Constructive destruction : Kafka's aphorisms, literary tradition, and literary transformation

314 Pages·1987·50.57 MB·English

by  Kafka

STUDIEN ZUR DEUTSCHEN
LITERATUR Band 9l
Herausgegeben von Wilfried Barner, Richard Brinkmann
und Conrad Wiedemann

Richard T. Gray
Constructive Destruction
Kafka's Aphorisms:
Literary Tradition and Literary Transformation
Max Niemeyer Verlag Tübingen 1987
CIP-Kurztitelaufnahme der Deutschen Bibliothek
Gray, Richard T.:
Constructive destruction : Kafka's aphorisms : literary tradition and literary transfor-
mation / Richard T. Gray. - Tübingen : Niemeyer, 1987.
(Studien zur deutschen Literatur ; Bd. 91)
NE:GT
ISBN 3-484-18091-9 ISSN 0081-7236
© Max Niemeyer Verlag Tübingen 1987
Alle Rechte vorbehalten. Ohne Genehmigung des Verlages ist es nicht gestattet, dieses
Buch oder Teile daraus photomechanisch zu vervielfältigen. Printed in Germany.
Satz und Druck: Laupp & Göbel, Tübingen
Einband: Heinrich Koch, Tübingen
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
CHAPTER ONE:
History, Tradition, and Structure of the Aphorism 21
I. The History of the Aphorism 24
II. The German and French Models of Aphoristic Expression . . .. 36
III. The Text-Internal Dialectic of the Aphorism 46
IV. Aphorism and Hermeneutics:
The Text-External Dialectic 52
V. Aphorism and Linguistic Scepticism 60
CHAPTER Two:
Aphorism and Aphorists in Turn-of-the-Century Austria 64
I. Aphorism and Zeitgeist 65
II. From Impression to Epiphany:
The Aphorism in the Austrian Jahrhundertwende 85
A) Ambivalence Toward the Form of the Aphorism 87
B) The Aphorism of Impression 90
C) The Aphorism of Epiphany 93
III. Aphorism and Sprachkrise in Turn-of-the-Century Austria . .. 98
A) Aphorism and Spracbkritik 99
B) Mzudmer's Kritik der Sprache 101
C) Hofmannsthal's Chandos 103
D) Musil: Essayism and Aphoristics 109
E) Karl Kraus: Aphorism and Critique of Sprachgebrauch 112
F) Wittgenstein's Tractatus 116
CHAPTER THREE:
Kafka: Aphoristic Text and Aphoristic Context 119
I. Kafka and Turn-of-the-Century Austria 121
II. Kafka's Inclination Toward Aphoristic Utterances 124
III. Kafka and "Aphoristics" 134
A) The Conflict of Individual and Universal 135
B) Aphorism and the Fragmentary 149
C) Dynamism and Perspectivism 154
D) Kafka's Conceptual Patterns 159
IV. Kafka's Aphorisms and the Crisis of Communication 163
CHAPTER FOUR:
Kafka and his Aphoristic Precursors 172
I. Aphorism and Autobiography:
Self-Observation and Self-Projection 174
II. Pascal and Kierkegaard:
Scepticism and Critical Method 190
III. Aphorism and Polemics: Karl Kraus 203
CHAPTER FIVE:
Kafka's Aphorisms: Intratext and Intertext 210
I. Compositional History and Compositional Strategies of Kafka's
Aphorisms 216
II. Form and Structure of Kafka's Aphorisms 233
A) Lexical Features 236
B) Metaphor 244
C) Syntactic Elements 252
D) Logical Structures 253
CHAPTER Six:
Aphorism and Met-Aphorism:
The Relationship of Aphorism and Parable in Kafka's (Euvre 264
BIBLIOGRAPHY 293
VI
"Sentenzen-Leser. - Die schlechtesten Leser von Senten-
zen sind die Freunde ihres Urhebers, im Falle sie beflis-
sen sind, aus dem Allgemeinen wieder auf das Beson-
dere zurückzuraten, dem die Sentenz ihren Ursprung
verdankt: denn durch diese Topfguckerei machen sie die
ganze Mühe des Autors zunichte, so daß sie nun ver-
dientermaßen anstatt einer philosophischen Stimmung
und Belehrung besten- oder schlimmstenfalls nichts als
die Befriedigung der gemeinen Neugierde zum Gewinn
erhalten."
Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches
Introduction
Franz Kafka the aphorist has undergone a radically different critical reception
than either Franz Kafka the novelist/storyteller or Franz Kafka the artistic
personality. While Kafka's novels and stories have become the standard
"acid-test" by which innovative interpretive methodologies must measure
their efficacy, Kafka's aphorisms have been greatly ignored, or treated as
mere adjuncts to his letters and diaries, and thus as reflexes indicative prima-
rily of trends in his life, and only secondarily of transformations in his art and
poetics.1 It is remarkable, in fact, that in spite of the geometrical progression
with which secondary literature on Kafka's art and life has appeared, as
recently as 1980 one critic could remark that Kafka's aphorisms have re-
mained terra incognita.2 However, while the aphorisms have only infre-
quently been treated as texts meriting in and of themselves careful literary-
critical analysis, even a cursory glance at most scholarly investigations of
Kafka's work betrays the fundamental role these texts have played in the
evolution and support of critical opinions on Kafka. Not uncommonly Kaf-
ka's aphoristic pronouncements become points of departure for the interpre-
tation of his works as a whole; and almost without exception the aphorisms
serve as interpretive instruments by means of which critics of diverse
ideological and methodological persuasions demonstrate the "authenticity"
of specific interpretations of any and all of Kafka's narratives. Ultimately,
however, one wonders whether these aphoristic texts, which make up such a
1 See Hartmut Binder, Motiv und Gestaltung bei Frank , Abhandlungen zur
Kunst-, Musik- und Literaturwissenschaft, Bd. 37 (Bonn: Bouvier, 1966), p. 85;
henceforth-cited as MuG.
2 Claude David, "Die Geschichte Abrahams: Zu Kafkas Auseinandersetzung mit
Kierkegaard," Bild und Gedanke: Festschrift für Gerhan Baumann zum 60. Ge-
burtstag, ed. Günter Schnitzler, et al. (Munich: Fink, 1980), p. 80.
l
small portion of Kafka's ceuvre, have not been accorded an interpretive
weight incommensurate with their actual significance. This is the central
problem which this study seeks to clarify. It attempts to define the position
of Kafka's aphoristic writings in relation to his life and works, as well as in
the context of the history of the aphorism as literary genre.
Compared with the body of aphorisms produced by such writers as
Lichtenberg, Nietzsche, or Karl Kraus, Kafka's aphoristic production ap-
pears exceedingly small: we possess only two aphoristic collections by Kaf-
ka, the so-called "Betrachtungen über Sünde, Leid, Hoffnung und den
wahren Weg," and the group of reflections entitled "Er." Taken together
these collections include only about 150 texts. It is possible, of course, to
recognize and isolate aphoristic remarks in Kafka's letters, diaries, and - to a
more limited extent - in his novels and stories. Still, even after these sources
have been examined, Kafka's aphoristic production remains slight. Despite
this scant quantity of aphorisms, Kafka is generally recognized as one of the
significant aphorists in modern German literature, on occasion even ac-
claimed as one of the greatest German aphorists,3 and he is consistently
represented in anthological collections of aphorisms.4 Certainly, Kafka is
known as an author of outstanding quality, not as one of extensive quantity,
and this is true for his aphorisms as well as for his narrative works.
Upon initial reflection one is surprised to find that an author prized for
such expansive narratives as Der Verschollene, Der Prozeß, and Das Schloß
would be recognized simultaneously as a prominent aphorist. In fact,
J. P. Stern alleges, with certain justification, that the impulse toward the
creation of aphorisms stands in diametrical opposition to the drive toward
narrative exposition.5 On the surface, at least, the apodictic force and well-
defined structure of Kafka's aphorisms contrast markedly with the con-
scious, mysterious subjectivity and infinitely expandable structure of the
novels; yet, as we shall see, even in this respect Kafka's aphorisms can
ultimately be connected with his fragmentary narratives. Indeed, characteris-
tic of Kafka's innovative narrative technique is an internal tension arising
from the desire for conclusiveness and apodictic certainty on the one hand,
This is the opinion of Eudo C. Mason, "The Aphorism," The Romantic Period in
Germany, ed. Siegbert Prawer (New York: Schocken Books, 1970), p. 229.
Most recently aphorisms by Kafka appeared in the anthology Deutsche Aphoris-
men, ed. Gerhard Fieguth, Reclam Universalbibliothek, 9889 (Stuttgart: Reclam,
1978); Kafka is also represented in the anthology Jüdische Aphorismen aus zwei
Jahrtausenden, ed. Egon Zeitlin (Frankfurt: Ner-Tamid-Verlag, 1963), in which,
surprisingly, Karl Kraus, the most prolific modern Jewish-German aphorist, is
absent.
J.P.Stern, Lichtenberg: A Doctrine of Scattered Occasions (Bloomington: Indiana
Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 192-3.
and, on the other, a labyrinthine openness and inconclusiveness which inces-
santly frustrates this drive for closure. Thus the commonly accepted contrast
between a sterile, legalistic, or bureaucratic style of language and the fantas-
tic, nightmarish, and often wildly imaginative narrated events can be as-
cribed to the creation of a linguistic structure, aphoristic in its precision and
laconism, which is constantly ruptured by "realities" it cannot contain.
Viewed in this manner, the spiraling process by which Kafka's narratives
typically develop (without going anywhere) appears as the persistent inter-
ruption of structural attempts at "aphoristic" closure.6 As our discussion of
the nature of aphoristic expression will elucidate, precisely this undermining
of its own persuasive structure and logic is constitutive of the aphorism as
genre.
In German literary history the marriage of aphoristic and novelistic form
has proven quite fruitful on different levels. Goethe, for example, included
aphoristic collections in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre and in Die Wahlver-
wandtschaften. Moreover, aphoristic utterances are frequently integrated in
an almost imperceptible way into the narrative discourse of the novel. Com-
monly, as for example in Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg, the characters of
a novel carry on discussions studded with aphoristic statements. At the same
time, characters often provide moralistic resumes of their situations in the
form of aphoristic-didactic observations. In addition, the narrator of a tale is
frequently in a position to supply aphoristic commentaries on the narrated
events.7 Significantly, however, Kafka's narratives display none of these
traditional patterns of integration between aphoristic and novelistic im-
pulses. Hence one is tempted to view Kafka's narratives as distinctly non-
aphoristic, since one of their fundamental characteristics is the technical im-
possibility of distanced commentaries on the narrated events by either
characters or narrator.8 Whereas aphoristic reflections occur in traditional
narratives in order to aid in the characterization of individuals or situations,
in Kafka's narratives such observations are smothered in the morass of un-
certain speculation which dominates the narrative. The unitary perspective
common to Kafka's narratives banishes any reflective commentary on the
The relationship of aphoristic and narrative tendencies in Kafka's literature will be
dealt with in chapter six.
The role of the "omniscient" narrator in much of the literature of realism is one of
aphoristic commentator.
Friedrich Beissner, Der Erzähler Franz Kafka: Ein Vortrag (Stuttgart: Kohlham-
mer, 1952) and Martin Waiser, Beschreibung einer Form: Versuch über Franz
Kafka, Ullstein Taschenbuch, Nr.2878 (1951; rpt. Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1972), esp.
p. 35, provided the earliest analyses of Kafka's narrative style and its effects; see
also Dietrich Krusche, Kafka und Kafka-Deutung: Die problematisierte Interak-
tion, Kritische Information, 5 (Munich: Fink, 1974), p. 29.
part of the narrator with regard to the narrated events; in addition, the
subjective isolation of each of Kafka's characters prevents them from attain-
ing distanced perspectives either on themselves or on the fictional events,
effectively preventing them from voicing any but the most myopic com-
mentaries. Yet on a structural level, Kafka's fiction displays traits analogous
to those of aphoristic expression; and altered application of the possibilities
of aphoristic expression in his novels is one symptom of Kafka's attempt to
problematize the naive objectivity of traditional fictional patterns inhering
both in the text itself and in the interactional structures with its readers.9
Any investigation of. Kafka's aphoristic texts must overcome a number of
initial hurdles. The first and most debilitating of these is the absence of a
reliable edition of these texts. While Max Brod's edition of Kafka's works,
appropriately termed by one critic a "Werkausgabe mit Schlagseite,"10 has
hampered the critical examination of all of Kafka's works, Brod's edition is
even more deceptive where the aphoristic texts are concerned. The appear-
ance of the historical-critical edition of Kafka's works should finally put
some of these problems to rest, but at this writing the volume containing
Kafka's aphorisms has not yet been published." The very nature of the
aphoristic text is responsible for its sensitivity to minor alterations. Apho-
risms are textual types which display an uncommon stylistic density and
which depend heavily on subtle internal-referential potentials of language. In
this sense aphoristic expression perhaps merely represents a concentrated
model of all "literary" language, in which every individual element is func-
tionally connected with the textual whole. Hence in the instance of minia-
ture, compact texts such as aphorisms, variants in a single word, or even in
punctuation, can radically alter the significance of the entire text. Franz
Mautner, for example, writes of the extraordinary sensitivity of the aphoris-
tic text: "Keine zweite Gattung ist so empfindlich gegen die Störung ihres
inneren Gleichgewichts wie diese, deren Wesen beinahe die labile Teilhabe
On the interaction of text and reader see Wolfgang Iser, Der implizite Leser (Mu-
nich: Fink, 1972); on Kafka's innovative strategies for altering the reading patterns
of his public, see Russell Berman, "Producing the Reader: Kafka and the Moder-
nist Organization of Reception," Newsletter of the Kafka Society of America, 6,
no. 1&2 (June & December, 1982), pp. 14-18.
Dieter Hasselblatt, Zauber und Logik: Eine Kafka Studie (Cologne: Verlag Wis-
senschaft und Politik, 1964), p. 9.
While necessity demands that I cite from Brod's currently available edition of the
aphorisms, I will describe in some detail the errors in his edition and the various
changes that these texts went through in Kafka's own process of composition or
revision. I an indebted to Professor Jürgen Born and to Hans-Gerd Koch for
permitting me access to the Kafka manuscripts in the "Forschungsstelle für Prager
Deutsche Literatur" at the Gesamthochschule Wuppertal.