Introduction

THE PAGES OF KAFKA’S FICTION teem with figures who, if they do not explicitly function as artists, are only a tenuous degree away from this calling. Kafka devoted so much of his fictive exposition to artists and their activities that it might be well to designate him, among other things, an aesthetician. Kafka was not, after all, gearing his writing to an academic audience. He was not under constraint to place his articulations under the rubric of some discursive subcontract, whether “aesthetics” or “creative writing,” that would identify his work and assure it an intellectual location and intellectual milieu. He felt as free to expend his writing on his diaries and letters as on his formal fiction.

As Kafka develops his characters, whether “people,” animals, or bizarre thought-things such as Odradek, he endows their artistic activities with features that, assembled in a constellation, form the parameters of a coherent aesthetics, one as distinctive as Kant’s, Hegel’s, or Proust’s. In devising parables to serve as stage settings for his polymorphous artistfigures, he revealed himself to be a rigorous theoretician of art and its roles in “advanced” Western society and culture. While certain of Kafka’s ideas about art clearly derived from the encounter with Western metaphysics and systematic philosophy conducted, among others, by the German Romanticists, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, under the illumination of his fictive exposition his aesthetic postulates took on a singular character and cast. Kafka’s aesthetics is infused with the rich and non-reproducible imprint of his specific writerly, formal, stylistic, and tonal experiments. The display of such “art-games” may well constitute one of the pivotal features of fiction, at least where a distinctive vision has been allowed to coalesce: serving as a theater in which the elements of reference, possibly related to “experience,” are distilled into aesthetic design-parameters and moods.

The mood of an aesthetics, perhaps the artist’s most distinctive trace, is the palette of tonalities under which a gradation of design-parameters assembles. The singular imprint enabling us to discern the lineaments of an aesthetics within the production of a particular artist is a function of the cohesion of a fictive world combined with aesthetic maturity.