Recovering Kafka's rhetorical unconscious

Abstract

Kafka has become answerable to cultural studies, in one form or another, to an extraordinary degree—a fact that speaks for the seemingly inexhaustible ability of his work to accommodate “forms of the real” both contemporaneous with his writing and in the decades following. So, there is Kafka, with his celebrated “Ohr für das Kommende,” held, as in “Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer,” Das Schloß, and Der Proceß, to have anticipated today's intractable border disputes, relentless immigration, and baffling simulacra, as if AI-generated. This approach, now so widely extended, marks, to my mind, a crisis, recalling us to the detail of Kafka's prose that mattered most to him as arising, we might say (and as Lacan has said) from his rhetorical unconscious. We know that it was Kafka's practice to frequent bookstores and riffle through the pages of the new arrivals, something short of reading them with the sort of engagement that justifies his mooted encyclopedic anticipations. His work is certainly full of allusions to contemporary authors and issues suggestive of our own; and even where they are not explicitly named, we are entitled to conclude the impossibility of proving that any such matter was not known to him. For example, he does not appear to have written down the name Nietzsche, but it is certain that he knew a great deal about him. And yet we should not leave home for all this border-crossing. I call for a return to Kafka's text with its special intensity drawn from regions “below,” following “dieses Hinabgehen zu den dunklen Mächten, diese Entfesselung von Natur aus gebundener Geister, fragwürdige Umarmungen und was alles noch unten vor sich gehen mag, von dem man oben nichts mehr weiß, wenn man im Sonnenlicht Geschichten schreibt” (Kafka to Brod; Briefe 384). This underworld is explosive with sexual and aggressive energies, confirmed, as it happens, by Kafka's saying to Max Brod, in answer to Brod's question of what Kafka meant with the concluding sentence of “Das Urteil,” “Ich habe dabei an eine starke Ejakulation gedacht” (Beug and Heller 20).

Where, exactly, does this alleged crisis take us? In a diary entry, Kafka wrote, “Mein Inneres löst sich […] und ist bereit Tieferes hervorzulassen” (Tagebücher 139). It is a truth universally acknowledged that many of Kafka's most telling inspirations—in the form of pregnant, “vacillating” (Lacan) metaphors—arrive on the page as if expelled from the unconscious: they have something to tell that springs over the artificial, daylit borders between stories. We want to pay attention to them in their rhetorical journey: they have no easy correlates with the empirical Realien of cultural studies, as, for example, the pocket. In “Das Urteil,” this signifier has lethal implications, marking the peak moment of aggression by a son to his father. You recall: as Herr Bendemann and his son Georg seem to share the running of a business, the father declares that he, and not Georg, has all of Georg's clientele “hier in der Tasche.” Georg replies, staring humorously at his father's nightshirt, “Sogar im Hemd hat er Taschen!” (Drucke 59). This remark could seem feebly playful enough, but not when one considers—as do Kafka, his German readers, Georg, and his father—the proverbial citation of “the last shirt, [which] has no pockets”—namely, the shroud. On Georg's lips, his father's nightshirt has become a shroud: he wishes to see his father dead! The awareness of this infamy rises in a crescendo: it is now Georg's father's turn to traffic in death, and he condemns his “teuflisch” son to death by drowning (Drucke 60). Now the obedient son, Georg embraces the verdict, accepting a dire punishment for his parricidal fantasy, even appearing to be grateful for it. What is the point? This detail—this word-image—will allow us to understand its resurgence in Die Verwandlung by an unconscious trans-textual logic. In at least two places in the manuscript of Die Verwandlung, Kafka writes “Gregor” as “Georg,” unconsciously linking the two sons and their punishments. The crux in Die Verwandlung is the father's readiness to fire small, hard apples into the back of Gregor, his emasculated son. I am concerned with one detail, regularly overlooked: these apples are small; they need to be small enough to fit into the pockets of Herr Samsa, or should we also say, of Herr Bendemann of “Das Urteil?”

Recall, once more, Georg's cruel rejoinder to his father in “Das Urteil”—“Sogar im Hemd hat er Taschen!” “Taschen ” then becomes a sort of mnemonic in Kafka's unconscious supermemory for violence aimed by the son at the father. Wouldn't the day of reckoning, when Gregor Samsa awoke one morning—his hideous, verminous shape a reproach to his family—call for punishment of his aggression along the trace line of “the pocket?” Wouldn't it be exactly right for the father to turn the pocket to his advantage, the pocket that in “Das Urteil” marked the peak moment of filial defiance, by packing it with a rhetorical ballistic reservoir? “Denn der Vater hatte sich entschlossen, ihn zu bombardieren. Aus der Obstschale auf der Kredenz hatte er sich die Taschen gefüllt und warf nun, ohne vorläufig scharf zu zielen, Apfel für Apfel” (Drucke 171). Why, otherwise, “fill his pockets?” And so “the last shirt” is, contrary to all childish expectations, not the shroud but the father's newly acquired bank uniform. And what has Daddy got in his “straffe blaue Uniform” (Drucke 169)? Pockets … full of another clientele, murderous family metaphors.

This is to have said quite a lot about pockets. I would suggest a project that I hope others will take up: the trans-textual significance of such key figures as die Narbe, die Wunde, der Schuss. How tellingly these figures migrate from “Das Urteil” to “Ein Bericht für eine Akademie,” appearing to link Rotpeter's trajectory, as a mediocre artiste, who, by dint of extraordinary effort, has attained the “Durchschnittsbildung eines Europäers” (Drucke 312) with Kafka's savage inquiry into his own competence. Recall Rotpeter's insistence that the bullet shot that inaugurates his artistic destiny be named, with special emphasis, “frevelhaft” (Drucke 302), a word that returns to the author's once moment of sexual jubilation, his violent ejaculation, on “breaking through” with “Das Urteil” to a higher literary destiny. Has it brought him to a less exalted place? I'm pleading for a return to other constellations—such as wounds, astral bodies, Alexander the Great among other Greek gods—embedded in a literary unconscious that does not read the newspapers.