Our Trial: Franz Kafka's Challenge to Literary Theory

Our Trial: Franz Kafka's Challenge to Literary TheoryAuthor(s): Judith RyanSource: NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Spring, 1985), pp. 257-266Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1345791 .

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Review Essay* Our Trial: Franz Kafka's Challenge to Literary Theory

JUDITH RYAN

Like iron filings around a magnet, most critical methods gravitate towards a certain set of intrinsically suitable texts. But Kafka seems accessible to almost any methodology one might care to apply. In fact, he appears to be the ideal subject for a course in "approaches to literature." The debate on validity in interpretation is not likely to end in the foreseeable future, if at all; but even those who believe in the possibility of multiple and equi-valent interpretations must be disconcerted by the claims of the various conflicting Kafka readings to represent the sole and unequivocal truth about his texts. Only a deliberate blur- ring of focus can reconcile, for example, the Freudian and the existential readings: if both are held to be applicable at once, they lose some of the very specificity that makes them useful tools for textual analysis. The critics' playground is at the same time the critics' problem. While Kafka may not be in the foreground of current literary interest, the irritation he continues to present may well be the test case for critical theory. Is our failure to resolve the Kafka problem an unperceived signal of a fundamental methodological bankruptcy?

In starting more from the dilemma than from the texts the newest group of Kafka scholars may at last be on the right track, and it may be useful for literary scholars in general to know what they are doing. The case is by no means closed nor have the implications for critical theory yet been worked out; but a start has been made. One difficulty is that this most recent step in Kafka scholarship is taking place in Germany, mapped onto a critical system somewhat removed from those most familiar in this country and against a background of earlier work on Kafka not all of which is as canonical outside the world of "Germanistik" as within it. The near-synchrony of these studies' appearance and the finely overlapping nature of their insights make one wish that their authors could have been-not solitary writers of separate books-but participants in one of those rare conferences that really moves a scholarly field along. By contrast the events of the Kafka centennial in 1983 (in which I myself par- ticipated) did less to advance the field than to make public what was already in fact its penultimate stage. Some of them, such as the exhibition at the Pompi- dou that reinforced the image of an essentially absurdist or surrealist Kafka, were actually retrogressive. The newer German critics do their best to under- mine this kind of "pigeon-holing" of Kafka, revealing in their different ways

* Judith Ryan's essay, looking back to the 1983 Franz Kafka centennial, is the second of Novel's annual major review essays designed to survey the most significant work being done in a particular field. Last year Robert Scholes grappled with Stanley Fish, Frank Kermode, and Frederick Jameson in his study of the new relation between texts and critics.



258 NOVELISPRING 1985

how Kafka puts into question not only such conventional and convenient categories but all categories of human thought whatsoever. I shall present here primarily four recent books on Kafka: all of them concerned with a single range of problems. In order to make their work intelligible it will be necessary to summarize quickly the now canonical studies that form the background to the new books, as well as the work of two forerunners who have made these recent developments possible.

In asking not so much "what is Kafka about?" as "what gives rise to our difficulties with Kafka?" the new critics in effect mediate between two poles of traditional Kafka scholarship, the search for an ultimate meaning behind the texts and the description of their inner workings. This is not to say that the two had never been combined before. In fact, the classical work on Kafka had never entirely ignored the one for the other. Even apparently structural analyses, such as those of Friedrich Beifner, the first to draw explicit attention to Kafka's characteristic narrative technique, were ultimately engaged in a search for the meaning behind the structures.' Beifner's discovery-since modified by a series of other scholars-that the "Kafkaesque" effect was due in large measure to a radical limitation of narrative point of view was presented from the start within the context of a specific interpretation of the texts' significance: Kafka's stories, Bei/ner claimed, borrowing a phrase from Kafka himself, were the direct presentation of their author's "dreamlike inner life." Their "meaning" thus lay not only in their reference to Kafka's individual self-perception but also in their exploration of the nature of subjectivity itself. In this sense the various structural studies that followed Beipner's lead were never in fact "empty" structuralism but found their raison d'etre in the explication of Kafka's critique of subjectivity. This line of enquiry forms a vital starting-point for the new Kafka criticism.

But despite the elaboration by his successors of Beipner's conception of point of view in Kafka, the most influential close readings of the texts were provided by Wilhelm Emrich.2 Emrich's contribution was a view of Kafka's oeuvre as a whole in which an underlying model could be discerned beneath the individual narratives. Though his presuppositions were never fully spelled out, they formed an almost leitmotivic network of terms that held his analysis together. Like Bei/ner, Emrich saw subjectivity as one of Kafka's principal themes, but he accounted for its predominance not by referring to Kafka's private dream- world but by situating his work within the context of twentieth-century alienation. It was alienation, in Emrich's view, that gave rise to the typically Kafkan "reification" of subjectivity; it was alienation that caused what he termed the "revolt of objects," their seeming refusal to be integrated into the subjective world; it was alienation that produced the fetishistic character of Kafka's work altogether. We will see how the apparent recalcitrance of the objective world is picked up in a new way by the recent critics. Emrich differs from them, however,

1 Notably in Der Erziihler Franz Kafka (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1952). 2 Franz Kafka (Bonn: Athenaium, 1958).



JUDITH RYAN [KAFKA'S CHALLENGE 259

in his belief that behind the aberrations and distortions of subjectivity there is an ultimate truth to be sought, and that Kafka's work is thus an embodiment of "absolute being." Here an unspoken ideology forced the work into its own preconceived categories.

The other canonical study that contributes-though far less directly-to the recent spate of books on Kafka is the work of Walter Sokel.3 Sokel's approach is essentially a psychological one; but rather than simply taking over and apply- ing categories from psychoanalytic theory, it uses psychoanalytical methods to define the sense in which Kafka's texts are related to what we take to be reality. He sees the stories as ambivalent, suspended between the poles of two selves: an outer self and a "pure" inner self. The texts embody the mechanisms- displacements springing from a fundamental conflict between self and world- by which consciousness both conceals and reveals the subconscious. However they are to be accounted for, such displacements are clearly at the heart of the Kafka problem, and Sokel's attention to these mechanisms, indeed his recognition of them as mechanisms, has implications that go beyond the actual terminology in which he couches his argument. The newer German studies are in no sense psychological approaches, but they are all acutely aware of the displacement mechanism in one guise or another.

If these classical studies, along with most of the rest of Kafka scholarship, seek to find meaning in essentially puzzling literary structures, two later works that may perhaps come to be regarded as turning-points begin to attack the problem of meaning itself. The first of these is Jbrgen Kobs' voluminous book, elaborately detailed, marvelously suggestive, but left unrevised by his untimely death.4 Unlike the vast tomes of Emrich and Sokel, held together by strong unifying themes, Kobs' finely-textured analysis has perhaps prevented its assim- ilation by other than the most devoted Kafka specialists. Seemingly an elaboration and correction of Bei/ner, it is in fact a pathbreaking book. Using linguistics where it might today use deconstruction, it attends to the rifts and discontinuities in what for Bei/ner had been Kafka's consistently limited point-of-view technique. Kobs is not content with merely demonstrating that Kafka's narratives are less single-mindedly subjective than Beilner had supposed; he asks rather about the meaningfulness of an analysis of point of view, what results it can be expected to bring and where its intrinsic limitations lie. Thus his discussion of what he calls "retrograde finality" in Kafka (the apparently circular dynamics of the texts) anchors this phenomenon not in the vague notions of "absurdity" that have so long plagued Kafka scholarship, but rather in the paradoxical nature of human consciousness as such. In focusing on those aspects of the texts that resist interpretation he takes an important step in the debate on the seemingly polysemantic character of Kafka's narratives. For Kobs the interpretability of Kafka is precisely a function of his uninterpretability: the inconsisten-

a Franz Kafka-Tragik und Ironie (Munich: Fisher, 1964).

SKafka. Untersuchungen zu Bewuptsein und Sprache seiner Gestalten, ed. Ursula Brech (Bad Homburg: Athenaium, 1970).




cies that have customarily been accounted for by an array of different interpretative models are in actuality the points of resistance beyond which the human mind cannot go. They are not there to be filled in but to mark the limitations of subjectivity. The protagonists' attempts to step beyond the categories of thought only succeed in sending them back to the very framework they were seeking to escape. This understanding of inconsistency and resistance in Kafka is crucial to the recent turning taken by the criticism, which now views the very places in Kafka that cannot be given meaning (in the sense of being read allegorically) as critical markers of meaning in texts whose very function is to explore meaning.

This is essentially the point of Horst Steinmetz' Suspensive Interpretation.5 This ectomorphic pendant and critique of Kobs' baggy monster is likely to be misunderstood-largely on account of its title, which seems to suggest that interpretation of Kafka must in effect be suspended. I do not believe that Steinmetz is to be read this way. Rather he is the first to have proposed what is now being elaborated by a series of others. Steinmetz' starting-point is an explicit discussion of the problem of interpretability in Kafka. He shows how any and all attempts to normalize Kafka, in other words to read his texts within the categories of accepted literary methodologies, are basically doomed to failure. Interpretative strategies are revealed as approximative and ultimately inadequate theories, mere fictions that serve the illusory function of making reality accessible to thought. The various "approaches" simply refract reality into a multitude of perspectives. Although this suggests, as Steinmetz quite polemically states, that literary theory has basically failed in its task, it also opens the way for a different reading of Kafka that would not so refract the material. This consists in the acceptance of indeterminacy as a functional part of the text. To interpret such texts is precisely to define the relationship between the intelligible and the unintelligible, between what is accessible to thought and what resists thought. By focusing on the parallel between the readers' attempts to make sense of the narratives and their protagonists' attempts to make sense of their world, Stein- metz demonstrates the quintessential feature of Kafka's writing: the way in which it replicates the very structures of thought and experience.

This problem is the one taken up by the more recent scholarship I wish to present here. But there is another problem that Steinmetz addresses rather astutely, if somewhat more in passing: the question of Kafka's place in literary history. The issue is by no means irrelevant to the problem of interpretation; in fact, it is intricately bound up with it. Hitherto the general consensus of opinion seems to have been that Kafka was basically a solitary figure outside the accepted epoch divisions. If he is located historically, he is usually linked in a relatively undifferentiated manner with this literary movement or that school of thought. Few of these attempts at categorization have yielded very productive results. But Steinmetz' comment is genuinely thought-provoking: "His work is located between the traditional use of literary conventions in the nineteenth- century novel and the negativity of texts." 6 I will return to the implications of

SSuspensive Interpretation. Am Beispiel Franz Kafkas (G6ittingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1977). * Ibid., p. 79.



JUDITH RYAN!KAFKA'S CHALLENGE 261

this remark when I come to Sabina Kienlechner's interpretation. Before turning to Kienlechner and her contemporaries, however, I would like to take a look at one recent contribution to Kafka scholarship that does attempt to examine his place in literary tradition and to combine this with an analysis of Kafka's understanding of reality.

The title of Gerhard Kurz' book, Traum-Schrecken, is drawn from one of Kafka's letters to Milena in which he defines the word as "behaving, in a place where one does not belong, as if one were quite at home there." 7 The phrase is striking because it inverts the common impression that Kafka's texts thematize feelings of not belonging rather than behaviors of belonging. But a moment's reflection yields numerous examples from the works. The word "Traum- Schrecken" expresses very nicely that momentary start when we involuntarily put into question all those otherwise unreflecting actions that show how much we take ourselves and the world for granted. It is the moment of incomprehen- sion experienced by one character in Description of a Struggle upon awakening from an afternoon nap to hear his mother calling to a neighbor that she is just "taking tea outdoors." Of course, this early piece is the one work of Kafka most closely connected with his epoch; its imperfections derive in part from its adherence to the turn-of-the-century mood. But it is an essentially turn-of-the- century Kafka that Kurz presents us with: a Kafka intimately related to Nietzsche and Freud, Bahr and Hofmannsthal. This origin of Kafka's work in the thought and atmosphere of 1900 is a phenomenon that has yet to be fully worked out in the criticism, but Kurz does little more than sketch in from time to time, in a rather summary fashion, the basic network of connections. This is disappointing, for there can be no doubt that the historic Kafka has yet to be accurately located and defined. Kurz' method, however, is basically associative: Kafka is connected with the "crisis of language," with the reversal of traditional social hierarchies, and with the absolute interiorization characteristic of Expressionism. All these and many other familiar categories of the epoch are invoked in a somewhat random fashion at irregular intervals throughout his book. Exactly how this conglomerate of ideas fits together is never made explicit. There are numerous fascinating suggestions that deserve to be followed up-and doubtless many a dissertation-writer will do so-but the total picture remains incoherent.

Despite this element of slippage a predominating view of Kafka's historical position may nonetheless be extracted from Kurz' study. This is one of a Kafka suffering, like Hofmannsthal, from a "crisis of language," but seeing through the syndrome sufficiently to be able to use language for his own subversive purposes. If language does not reveal truth, this Kafka seems to say, then at least I can show it up for the sham it is. There is much to be said for this view of Kafka, but it hardly needed such recurrent reference to the epoch for its sup- port; it could equally well be derived from the more intrinsic studies that had preceded Kurz' book. Of greater need at this point is a more precise definition of how Kafka differs from his contemporaries of the "crisis of language." Here

STraum-Schrecken. Kafkas literarische Existenzanalyse (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1979), pp. 262, DM 46.00.




Kurz' notion of "subversive narration" might prove to be a valuable tool, and it is in his introduction and explication of this term that Kurz' contribution to the scholarship lies.

The term itself is the logical consequence of those critiques of Bei3ner that had shown that Kafka's narrative point of view was not strictly speaking the representation of an unbroken subjectivity. Before Steinmetz the hints of a reality other than that accessible to the individual consciousness had been taken as pointers to a positive truth outside the phenomenal world. For Steinmetz they were indeterminacies that marked the inadequacy of the categories of thought. In accordance with his emphasis on the "crisis of language," Kurz turns the problem another way: for him it is not so much that man is excluded from truth as that he does not have the means to express it. Kafka's narrative technique takes as its starting-point naive suppositions about meaning and continuity and systematically undermines them; it sets up significances and simultaneously implies that things are quite different. This is, I think, an accurate assessment of what Kafka is doing; and the point about his subversiveness is well taken. But by equating the critique of consciousness with the critique of language, Kurz cannot do full justice to the radicality of Kafka's methods. Kafka's subversiveness goes much further than Kurz imagines and the phenomenon of "Traum- Schrecken" springs from something more alarming than the inadequacy of the language at our disposal.

The problem of perception and knowledge is the subject of Margret Walter- Schneider's book, Denken als Verdacht.8 As the title suggests, her Kafka too has an element of the subversive about him, but it takes the form more of problem- atizing the structure of thought than of radically undermining it. Deriving again from the BeiJner-Kobs axis of Kafka scholarship, Walter-Schneider's analysis is essentially an investigation of Kafka's presentation of perception and subjectivity that attempts to provide a systematic logical framework for the dilemmas Kafka portrays. Her basic insight is not really new, but it had not been elaborated at this length before. She shows that while our access to the world of objects is foreclosed by the subjectivity of perception, it is precisely this subjectivity that is our only means for perceiving the object. The phenomenon underlies most of the familiar paradoxes of Kafka's texts, and Walter-Schneider intro- duces it most appositely by a perceptive analysis of "Die Sorge des Hausvaters" and its peculiar object Odradek. It is useless to puzzle over the meaning of the name, she points out, since it is chosen for the very purpose of naming what cannot be comprehended. In its confusing conglomeration of oddly assorted details, Odradek represents the object as such, which must necessarily remain inaccessible to subjectivity.

Like Kurz, Walter-Schneider also regards the problem as in part one of language. She contrasts in a whole series of analyses the thing seen with the thing communicated in an attempt to show why it is so often impossible for

8 Denken als Verdacht. Untersuchungen zum Problem der Wahrnehmung im Werk Franz Kafkas (Zurich and Munich: Artemis, 1980), pp. 163, DM 49.00.



JUDITH RYANIKAFKA'S CHALLENGE 263

Kafka's protagonists to give expression to what they have observed. But unlike Kurz she believes that Kafka saw in language a way of gaining distance from what otherwise subsists only in the immediacy of perception. Yet his simul- taneous mistrust of language accounts in her view for the deliberate reduction of vocabulary he undertook. This may be, but her emphasis on communication seems to result from a dual usage of the terms "subject" and "object." One of her prime cases is the tale of the scientific dog who never succeeds in solving the mystery of where food comes from. In her interpretation of the music episode she claims that the dog has now become the "object of outside forces." In this new state his perception expands and changes in kind, she says, so that he comes into greater knowledge than he would otherwise have. But as soon as he attempts to communicate these insights to his fellow-dogs he is unable to do so since he has become once more a "subject." Yet if he has been an "object" of outside forces, this word is surely used in a different sense; any kind of experience, even the puzzling one the dog has of music, must be apprehended by subjectivity. The point of the story is to be found rather in the discrepancies the dog notes between the various aspects of his (subjective) experience, discrepancies that lead him to suspect that subjectivity might not be reliable. It is a pity that Walter-Schneider did not restrict herself to a somewhat more rigorous exploration of her central notion, thinking as suspicion, as distrust of its own validity.

This difficulty becomes especially evident when she comes to discuss those texts which seem to present solutions to the epistemological dilemma. In claim- ing that certain of Kafka's characters are successful because they become subject to a kind of "enchantment," a magical transformation that removes them for a time from the sphere of subjectivity, she reveals an underlying dualism that ultimately prevents her understanding of Kafka's critique of thought from detaching itself fully from the kind of metaphysics that informs the canonical Kafka scholarship (notably Emrich). One of her examples here is "The Silence of the Sirens," perhaps Kafka's wittiest presentation of the problem of knowledge, cast in a life-or-death format. But this is no example of enchantment. Odysseus survives the sirens' cunning deception (although they appear to be singing, they are not in fact doing so) by refusing to "hear their silence," i.e. by disregarding both the conventions and the intrinsic logic of thought. To see this piece, and a number of similar examples from The Castle and elsewhere, as a mystery or a miracle is to stop short of what Kafka scholarship really needs: a precise analysis of the mechanisms by which such subversions of thought can be carried out within the very parameters of thought.

By adopting a methodology akin to that of Adorno and his followers, Sabina Kienlechner is able to give a more coherent and rigorous account of the problem of knowledge in Kafka." Her starting-point is ingenious because it is one that might, in the wrong hands, have led to a mere repetition of misguided cliches

* Negativitit der Erkenntnis im Werk Franz Kafkas. Eine Untersuchung zu seinem Denken anhand einiger spilter Texte (Tiibingen: Niemeyer, 1981), pp. 165, DM 46.00.



264 NOVELjSPRING 1985

about Kafka. By a bold and original stroke she begins by interpreting Kafka's aphorisms on the Biblical passages about the fall of man as essentially a-religious texts. They are, rather, an extensive exploration of how we can have access to absolute truth. She concludes that such knowledge can only be gained ex nega- tivo; our suffering in the world of exclusion from knowledge is the negative trace that points to what is impossible for us ever to know.

This way of seeing the texts as signs to what cannot be presented yields some fine interpretations, even if one does not agree that Kafka believed in the existence of a truth beyond the phenomenal world. Kienlechner shows, for example, that the hunger artist and the panther that replaces him after his death are not alternatives, but rather the positive and negative of the one image. The hunger artist's ultimately successful attempt to remove himself from the "haecceitas" of this world, of whose negativity he alone is aware, leaves as a marker its negative trace, the vitalism of the panther who accepts this world without awareness of its actually delusive nature.

This may seem to represent only a very subtle modification of the familiar view of the hunger artist and the panther as opposites. But in the last section of her book Kienlechner turns the insights gained from this model analysis to a tale considerably more in need of explication, "Josephine, the Singer." It is too easy to read the story of the mouse singer as a Kafkan elaboration of the artist novella in the manner of Thomas Mann. Kienlechner deals, however, less with the relation of Josephine to the rest of the mouse-folk than with the puzzling ordinariness of Josephine's singing. Again and again the narrator of the tale emphasizes that although Josephine behaves as if she were engaged in a great artistic performance, and although indeed the other mice also respond to it as if to high art, everyone knows perfectly well that her singing is not really even singing at all. But in its very negativity it represents a kind of art that in fact surpasses the highest worldly art: its nothingness reveals the illusory nature of this world and acts as a pointer to a truth that lies beyond the grasp of worldly thought.

In keeping with the new emphasis on the subversive nature of Kafka's writing Kienlechner sees his presentation of the negative trace as an act of resistance. By conceiving of the possibility of another reality beside that of phenomenality, Kafka is attempting, in Kienlechner's view, to resist the dictates of this world. In The Castle, for example, K. persistently flies in the face of all that he is told, believing in his calling as a land surveyor and hoping for admis- sion to the castle and to the revelations he desires. In so doing K. rebels against the accepted laws of logic and holds fast to the possibility that they can ultimately be set aside. By the dialectics of the Adornian method, this kind of subversion, though negative in its actual form, must be read in a positive light. Returning to her starting-point, the biblical aphorisms in Kafka's notebooks, Kienlechner defines the positive face of Kafka's negative impression as a religion without religion, a way of escaping the dictates of reality that parallels the religious way without in any sense being identical with it.



JUDITH RYANIKAFKA'S CHALLENGE 265

If Kienlechner's interpretation is an impressive adaptation to the texts of a method derived from outside the texts, Susanne Kepler's recent book is an analysis of the same problem that stays much more closely within the terms of the material itself.10 Like Kurz and Walter-Schneider she begins with a study of language in Kafka, but it soon becomes apparent that this is just the first stage in an argument that moves to encompass modes of thought in general. And while Kepler is fully aware of Kafka's concern with these problems in the turn-of-the-century critique of language, she also shows that the paradoxes generated by his working through of linguistic and epistemological questions are more than just the typical issues that confounded his contemporaries. They are, as she quite rightly points out, "problems of thought in general, including scientific thought, that still today remain unresolved." 1

Even Kepler's discussion of linguistic scepticism in Kafka is far more specific than that of any of her predecessors. She demonstrates at some length how Kafka thematizes this issue, first in Amerika, where Karl's attempt to learn English is an important phase of his development, then in The Trial, where Josef K.'s resistance to the new meanings the court gives to familiar words plays a central role. In the latter novel it culminates in his confusing meeting with the Italian businessman where his inability to understand the foreign language anticipates his inability to interpret the legend told him in the cathedral. Working from recent developments in philosophy, KePler examines the function of language in the conflict between experienced reality and postulated ultimate truth that underlies Kafka's writing. She points out, for example, that K,'s status as a land surveyor is in fact less paradoxical than it may at first appear. Imperative sentences have no truth value, and K.'s assertion of his employment is made precisely in this form: "Let it be said that I am the land surveyor" is what the original German says.

From this and similar analyses of the truth-value of language in Kafka's texts Kepler develops a new and plausible theory about Kafka's critique of thought. The narratives, she maintains, are neither fantastic projections of a solipsistic mind nor reflections of a dreamlike inner truth but attempts to make concretely visible the consequences of logical thought. Like Steinmetz she sees the gaps and indeterminacies as ways of breaking through the consensus of conventional ways of thinking, but she diverges from her predecessors in regarding Kafka's fictions as comprised of coexistent interlocking "possible worlds." In The Trial, for example, the world of the office and the world of the court are not to be understood as an opposition between, say, the real and the spiritual. Both worlds, as KePler sees it, are presentations of a possible way of perceiving and thinking; each has its own logical consistency which is not in any way affected by its coexistence with the other. Whereas Steinmetz had regarded Kafka's critique of thought as an attempt to invalidate thought, Kepler views it as an experiment with multiple possibilities. This conception allows her to see Kafka

1o Kafka-Poetik der sinnlichen Welt (Ttibingen: Metzler, 1983), pp. 214, DM 72.00.

11 Ibid., p. 114.




as a positive rather than a negative innovator, while at the same time radically eliminating the hierarchical dualisms that had hitherto been the hallmark and the stumbling-block of Kafka scholarship.

One gratifying aspect of the new group of Kafka studies is the way they range freely and equally over the entire corpus of his work. In this they contrast strikingly with another recent publication, Charles Bernheimer's Flaubert and Kafka, a psychoanalytic interpretation that makes use of new developments in literary theory but sticks very closely to those works of Kafka which respond best to this kind of treatment, notably The Judgment and The Trial.12 The books I have presented here-in fact only a selection from the flourishing Kafka literature of the last few years13--show that it is possible to find a way of looking at Kafka that does not privilege one class or group of stories over another. But they also show how thoroughly and how radically Kafka understood the business of writing fiction. In revealing Kafka's concern with the critique of thought they help us to place his fiction where it properly belongs, as a subset of a certain kind of enquiry into logic. Of course all fiction is a category of thought, and all fiction sets up one variety or another of possible worlds. In thematizing this fact and in dramatizing the clash between different sets of logical possibilities, Kafka can be shown to be a true representative of his epoch (one has only to think, for example, of Robert Musil).

These new enquiries have pushed Kafka criticism to a high level of abstraction. But they account for the whole phenomenon Kafka in a way that was not possible with the more familiar "approaches." The consequences for literary criticism, which may require a more complex meta-theory than is at present available, have yet to be drawn.

12 Flaubert and Kafka. Studies in Psychopoetic Structure (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 280, $24.00.

18I should like to make special mention of Richard Jayne's Erkenntnis und Transzendenz. Zur Hermeneutik

literarischer Texte. Kafka: Forschungen eines Hundes (Munich: Fink, 1983), pp. 116, DM 28.00, an analysis of a single narrative which sees the text as itself enacting the hermeneutical process of literary interpretation. Jayne concerns himself with Kafka's portrayal of the epistemological dilemma, but ultimately regards this as based on a belief in transcendence.



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Our Trial: Franz Kafka's Challenge to Literary Theory