Abstract
In “Before the Law,” Kafka’s most famous parable from The Trial, a humble man can spend a lifetime waiting for permission to enter the portals of official culture. The radiance of the Law beckons to him like the splendor of canonical language, much as the examples of Flaubert and Goethe, as Max Brod reminds us, called to Kafka.1 Worship of canonical German, it seems often left Kafka like “the man from the country,” seduced by the splendor of a canonical language that will bestow him with its distinction once and for all. Kafka admired Goethe, however, as Max Brod points out, with a “little note of mischief,” and his worship was less a writer’s seduction by high language than Kafka’s need to define canonical German’s limiting force.2 The classics, as Josef K. complains, should be “accessible to anyone at any time.” But canonical language tries to mark the difference between inside and outside: between those who possess elegant language, and its privileges, and those guilty outsiders “from the country,” or elsewhere beyond the pale, and thus to separate the cultured from those who speak “other,” lesser, or simply different tongues.3 In this high cultural sense, it’s worth remembering that amoretz, the Yiddish word for Kafka’s “Mann vom Lande,” with its older Hebrew source as amha-aretz, means the same as a “schlemiel,” a fool.
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Notes
Max Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography (New York: Schocken Books, 1947). “To hear Kafka talk about Goethe with awe was something quite out of the ordinary,” Brod reports… the love he felt for Goethe and Flaubert never changed in all the twenty-two years I was his close friend” (122, 51).
Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Breon Mitchell (New York: Schocken Books, 1998), p. 216, and Der Prozess, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Max Brod, Vol. 2 (Frankfurt, 1976), p. 182: “Das Gesetz soll doch jedem und immer zugänglich sein.…” Citations from Amerika will be taken, with slight modification, from Franz Kafka, Amerika, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken Books, 1974), and Amerika, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Max Brod, Vol. 1. References will hereafter be given parenthetically in the text.
Robert Alter, Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 68.
Evelyn Torton Beck, Kafka and the Yiddish Theater: Its Impact on His Work (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971), p. 5.
See Georg Langer, “Ma’shehu al Kafka” (A Few Words on Kafka), first published in 1941, later included in Me’at Zori, ed. Miriam Dror, (Tel Aviv, 1984), pp. 132–134. Versions of Kafka’s acquisition of Hebrew are actually quite varied; for the standard account, see Hartmut Binder, “Kafka’s Hebräischstudien,” Jahrbuch der detuschen Schillergesellschaft 11, 1967, 526–556.
Heinz Politzer, in Franz Kafka: Parable and Paradox (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1962), p. 174, was one of the first well-known American critics to point out this multilingual fact.
One of Kafka’s own sources for this linguistic history is a book much discussed in his diary entries of early 1912: Jakob Fromer, Der Organismus des Judentums (1909), pp. 64–65. Ritchie Robertson gives an extensive account of Kafka’s Yiddish sources in Kafka: Judaism, Politics, Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985).
See Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 282–285, and the section of Franz Kafka: Jewish Patient discussed below.
Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1973), p. 282.
Franz Kafka, Diaries, Entry of January 24, 1912, p. 173.
Franz Kafka, Letter to Max Brod, June 1921, in Letters to Friends, Family and Editors, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Schocken Books, 1977), pp. 286–289, and Briefe, 1902–1904, ed. Max Brod (New York: Schocken Books, 1958), 334–338.
The term has a long history in Kafka criticism, centering on the question of whether Kafka’s German was in fact pure, denuded of any dialect, tinted and perhaps tainted by other languages and idioms, or a canonical or “major” literature inflected with a minority perspective, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms (Kafka: For a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan [1975; University of Minnesota Press, 1986]. For the initial position, using the same term “papiernes Deutsch” in 1918 that Kafka used in the 1921 letter to Brod, and on the relation of Prague German to other languages, dialects, or accents, see Fritz Mauthner, Errinerungen (München, 1918), pp. 51 ff. For a still helpful framing of the issues, see Peter Demetz, “Noch Einmal: Prager Deutsch,” Literature und Kritik, 1:6, 1966, 58–59.
Max Brod, “Der Dichter Franz Kafka,” in Gustav Krojanker, Juden in der Deutschen Literature (Berlin: Welt-Verlag, 1922), p. 60,
and Marthe Robert, As Lonely as Franz Kafka, trans. Ralph Mannheim (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), p. 3.
Robert Alter, Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 64. As Karl Grödzinger notes, Kafka’s texts and personal denials of Jewish knowledge operated according to a kind of “Verstellungstrategie,” or strategy of dissimulation. Comparison of the Hebrew and Yiddish sources of the Kabbalah and Kafka’s accounts of them in his diary and literary works, Grödzinger shows, demonstrates an impressive carrying over of Hebrew and Yiddish material in what remains a linguistically German text. See Karl Erich Grödzinger, Kafka und die Kabbala (Frankfurt: Fisher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1994), p. 12. Kafka’s diaries and notebooks, as scholars know, contain many open references to Hebrew and Yiddish sources, and by the time the eighth Oktavo Notebook was written, fifty-eight of the seventy pages were filled with Hebrew vocabulary. Unfortunately, the discussion of how much or how little Kabbalah Kafka knew has drawn attention away from how many of Kafka’s Hebrew and Yiddish concerns are transparently discussed in German terms.
Harold Bloom, The Strong Light of the Canonical: Kafka, Freud, and Scholem as Revisionists of Jewish Culture and Thought (New York, 1987): “… what most needs and demands interpretation in kafka’s writing is its perversely deliberate evasion of interpretation,” p. 7.
Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, trans. Harry Zohn (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1981 [1975]), p. 125: “I am reminded of one of my own statements… that students of mine used to quote. Apparently, I told them that in order to understand the Kabbalah, nowadays one had to read Franz Kafka’s writings first, particularly, The Trial”).
David Biale, “Gershom Scholem’s Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on Kabbalah: Text and Commentary,” Modern Judaism 5:1 (February 1985), p. 69. Kafka’s ability to “explode the conventional meaning of well-known texts and reveal their secrets,” as David Biale puts it more fully, “must have reminded Scholem of the Kabbalah,” but also indicates a larger model of an open literary and cultural tradition. For Kafka’s “new Kabbalah,” see Diaries, January 16, 1922, p. 399, an entry composed after both The Trial and Amerika.
On Kafka and Czech, see Scott Spector, Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin de Siecle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 217–232.
Ruth Wisse, “The Logic of Language and The Trials of the Jews: Franz Kafka and Yosef Haim Brenner,” The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey Through Language and Culture (New York: The Free Press, 2000), pp. 74–75 ff, and Sander Gilman, Franz Kafka: The Jewish Patient (New York: Routledge, 1995), 39–40. In Gilman’s less forgiving terms, Kafka can produce only “stereotypes of the Jew.” The presence of authentic Hebrew and Yiddish sources in Kafka’s German, and his sympathetic portryal of them, belie precisely such Jewish stereotypes, including the Nordauesque myth of the deracinated Jewish intellectual on which Gilman’s reading is based.
The Trial, p. 7. On K’s arrogance, see A. E. Dyson, “Trial by Enigma: Kafka’s The Trial,” (1972), in Harold Bloom, ed., Modern Critical Interpretations: Franz Kafka’s The Trial (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), p. 70.
Franz Kafka, “An Introductory Talk on the Yiddish Language,” February 18, 1912, in Mark Anderson, ed., Reading Kafka: Prague, Politics and the Fin de Siècle (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), p. 266.
Enid Welsford, The Fool, His Social and Literary History (Gloucester, Mass, 1966), p. xi.
Quoted in Ruth Wisse, The Schlemiel as Modern Hero (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 4.
Ruth Wisse, The Schlemiel as Modern Hero, p. 16, and Marthe Robert, As Lonely as Franz Kafka, p. 180. This idea of a “shadow” self or discourse is not part of the Jewish schlemiel tradition, which, to paraphrase the French, is much more comfortable in its own linguistic skin. On Heine’s earlier use of the schlemiel as a figure for autonomous Yiddish and Hebrew “counter-narrative” in the German text and tradition, see Willi Goetschel, “Rhyming History: A Note on the ‘Hebrew Melodies,’ Germanic Review 74:4 (Fall 1999), 279 ff.
See Steven E. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness 1800–1923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982).
See Steven E. Aschheim, “Caftan and Cravat,” in Brothers and Strangers, 58–79. On pp. 14–15, Aschheim cites Jacob Fromer’s Introduction to Solomon Maimons Lebensgeschichte to show how the Caftan, the Kabbalah, and Hebrew and Yiddish were linked in Kafka’s period. In fact, Kafka recommended this specific edition of the work, which he possessed and wrote about in his diaries, to his friend, Felix Weltsch, in his letter of December 1917. Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Schocken Books, 1977 [1958], p. 173.
Quoted in Emmanuel S. Goldsmith, Modern Yiddish Culture: The Story of the Yiddish Language Movement (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), p. 53.
Kafka finished working on the novel in late 1914 and finally abandoned it in 1915 or 1916. Hartmut Binder dates the composition of the final chapter, “The Great Nature Theater of Oklahoma,” as the second week of October 1914 and Kafka’s beginning of the first chapter of The Trial as the second week of August 1914. See Malcolm Pasley and Klaus Wagenbach, “Datierung Sämtlicher Texte,” in Jürgen Born, ed., Kafka Symposion (Berlin, 1965), pp. 62–63,
and Hartmut Binder, Kafka Kommentar zu den Romanen, Rezensionen, Aphorismen und zum Brief an den Vater (München: Winkler Verlag, 1976), pp. 5–6.
Levi had read “In the City of Slaughter” [“In Shkhite-Shtot”], the Yiddish version of what was already a Hebrew classic, “Ba’ir haharegah.” the work. which made its author the leader of the “Generation of Bialik,” as writers in this period of the revival of Hebrew as a modern literary language came to be known. Dan Miron, Bodedim b’-Moedam: L’Dyokana Harepublika Hasifrutit Haivrit b’Thhilat Hamea Haesrim [When Loners Come Together: A Portrait of Hebrew Literature at the Turn of the Twentieth Century] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1987), p. 125 ff.
On Hebrew’s cultural authority, see Benjamin Harshav, The Meaning of Yiddish (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 21–22.
Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953), p. 29.
“A Hearing Aid,” in “Tales from Chelm,” Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg, eds., A Treasury of Yiddish Stories (New York: Penguin Books, 1953), p. 672, and Ruth Wisse, Schlemiel as Modern Hero, p. 11.
John Guillory, “Canon,” in Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, eds., Critical Terms for Literary Study, second edition (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 231–244. Karl’s writing desk, is not at “school,” for as Guillory notes, “the school brings the written text into contact with spoken language” and thus would cast a shadow on Uncle Jacob’s transcendent linguistic dream for Karl (p. 240).
See “Internal Jewish Bilingualism,” in Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 247–314.
“Die Unfähigkeit des Heizers ist letzten Endes ein künstlerisches Versage.” [“The stoker’s incapacity” to speak canonical language, according to Sokel, “is in the final analysis an artistic failure.”] Walter Sokel, Franz Kafka: Tragik und Ironie (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1976), p. 353.
Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 340: “Whenever art has succeeded in taking its bearings from the plebian moment—and not in a tongue and cheek way, but seriously—its weight or gravity increased.”
For an account of these different meanings, see Hartmut Binder, Kafka-Kommentar zu Sämtlichen Erzählungen (München: Winkler Verlag, 1982), p. 232.
Kafka’s source for this linguistic history is a book much discussed in his diary entries of early 1912: Jakob Fromer, Der Organismus des Judentums (1909), pp. 64–65.
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© 2003 Doris Sommer, ed.
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Suchoff, D. (2003). Kafka’s Canon. In: Sommer, D. (eds) Bilingual Games. New Directions in Latino American Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403982704_17
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