Kafka's Nonhuman Form

Troubling the Boundaries of the Kafkaesque

Ted Geier

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9783319403946
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book is a compact study of Kafka's inimitable literary style, animals, and ecological thought—his nonhuman form—that proceeds through original close readings of Kafka's oeuvre. With select engagements of Adorno, Derrida, and the literary heritage from Romanticism to Dickens that influenced Kafka, Ted Geier discusses Kafka's literary, "nonhuman" form and the way it unsettles the notion of a natural and simple existence that society and culture impose, including the boundaries between human and animal. Through careful attention to the formal predicaments of Kafka's works and engaging with Kafka's original legal and social thought in his novels and short stories, this book renders Kafka's sometimes impossibly enigmatic work legible at the level of its expression, bringing surprising shape to his work and redefining what scholars and readers have understood as the "Kafkaesque".

© The Author(s) 2016

Ted GeierKafka’s Nonhuman FormPalgrave Studies in Animals and Literature10.1007/978-3-319-40394-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Present Progression, Always-Already, Grammars of the Nonhuman

Ted Geier¹

(1)

Humanities Research Center, Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA

Abstract

Kafka’s style is notoriously difficult well ahead of his expression of a deep thinking about life and its prospects. The various social structures all bodies are subjected to—even bodies are under review in Kafka—articulate strange things that cannot be called animal, human, or anything at all. Kafka anticipated Animal Studies critiques of anthropocentrism but also worked through this concept in attempts to express the nonhuman despite human forms of expression and thought. Literature has always troubled such boundaries through “strange” narrative strategies, and recent work in Animal Studies and the “Nonhuman Turn” owes much to Kafkan form. His formal ambiguities, perhaps they are even failures, work to undo the violence of the human that persists even where humanism has already been rejected.

Keywords

ModernismRomanticismDickensAdornoDerridaNonhumans

End Abstract

Kafka is one of those major world authors who nearly everyone—academic or not—knows something about. Most of us have even “read a little Kafka,” and just about anyone might apply the dreaded “Kafkaesque” in polite conversation on impolitic conditions. And yet somehow, Kafka remains one of the most woefully under-read twentieth-century authors that everyone reads. This is because, besides any trouble with translation, reading Kafka’s style on its proper scale—sentences, paragraphs, the choice of a word for animal eating instead of human eating, punctuation even—is slow-going and leads only to renewed complexities and re-readings. This strange, immersive, iterative reading experience is, in turn, a direct address—and a precise form of address—of the increasing problems of intimate and inescapable coexistence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ new structures and scales of atrocity and global suffering.

Among the governing problems this book responds to are: (1) The ubiquity and forms of nonhuman life in Kafka’s themes and story content; (2) The literary disorientations throughout Kafka’s work, and the ways in which they articulate a critique of subjectivity and subjection regardless of subjective identification; and (3) The generous nonhuman frame Kafka constructs throughout his works, which renders trivial the questions of human/not human so commonly definitive of both the animal question and the status of life in modernity. The first question must be taken at face value to begin, and of course almost always has been in the many addresses of the Red Peter (Rotpeter) story. Magical horses and fleas in fur lining “flesh out” the stories, perhaps driving plot, perhaps inflecting characters. However, the gathering of creatures, species, and nonhumans of all sorts—as the editors of a recent volume on Kafka’s menagerie assert in their greatest claim on Kafka’s figures, taken though it is from yet another reading of Kafka’s journals and letters to make sense of Kafka’s works—is part of a “whole human and animal community” (1917 letter to Felice Bauer). ¹ This “wholeness,” and the attending always-already of Kafka’s work, is precisely the point, and precisely the trouble with Kafka’s nonhuman form. The flat consubstantiality of species and characters dictates authority figures and figures of limitation and imprisonment.

Kafka’s literary form, grouped under modernism’s banner while also founding his singular, boundless auteur reputation, expresses and builds the nonhuman experience that “lives in” the human. This “living in” threatens to live out as the reflexive modernist subject, eliminating the reflective project of selfhood the human subject had previously prided itself on through incessant and increasingly alien self-relation. The horrible livelihood this attends is, in fact, a mundane irrelevance beyond the obsessions, quests, “investigations,” and interrogations of Kafka’s characters. Kafka’s nonhuman form is not animal subjects (or objects) in his works, nor is it any failed human subject. Truthfully, “nonhuman” imports the entire predicament into the tasks of inquiry and escape so common to his works before the work has even begun. The totality and failure of subjection in the literary force and indifference of Kafka’s formal modes are wholly united, but something is being apprehended, and capture and captivity are equally interrogated, under arrest by, in, and for form.

Kafka brackets the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries at the limit of the “long” nineteenth century (the beginning of the World War era) and an incessant, portable now-time that forces a reconsideration of the period division evermore in today’s academy. The various linguistic and cultural qualifications of his work over the years have only further ensured that Kafka would wind up as a canonical world author before the concept and, increasingly, as not-representative-enough in all sorts of ways. At the same time, his literature of abjection and suffering across multiple cultural and social registers on the precipice of the global tragedy of the World Wars and his ongoing influence on the expression of life and death in the valorized bearers of World Literature at least until 2001 properly complicates the concept and earns it anew. The singularity and the ubiquity of Kafka’s forms of life earn a totality devoutly to be wished, then committedly rejected, as I will also discuss at various points in relation to the critical theory of Theodor Adorno and as negotiated in Kafka’s redress of community, individuality, success, type, and a host of would-be mobile concepts of life and living.

There is a much longer tale to tell about literature from the nineteenth and through the twentieth century as it expresses the increasing velocity, impaction, and suffering of modern industrial life. This of course also foregrounds a particularly urban literature in this period before it inaugurates a later “global” literature of atrocity and demolition into the Post45 Cold War scene. Furthermore, this foregrounds the sense of stark, dire living—if it can be called that at all, as the story goes—in the age of mass destruction and urban flattening of individuals to crowds and traffic flows. There’s very little sunny, positive energy in such a frame. This is certainly not the end of the story though, and as I’ll discuss in Kafka’s works at various points, the chance for hilarity against the darkest peril and interior strife is often capitalized upon. This passive voice construction is important to the effort as well, in fact, and links up with free indirect discourse and other dissociative devices throughout Kafka as in his most sensitive readers: Italo Calvino’s postwar charms and urban (non-urban!) surprises in Marcovaldo and Karen Tei Yamashita’s swarming crowds and uncertain nonhuman narrator in Through the Arc of the Rainforest, for example. The casual, dislocative agency of the urban (global!) écrivain, the flâneur without content, is a funny affair indeed.

Modernisms, Thingy Things, and Other False Trails

There is a project of comparative modernisms yet to be adequately performed on Kafka and animals, but there has certainly been a strong tradition in modernism and in scholarship of addressing, even recuperating, nonhumans that would not be called animals. Certainly, the contemporary reader has her or his list of recent forays into ecologies of stone, the fungal and the microbial, and more, but the forerunners of some of these approaches might well be Bill Brown’s Thing Theory, and at least as pertains to modernism, Brown and others have interjected vital critical theories on subject/object failures that might inspire similar approaches to Kafka before, I’ll contend, not quite doing the trick. Some of the literature on Joyce, in particular, is on the way to the narratologies I’m examining in Kafka here, but it should be acknowledged up front that a cross-reading, comparative address of Joyce and Kafka has some shortcomings for the “literary materialist” who demands clear, direct relations of reading and responding:

Kafka … probably never heard of Joyce, who had not become widely known in the German-speaking parts of Europe by 1924, the year of Kafka’s death. It’s clear that Joyce, who took a perverse pride in not keeping up with his literary contemporaries, knew next to nothing about Kafka. (69–70) ²

In David Hayman’s “arranger” concept, pertaining to Joyce’s Ulysses, a mechanical overlord seems to exceed and usurp author, narrator, and character all at once, becoming “a creature of many faces but a single impulse, a larger version of his characters with a larger field of vision and many more perceptions to control” (Ulysses, the Mechanics of Meaning, 93, and quoted in Somer, 65). ³ Hugh Kenner’s influential expansion of the theory in his own book on Joyce highlights the omniscient yet subjective, even pathological restrictiveness of The Arranger:

So as the Arranger takes increasingly prominent charge the ten-episode Ulysses of ‘objective’ irony, the book that terminates with ‘Wandering Rocks’, will turn into a different sort of book altogether. Still, there’s no sharp break. The Arranger was there all the time, and the principles according to which he will now commence to alter Ulysses were potential from the start, latent, obeying an aesthetic of delay. (71) ⁴

This is not Kafka’s aesthetic, as I will demonstrate. Kafka’s concern is for the priority of circumstance and the conditional status grammar—expression and articulation—exerts over experience. The trouble with Kafka, naturally, is the trouble of both origins and endings. And as I’ll suggest, even those stories that fit a neat structural type with beginning and end, published in his lifetime so there can be no doubt of his intention, are preoccupied with the incompletion of completion, the always-already of any origin point.

If Joyce’s concentric narratology succeeds in crafting a second, third, fourth, or further-order level of commentary and emotion, as Hayman, Kenner, and subsequent commentators seem to generally agree he does, Kafka’s clear interest is in the failure of expression as it realizes the violent categories of experience. In a related prior vein, Poe’s “Man of the Crowd” runs all night, but then the night mercifully ends and the busybody collector of types departs with the handy summary of affairs so neatly announced at the story’s beginning: Es lässt sich nicht lesen. At various points throughout, I’ll engage the Romantic–Kafka connections, and Brown and others have also drawn connections between the uncanny strangeness of Romantic works and the revisions of narration that seek to express those conditions further in modernist articulations. Brown’s Thing Theory, which one might choose in the case of Joyce, might also, perhaps, help to articulate the way things go with Kafka given Brown’s own articulation of things in the wake of modernism. This lineage continues on, though generally without a major focus on Kafka as of yet: Brown has recently published Other Things and Aaron Jaffe’s The Way Things Go is an aphoristic and personal treatise on things and “second modernism.” In closing, Jaffe writes of a “version of thing-life”—avoiding with “version” a claim on some persistent object of study that would exceed Kafka’s sense of things—that “charts a felt way into the life-cycle of materials, the deep, inhuman rhythms unavailable to a single human frame, and it backslides when it comes to narrative hubris” (130). This might work, after all.

In “The Secret Life of Things (Virginia Woolf and the Matter of Modernism),” Brown’s way in, as opposed to Kafka’s incessant search for a way out that will never come, is equal parts Heidegger and Adorno, a curious mix given at least Adorno’s routine rejections of Heidegger’s thought and politics. But on Adorno, he is especially precise on the effects and affects of an important current of thingly materialist ontologies:

The passage into materialism, as Adorno came to describe it, requires acknowledging “things” outside the subject/object trajectory, which means thinking sensation in its distinction from cognition. For the “dignity of physicality” is indissoluble in, and not exhausted by, the subject/object relation, epistemologically or phenomenologically understood. Still, if “things” are not exhausted by that relation, it is only in the subject/object nexus where they occur, or where they can be narrated as the effect (not the ground) of an interaction at once physical and psychological, at once intimate and alienating. To the degree that the “thing” registers the undignified mutability of objects, and thus the excess of the object (a capacity to be better than it is), the “thing” names a mutual mediation (and a slide between objective and subjective predication) that appears as the vivacity of the object’s difference from itself.” (2)

Brown goes on to reveal his interest in the malleability of status, still on the subject, the matter, of things themselves in some ways: “within the shimmering splinters of [broken] glass, glass can become something else” (3). But his distinction between objects and things holds up well for a Kafkan study, I think, especially on this count: “Producing a thing—effecting thingness—depends … on a fetishistic overvaluation or misappropriation, on an irregular if not unreasonable reobjectification of the object that dislodges it from the circuits through which it is what it typically is. Thingness is precipitated as a kind of misuse value” (2–3). The “instability” Brown articulates and the alien intimacy, which he rightly alludes to in prior “uncanny” works by Hoffman and British Romantics (the Gothic is a clear interlocutor for Kafka as well), then focuses on Woolf’s defamiliarizations of everyday objects. There is indeed an “everyday,” a stereotype (“what it typically is”) that Brown is at pains to work from as a sort of ground, despite his cutting analytic elegance on the question of objects that could be taken to a further thinking on the disposable form of the type and the class—the human, the entity, the singular, the grammatical tense of narration and its insufficient accounting of experience demolished in an equally insufficient “modernity.”

These are the full Kafkan registers of language and expression, which pay attention to materials (the focus of Woolf’s thingly innovations for part of Brown’s important essay) only insofar as they can undo and distort that grounding category altogether. If Woolf populates with abject objects that are not themselves and ambiguous alienations from life during wartime—Brown’s angle on the history of glass and World War I in London suggests this is the case—and if Joyce editorialized on end to arrange characters, religions and feelings, senses and places all under a unifying umbrella of subjective irrelevance, Kafka has already determined fetishizations and authoritative performances to be abject wastes of time, material, and more. He has included humans, animals, neither at all down to the level of word, tense, and case in a formal expression of what might otherwise become a lineage of Anglo-Modernist studies and recent critical theory. However, as a frame for the sort of nonhuman form interrogated throughout this book, these addresses of modernist narration and the undone objects of life that may not even be life may prove to be extremely useful to an Animal Studies to come. Kafka’s nonhuman form, and his non-animal form on its particular terms, might coin a broader frame: the nonhuman style.

Under Arrest: Disciplining Kafka’s Characters

Kafka’s characters, among which his writing and its progress can be counted, do not neatly fit the category, and as the strains of expression in his work show, they strive time and again against the ease of daily life in administered coexistence. “Wandering around” is decidedly not on order, reminiscent of the indirectly antagonistic commitment of Melville’s scrivener, determined and active yet immobile and practically idle. “Screwing around” is even less likely, although Kafka’s characters are routinely preoccupied with the chance to remove the quotation marks and get down to business. Kafka’s particular engagement of the world as it shifts and accelerates out of the long nineteenth century responds to the driving sense of life forms without life, existences, roles, and commitments without reflection or agency, repeatable and replaceable, programmable and immanently killable. Barest life, yet of the fiercest resistance through manic narration—not properly bare at all then, and surely not resisting power in determined commitment so much as reacting to it, sneeringly succumbing to it in mock authoritarian strains.

One of the abiding circumstances in Kafka, and one that will sustain a significant portion of the investigations herein, is the condition of being under arrest, captive and captivated, at the outset of narratives. This narrative subjection, as I’ll show across Kafka’s works, induces restricted narration and is, as such, a relatively standard convention, but the efforts to undo origin points and the failure to produce closure, time and again, take on the proverbial “life of their own” in Kafka. This is also the specific undoing of any autonomous subjectivity and a point of departure from the assertive über-narrator Joyce’s commentators protect in the examples already discussed. This legal subjection crosses into broader sociation and ambiguous relations, communities, and narrations in Kafka’s works. Alongside the grammatical and narrative nonhuman in Kafka, the legal frame reiterates the apparatus of subjection as formal condition. The law in Kafka’s overtly legal fictions, as an unapproachable totality and a nonexistent force, always in force, thus articulates the nonhuman as a master category of life through the ineffable processes that bind humans to their nonhumanity, but beyond such a cursory critique of humanism, the combinations of these nonhumans and the animals interrogating experience and captivity in Kafka build an expansive, collective nonhuman that goes beyond mere animal characters, figures, or linguistic turns in the rhetoric of capture and control. This will be examined at multiple points throughout the book.

In the “first interrogation” of the The Trial, K., “seized … from behind by the collar,” picked up for a crime he never knows, is quickly distracted from whatever his mind had most recently been on (a couple, in fact a woman perhaps endangered by a man, and begging K.’s sense of order to rush across the room and right matters) (59). The “mock” resistance is authoritarian throughout the work in its insistence on proper procedure and attempts to impose himself and his reason on all parties, in all rooms, despite the creeping irrelevance of his struggle. Here is a foregrounded demolition of the resistant subject: “it seemed to him as if his freedom were being threatened, as if he were being arrested in earnest.” It is too late. He has been arrested from page one. This sidelong conjecture on his feelings and experience began long ago with “someone must have slandered Josef K.” (3). K. is here being obstructed, “barred” in the courts from intervening in the violence, or at least the commotion, of the couple on the other end of the room. Just before, his vision had been impeded by the “unbearable,” strange “atmosphere,” and indeed the bad air of the courts recurs in the work as a condition of experience before the law. But as K. is being physically impeded, he then notices something about all of the bodies in his way: “under the beards—and this was K.’s real discovery—badges of various sizes and colors gleamed” (59). Here the narration breaks and K.’s speech is tagged directly in quotation marks: “‘So!’ cried K., flinging his arms in the air, his sudden enlightenment had to br...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: Present Progression, Always-Already, Grammars of the Nonhuman
• 2. Digging In (Not Digging It): Obsessive Creatures and Sociality
• 3. Finding Oneself Awoken From: Nonhuman Metamorphoses
• 4. Unlike a Dog, Having Done Nothing Wrong: After the Law
• 5. Conclusion: Interminable Subjects
• Backmatter