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Kafka and Wittgenstein Kafka and Wittgenstein Kafka and Wittgenstein The Case for an Analytic Modernism Rebecca Schuman northwestern university press evanston, illinois Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2015 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2015. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Schuman, Rebecca, author. Kafka and Wittgenstein : the case for an analytic modernism / Rebecca Schuman. pages cm. Based on the author’s dissertation—University of California–Irvine, 2010. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8101-3146-0 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8101-3184-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8101-3150-7 (ebook) 1. Kafka, Franz, 1883–1924—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1889–1951. 3. Literature—Philosophy. I. Title. PT2621.A26Z8651716 2015 833'.912—dc23 2015029414 Except where otherwise noted, this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. In all cases attribution should include the following information: Schuman, Rebecca. Kafka and Wittgenstein: The Case for an Analytic Modernism. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2015. For permissions beyond the scope of this license, visit http://www.nupress.north- western.edu/ An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of librar- ies working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. More information about the initiative and links to the open-access version can be found at www.knowl- edgeunlatched.org. Contents Acknowledgments vii List of Abbreviations ix Introduction: Why Kafka and Wittgenstein? 3 Part One: Logical Modernism: Kafka and the Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus Preface to Part One Logic, Skepticism, and Mysticism 15 Chapter 1 The Trial and the Law of Logic 39 Chapter 2 The Metamorphosis and the Limits of Metaphorical Language 55 Chapter 3 “The Judgment,” Ethics, and the Ineffable 85 Part Two: Analytic Skepticism: Kafka and the Philosophical Investigations Preface to Part Two Wittgenstein’s Transition and a More Analytic Kafka 109 Chapter 4 The Castle and the Paradox of Ostensive Definition 113 Chapter 5 Rule- Following and Failed Execution: “In the Penal Colony” 137 Chapter 6 The Private Language Argument and the Undermining of “Josefine the Singer” 167 Concluding Thoughts: The Problem with (Critical) Progress 193 Notes 197 Works Cited 213 Index 219 Acknowledgments I would like to thank Henry Carrigan at Northwestern University Press for bringing this project under contract and thus into existence as a book, rather than my dissertation, which is how Kafka and Wittgenstein began ten years ago in Irvine, California. Speaking of which, my gratitude runs eternal for the rigorous guidance of the University of California– Irvine’s Kai Evers, my doctoral adviser, mentor, and friend, and to John H. Smith, David T. Pan, Gail K. Hart, Glenn Levine, and Anke Biendarra. The second chapter of this book first appeared in The German Quarterly as the article “Unerschütterlich: Kafka’s Proceß, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and the Law of Logic,” for which I thank James Rolleston and Kata Gellen. My third chapter first appeared in Modern Austrian Literature as the article “Kafka’s Verwandlung, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, and the Limits of Meta- phorical Language,” and its journey into publication was not an easy one. I’d like to thank Craig Decker for championing it through four major revisions, under the nose of an increasingly malcontent reader. Thanks also to Robert E. Norton, Bernie Rhie, Karen Zumhagen- Yekple, Yi- Ping Ong, and Bern- hard Malkmus for reading sections of this manuscript, and special thanks to Samuel Frederick for reading the whole thing, and alerting me to any “deal breakers” before I submitted it for review. Finally, I cannot express enough gratitude to the readers who reviewed this book as a manuscript, and recom- mended it so enthusiastically for publication. I would also like to thank my freelance copy editor, Jason Eversman, who put the manuscript into Chicago style, fixed the hot mess that was my endnotes and bibliography, and master- fully repaired all of the minute textual details at which my impatience and incompetence know no bounds. This book would not have been possible without the financial support of the following: the University of California-Irvine, which afforded me a Dis- sertation Year Fellowship in 2009– 10; the Austrian Fulbright Commission and the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften (IFK), for bringing me to Vienna for 2008–09; and, finally, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), for accepting me into the New Faculty Fellows Program and placing me at the Ohio State University for 2011– 13. The ACLS position included a low teaching load and a travel allowance, and enabled me to produce the non-dissertation version of this book, from start to finish, in less than two years. vii viii Acknowledgments Finally, I would like to thank my family: Sharon, David, Ben, Lani, Milly, Charlie, and Billy Budd. And most importantly of all, Waldemar Rohloff, my husband and long- suffering companion through every second of this project, and my daughter Halina Schuman- Rohloff, who burst into existence at the very end, and destroyed my scholarly brain in the best possible way. St. Louis, Missouri, 2015 Abbreviations GW Franz Kafka. Gesammelte Werke [Collected Works] in Zwölf Bänden. Edited by Hans- Gerhard Koch and Malcolm Pasley. 12 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1994. TLP Ludwig Wittgenstein. Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus/Logisch- philosophische Abhandlung. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1963. PI Ludwig Wittgenstein. Philosophical Investigations [Philosphische Untersuchungen: Dritte Auflage, mit englischem und deutschem Register]. Edited and translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. New York: Macmillan, 1968. ix Kafka and Wittgenstein Introduction Why Kafka and Wittgenstein? Franz Kafka’s novels and stories have the dubious honor of being often and hastily relegated to the confines of a single adjective that is supposed to evoke both the necessary uniqueness and slippery indescribability of its namesake. Though it may be unfair to the twentieth century’s best- known German- language author to relegate him to an “-esque,” if I were forced at gunpoint to explain what “Kafkaesque” is supposed to be, I would recite from memory the “Kleine Fabel” (“Little Fable”), a tiny story whose mouse protagonist gives way to an existential cat villain, and in so doing double- crosses us twice: “Ach,” sagte die Maus, “die Welt wird enger mit jedem Tag. Zuerst war sie so breit, daß ich Angst hatte, ich lief weiter und war glücklich, daß ich endlich rechts und links in der Ferne Mauern sah, aber diese lan- gen Mauern eilen so schnell aufeinander zu, daß ich schon im letzten Zimmer bin, und dort im Winkel steht die Falle, in die ich laufe.” – “Du mußt nur die Laufrichtung ändern,” sagte die Katze und fraß sie.1 “Alas,” said the mouse, “the world gets smaller every day. At first it was so wide that I was afraid, and as I ran along I was happy when I finally saw walls appear in the distance at my right and left. But these long walls closed in so fast that I’m already in the last room, and there in the corner is the trap into which I must run.” “You’ve simply got to run the other direction,” said the cat, and ate it. I choose the “Little Fable” because I see it as both a perplexing work on its own and a baffling microcosm of Kafka’s fictional universe, partly because the way in which it captivates the reader, even at its tiny length, is the same way in which all of Kafka’s most captivating works are captivating. This is an appeal that is surprisingly quantifiable for a writer who himself specialized in the ineffable: that is, “Little Fable” displays three elements now attributed, for better or worse, to the aforementioned Kafkaesque. The first is the characterization of the mouse, who embodies the Kafkan quasi- protagonist’s ability to portray certain doom by way of outside forces 3 4 Introduction that appear to exist precisely to seal that doom—in the fable’s case, these forces are depersonified into narrowing walls (representing a slow, oppres- sive end) and a trap (representing a quick and violent one). This dichotomy appears all over Kafka’s canon: we see it in Josef K.’s slowly but inevitably encroaching trial and the quick and gruesome “execution” (or is it murder?) that brings it to an end; we see it in Georg Bendemann’s slow, albeit largely symbolic, suffocation via his overbearing father (echoed in the suffocating nature of the Bendemann family flat), itself put to an end by Georg’s hastily stipulated suicide. It reappears in the “death” of Gregor Samsa’s individuality, freedom, and dreams at the hands of the late- capitalist world, itself brought to an end by his sudden metamorphosis into a monster— which itself brings about yet another suffocating, slow death meant in large part to mirror the one that was taking place before the metamorphosis. And, in its most violent incarnation, we see this dichotomy in the ornamental torture prescribed by the penal colony’s officer, one that ends up instead as a quick, grotesque but altogether unvarnished impalement. The second way in which the “Little Fable” acts as a fitting epigram for the would- be Kafka reader is its double- twisting plot, remarkable in this case, given the story is three sentences long. The first twist comes when the mouse- protagonist realizes (albeit from a shady outside source) that she has been running in the wrong direction; she has been going about the entire thing the wrong way.
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