Kafka's Stereoscopes

The Political Function of a Literary Style

Isak Winkel Holm

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501347832
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: German Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In 1911, Franz Kafka encountered the Kaiser Panorama: a stereoscopic peep show offering an illusion of three-dimensional depth. After the experience, he began to emulate the apparatus in his literary sketches, developing a style we might call "stereoscopic, " juxtaposing, like the optical stereoscope, two images of the same object seen from slightly different perspectives. Isak Winkel Holm argues that Kafka's stereoscopic style is crucial to an understanding of the relation between literature and politics in Kafka's work. At the level of content, the stereoscopic style offers a representation of the basic order of a specific community. At the level of form, the stereoscopic style is structured as the juxtaposition of two dissimilar images of the same community. At the level of function, finally, the style provokes a reconsideration, and perhaps even a reconfiguration, of the social order itself. With insights from literary studies, philosophical aesthetics and political theory, Kafka's Stereoscopes offers a detailed but highly readable argument for the relevance of Kafka's literary works in today's political reality.

Part I

One We Don’t Want to Accept Him

Content, Form, and Function of Kafka’s Stereoscopes: “Fellowship”

Over three chapters of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel Notes from Underground (1864), we read the story of a farewell dinner given for an officer, Zverkov, who is about to be transferred from St. Petersburg to a distant Russian province. The night before his departure, three former high-school friends meet to arrange the dinner to which the underground man, the protagonist of the novel, is explicitly not invited. “But this is our own narrow circle of friends,” one of the high-school friends says to the underground man. “It’s not an official gathering. Perhaps we don’t want you at all …”¹ The protagonist’s toe-curling efforts to gatecrash the dinner party lead, among other things, to problems of number. It is unclear how many dinner guests there will be the following evening and, hence, how many roubles the three friends (plus Zverkov) will have to spend: “With three of us that makes twenty-one altogether,” and “What will the four of us do with half a dozen bottles?”²

Kafka, an enthusiastic reader of Dostoyevsky, offers an abstracted version of the conflict between the underground man and the narrow circle of Zverkov’s friends in a short text from the autumn of 1920, published posthumously by Max Brod in 1936 under the title “Fellowship” (“Gemeinschaft”). I quote Kafka’s text in its entirety:

We are five friends, one day we came out of a house one after the other, first one came and placed himself beside the gate, then the second came or rather glided through the gate as gently as a little ball of quicksilver glides, and placed himself near the first one, then came the third, then the fourth, then the fifth. Finally we all stood in a row. People began to notice us, they pointed at us and said: Those five just came out of that house. Since then we have been living together; it would be a peaceful life if it weren’t for a sixth one constantly trying to meddle. He doesn’t do us any harm, but it annoys us, and that is harm enough; why does he intrude where he is not wanted? We don’t know him and don’t want to accept him. There was a time, of course, when the five of us did not know one another, either; and one could say that we still don’t know one another, but what is possible and can be tolerated by the five of us is not possible and cannot be tolerated with this sixth one. In any case, we are five and don’t want to be six. And what is the meaning of this continual being together anyhow? It is also meaningless for the five of us, but here we are together and will remain together; a new union, however, we do not want, exactly because of our experiences. But how is one to make all this clear to the sixth one? Long explanations would almost amount to accepting him in our circle, so we prefer not to explain and do not accept him. No matter how he pouts his lips we push him away with our elbows, but however much we push him away, back he comes. People count us and say: Earlier there were 5, now it is 6. No, we say and stamp our foot in the ground, “we are only 5.”³

If we compare the two representations of an awkward situation, it is evident that in “Fellowship” Kafka has stripped the situation of social particularities such as education and profession, thereby turning the tight circle of friends into a non-specific and diagrammatic community. The six individuals outside the house are distinguished by their complete lack of distinguishing features. Instead of names, the narrator—one of the five friends standing in a row—offers us merely numbers. As alike as balls of mercury, they seem to be elements of a scientific experiment or characters in a parable rather than individual human beings. Unlike the realist and naturalist novels that Kafka enjoyed reading (among them those of Dickens and Flaubert), his literary works do not offer any detailed panorama of the specific social, ethnic, and political communities of his day. Although deeply concerned with questions of Jewishness, for instance, in his literary works Kafka does not characterize a single fictional person by the word “Jew.”⁴ Instead, the groups of friends, family members, workers, villagers, jackals, dogs, and mice that populate Kafka’s literary works can be described as diagrammatic communities, and in that respect are similar to the five nameless friends standing outside a generic house.

Moreover, “Fellowship” also differs from Notes from Underground in its stereoscopic style. As we shall shortly see, the parable juxtaposes two disjunctive images of the tiny community outside the house, thereby offering the reader an unstable and uncanny aesthetic experience of the urban scene comparable to Kafka’s experience of the Italian urban view presented by the Kaiserpanorama in Friedland. In a sense, the reader perceives the narrow circle of friends as three-dimensional shapes in the strange wax figure-like atmosphere of the stereoscopic peep show. The sexual connotations of the word “peep show” are not beside the point here. In Kafka’s day, following the advent of silent movies, stereoscopic apparatuses were rendered obsolete and relegated to the field of pornography.⁵ As we shall see in Chapter 8, pornographic stereographs serve as templates for a number of scenes in The Trial. In “Fellowship,” the sexual connotations seem to be of a masturbatory nature. If we choose to see the five friends standing in a row as the five fingers of a hand and the sixth one as a penis or a pen, then the parable turns into a riddle, perhaps even a dirty joke, about the relationship between two kinds of solitary pleasure. Starting out from the micro-sociological analyses in Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, however, I will approach “Fellowship” as an exploration of social life, and not a reflection on the relation between the sexual life and the literary life. I begin by expounding on the three theses put forward in the introductory chapter concerning the content, form, and function of Kafka’s stereoscopes.

Living Together

According to my first thesis, the content of Kafka’s stereoscopes is the configuration of a community. The subject matter of “Fellowship” is the community outside the house, or, to be more precise, in fact two different communities referred to, respectively, as a “living together” and as a “continual being together.”⁶ Even if these two designations, “Zusammenleben” and “Beisammensein,” are nearly identical, they denote two different configurations of sociality.

The narrator claims that the five friends standing in a row are “living together.” He also refers to this “Zusammenleben” as “the five of us,” as “our circle,” and as a “union.” By hinting at “what is possible and can be tolerated by the five of us,” the narrator implies that this union of friends is bound together by a shared set of rules and norms.

But the narrator also refers to the group of all six individuals outside the house (that is, the five friends plus the burdensome sixth) as a “continual being together.” This “Beisammensein” is not a circle of friends but, rather, a crowd of non-friends. Speaking for his friends, the narrator is careful to point out that the rules and norms of the five do not apply to the sixth: “What is possible and can be tolerated by the five of us is not possible and cannot be tolerated with this sixth one.” Thus, this continual being together takes place outside the jurisdiction of the community of friends. This is probably why the communal life in question seems to consist of childishly or rudely pouting lips, pushing away, and then returning.

Yet even if the narrator briefly mentions the community’s social laws, he seems unconcerned with their content. Remarkably, he says nothing about what is, in fact, “possible and can be tolerated by the five of us.” Rather than actually applying the laws by judging specific acts to be either legal or illegal, moral or immoral, he restricts himself to passing judgment on the applicability of these laws. Whatever their content, the laws do not apply to the interaction between the five friends and the interloping sixth.

As we have seen, the six outside the house have neither names nor individual features, only numbers: “then the second came or rather glided through the gate as gently as a little ball of quicksilver glides.” Even if the small balls of mercury connote scientific matter-of-factness, they are in themselves figurative: the second friend glides through the gate as a ball of mercury might glide.⁷ If the social imaginary is to be defined as the store of figures, metaphors, symbols, and narratives with which a group of people conceive the basic shape of their own being together, then it plays an important role in “Fellowship” as the imaginative figuration of human beings as small balls of mercury. Indeed, the rhetorical image of the chemical element organizes the entire representation of communal life outside the house. The uniformity of the balls of mercury underlines the homogeneity of the union of friends, and the capacity for globules of quicksilver to easily merge into a larger ball emphasizes the group’s effortless formation.

Even if the mercury is mentioned only once at the beginning of the text, the rhetorical figure is implicitly present in what follows. Three times the narrator rejects the possibility of accepting the sixth individual by using the word “Aufnahme”: the five friends “don’t know him and don’t want to accept him” (“bei uns aufnehmen”); if they were to offer long explanations, it “would almost amount to accepting him in our circle” (“Aufnahme in unsern Kreis”); and they prefer “not to explain and do not accept him” (“nehmen ihn nicht auf”). Interestingly, the German “aufnehmen” not only denotes the social process of integrating an individual (or a group of individuals) into a larger community, but also the chemical process of absorbing a substance into a solution.

Chemical imagery also plays a role when the narrator claims that the sixth individual is constantly “trying to meddle.” Here the German “einmischen” (from “Mischung,” “meddling” and “mixture”) can be understood as a reference to the blending of different substances. Similar connotations can be found in the description of the second friend’s gliding movement as “leicht” (“gentle” or “light”) and in the characterization of the intrusion of the sixth one as “lästig” (“it annoys us”). The German “lästig,” etymologically derived from “Last” (“burden”), is a figuration of the difference between friend and non-friend in terms of physical weight. All in all, the social imaginary of “Fellowship” naturalizes the circle of friends by describing the constitution of their community as a matter of chemical forces rather than of collective decisions. In fact, the narrator offers only tautological arguments for not accepting the sixth individual (“In any case, we are five and don’t want to be six”). Rather than rational argumentation, his configuration of the community seems to be based on imaginative figuration.

This first thesis on Kafka’s stereoscopic style assumes a critical stance toward scholars who interpret his literary works as satires of bureaucratic organizations or critiques of legal systems.⁸ As we have seen, the exploration of the diagrammatical community in “Fellowship” is not concerned with particular institutional practices or legal procedures, but ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Kafka and the Political: In the Kaiserpanorama
• Part I
• One We Don’t Want to Accept Him
• Two They Are Not Human Beings
• Three Simultaneously Also Nothing
• Four Storming the Border
• Part II
• Five A Construction of Chance and Laws
• Six A Weakness of Imagination
• Part III
• Seven A Matter of Justice
• Eight I Speak for Them, Not for Myself
• Nine As If the Whole of Existence Were Transformed
• Conclusion: Worthy of the Law: “On the Question of the Laws”
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright