Deranged Cosmos: Kafka’s Stories

Kafka’s universe feels uncannily familiar. But what about his hapless heroes’ struggles with infinite bureaucracies, strange transformations, and absurd predicaments ring true to our own experience of the world? What is it that we think we recognize in his texts? The pat answer is the ubiquity of the Kafka icon, the cheap paradox of the commonplace enigmatic lambasted by Adorno: “Kafka’s popularity, that comfort in the uncomfortable which has made of him an information bureau of the human condition, be it eternal or modern, and which knowingly dispenses with the scandal on which his work is built.”  In short, Kafka as modernity’s patron saint of human finitude, the unbridgeable gap between transcendent law and mortal guilt, the doomed struggle against anonymous powers that be, of tragic neurotic hesitation, of known unknowability, of the picturesquely weird.

The insufficiency of the gesture that takes Kafka to announce the modern bureaucratic nightmare or the immeasurable distance of the transcendental law or the tragic guilt of the son resides in its failure to register the texture of his writing in favor of his writings’ obvious symbolic elements. The trouble is that these platitudes seem to arise spontaneously in Kafka’s texts themselves. This suggests that any attempt at a more sophisticated reading of Kafka’s texts that peremptorily rejects the Kafka icon will itself fail to grasp them. To not take the bait of the obvious, to disdain the texts’ deployment of psychoanalytical, existential, and metaphysical motifs and themes, is to similarly miss the text. As Benjamin cautions, “There are two ways to miss the point of Kafka’s works. One is to interpret them naturally, the other is the supernatural interpretation.” Hence the question that has plagued Kafka’s readers, articulated by Deleuze and Guattari in their monograph on Kafka: “How can we enter into Kafka’s work?” Is it enough to be aware of the dangers of accepting or rejecting the Kafka icon? Is it possible to develop an interpretative program that takes the obvious as the obvious as a necessary preliminary step, heeding Camus’ claim: “The whole art of Kafka consists in forcing the reader to reread.”

Our seminar will take up the challenge of Kafka’s writings, their insistence on interpretation even as they resist it. We will read a selection of fiction by Kafka ranging from the parables through the short stories to the novella The Metamorphosis. Each week, the primary readings will be paired with an essay by a theorist grappling with the difficulty of reading Kafka: Camus, Benjamin, Deleuze and Guattari, and Adorno