Franz Kafka: The Necessity of Form

344 Pages·1990·9.752 MB·English

by  Stanley Corngold

Franz Kafka
The Necessity of Form
ALSO BY STANLEY CORNGOLD
BOOKS
The Commentators' Despair: The Interpretation of Kafka's
"Metamorphosis"
The Fate of the Self: German Writers and French Theory
EDITED WORKS
Aspekte der Goethezeit (with Michael Curschmann and Theodore
Ziolkowski)
Ausgewahlte Prosa by Max Frisch
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
Thomas Mann, 1875-1975 (with Richard Ludwig)
FranzK afka
The Necessity of Form
by Stanley Corngold
CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS • ITHACA AND LONDON
Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities/
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program.
Copyright © 1988 by Cornell University
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book,
or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission
in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University
Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850, or visit
our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.
First published 1988 by Cornell University Press
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Corngold, Stanley.
Franz Kafka : the necessity of form.
Includes index.
1.Kafka, Franz, 1883–1924. 2. Authors, Austrian—20th century—Biography.
I. Title.
PT2621.A26Z664 1988 833′.912 [B] 88-47721
ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-2199-0 (cloth) — ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-9768-1 (pbk.)
The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
My whole being is directed toward literature; I have followed this
direction unswervingly .. ., and the moment I abandon it I cease to
live.E verything I am, and am not, is a result. ... It is the earthly
reflection of a higher necessity.
FRANZ KAFKA, Letters to Felice (1913)
From the West all content acquires meaning from form only, one's
gaze is fixed only on form, courtesy of Flaubert .... It became the
feature of apocalypse: the task of reality pure and simple, the
transposition of all substance into form, into the formula.
GOTTFRIED BENN, "Ziichtung I"
He does not live for the sake of his personal life; he does not think
for the sake of his personal thoughts.I t seems to him that he lives
and thinks under the compulsion of a family, which, it is true, is
itself superabundant in life and thought, but for which he constitutes,
in obedience to some law unknown to him, a formal necessity.
FRANZ KAFKA, The Great Wall of China (1920)

Contents
Preface lX
Acknowledgments XVll
Abbreviations for Kafka Citations XlX
Introduction I
PART I KAFKA'S CAREER
I '"You,' I Said . . ." : Kafka Early and Late 13
2 The Hermeneutic of "The Judgment" 24
3 The Metamorphosis: Metamorphosis of the 47
Metaphor
4 Metaphor and Chiasm 90
5 Kafka's Double Helix
ms
PART II KAFKA'S CONTEXT
6 Kafka, Nietzsche, and the Question of Literary 139
History
7 Consternation: The Anthropological Moment in
Prose Fiction (Cervantes, Flaubert, Kafka)
Vll
Contents
8 The Curtain Half Drawn: Prereading in Flaubert 203
and Kafka
9 The Trial/"In the Penal Colony": The Rigors of 228
Writing
IO Kafka as Expressionist 250
EXCURSUS ON METHOD
II Principles of Kafka Interpretation 291
12 "The Pure Expression": An Exemplary Reading 299
of Kafka
Index 313
Vlll
Preface
To say what Kafka's work means is to say more than one can, if
meanings depend on descriptions of experience, having beginnings
and ends. For here, in Holderlin's words, "beginning and end no
longer allow themselves to be coupled together like rhymes. "1 Kafka
himself doubted that "TheJudgment"-the story he loved the best­
meant anything "straightforward" and "coherent. "2 But the want of
such meaning should not suggest something fugitive or arabesque
about his achievement. Kafka's work is informed by a literally
cabalistic stringency that draws reading after reading to itself-in­
cluding readings based on experience. This is a fact about its power to
invite disclosure by experience, not its need to be improved by it.
Indeed, recent studies of Kafka have been less and less concerned with
reproducing the description of personal experience that Kafka's work
purportedly makes. In other words, Kafka is rarely read today as if he
were writing in the discursive system of I 800, in which, as Friedrich
I. This sentence is Friedrich HOlderlin's description of Nature in dissolution; see
Siimtliche Werke (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1961), 5:220. Sources for the foregoing
epigraphs are LF 313; Gottfried Benn, "Ziichtung I," in Gesammelte Werke: Essays,
Reden, Vortriige (Wiesbaden: Limes, 1959), 1:217; GW 269.
2. In a letter to Felice Bauer dated June 2, 1913, Kafka wrote: "Can you discover
any meaning in 'The Judgment' -some straightforward, coherent meaning that one
could follow? I can't find any, nor can I explain anything in it" (LF 265). Silvio Vietta
notes, "In Kafka's stories 'meaning' itself is thematized"; see "Franz Kafka, Expres­
sionism, and Reification," trans. Douglas Kellner, in Passion and Rebellion: The Expres­
sionist Heritage, ed. Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas Kellner (South Hadley, Mass.:
Bergin, 1983), p. 2ro.
IX