©Copyright 2014 Timothy Coombs Critical Conditions: This Signature of the Wound in Franz Kafka’s Shorter Fiction Timothy Coombs A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2014 Reading Committee: Richard T. Gray, Chair Eric Ames Richard Block Program Authorized to Offer Degree: Germanics University of Washington Abstract Critical Conditions: The Signature of the Wound in Franz Kafka’s Shorter Fiction Timothy Coombs Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor in the Humanities Richard T. Gray This dissertation explores the significance of wounds in four short texts by Franz Kafka: “Ein Landarzt,” “Das Urteil,” Ein Bericht für eine Akademie,” and “Prometheus.” Rather than reduce the metaphor of the wound to biographical or psychoanalytic principles, two approaches that have predominated scholarship on these texts, this study examines how the wound promotes a critical undecidability in Kafka’s language: a condition in which body and body of text demand and defy “treatment” on several levels. Using a variety of rhetorical, narratological, and philological evidence, this dissertation argues how woundedness functions as a “critical condition” in these texts that paradoxically extends and enriches their interpretive life — an openness that resists closure of any form. Acknowledgements This dissertation would not have been possible without the continuous support and encouragement of Rick Gray, whose Graduate seminar on Kafka inspired me to first open this wound, but whose mentorship helped me finally close it. I extend a similar sense of gratitude to my reading committee, Eric Ames and Richard Block, who always expressed an interest in my work, as well as to my friends and colleagues in Germanics department, especially Jan Hengge, Jasmin Krakenberg, and Nathan Magnusson. I’m grateful to Jane Brown for teaching me how to write a shapely paragraph, and to Marshall Brown for his support at MLQ and for keeping my work on-track. A special acknowledgement goes to Neil Donahue, who steered me in the right direction and whose seminar on Erich Auerbach still informs my work over a decade later. I am fortunate to have received financial support from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst and from the Hanauer Endowment while writing and researching this study, especially at a time when funding seemed scarce. Finally, a heartfelt thank you goes out to my family for first exposing me to German culture and for believing in me even when I didn’t. But most of all, I am forever grateful to Michele, who not only endured many drafts of this dissertation, but whose love ensured that I would one day finish it. For Frank Gruber Table of Contents Introduction: The Text as a (W)hole ...............................................................................................1 1. The Openness of the Wound: Exposure in “Ein Landarzt” ......................................................18 2. The Father’s Scar: Closure in “Das Urteil” ..............................................................................49 3. Inflammatory Rhetoric: Injury and Compensation in “Ein Bericht für eine Akademie” .........80 4. Sore Subjects: Chronic Pain in “Prometheus” ........................................................................112 Bibliography ...............................................................................................................................144 Introduction The Text as a (W)hole Aber es tut gut, wenn das Gewissen breite Wunden bekommt, denn dadurch wird es empfindlicher für jeden Biß. Ich glaube, man sollte überhaupt nur solche Bücher lesen, die einen beißen und stechen. Wenn das Buch, das wir lesen, uns nicht mit einem Faustschlag auf den Schädel weckt, wozu lesen wir dann das Buch? Franz Kafka Briefe, 27 This study traces a pattern of woundedness in four shorter works by Franz Kafka — “Ein Landarzt” (1918), “Das Urteil” (1913), “Ein Bericht für eine Akademie” (1917), and “Prometheus” (1919) — in which representations of the body and the bodies of text that shape them become productively entangled. The wound emerges not only as a common theme in these texts, but more significantly, as a feature that comes to characterize each text as a whole—what could also be read, metaphorically speaking, as a kind of signifying hole: an opening, a contusion and profusion of signs. In this sense, the wound presents us with a unique point of entry for exploring what Peter Brooks has called the “semioticization of the body […] matched by a somatization of the story” (xii). It marks, that is, a privileged site in Kafka’s corpus where language not only inscribes the flesh, but where bodies also materialize specific attributes of 1 these texts: their struggles with exposure (“Ein Landarzt”) and closure (“Das Urteil”), for example; their spells of inflammation (“Ein Bericht für eine Akademie”) and recurring pain (“Prometheus”). Drawing on a variety of rhetorical, narratological, and philological evidence, this study interrogates, above all, how the wound conditions a particularly “critical” experience of reading, one that can be understood in terms of a pervasive sense of crisis: not only the alarming presence of a wounded body, imprinted by illness or violence, but also the dilemma of how to interpret that body, how to treat it hermeneutically and epistemologically — a condition that affects Kafka’s characters and readers alike. Praxis Derived from the Greek krisis (κρίσις), the term “critical” describes both the “turning point of a disease,” such as when a patient requires urgent care, as well as an important “judgment, decision or selection,” where we derive our modern understanding of criticism, and by extension, critical interpretation.1 The title Critical Conditions reflects these different, but nonetheless interrelated semantic fields, especially in cases where the somatic condition of Kafka’s characters coincides with the undecidability of his language. But a paradox arises when associating bodily openness with interpretive openness: if Kafka’s wound corresponds with a kind of semantic openness, as I suggest in the readings that follow, then it must also be subject to that openness. Which is to say: even openness is open to interpretation, and attempts to declare the wound as “open” risk closing it with the same defining gesture. The question, then, becomes 1 http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=crisis 2 one of critical care: how are we to treat this open wound without restricting it, without contaminating it in the very act of treatment? As I hope to demonstrate, this question plays a crucial role not only in how we construct and confront meaning in these texts, but also how paradox becomes a “critical condition” in itself. This is not necessarily a new observation, of course. Heinz Politzer was perhaps the first critic to examine the significance of paradox in Kafka’s writing — its capacity to decentralize and proliferate meaning, especially in the parables.2 Similarly, Gerhard Neumann described a “gleitendes Paradox” in Kafka’s fiction where “alle starre Begrifflichkeit ins Gleiten kommt” (“Umkehrung” 722), disorienting the reader and disrupting forms of conceptual thinking. But my contribution here is to understand the wound as an inherently paradoxical feature, a protean fixture (to use an appropriately contradictory image) that exists neither fully inside nor outside the wounded body, but undecidably between. I see the wound, in other words, not only as a lens for reading Kafka’s language, but also in terms of a paradoxicality that enriches and extends the interpretive life of his work — an openness, finally, that signals a series of conflicting prognoses: transparency and uncertainty, agency and helplessness, awareness and neglect. If my own language seems similarly conflicting at times, however, it is because a full- length study of the wound is necessarily complicated by the question of how to read and assign meaning to it. This is a dilemma that also besets Kafka’s country doctor. Just before uncovering his patient’s fatal wound, for example, he remarks that “Rezepte schreiben ist leicht, aber im übrigen sich mit den Leuten verständigen, ist schwer” (Drucke zu Lebzeiten 257). If anything, this statement acknowledges how questions of methodology arise both within, and as a consequence of, these texts — and moreover, how the wound, once it commands our attention, 2 See: Heinz Politzer’s Franz Kafka: Parable and Paradox. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1966. 3 leverages a unique power in how we read these texts as a (w)hole. While I cannot claim to succeed in answering these questions — especially since, as Walter Benjamin has also noted, failure is a productive outcome in Kafka’s writing (Benjamin 27) — my reliance on wordplay and associative logic throughout this study advances its own implicit argument: namely, that the wound can only be approximated through language because it is, above all, language that inflicts the wounding. Words assail Kafka’s reader just as wounds afflict the body; they harbor an openness that proves at times equally liberating and restrictive, resolute but also tentative. The homophony of “whole” and “hole,” in this sense, articulates what, in hermeneutical terms, translates as a paradox of coherence and rupture, an aesthetic wholeness that Kafka achieves through a language of puncture, laceration, and limitation. In an interview conducted shortly before his death,