Kubrick and Kafka: The Corporeal Uncanny

1. Photographs and Stories

"The necessary condition for an image is sight," Gustav Janouch claims to have said to Kafka. Kafka supposedly smiled and replied: "We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes." ¹ Photography as exorcism is performed in order to drive things out of our minds. In a typical paradox, Kafka transforms the photograph from a vehicle of remembrance, a monument to a thing or moment in the external world, into a means of expelling a "thing"--a place, a person, a demon?--from the mind itself. Given material expression in the photograph, the image is separable, detachable not only from its referent but, as Kafka is supposed to have put it, from the "mind." In Kafka's formulation as transmitted by Janouch, stories are "a way," a means of shutting the eyes, of not looking at what we do not wish to see. But this paradox ensures that the link between photographs and works of fiction remains ambiguous. On the one hand, stories are seen in contradistinction to photography--not as a means of exorcising demons, but rather as a means of shutting them out, of erecting a textual barrier between self and world. On the other hand, it is the relatedness of story to photograph that is intriguing, the sense in which writing too, may be an exorcism. "Shutting the eyes," as an act entailed in writing, would render narrative an effort both to expel and shut out the images that photography fixes. In this reading, narrative is complicit with photography in its attempt to keep the "things" that haunt us at a distance. But is sight really the "necessary condition for the image," as Janouch postulates? Surely it is also suggested that some images exist in the mind's eye alone. ²

What, then, might keeping one's Eyes Wide Shut imply? The title of Kubrick's last film almost certainly refers to this exchange between Kafka and Janouch, albeit indirectly. ³ Adopting Kafka's tendency to speak in paradoxes, Kubrick shrouds the relations between photograph and narrative in further ambiguity. Where to look for enlightenment? Quoting Kafka and Janouch in Camera Lucida, his meditation on photography, Roland Barthes muses that the best way to look at photographs may be to look away, to close one's eyes. "Absolute subjectivity," writes Barthes, "is achieved only in a state, an effort, of silence. Shutting your eyes is to make the image speak in silence . . . to say nothing, to shut my eyes, to allow the detail to rise of its own accord into affective consciousness" (CL, 55). The detail to which Barthes refers is of a particular kind: it is what he calls the punctum, an element which "shoots out of [the scene] like an arrow and pierces me" (CL, 26). The marks or wounds created by the punctum generate affective responses: "a photograph's punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)" (CL, 27); it is that which "attracts and distresses"(CL, 40).

With reference to Barthes's reflections, then, keeping the "eyes wide shut" refers to the insight that comes from sustained meditation on the image that a photograph leaves in the mind's eye. It is when all else is excluded--what Barthes calls the "noise" that surrounds the image--that the significant detail, the wounding punctum, brings insight in the form of affective response. Barthes, then, takes Kafka's words literally, applying them to the photograph rather than to the story. "Shutting his eyes," Barthes restores the image of the exorcised "thing" to the mind. Reconnecting with the wounding "thing" and viewing it in the mind's eye once more, Barthes savors those affects that Kafka prefers to keep at bay. Could it be that Eyes Wide Shut--a film whose title was chosen by Kubrick, remaining enigmatic to his screenwriter--contains a punctum, something that attracts and distresses...