Introduction

The papers on Kafka that follow expand talks given at a conference at Princeton on March 26–27, 2010, with the title Kafkas Spätstil/Kafka’s Late Style. The conference, the first of three, with the second one held at the Humboldt University in Berlin in March 2011 and the third to be held at Oxford in 2012, was organized under the auspices of the Kafka Network, a consortium of the three universities aiming to create new perspectives on Kafka and his work. Contributors were encouraged to consider the leading remarks drafted by members of the core faculty of the Network—remarks that are elaborated in the following pages.

For all the well-known wealth of interpretation and anti-interpretative thrusts, readings of Kafka have tended to see his work (with the exception of the very earliest pieces) monolithically. The dominant pattern emerges from the work of the middle period, following the “breakthrough”—“Das Urteil,” Die Verwandlung, “In der Strafkolonie,” and Der Process—and to a lesser degree, the stories in the Landarzt-volume—“Ein Bericht für eine Akademie” and “Ein Landarzt.” This perspective is compelling, turning on concepts of patriarchal repression, filial impiety, self-torment, and the institution of the law run amok. As a result, the late work has been less well studied, and fine distinctions overlooked, despite its evident innovations in narrative mode, figuration, reference, and idea. ²

The beginning of the late work might well be dated biographically from September 1917. The emergence of Kafka’s tuberculosis and his gradual withdrawal from his professional work (as Senior Legal Secretary for the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague) mark a distinct caesura in his personal history; this caesura may be taken to mark a break in compositional mode.

What are the evident differences? The late work exhibits a greater measure of distance and mediation between the author and the actions of his protagonists—consider the disenchanted narrators of “Josefine, die Sängerin oder das Volk der Mäuse” and “Ein Hungerkünstler” and, looking back a bit, “Ein Bericht für eine Akademie”—and a related, merciful softening of the tragic end, by and large: Josefine’s vanishing is sweeter than, let us say, Joseph K.’s death by stabbing; the ape’s conclusion is unhappy though he is neither drowned nor impaled; “Forschungen eines Hundes” profiles a narrator who, unlike many of his predecessors, is not himself persecuted. All in all, these late characters are less subject to others’ violence; like K. in Das Schloss, they exhaust themselves or, as in the case of the figure of Odradek in “Die Sorge des Hausvaters,” they cannot even exhaust themselves and hence appear indestructible. Something of Kafka’s skill at negotiating the conflict between opposed parties—a skill he practiced at “the office”—is on display at the end, detached from its original setting, especially if one chooses to see, in Das Schloss, an imaginative cooperation between two modes of being—Kafka’s bureaucratic existence and “the being of the writer” (Schriftstellersein). K.’s desire to enter the castle may represent a desire to enter the genuine precincts of writing, and yet the castle offices are modeled on modern bureaucratic institutions, especially the offices where Kafka spent the whole of his professional life.

In the second volume of his Kafka biography, Rainer Stach called the late period of Kafka’s work Die Jahre der Erkenntnis. That phrase can sound altogether too salutary; it is hardly a question of Kafka—a skeptic of cultural information—acquiring a stock of palpable, employable pieces of knowledge. Walter Benjamin’s dictum is apposite here: “Erkenntnis und Wahrheit sind niemals identisch; es gibt keine wahre Erkenntnis und keine erkannte Wahrheit.”³ Yet Kafka’s late texts are given over to acts of fundamental reflection, a thrust conspicuous in the Zürau aphorisms and the Brief an den Vater and one no less apparent in the late fictions. Here, thought turns increasingly to a critical reflection on art and artistry. Consider the Hungerkünstler-volume and “Forschungen eines Hundes,” a work that, Adorno, in his correspondence with Benjamin, strikingly...