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Rich Text/Poor Text: A Kafkan Confusion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Ruth V. Gross
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Abstract

Franz Kafka’s “Eine alltägliche Verwirrung” ‘An Everyday Confusion’ is a skeletal, or “poor,” text in that one code of reading—the referential—dominates it, while other codes present in a classic, or “rich,” text are almost absent. Using a method freely adapted from Roland Barthes’s S/Z, my article closely examines the referentiality of Kafka’s text, juxtaposing the proverbial (or common-language) response evoked by the text with the personal reactions of a single reader. Kafka’s theme, the inability of common, proverbial language to make real communication possible, is allegorized in the brief tale of A and B, whose comings and goings are mirrored, and at times interfered with, by the language in which these events occur.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 95 , Issue 2 , March 1980 , pp. 168 - 182
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1980

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References

Notes

1 Barthes, S/Z, trans, by Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang. 1974), p. 5.

2 In using the terms “rich” (or “copious”) and “poor” (or “meager”), I refer to a fullness or paucity of stylistic detail, not to pluralities in or of meaning.

3 Smith, “On the Margins of Discourse,” Critical Inquiry, 1 (1974), 793.

4 Norman N. Holland, Poems in Persons (New York: Norton, 1973), pp. 159–60.

5 In Franz Kafka: Tragik and Ironie (Munich: Lan-gen-Müller, 1964), Walter Sokel structures a theory of tragedy in Kafka on the basis of a rich and stimulating exegesis of “Eine alltägliche Verwirrung.” Interpreting the story psychologically, Sokel sees the horrible confusion to be a result of A's sin of omission, that is. his failure to recognize B on his doorstep. In Sokel's view A's haste causes his own unhappiness. Drawing on Kafka's aphorisms, Sokel demonstrates Kafka's feelings about impatience (Ungeduld) and provides a strong argument for reading “Eine alltagliche Verwirrung” as an expressionistically alienating representation of thoughts Kafka had stated clearly in the aphorisms. Elizabeth Trahan, in her article “ ‘A Common Confusion’: A Basic Approach to Franz Kafka's World” (German Quarterly, 36 [1963], 269–78), considers the story as an “entrance” into “Kafka's world.” But by using a translation of the text and retelling the plot of the story, she fails to see the important element of Kafka's language and thus understands the story as dealing primarily with “man's relationship to man.” (Meno Spann, in his Franz Kafka [Boston: Twayne, 1976], points again and again to the mistakes critics have made when relying on translations of Kafka's works—an “unadvisable procedure” [p. 60]—instead of dealing with the German.) As Stanley Corngold has distinguished the “metamorphosed metaphor” from Sokel's “extended metaphor” and removed “Die Ver-'wandlung” from an expressionist tradition (The Commentator's Despair [Port Washington. N.Y.: Kennikat, 1973]), I distinguish between traditional interpretations of “Eine alltägliche Verwinung” as the “hero's psy-chological Selbsttäuschung” of despair and a reading of the text as a system of linguistic commonplaces and grammatical dimensions. The latter approach incorporates the important tradition in Kafka studies of Gunther Anders, a tradition that stresses Kafka's inspiration in “ordinary language,” while avoiding psychological speculations about the “characters” or about Kafka himself.

6 Cohn, “Trends in Literary Criticism: Some Structuralist Approaches to Kafka,” German Quarterly. 51 (1978), 183.

7 All the proverbs cited in the left column of Part ii can be found in Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Wander's Deutsches Sprichwörter Lexikon, 5 vols. (1867: rpt. Aalen: Scientia Verlag. 1963). or in Jerzy Gluski's Proverbs (New York: Elsevier Publishing Co., 1971). All the translations are my own, and I have tried to make them as literal as possible. Although there are often comparable proverbs in English, the images and metaphors of the German sayings are important to the argument.

The sources for the quotations in the right column of Part ii are as follows (unless otherwise indicated, the translations are my own): Barthes. “The Dissolve of Voices,” S/Z, p. 40. Binder. Kafka Kommentar zu sämtlichen Erzählungen (Munich: Winkler Verlag, 1977), p. 236. Anders, Kafka pro und contra (Munich: C. H. Beck Verlag, 1967), p. 40. Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms (Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1969), p. 33. Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1946), p. 297. Leacock, “A, B, and C—the Human Element in Mathematics,” Literary Lapses (London: John Lane, 1950), p. 82. Leiris, “Alphabet,” La Règle du Jeu I, Biffitres (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), p. 39. Frye, The Secular Scripture (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press. 1976), p. 102. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, std. ed., trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), p. 36. Deleuze, Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1968). Einstein, quoted in obituary article. New York Times, 19 April 1955, p. 27. Marx, Dos Kapital. iii (Zurich: Ring Verlag, 1934), Pt. ii. Bk. iii, 870. Carroll, “Tweedledum and Tweedledee,” Through the Looking Glass (New York: Macmillan, 1899). p. 68. Whitehead. Science and the Modern World (New York: Macmillan, 1929), p. 95. Smith, “On the Margins of Discourse,” Critical Inquiry, 1 (1974). 795. Thoreau, “Wednesday,” A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (New York: Scribners, 1921), p. 197. Kraus, Auswahl cms dem Werk, ed. Heinrich Fischer (Munich: Kösel Verlag, 1957), p. 339. Trübners Deutsches Wörterbuch, ed. Walther Mitzka (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter Verlag, 1955), vi, 307. Kafka. “Fursprecher.” Gesammelte Schriflen (Prague: Heinrich Mercy Sohn. 1936). p. 139. Stern and Stern, trans., “Advocates.” Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken, 1946). p. 451. Todorov, Introduction à la littérature fan-tastique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1970), pp. 183–84. Howard, trans., The Fantastic (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press. 1975), p. 175.

8 Kafka, Gesammelte Schriflen, ed. Max Brod, 2nd ed. (New York: Schocken Books, 1946). v, 122–23. The translation that follows is my own.

9 Taylor, The Proverb (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press. 1931 ), p. 168.

10 Corngold relates Kafka's attributing the “unreadable ending” of “Die Verwandlung” to a business trip Kafka had to take just as he was nearing the end of the story (p. 1).

11 Heinz Politzer. “Franz Kafka's Language,” Modern Fiction Studies, 8 (Spring 1962), 20.

12 Johnson, “The Critical Difference,” Diacritics, 8 (June 1978), 3.