Comic in Kafka: A study of Das Schloß based on Henri Bergson's le Rire

77 Pages·2009·3.171 MB·English

by  Anders Bergman

Anders Bergman
Comic in Kafka
A study of Das Schloß based on Henri
Bergson's le Rire
VDM Verlag Dr. Müller
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Contents
FIRST PART: INTRODUCTION 3
1. Purpose, method, earlier research 3
2. Summary of ie Rire 6
3. Summary of Das Schloß 11
SECOND PART: ANALYSIS 14
4. Absence of feeling 14
4,1. Clues in the text 17
5. The comic in words 19
6. The logic of dreams 23
7. The comic in situation 28
7.1. Stage-made misunderstandings 28
7.2. Repetition and inversion 33
8. Comic in characters 34
8.1. Types or individuals? 34
8.2. The comic in forms 39
8.3. Professional comic 41
8.4, the assistants 46
8.5. Comic elements in K. 48
9. Concluding discussion 54
9.1. The äbsurdistic humour 54
9.2, The vicious and correcting laughter 55
9.3. The object of the laughter 58
9.4. Concluding remarks 58
10. Notes 66
11. References 74

FIRST PART: INTRODUCTION
1. Purpose, method, earlier research
Max Brod remembered that when his friend Franz Kafka (1883-1924) read out
his stories aloud ”we friends of his laughed quite immoderately [...] And he
himself laughed so much that there were moments when he couldn’t read any
further”.1
Many would probably think that this is far from the ordinary image of Kafka.
What one usually associates with his name is a nightmarish world devoid of
feelings and understanding, full of anonymity and over-bureaucratisation. In the
English language you have even got the word Kafkaesque to describe this.
It is not my intention to argue against that characteristic; however some addi­
tions to it seem to be called for. The aspect I would like to add is the comic fea­
ture, an aspect that permeates all of Kafka’s works but is too easy to miss or dis­
regard. I will confine myself to analyse the comic aspects of one specific work:
the unfinished and posthumously published novel Das Schloß (1926).
The risk with such a venture is that everything possible eventually will be in­
terpreted as something comic. I hope this will be avoided, since my intention is
not trying to present Das Schloß as a comic novel, whether the last pieces of the
jigsaw puzzle must be hammered in by force or not; rather, I want to find out to
what extent and on what grounds it could be called a comic novel. This thesis
will not only present the comic features but also try to explain why they become
comic, what different kinds of comedy there is in the book, if they provoke a
kind-hearted laughter or a vicious one, and how one could define the comedy of
the book.
Laughter is individual. This thesis will not deal with episodes I personally
find comic; instead I have chosen a study of the nature of the comic, contempo­
rary to the novel, whose definitions I will follow hereafter. The study is le Rire
(1910) by the philosopher and Nobel Prize winner Henri Bergson (1859-1940).
3
The question for this thesis therefore becomes: to what extent and on what
grounds could one, according to Bergson, call Das Schloß a comic book? Had I
chosen a different theoretical analysis of comedy, the results would most likely
have become different, but here 1 shall confine myself only to Bergson’s study
and only when really called for compare his study with other studies of the
comic.
“It is difficult to be wrong about Kafka” W.G. Kudszus writes in an essay on
Kafka.2 “Nothing seems unqualifiedly true of Kafka or his work” according to
Homer Swander.3 Both are equally right. It is important to keep in mind, when it
comes to the novels of Kafka, that they are unfinished, never intended to be pub­
lished and probably not even corrected by Kafka. As a matter of fact he plainly
asked Max Brod to bum the manuscript after his death. Therefore it is very dif­
ficult to know how to deal with the novels and this has certainly contributed to
the many and varied interpretations of them. But that is not the only reason.
There is something in the writings of Kafka, which invites to different interpre­
tations:
My daughter Rachel read The Metamorphosis at thirteen and thought it hu­
morous; Gustav Janouch, Kafka’s friend, read it as a religious and ethical
parable, Bertold Brecht read it as the work of “the only true Bolshevist
writer”; the Hungarian critic György Lukács read it as the typical product of
a decadent bourgeois; Borges read it as a retelling of the paradoxes :of Zeno;
the French critic Marthe Robert read it as an example of the German lan­
guage at its clearest; Vladimir Nabokov read it (partly) as an allegoiy on
adolescent Angst. The fact is that Kafka’s stories [...] offer and take away,
at the same time, the illusion of understanding [.. ,].4
And this concerns only a short story, which Kafka in fact allowed to be pub­
lished during his lifetime!
When it comes to Das Schloß, the last of Kafka’s novels, written in the early
twenties, Brod has given us an interpretation, which, according to Lars Fyhr, has
had a “monumental [...] importance for the early, and perhaps still [1979]
dominating view, on Kafka and his works,”5 and which looks at K.’s approach to
the Castle as man’s attempt at reaching God. Others have interpreted it from a
Freudian perspective, as an existentialist piece, as an autobiography of Kafka, as
an allegory of man’s fears and as a love drama. One can also add that most
scholars consider this to be Kafka’s greatest work.6
The various interpretations of Kafka reminds one of the interpretations of the
letters that Klamm sends K. in Das Schloß: K.’s own apparently rational inter­
pretation of it soon gets refuted by another, which in its turn is refuted by a third
party, until K. eventually is informed that “die Briefe richtig zu beurteilien, ist ja
unmöglich.”7 This shady way of writing called Kafkaesque is in this way both in
Kafka’s books and in his plots as well.
The literature on Kafka is gigantic, especially in the German language. Its ex­
tent and content must in itself be called Kafkaesque. The comic aspects of Kafka
have also been studied: already in Brod’s early biography the author is anxious
to emphasise the humour of Kafka’s works and personality. I will however re­
frain from taking into consideration Kafka’s personality and his own views on
the books, since it is the text and not the author that must be in focus here.
My contribution to the Kafka literature would be an analysis of the comic as­
pects in Das Schloß based on a theory on the comic that hitherto has not been
applied to the novel or indeed to Kafka’s works at all. Bergson is mentioned in
Mark Spilka’s study Dickens and Kafka8 but Spilka rejects him as not being ap­
plicable to the sort of humour that Spilka sees in Kafka, viz. the grotesque hu­
mour. One has to keep in mind, however, that Spilka is not trying to analyse the
humour of Kafka, only comparing Kafka and Dickens and thus restricts himself
to mentioning the issues they have in common. This is not the same thing as
analyzing the humour or the comic aspects of Kafka.
Considering the vastness of the Kafka literature, one has to make a selection
of sources to take part of. For this thesis, I have tried to take part of different
countries’ and different decades’ opinions, and naturally have taken part of the
scholars who have focused on the matter of the comic in Kafka.
5
For the readers who are not familiar with the German, the Swedish or the
French languages, I have made English translations of the longer quotes and key
expressions from Kafka and Bergson in the notes at the end of this thesis. Re­
garding the English translation of Das Schloß, I have used the translation made
by Jon Calame and Seth Rogoff (Vitalis, 2008). The English translation of Berg­
son’s le Rire is that of Cloudesely Brereton and Fred Rothwell (Arc Manor,
2008).
2. Summary of le Rire
To be able to discuss the comic aspects of Das Schloß, I first of all have to de­
fine what I mean by the word “comic”. The theoretical basis I have chosen is
Henri Bergson’s study le Rire, which perhaps will prove to be a good guide to
the comic aspects of Kafka. In his study, Bergson does not propose to give a
complete description of the comic - the subtitle, one has to remember, is iiessai
sur la signification du comique”. Bergson is aware of the fact that what we laugh
at is individual; what he wants to do in his study is to present issues that seem to
provoke laughter in most people. I will refrain from making an analysis of the
study, although much can be said about it, and will limit myself to give a sum­
mary of it and later perhaps, if called for, discuss certain topics in it.
Bergson begins his study (p. 2-7, English translation p. 10-12) with three in­
troductory reflections upon where the comic is to be found: first of all, there is
no comic outside the human boundaries; a landscape, for example, cannot be
comic, and an animal can only be comic in the way it resembles a human. Sec­
ondly, laughter is a manifestation of an absence of feeling, or at least a state
where the heart temporarily has been switched off and only the intellect is work­
ing, and thirdly, the more people present, the more you laugh at a given object.
Bergson stresses the social aspect of the laughter many times in his essay.
What he then emphasises (p. 7-17/12-18) is the mechanic or automatic struc­
tures behind the comic: a comic situation is created when something of a ma­
chine or object enters into the living. For example, a person with a vice or a cer­
tain very characteristic feature, himself unaware of it but by everyone regarded
as comic; or the comic writer letting his characters be guided by vice to the point
that they are turning into puppets.
The fact that the comic is invisible to the comic person but visible to others
makes these “others”, the beholders, not wanting to become like the comic per­
son: there is something chastising in the laughter, here enters the social animal
in man, demanding conformity. All sorts of divergences and eccentricities be­
come suspect, and the laughter becomes a mode of correction.
Next, Bergson discusses the comic of forms, gestures and movements (p. 17-
22/18-21). He establishes that a body that has got stuck in some sort of a perpet­
ual stiffness becomes comic: for instance, a hunchback or a face with wrinkles
that associates one with a crying mine. The comic is therefore more closely re­
lated to rigidity than to ugliness.
Conscious gestures, or gestures one does one single time, are not comic, but
the unconscious, frequently repeated gestures are: therefore, here also one finds
the close relation to the mechanic and automatic. The art of the authors of farces
consists in just this, to bring out this mechanic element in the living, and still
maintain some sort of realism (p. 22-28/21-24).
Then follows an excursus on mechanic elements in the living (p. 28-50/24-
36). A break in continuity, for instance in fashion, makes us notice the comic
aspect of dressing fashions. The mechanic in society is presented as a sort of so­
cial masquerade for the one with a comic vein; reality as a matter of fact often
surpasses fantasy. Comedy is created also when something spiritual is presented
as something material, for example the orator who, at the most elevated moment
of his speech, begins to sneeze. Persons being troubled by their body also be­
come comic - even the shy one, that is, the persons who is embarrassed by the
7
presence of his own body. Bergson concludes by remarking on the comic effect
made by describing a person as a thing.
This is followed by an analysis of the comic in situations. Bergson compares
this to three kinds of children’s plays. Firstly the Jack-in-the-box (“le diable à
ressort”, p. 53-59/38-41): a fixed idea, a thought continually being suppressed
but always struggling up to the surface. Secondly the “Dancing Jack” (“le pantin
à ficelles”, p. 59-61/41-42): the puppet, governed by other people, and thirdly
the “snowball” (“la boule de neige”, p. 61-63/42-45), that keeps rolling down
the hill, getting larger and larger, that is, a situation that keeps getting worse.
However, dealing with the snowball, Bergson remarks that it is even more funny
with the situation that keeps going round in a circle, where everything that is
done is done in vain, the situation that ends where it began (p. 63-68/45-47).
An analysis of the tools of the farce results in the following list: firstly, the
repetition (“la repetition”, pp. 8-71/47-48), like the Jack-in-the-Box, but here it
concerns a situation and not a thought that keeps recurring, in contrast to the
stream of life where otherwise everything happens only once. Secondly, the in­
version (“l’inversion”, p. 71-73/48-49): mixed roles, the impostor becomes the
deceived one, the thief gets robbed etc., a symmetrical structure that becomes
comic by means of images of recent corresponding situations. And thirdly, the
reciprocal interference (“l’interférence des series”, p. 73-77/49-52): equivocal
situations, dramatic irony (although Bergson does not use the term) and stage-
made misunderstandings.
In the following section Bergson analyses the comedy based on language,
which he determines to follow the same laws as the forms of comedy described
above, with the one difference that this form is very hard to translate (p. 79/53).
In this sort of comedy, the language itself becomes comic. Bergson finds that
comic scenes can be summarised with a well-known witticism; in fact a comic
scene is a sort of condensed witticism (p. 79-84/53-56). As an example he re­
lates the scene in Molière where a father has summoned the doctor to examine