You Need Only to Change Your Direction: New Works on Kafka

By most measures—new scholarship, translations, critical editions in German and Czech, university courses, fiction in all languages inspired by his writing, and the publication of A Franz Kafka Encyclopedia with over eight-hundred entries—Franz Kafka, the peripheral writer par excellence, has become a writer of and for the world. And if we believe that "world literature is not a set canon of texts but a mode of reading"¹ then Germanists ought to take note. Three new books by scholars whose primary fields lie outside of German studies provide new, futural approaches to Franz Kafka's work and life. Jennifer L. Geddes, professor of Religion, and Mark Christian Thompson, professor of English, offer new modes of reading Kafka's most famous short stories. Marek Nekula, a specialist in Czech language and literature, brings a New Historicist approach to archival sources related to Kafka's upbringing, education, and languages, in order to revise and to deepen our understanding of Kafka as a Prague writer.

The first said: You have won.The second said: But unfortunately only in parable.The first said: No, in reality: in parable you have lost.²

Kafka's Ethics of Interpretation: Between Tyranny and Despair by Jennifer Geddes addresses Kafka's "own central concern with interpretive activity and his sense of it as having life-or-death consequences" (9). The thesis that these enigmatic texts prove fertile ground for an "ethics of interpretation" seems at first counterintuitive. If anything, meaning becomes ever more elusive as we read on. We feel perplexed at the end of "Give it Up," dizzy by the end of "On Parables," and almost enraged when the Hunger Artist declares that he would have eaten just like everyone else, if only he had found the food he liked. Is there a lesson about understanding? Perhaps my quest to understand what the text is about—in part, an outgrowth of many years spent teaching Kafka to undergraduates—diverted me from seeing that the interpretive quest is that what. The tug-of-war is its defining feature. In Geddes's words, "The Kafkan text calls for interpretive activity and resists definitive interpretation by its reader … The Kafkan text itself teaches us about interpretation as engagement in the effort to understand, accompanied by a hesitation that acknowledges its own limitations (it can never arrive at a complete interpretation) and its temptations—it must resist its own desire for mastery" (107). Refreshingly, Geddes's concern is not interpretation as an art or science, but as an ethical act or discipline. Resisting the desire "to win," as the parable puts it, is the first principle of this ethics.

Another principle presented is that definitive interpretations are often destructive; "the ethical stance of resisting closure" (108) requires tolerance for ambiguity and rewards hesitation. There are other axioms: multiple interpretations may be more accurate than a single one; and, in the face of human suffering, interpreting must cease and yield to a different mode of "attention." Geddes arrives at this ethic from stories in which interpretation takes place, for the most part, between the two poles indicated in her title: "hermeneutics of tyranny" and "hermeneutics of despair." The hermeneutical tyrants, of course, include the three fathers of the Letter to his Father (1919), "The Judgment" (1913), and The Metamorphosis (1915), as well as the Officer of "In the Penal Colony" (1919). (Geddes uses English titles and quotes only in English translation). In these tales of punishment, Geddes's mode of reading uncovers dynamic "economies" of interpretation, mis- and reinterpretation, distraction, attention, and engagement...