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Times Literary Supplement, 13. 10. 1995 Jeremy Adler Stepping into Kafka’s head No author has done more to formulate the myth of the twentieth century than Kafka. He compresses the century’s anxieties into grotesque images deeply imbued with cultural associations, yet shockingly new in conception: the court, the castle, the torture machine, the human beetle, the hunger artist. Into these visionary emblems, he condenses our continuing dilemmas: bureaucracy and barbarism, capital and the expense of the soul, patriarchy versus the liberal idea, and the doomed will to transcendence. The Trial’s conjoining of evil with metaphysics has turned the novel into a symbol of the age that has not only amassed the forces of darkness, but actually worships the evil which il professes to despise. As K. gloomily recognizes, »the lie has been turned into the world order«. Such prophecy is essentially biblical, yet, paradoxically, Kafka creates his myth by turning his own sensibility as a Germanspeaking Prague Jew, an outsider at the edge of Empire, into the central focus of his work. Indeed, by telescoping his subjectivity into the smallest linguistic correlatives – notably the letter K. – Kafka hit upon a powerful formula, whose mythopoetic algebra generates his work’s seemingly endless connotations. The coincidence of such textual minutiae with universally suggestive meanings elevates the accurate editing of Kafka’s writings into a matter of some considerable interest. Even before the completion of the great critical edition, Schriften, Tagebücher, Briefe: Kritische Ausgabe, published by Fischer, supported by a distinguished advisory panel and edited by a team of four, among whom the British scholar Malcolm Pasley has played a leading role, a competing edition has been launched by Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, pointedly calling itself historical-critical: Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe sämtlicher Handschriften, Drucke und Typoskripte. The divergent titles signify radically different approaches, and a critical battle has commenced, not wholly unlike that about the text of Joyce’s Ulysses. Both the Fischer and the Stroemfeld/Roter Stern versions of Kafka’s complete works lay equal claim to respect Kafka’s Schrift – his own term for writing which also evokes the biblical writ, as it is quoted by Pasley in the title of his latest book, »Die Schrift ist unveränderlich« (»The Writing is Unalterable«). Pasley’s gentlemanly empiricism is everywhere in evidence in the essays here collected, in which he distances himself from the mystifying psychologizing so common in Kafka studies. Emphasizing the constancy of the text itself, he repeatedly demonstrates the physical quiddity of Kafka’s work. In a keynote article unfortunately omitted here, Pasley demonstrated how the story Eleven Sons is actually a portrait of eleven other stories: Kafka so far identifies with his work, that even his pen, ink and paper become literary arcana. The texts bristle with references to letters, signs and writing, and Pasley shows the regular interaction between the act of composition and literary content. For example, immediately after a skirmish with his writing instrument, Kafka mentions a pen in The Lost One, while the format of the notebooks he used provided a tool for stimulating the linear progress of his narratives. Pasley’s findings all belong within the ambit of his edition, but deserve to be read in their own right, not just for their insights, but for the respect they instil towards linguistic fidelity. As such, they provide a typically discreet monument to the achievement of the man who – after Brod – has done more than any other to ensure the just transmission of Kafka’s work. The Fischer enterprise, edited by Born, Neumann, Pasley and Schillemeit, began to appear in 1982, but builds on many years’ editorial preparation. Although nothing can diminish Max Brod’s achievement in disobeying Kafka’s admittedly equivocally expressed instructions to destroy his unpublished papers – by preserving, editing and publishing them, Brod ensured that Kafka would be remembered in his true greatness, and not just for the handful of tales published during his lifetime – it has to be said that Brod’s treatment of Kafka texts were widely found to be unreliable, not to say slapdash. When my father, H. G. Adler, visited him in Tel Aviv in the late 1960s, Brod proudly announced the discovery of a new Kafka story. »Where?« my father naively enquired. »Why, here in my desk, of course!« Brod replied. Punctuation changed from printing to printing to printing; the novel properly called The Lost One appeared as Amerika: fragmentary passages from The Trial later appeared as appendices; and so on. If none of this diminished Brod’s essential achievement (or Kafka’s), it did indicate a need for greater accuracy, in the absence of which, speculation mounted. In 1953, Uyttersprot attracted considerable attention by proposing a rearrangement of the chapters in The Trial; since Brod himself owned the manuscript and refused access to others, his refutation did not carry much weight. Only after Brod returned the greater part of the papers to Kafka’s family, who deposited them at the Bodleian in 1961, could the critical study of the manuscripts begin in earnest. The Fischer edition is classically simple in conception, if somewhat cumbersome for scholarly use: each complex – published stories, novels, posthumous prose, diaries – is presented in two parts, a text volume free from all editorial matter, and an apparatus volume, containing fundamental material. The elegance lies in the result: a superb final text, also available as a separate volume or, inexpensively, in paperback. Irritations arise in using the apparatus; one misses aids to lucidity like a plan of contents for the whole edition, volume numbers, or page numbers in cross-references to other volumes. To be directed to »the apparatus volume of The Trial« on p 43 of that to the Diaries is to leave the reader feeling a little like Joseph K. before the labyrinthine Law. The gains are indisputable. Punctuation is immeasurably improved. Kafka’s practice of composing in notebooks where diary entries, aphorisms and other texts collide, from which Brod – understandably – separated out many individual works, is restored, giving a better sense of Kafka’s working method. The new versions of the writing for which Kafka used the school exercise books known as the Octavo Notebooks depart quite radically from Brod’s version in chronology, structure and content. A well-known critique of psychology now reads: How lamentable my self-knowledge is in comparison with my knowledge of my room. (Evening.) Why? There is no observation of the inner world, as there is of the external. Psychology is, in all, probably an anthropomorphism, a [nibbling] at borders. The earlier continuation is now consigned to the apparatus as an authorial deletion: »The inner world cannot be described, only lived«, and the apparatus discloses that the word »psychology« replaces the earlier »descriptive psychology«. The change to a fonmulation which now encompasses analytic psychology reveals that the passage may be read in terms of a struggle with Freud, who had earlier held such inspirational fascination for Kafka. Minor changes, then, may signify major shifts in thought. As such, all Kafka’s writing needs to be read in the light of its deletions, which range from typographical alterations to imagined self-annihilation: One could also think: you must do away with yourself, and without falsifying this knowledge one could then survive thanks to the consciousness of having discovered it. Both writing and erasure assume a central role in defining Kafka as a writer. Self-erasure, in fact, determines his self-creation, as he merges with the text. This occurs in Kafka’s most famous novelistic deletion in The Lost One, when he consistently changes the first-person singular to the third, creating the characteristically fuzzy narratorial persona, so intimate with both us, the readers, and the character, that we seem to step inside Kafka’s head. Now, we gain access to innumerable other creative deletions. Notwithstanding the critical edition’s respect for the incomplete manuscripts, it also somewhat paradoxically enshrines the ideal of a definitive text, intended by the author, and finalized according to rational principles by an editor, who decides between »text« and »variants«, and foregrounds the former, whilst relegating the latter to notes. This equivocation can be seen most clearly in the different textual principles applied to the Diaries and to The Trial. In the former, every emendation in punctuation is recorded, while in the latter, certain emendations are not. These are precisely the problems that the Stroemfeld/Roter Stern edition attacks in asserting a contrary understanding of what constitutes a text: fluid, changing, incomplete, even inchoate at times, the writing never reaches its goal, but remains in status nascendi. Punctually after the expiry of Kafka’s copyright on January 2, 1995, Roland Reuss and Peter Staengle brought out their introductory volume to the new historico-critical edition, which contains an editorial preface, and sample texts from The Judgement, Kafka’s literary breakthrough, and The Trial. To celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, this is followed by Staengle’s facsimile edition of three letters to Milena. The full text of The Trial is due but this winter, that of the letters to Milena in 1997. Reuss and Staengle adopt the editorial style pioneered by D. E. Sattler’s Frankfurt Hölderlin edition. By rejecting the idea of a definitive text, and instead printing Hölderlin’s writing and perennial rewriting of his poems in facsimile with typographically mimetic transcriptions, Sattler revolutionized the whole idea of a critical edition. Instead of offering an authorized text, he preferred the holograph, and opened up the reader’s access to the writer’s hand. At a stroke, this did away with problems of emendation and the display of variants, though it did leave the actual transcriptions open to continuing disputes. Reuss and Staengle, like Sattler faced with an unfinished œuvre, will also print facsimiles and transcriptions of the complete works. The closest parallel for this is the little-known Kafka’s Briefe an die Eltern aus den Jahren 1922-1924 (Prague Odeon, edited by Josef Cermak and Martin Svatos, 1990). This contains facsimiles of Kafka’s moving letters and cards to his family, now in the Strahov Library, Prague, with facing transcriptions and commentary. Pasley’s essays impinge directly on the latest debate, in which Reuss and Staengle in effect take Pasley’s findings to their logical conclusion. In an important piece, Pasley shows how heavily textual meaning in Kafka can be affected by punctuation. The absence of commas at one point in The Castle can reflect the immediacy of K.’s impressions, while the unusual full stops at another can convey the jerkiness of his perceptions. Normalizing the commas, as Pasley observes, also »normalizes« K. He intriguingly follows such changes through various stages of composition, and notes how the later printings of The Castle falsify its meaning. In the manuscript, the following sentences have only a single pause marked by a single stop: None the less K. called out the name with all his strength, the name thundered through the night. And from the distance a weak answer came after all, that was how far Barnabas had reached. The sentence typically mirrors the import of the entire text. In the first printing, the first comma is replaced by a stop, and in the third, the second comma by a semicolon: the original punctuation imitated K.’s gesture as he shouts, hears his own voice echo through the night, waits, and hears the response from the strength of which he deduces Barnabas’s position. In other words, the sentence epitomizes K.’s action as a land-surveyor, physically isolated from the community that he wishes to join. The balancing of call and reply upon a single pause exactly translates the interaction of sound and spatial orientation into a textual reality, affecting the subtle osmosis by which the reader apprehends K.’s character. Multiplying the pauses turns K. from a forlorn solitary, reflectively lost in the echoing void of the night, into an energetic loner, coolly calculating his position. Pasley counts seventy such alterations in the first three chapters of The Castle, where the changes considerably alter the »flowing parataxis« of the original. This represents a high degree of editorial interference by Brod. Comparison with works which Kafka himself saw through the press confirms this impression, and leads Pasley to conclude that in his manuscripts, Kafka tended to punctuate largely for himself; thus, he mainly uses a binary signsystem (comma/full stop) in the manuscripts, whereas in the published works, he shifts to a ternary one (with more semicolons) to communicate with the reader. In Kafka’s solitary writing, the punctuation remains agonistic throughout his »storming of the last earthly barrier«, but when embracing a reader, it becomes conspiratorial, as is symbolized in the dialectical compromise sign that unites stop and comma. That leads to an editorial dilemma: to normalize, or not to normalize? Gently chiding Brod, Pasley concludes that … »the solution to this problem has not always been very successful«. Not for Reuss such courteous admonishments. In an article whose title effectively responds to Pasley’s, »Genug Achtung vor der Schrift?« (»Enough Respect for the Writing?«) published in the first volume of Stroemfeld/ Roter Stern’s new scholarly journal, Text: Kritische Beiträge, Reuss roundly taxes the critical edition with textual infidelity. Reuss criticizes its omission of Kafka’s Hebrew exercises and official writings and condemns its conception, structure and editorial principles. As Kafka published only a number of stories, the edition’s inclusion of two volumes of Posthumous Writings and Fragments anomalously distinguishes these from the rest of the unfinished works (including the novels) and creates an artificial distinction between them and the so-called Diaries. Reuss, then, would stress the integrity of Kafka’s fragmentariness. The approach is evident in his editorial policy for The Trial. Pasley’s study of its manuscript brought major insights into the composition, such as the fact that Kafka wrote the conclusion immediately after the opening chapter, to provide a narrative framework, and so ensure closure. He then composed individual chapters like episodes, which he subsequently tore from his notebooks and kept in separate folders, working not unlike the building method in The Great Wall of China. The order of chapters and fragments is not fully resolved. For instance, Pasley relegates Brod’s serviceable Chapter Four, introducing »Miss Monday« and »Captain Lance«, to an appendix, although it logically belongs between Chapters Two and Three, in order to explain why K. in the latter briefly borrows the name »Lance«; and the crucial but deleted reflection on dreaming and waking from Chapter One (»the moment of waking is the most dangerous in the day …«), printed by Brod in an appendix, is now consigned to the apparatus. Ironically, Brod’s text, which was the basis for his paperback edition, included more Kafka than the Fischer text and its paperback derivative. At the very least, the current paperback should be revised to include significant deletions as an appendix. The promised solution in the historico-critical edition is to reproduce the entire Trial as a series of bundles bound in fascicle as separate booklets, to mimic the originals. Another debated aspect involves the use of silent emendation. While this affects only typographical minutiae, the result can be substantive, and produces some curious readings. Thus, certain aspects of punctuation and spelling are normalized in the Fischer edition. This even extends to the title of Kafka’s novel in which one letter is restored to its original spelling and two are normalized. Reuss and Staengle retain the full historical flavour throughout. Kafka himself was fully conscious of how even the most minute details of punctuation could affect meaning, as is clear from a diary entry of March 26, 1911, cited by Reuss: Omission of the fullstop. In general the spoken sentence begins in a large capital letter with the speaker, turns in its course as far as it can towards the listener and returns to the speaker with the fullstop. If however the stop is omitted, then the sentence which is no longer contained blows with its entire breath towards the listener. Silently inserting absent punctuation, as occurs in the Fischer Trial, can destroy this effect. At the end of the Cathedral chapter, the priest addresses Joseph K., and his epigrammatic conclusion opens with quotation marks: »The law wants nothing from you. It takes you up when you come and it releases you when you go.« Reuss and Staengle restore Kafka’s omission of a final inverted comma. Consequently, the speech that begins as an address to Joseph K. typographically extends beyond him to embrace the reader. Similar examples confirm this as a stylistic trait, where punctuation stretches the indefinable edges of language. Each major edition of The Trial has offered more textual insight. Brod himself published illuminating variants (unfortunately omitted in the English translation), like the first version to the conclusion of the last paragraph but one: Where was the judge? Where was the High Court? I have the say. I raise my hands. This became: Where was the judge, whom he never saw? Where was the High Court, which he never reached? He raised his hands and stretched out his fingers. The new clauses distance K. from the court, just as deleting the first person distances him from the reader. Pasley’s edition multiplies such insight into Kafka’s narrative alchemy. The opening chapter contains a crucial explanation, which can now be seen as it arose: Our authorities … are attracted by guilt, as it says in the law, and has to dispatch us guards. That is the law. Where could there be an error? The sentence »That is the law« proves to be an inspired insertion evoking several different senses of the word – legal code and law of nature – which turn the novel’s law into an absolute. Yet the method of relegating difficulties to the apparatus creates problems, as can be seen at the other end of the spectrum. K.’s weekly partner from the demi-monde, »who by day only receives her visitors from her bed«, is mostly called Elsa, but twice features punningly as »Betta« (ie, »beta«, »better«, or »bedder«), a fact misleadingly not signalled under variants, only under emendations; yet to alter, and not to embed K.’s mistress in the text, is to treat the reading as Kafka’s error, whereas it could well be Joseph K.’s own mind that is here exposed, in all its onomastic equivocality. Such are the inchoate textual difficulties that Reuss and Staengle present with an absolute minimum of editorial interference, lucidly presenting a clear facsimile of the manuscripts with facing transcriptions, including every deletion, insertion, or relocation. For the first time, we can now read Kafka as he actually wrote. His evocatively graphic script, additional pencil marks and signs of Brod’s editing indicate the reliability of the reproductions. One has the impression of a musical score, registering the creative moment, as when, for example, the number of lines per page suddenly shoots up in a crescendo during the composition of Before the Law, or Kafka’s inimitable letter-forms alter with his mood and meaning. The curious hatched paper, so like a school exercise book, that appears in Staengle’s edition of the love-letters to Milena, no doubt needs to be seen in this context, as cage, barrier, system and support: the writing physically enacts its own adulterous transgression. On the strength of these introductory volumes, the project therefore deserves to be welcomed unreservedly as a magnificent new edition, which will significantly alter the way in which Kafka is read and interpreted. The fact that Kafka’s art is predicated on erasure – textual, aesthetic, existential – in which cognition of a fact also hinges on what it obscures, demands a portrayal of the text in which deletions, equivocations and incomplete re-corrections assume an equal right to be incorporated into the literary meaning. Throughout, the reader is invited to follow the subtle shifts in sense and texture which occur on every page, from the comical effect achieved by revising the syntax of the Italian businessman’s exit to the brief, ominous identification of the Priest with the Doorkeeper. The collision of forces at the heart of Kafka’s mythic encounters – with the father, the law, the castle, or indeed, with Freud – can now, for the first time, be pursued down to the very fractures and faultlines of literary composition. |
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