time Kafka takes aim at the social and biographical—not to say, biopolitical (see Vogl 22)—logic of the traditional realist novel. “Das Urteil” can be conceived as Kafka's leap out of both psychological realism and the bourgeois logic of familial succession (see Weitzman 94); Der Verschollene parodies the sentimental rags-to-riches tales of authors like Horatio Alger and Charles Dickens; even such works as “Ein Bericht für eine Akademie” or “Forschungen eines Hundes” can be read as burlesques of the novel of development and its promises of personal fulfillment through social recognition and/or heuristic experiment. Meanwhile the uncanny concreteness of Kafka's style, despite all propositional illogic and free indirect rumination, mimics the sensual fullness of realist prose without ever quite coalescing into the latter's “already real wholeness” (Bakhtin 46). What unsettles, in Kafka, is thus not the absence of realism, with its sense of visual saturation and world-building effects, but its purely formal expression, the appearance of traditional verisimilitude with no recognizable verity behind it. As that ambivalent Kafka-hater, Georg Lukács, writes, “Denn die großartig ausdrucksvollen Details [of Kafka's work] sind also nicht – wie im Realismus – Konzentrationen, Knotenpunkte der Wendungen, der Konflikte ihres eigenen Daseins,” but rather “bloße Chiffrezeichen ihres unfaßbaren Jenseits” (“Kafka” 535)—which Lukács, at various points in the same essay, calls “das Setzen einer unaufhebbaren Transzendenz (des Nichts)” (505), the “blinde und panische Angst vor der Wirklichkeit” (534), or “das ahnungsvoll vorweggenommene, in ein zeitloses Sein umstilisierte ‘Wesen’ der imperialistischen Periode” (535). What Lukács forgets, however, is that the realist novel is governed by its own form of “unaufhebbaren Transzendenz”; not, indeed, the “transzendentale Heimatlosigkeit der Idee” for which his younger self once designated the novel as the proper literary form (Theorie 587), but rather the modern and as it were ersatz transcendence of the human being, that is to say, of the world as mediated and reconciled through human perception: in the words of the nineteenth-century novelist and theoretician Otto Ludwig (to whom Lukács's realism theories in fact owe a significant debt), “Eine Welt, die in der Mitte steht zwischen der objektiven Wahrheit in den Dingen und dem Gesetze, das unser Geist hineinzulegen gedrungen ist, eine Welt, aus dem, was wir von der wirklichen Welt erkennen, durch das in uns wohnende Gesetz wiedergeboren” (265). The transcendence of the traditional realist novel consists in the fact that everything in it must refer to a higher instance, must form precisely the referential “Knotenpunkte” of that cohesive social reality whose absence in Kafka Lukács decries, a reality “in der die Mannigfaltigkeit der Dinge nicht verschwindet, aber durch Harmonie und Kontrast für unsern Geist in Einheit gebracht ist; nur von dem, was dem Falle gleichgültig ist, gereinigt” (Ludwig 265). Normative human experience—including and perhaps especially, normative cognitive human experience—becomes the touchstone of a literary form that has otherwise cast off necessity, replacing genre conventions and stable symbolic orders with the purported unity and totality of lived existence. In this sense, Kafka's play with the rules of logic and verisimilitude effects, not a leap into nihilism, but an undermining of the inherent idealism of the realist novel—a covert idealism, which sublimates the profane substance of the material world into a medium for human emotion and apotheosizes the forms and ways of seeing and being of everyday life without ever really allowing the question, despite all diversity of content, of whether other forms and ways could be thinkable. Of course K.’s life will form a completed narrative arc in which he emerges as the exemplary figure of a logically coherent and psychologically meaningful world—that's what they teach in school.

Such a wish—even if in the mouth of a fictional character—is perhaps not so far from the reality of Kafka's poetics. Kafka attempts with his writing to shake off the bad education that has been passed down to him—a second draft of this text inculpates among those responsible for the speaker's faulty training “verschiedene Schriftsteller” (Tagebücher 18)—and to dwell in the ruins of a literary tradition that seamlessly binds inner experience to external condition, individual destiny to historical milieu (see Neumann 41), which he inhabits, not in the melancholy fear that it will not be restored, but rather in the ironic knowledge that it was never all that intact to begin with. The author who, at least according to certain metrics, never comes of age also never stops sifting through the detritus of the literature that he was brought up with.