"A Place so Insanely Enchanting": Kafka and the Poetics of Suspension

"A Place so Insanely Enchanting": Kafka and the Poetics of SuspensionAuthor(s): Michael G. LevineSource: MLN, Vol. 123, No. 5, Comparative Literature Issue (Dec., 2008), pp. 1039-1067Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29734453 .Accessed: 28/03/2014 06:45

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"A Place So Insanely Enchanting": Kafka and the Poetics of Suspension

Michael G. Levine

So I find myself wavering, constantly

flying up to the top of the mountain, but

barely able to last an instant up there.

Other people waver as well, but in lower

regions, with greater strength; if they are

in danger of falling, they are caught by the relative who walks beside them for that

purpose. I, however, weaver way up high; it

is unfortunately not death, but the eternal

torments of dying.

Kafka, Diary entry August 6, 19141

Perhaps nowhere in the Kafkan corpus is the desire for suspension?or, as Henry Sussman has put it, the desire "for the perpetual suspension of suspension"?more clearly expressed than in the late story "First

Distress."2 In it, a high-strung trapeze artist performs as a member of

a traveling show. So attached is he to his art that he descends from his

perch in the vaulted dome of a circus tent only when the show moves

on to another venue. For such travel, racing automobiles are used

to whirl the artist by night if possible or in the earliest hours of the

morning through the empty streets at breakneck speed to minimize his discomfort. For railway journeys, a whole compartment is reserved

in which he hangs suspended in a Gep?cknetz, or luggage rack.

During one such trip, the artist, biting his lip, declares that hence?

forth he must have two trapezes for his performance instead of only one, two trapezes opposite each other. His manager immediately accedes to the demand, but his compliance seems only to exacerbate

MEN 123 (2008) : 1039-1067 ? 2009 by The Johns Hopkins University Press


1040 MICHAEL G. LEVINE

the tension it was meant to relieve. Indeed, the artist's distress con?

tinues to mount, finally brimming over in a tearful outburst. Deeply affected by the spectacle, the manager springs to his feet, climbs up on the seat, and caresses the artist, eventually coming cheek to cheek

with him and allowing his own face to be covered in the latter's tears [so da? es auch von des Trapezk?nstlers Tr?nen ?berfl?ssen wurde].3

As the desire for ever more radical forms of suspension grows, as

the manager is increasingly implicated in a movement of desire that knows no bounds and is only intensified by the prospect of its satisfac? tion, this desire seems progressively to free itself from any determinate

mooring and to hang suspended in the air like a trapeze artist hover?

ing between two bars. It becomes, in a sense, desire that no longer

belongs to anyone, a desire for artistic freedom that is itself liberated from any and all possession.

As this emancipatory movement grows, discrete bodies lose their

contours and become increasingly difficult to distinguish from one another. Physical proximity, initially suggested by the touching of the

protagonists' cheeks, thus gives way at a certain point to corporeal dissolution as artist and manager lose themselves in a wash of over?

flowing tears. As though to suggest that the medium of dissolution were itself destined to dissolve, destined to lose itself in something even more amorphous, the wash of tears gives way in its turn to a

flood of open, anxious, and seemingly endless questions. "Once such

thoughts had begun to obsess him," the manager reflects about the

artist, "could they ever come to an end? Would they not continue to

become more and more intense? Weren't they a threat to his liveli?

hood, life-threatening?" (KSS 86; GW1: 252). While physical bodies, discrete identities, and stable discursive posi?

tions tend to dissolve in the course of the story, the anxious questions to which they give place assume in their turn a strange corporeality. Indeed, each of the woundingly open questions raised by the man?

ager does not so much flow from the preceding ones as double back on them, unfolding within them like a blossoming stigmata. And it is just such wounds that seem to open now on the smooth, childlike forehead of the trapeze artist, engraving themselves there as the first furrows of care. These furrows are subtly brought to our attention by the manager, who, seated again in his corner of the railway compart?

ment, glances up secretly over the top of his book at the exhausted artist asleep again in his net. Eying the unconscious artist in this way, the manager effectively superimposes the act of reading upon that of

seeing, the lines of the book upon the creases of the brow, thereby


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gesturing toward an inscription that is itself suspended between text and body, an inscription the artist somehow writes in his sleep and will henceforth be able to read only through the eyes of another. It is this gestural dimension of Kafka's text to which Walter Benjamin

draws our attention, noting that "for Kafka, there was always something that could only be grasped in the gesture. And this gesture, which he did not understand, constitutes the cloudy part of his parables. From

this gesture arises Kafka's fiction."4

In what follows, I examine the gestures associated with forms of

suspension in Kafka's work and the way they are associated, as Ben?

jamin puts it, with a grasp that is not that of understanding, a grasp that instead dislocates understanding from within and makes of this creative misunderstandings means by which to get a different hold on

things. Beginning with the story "First Distress," we have already had occasion to note how a rather straightforward grip associated with the

trapeze artist's hold on a single bar gives way in the course of the story to other, more precarious modes of artistic and interpretive suspension.

To continue to trace this movement, I turn now to a passage from The

Castle cited at length by Benjamin in his Kafka essay.

The Castle

Very different in tone from "First Distress," the passage has a strikingly similar narrative structure. Indeed, its narrative development?or rather its lack thereof?takes us to a place that for all its ostensible

differences is not unlike the locus of suspension explored in "First Distress." It is a place K. comes upon in the course of his lovemaking with the barmaid Frieda, a place to which only such lovemaking, it seems, could give access.

They embraced each other; her little body burned in K.'s hands; they rolled a few paces in an unconscious state from which K. repeatedly but vainly tried to rescue himself, bumped dully against Klamm 's door, and then

lay in small puddles of beer and other rubbish with which the floor was

covered. Hours passed there, hours breathing together, hearts beating as

one, hours in which K. felt more and more that he was lost, that he had wandered farther than any human being before him, into parts so foreign that even the air hadn't a single component of the air in his homeland, into a place where one would inevitably suffocate from the foreignness, a

place so insanely enchanting that one had no alternative but go on and

get even more lost.5



As ecstatically disorienting as the tone of this passage may be, its move?

ment into increasingly foreign parts is fairly easy to follow?especially if we allow ourselves to be guided by the carefully choreographed artistic performances of "First Distress."

Like "First Distress," the scene in The Castlebegins with two separate bodies pressed up against each other. Struggling to transcend their

physical shapes and individual identities, the two roll around on the floor utterly oblivious to the world around them. Indeed, the more

they lose themselves in each other, the more they forget who and where

they are, the more they bump up against things and knock unwit?

tingly on Klamm's door, the harder it is to tell them apart from their

surroundings. Such is the heat of this scene, in which Frieda's little

body is said to burn in K.'s hands, that the lovers not only exchange all manner of bodily fluids but themselves dissolve utterly intoxicated into the puddles of beer in which they lie. Here the first act of the little drama, the first degree of dissolu?

tion, comes to a stop with molten subjects rendering their shapes and vital energies pooling stagnantly on the floor. What remains of the lovers?or rather of a separateness still to be overcome?is

conveyed through a certain rhythm. Gone is the subject "they," the

active verbs "embraced," "rolled," "bumped," and even "lay"; gone are the precise spatial and temporal coordinates. In their place, it is

said only that "hours passed, hours breathing together with a single heartbeat [Dort vergiengen Stunden, Stunden gemeinsamen Atems, gemein? samen Herzschlags].'" Yet the back and forth of respiration, like the tick-tock of two hearts beating as one, is still too much. As though to

suggest an overcoming of this minimal alternation, the amorphous

puddles themselves gradually give way under the rising temperature of the scene to a more diffuse, intoxicated, and vaporous state. The

stagnant waters turn into stale air, into air so thick, so heavy that it

can no longer be taken in or breathed out. If K. is said to choke on

it?or at least to be threatened with suffocation, it is not just because the air is unbreathable, but rather because there is no longer any

exchange between inside and outside. Having initially dissolved into the puddles of beer on the floor, K. is now about to evaporate, to

vanish completely into the air. Indeed, what makes this atmosphere so utterly foreign is not simply that it "hadn't a single component of

the air of his homeland" but rather that it is so saturated, so full of K.

Turning inside out, no longer quite inside or out, hanging suspended at the congested bottleneck of vaporizing body and thickening air, K. in effect chokes on himself.6


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The Metamorphosis

Like the vaporizing K. of his late, unfinished novel, The Castle, Gregor Samsa of Kafka's early and perhaps most famous story, The Metamorpho?

sis, loses volume as he merges increasingly with his surroundings. As

the body of this monstrous vermin parasitically feeds on itself, it not

only grows thin but flattens out. Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, the focus in the narrative more generally shifts from three dimensions

to two: from the interior of Gregor's "regular human room, only a

little on the small side" lying tranquilly "between the four familiar walls" to the two-dimensional space of the walls themselves.7 In other

words, as Gregor begins to climb the walls and ceiling, the emphasis shifts from voluminous interiors to flat, planar surfaces.

In order to appreciate the full significance of these shifts, it is

important to bear in mind the ways in which related issues tend to cluster around these coordinates. For example, at the beginning of

the story the "four familiar walls" used by Gregor to get his bearings in space are directly correlated with the quarter-hour divisions of the

clock by which he locates himself in time. The precision with which these spatio-temporal relationships are calibrated at this point is in turn linked to the sharpness of the narrative eye, just as the issue of

depth perception?in particular Gregor's ability to see things in relief as they stand out distinctly from their surroundings?is related to the matter of his own physical volume ("his vaulted brown belly" [M 3; GW1: 93]) and especially to his position relative to his surroundings? both physical and familial?at the outset of the story. Gregor's mother,

father, and sister?each standing at a different door of his centrally located bedroom?communicate with each other through his space. Indeed, while Gregor may no longer be able to take part directly in the

exchange, he is still its principal object, just as his room is literally the medium, the switchboard or Zentrale, through which it takes place.

By contrast, when Gregor dies, his body is described as being "completely flat and dry" (M 55; GW I: 154). This literal loss of vol? ume reflects not only an atrophying interest in the world outside but also a decrease in attention paid to him by others. It accentuates an

evacuation of the very opposition between inside and out as the focus

increasingly shifts to the tenuous borderland of writing and a different, less stable articulation of spatio-temporal relationships in general. Even

before Gregor is positively attracted to flat, planar surfaces, before he

distracts himself by crawling over the walls and ceiling of his room, he begins to experience three-dimensional space?both the volume of his room and that of his own body?as oppressive.



Gregor's agoraphobia, his anxiety about being in a voluminous,

open space, is accompanied by a significant decrease in his field of vision: "from day to day," it is said,

he saw things even a short distance away less and less distinctly; the hospital

opposite which he used to curse because he saw so much of it, was now

completely beyond his range of vision, and if he had not been positive that

he was living in Charlotte Street ... he might have believed that he was

looking out of his window into a desert where the gray sky and the gray earth

were indistinguishably fused. [ in eine Ein?de . . . in welcher der graue Himmel

und die graue Erde ununterscheidbar sich vereinigten.] (A?29; GWl: 124)

One can almost picture the horizons of visibility closing in on Gregor as his myopia increases. Yet the shallowing of his depth of vision and the weakening of his sense of sight is to some degree compensated by a hyper-developed sense of smell and touch. More importantly, Gregor's decreasing capacity to see shapes clearly and distinctly is

accompanied by the increasing dissolution of his own shape. Long before his bodily space is literally violated when he is kicked through doorways and bombarded with apples, Gregor's space is defined by everything with which he comes into contact. Thus, for example, his sister does not dare touch the utensils used for feeding him. This touch?

ing taboo also extends to Gregor's very name, which is almost never

used to contact him, and which is later replaced by the pronoun "it" when his sister exclaims, "I won't pronounce the name of my brother

in front of this monster, and so all I say is: we have to try to get rid of it" (M51; GWl: 149). In short, as Gregor becomes more dependent upon his antennae and sense of touch, the taboo against touching him

extends to almost everything with which he has come into contact.

Such things can only be touched on indirectly, if at all. Yet, as Gregor literally gets flatter and lower, his existence in the

family and his influence over it become more insidious and indirect, more nebulous and diffuse. His reduction to the pronoun "it," while

certainly depersonalizing him in the extreme, at the same time bears

witness to his absorption into?and contamination of?the very lan?

guage of the text. Like a fresco that fades into the wall on which it was painted, Gregor's image fades into the surface of narration. As it

does so, the surface itself assumes a certain density. Indeed, Kafka uses

the word Plafond at a certain point not simply to refer to the ceiling of Gregor's room but to draw attention to a locus of suspension that

gradually opens within the text, a space that is neither simply plat nor

fond, but instead profoundly superficial.


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Gregor's absorption in these uncannily deep surfaces of the text has

something sexual?perhaps even beastial?about it. Consider in this

regard the scene played out on the fifth transparent side of a picture frame in which he mounts the glass, pressing himself up against it and flattening himself into it. Described in a kind of free indirect style that itself hovers indecisively between inside and out, "the glass," we are told, "held him tight and soothed his hot belly [ihn festhielt und seinem hei?en Bauch wohltat]" (M35, trans, mod.; GW1: 131).

This scene of dissolute coupling enacted on and with a flat, seemingly transparent surface echoes the moment discussed above in which the

increasingly myopic Gregor leans against the windowpane of his room and observes the fusion of a masculine gray sky and a feminine gray earth in a kind of urban no-man's-land [in eine Ein?de . . . in welcher

der graue Himmel und die graue Erde ununterscheidbar sich vereinigten] (M 29, trans, mod.; GWl: 124). The faintly sexual overtones of this scene, overtones carried primarily by the gendered terms of the less

than-transparent narrative surface, become much clearer when the

verb vereinigen, associated here with a process of fusion and the Ein?de

in which it is accomplished, is used shortly thereafter in the noun form Vereinigung to describe a primal scene of parental coupling, a union of the graying pair that is so complete and that so completely overwhelms its filial spectator that Gregor loses consciousness at the

very sight of it.

With his last conscious look he saw the door of his room being torn open and his mother rushing out ahead of his screaming sister, in her chemise, for his sister had partly undressed her while she was unconscious in order to let her breathe more freely; saw her run up to his father, her loosened

petticoats sliding one by one to the floor on the way; saw as, stumbling over the petticoats, she forced herself on his father and embracing him, in complete union with him [und ihn umarmend, in g?nzlicher Vereinigung mit ihm]?but here Gregor's sight went dim?her hands joined at the back of his father's neck, she begged for Gregor's life. (M39, trans, mod.; GWl: 136)

"The Judgment"

Whereas in The Metamorphosis modes of suspension are increasingly associated with an oxymoronic locus of profound superficiality, of what one might call an inter-dimensional space of "platfundity," in "The

Judgment," written a few months earlier, this tiefe Fl?che is associated



with a reworking of horizontal and vertical axes and opens as what

is described at the end of the story as a "schiefe Fl?che, " as a ramp or

inclined plane (KSS 12; GWl: 52). To appreciate the significance of this moment, it is necessary once

again to trace the gradual remapping of spatial coordinates in the

story, paying particular attention to the ever-accelerating movement of

time that accompanies it. In the opening paragraph, the protagonist,

Georg Bendemann, is shown sitting contentedly at his desk in a room located on the second floor of "one of the low, jerrybuilt houses that stretched along the river in a long row" (KSS 3; GWl: 39), letting his

eye wander out the window and stray carelessly from the river to the

bridge to the hills beyond. This horizontal movement, initially associated with a long row of

homes, the natural flow of the river, the leisurely pace of a Sunday morning, and the dreamy self-absorption of the protagonist, comes to

an abrupt halt when Georg's father, laid out in his own bedroom like a corpse in its winding sheet, suddenly rises from the dead.8 Throw?

ing off the blanket in which Georg had just wrapped him, the father stands bolt upright, lightly touching the ceiling with one hand. Not

only does the orientation abruptly shift from the horizontal to the vertical axis, but the father, standing up straight as a tent pole, opens the very space through which he moves; that is, the Decke, the blanket under which he lay covered up in bed, unfolds into the Plafond, the canvas-like ceiling he seems to hold up with one hand. To put it a little differently, Georg's tent pole of a father distends the flat space of the Decke from within, disclosing its tenuous depth and measuring out its uncanny dimensions with the phallic length of his resurrected

body. Such is the force with which the covers are sent flying that they immediately flatten out and completely unfold in flight [der Vater. . .

warf die Decke zur?ck mit einer Kraft, da? sie einen Augenblick im Fluge sich ganz entfaltete] (KSS 9; GWl: 48).9

The scene helps us make sense of a little story within the story nar?

rated a moment earlier. "'Just try to remember, Father,' said Georg. . . .

Tf you think back, you're bound to remember'" (KSS 8; GWl: 47). Referring then to the visits they had formerly been paid by an expatri? ate friend now living in Russia, Georg continues,

" 'That was the time

he told us the most incredible stories about the Russian Revolution.

How, for example, on a business trip in Kiev, during a riot, he had seen

a priest on a balcony who cut a broad, bloody cross into the palm of his hand, raise this hand, and appeal to the crowd. Why, you repeated this story to others from time to time'" (KSS 8; GWl: 47).


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Here the intersection of horizontal and vertical axes takes shape as the sign of the cross cut by the priest in the palm of his hand.

Holding his hand up to the tumultuous mob and indeed addressing them with it, the priest uses the cross as an apotropaic device. Not

only does he conjure the divine powers associated with its vertical axis to intervene in the horizontal plane of temporal conflict, but, in doing so, he casts himself as an empowered mediating figure, as someone singled out as the privileged point of intersection between

heterogeneous dimensions.10

By the end of the text, however, something opens in the place of

the cross. To fully appreciate the significance of this opening, it is

important to recall that from the moment the father rises from the

grave midway through the story, standing suddenly erect on his bed and dominating the center of the room, the son in his turn begins to shrink defensively into one of its corners, reducing himself to a dimensionless point, an infinitely sharpened point of attention.

At this moment in the story, attention also begins to shift to the

accelerating passage of time. Not only is the "No!" with which the father suddenly asserts himself described as an answer that arrives

almost before the question preceding it had left the speaker's mouth [ "Nein!" rief der Vater, da? die Antwort an die Frage stie?] (KSS 9, GW 1:

48), but Georg's memory of a decision made long ago to observe

everything his father did "with the utmost precision so that he should not be surprised by any indirect attack from behind or above" fades almost as soon as it is recalled. Or, as the narrator puts it, "Now he

remembered that long-forgotten decision once again and forgot it, the way one draws a short thread through the eye of a needle ?Jetzt erinnerte er sich wieder an den l?ngst vergessenen Entschlu? und verga? ihn, wie man einen kurzen Faden durch ein Nadel?hr zieht]" (KSS 10, trans, mod.; GW1: 50).

Here, the regular alternation of question and answer, memory and

forgetting, gives way to another temporal rhythm. WTiereas a moment

earlier the father had been shown playing with Georg's watch chain while being carried into bed, passive both in his relation to filial power and to the mechanized, objectified, and seemingly inexorable passage of time itself, he now stands on his own two feet, actively beating out

an altogether different tempo in the back-and-forth movement of

his index finger [sein hin- und herbewegter Zeigefinger] (KSS 10; GW1: 50).u

Apparently raised only for emphasis, only to underscore his assertion

that Georg's "friend hasn't been betrayed at all," the wagging finger



functions simultaneously as a temporal index, as a way of indicating that time itself at this point moves forward and backward at once.

Contrary to the homogeneous, empty time kept by Georg's pocket watch, the tempo beat out by the father's finger is associated with the time of the unconscious, a time in which mutually exclusive moments

may co-exist without necessarily canceling each other out. It is a time

in which the tick-tock rhythm of conscious thought and the controlled alternation of this/that, now/then, back/forth, I/you, memory/for? getting, is syncopated. And it is just this syncope, this other beat, this

momentary suspension of a normal heartbeat, that is indicated by the

wagging Zeigefinger, by a digit that is at once a temporal index, a Zeiger or hand of the clock, and a pointer or index finger.

Initially moving forward, the finger points toward Georg indicating, as the father says, that "the friend has not been betrayed [verraten] after all." Yet, moving back, it also points to the father, who immediately adds, "I've been his representative [sein Vertreter] here on the spot" (KSS 10, trans, mod.; GWl: 50). Needless to say, the speaker's "I" is

yet another indexical and, like the others, it points in two directions at once, saying in effect "I am he," "I, his Vertreter here on the spot, am but a displaced version of the verratenen friend." Yet, if we know

anything about this strange friend bound to the Bendemanns through an exchange of letters, it is that his place in the story is but a perpetual dis-place, that he lives abroad only because he cannot return home

and resides among those who are at home abroad?the native Rus?

sian population and the ex-patriot community of St. Petersburg?only as an outsider.12 Indeed, so defined is he by this state of suspension, so inhabited is this Freund by the Fremde in which he dwells that he is himself little more than a litter of letters, an internal exchange of the letters fremd.13

The back and forth movement initially concentrated in a single extremity and indicative of a certain beating of time in place soon

spreads throughout the paternal body as the elder Bendemann, now

tilting forward and back, is himself transformed it into a giant met? ronome.14 "'Now he's going to lean forward,' thought Georg, 'if only he would fall and smash to pieces!' [Jetzt wird er sich vorbeugen' dachte

Georg, 'wenn er fiele und zerschmetterte!']. . .His father leaned forward

[beugte sich vor] but did not fall. Since Georg did not approach him, as he had expected, he straightened up again" (KSS 11; GWl: 50).

Contrary to expectations, the father bends but does not break.

Leaning forward, he points toward a later moment in the story when he will indeed topple over with a resounding crash and thereby real


MLN 1049

ize Georg's parricidal wish. Yet, leaning back, he recoils from that moment, marshalling all his remaining forces. No longer derived

solely from the friend whose place he takes, the father's strength now comes from Georg's dead mother and lost clientele, as well. Swollen

by the ranks of those he stands in for, the father leans back, stiffened

by the pockets of resistance that seem suddenly to open all over his

soiled, old, shroud-like gown. "He's got pockets even in his nightshirt!"

Georg remarks to himself (KSS 11; GW1: 51). Leaning back, the reinvigorated father thus measures out the time

separating Georg's wish from its fulfillment, ticking off in effect the time he himself has left. Ultimately, however, the father's swaying body, like the other temporal indices to which it is related, does not

simply lean forward or backward but instead points equivocally in two directions at once, inclining toward the very fall it seeks to prevent and in the process enacting two opposing senses of the pivotal verb

vorbeugen. Both the father's equivocal gesture and narrator's ambigu? ous word point in their turn to a more complex articulation of the

father-son dynamic, suggesting that each of the antagonists is at once

more at odds with himself and more deeply implicated in the desires of the other than had heretofore been imagined?which is why the

story ends not so much in a double death as in a doubly suspended, indefinitely drawn out moment of dying.

The timing of the final scene is such that Georg's wish that his father fall and be smashed to pieces is fulfilled at the very instant his own death sentence is spoken. It is an instant in which Georg, reduced since his father's sudden rise to power to an infinitely small, infinitely sharpened point of attention, now seems to close his eyes and open his ears, experiencing both his father's fall and this own fatal predica? ment as primarily acoustic phenomena. Georg is in a sense all ears

at this point, and it is telling in this regard that upon being flushed out of his tiny corner, propelled down the staircase of his house, and driven out onto the street, it is the sound of his father's falling body crashing down behind him and the death sentence just pronounced upon him that continue to ring in his ears [den Schlag.

. . trug er noch

in den Ohren davon] (KSS\2\ GW1: 50). Indeed, it is unclear whether

Georg actually hears his father's terrible words?"I now sentence you to death by drowning"?or is simply driven out of the room, literally blown away by the force of what he cannot take in: by the crashing words of the sentence which continues to resound incomprehensibly in his ears. "Georg," Kafka writes,



felt himself driven from the room, the crash with which his father collapsed behind him onto the bed went on ringing in his ears. On the staircase, which he rushed down as if its steps were an inclined plane [?ber deren

Stufen er wie ?ber eine schiefe Fl?che eilte], he nearly bowled over his cleaning woman, who was just coming upstairs to tidy apartment after the night.

"Jesus!" she shouted, covering her face with her apron, but he was already gone. Out of the front door he rushed, across the roadway, driven toward

the water. Already he was grasping at the railings as a starving man clutches

food. He swung himself over, like the excellent gymnast he had been in his

youth, the pride of his parents. Even as his grip weakened, he continued

holding on, between the bars of the railing he caught sight of a bus that

would easily drown out the sound of his fall [ der mit Leichtigkeit seinen Fall

?bert?nen w?rde], and crying out softly: "Dear parents, I really always loved

you," he let himself drop. At this moment, the traffic going over the bridge was nothing short of

infinite. [In diesem Augenblick ging ?ber die Br?cke ein geradezu unendlicher

Verkehr.] (KSS 12, trans, mod.; GWl: 52)

Whereas earlier in the story the intersection of horizontal and vertical

axes was embodied in the sign of the cross cut into the hand of the

priest, here it is the staircase with its graduated steps that figures a controlled, mediated interrelationship of the horizontal and vertical.

Yet, as Georg hurtles down the staircase, he?like his father before

him?transforms the very space he traverses. Not only does the winding

stairway now seem to externalize the coils of the inner ear in which

a still incomprehensible sentence continues to ring, but as the steps

slip away, slanting into each other, they turn suddenly into an inclined

plane, "eine schiefe Fl?che." As though to suggest a reworking here of the earlier figure of the cross, the cleaning woman cries out "Jesus!" and covers her face with her apron as Georg rushes past.15

By the end of the text, Georg is less a Christ figure than a dimen sionless point suspended at the very crux of a cross, at the degree zero of horizontal and vertical axes. Such a point is marked in the text as a moment of double suspension. Letting go of the railing to

which he had clung, Georg drops from the bridge. Yet, before he has a chance to hit the water, the narrative shifts in the blink of an

eye to the horizontal movement of traffic streaming endlessly across

the bridge. It is this shift?"In diesem Augenblick"?that keeps the vertical descent from ever coming to an end. Held in suspense by the horizontal flow of unending traffic, the vertical drop is not only

momentarily interrupted but indefinitely, inconclusively, and perhaps even infinitely prolonged.16

In a text in which the back and forth movement of temporal, digital,


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and deictical indices subtly beats out a different narrative rhythm while

pointing increasingly to the act of pointing itself, it should come as no surprise that the interruption of a vertical plunge by a horizontal flow at the very end is achieved only through an intervention in the

story of the heretofore transparent narrator; that is, it is on the level

of narration rather than that of the narrated content that this inter?

ruption occurs.17 With this supplementary shift, the scene of suspen? sion itself comes to hang uncertainly in the skewed surface?die schiefe

Fl?che?of the narrative.18

The convergence of the aforementioned modes of suspension at this

point in the story invites us not only to read them in terms of each other but also to view the point itself as an over-determined puncture wound in time: as a moment so intense it seems to compress an eter?

nity into a single instant, a moment so traumatically overwhelming it seems never to let go or to admit of any closure.19 Resistant to nar?

rative development, such moments tend instead to insist at the very

margins of the Kafkan corpus, resonating in the body of his work like an incomprehensible ringing in the ear. Nowhere is this ringing of

greater structural significance, nowhere is it more intimately bound

up with the related questions of bodily openings and the violence of

overwhelming?if at times overwhelmingly pleasurable?experience we have been tracing than in the unpublished fragment, "Researches of a Dog" ["Forschungen eines Hundes"].

"Researches of a Dog"

Written in 1922, "Researches" is the first-person account of a dog

exposed at an all too young and impressionable age to a certain musi?

cal experience, one so unfathomably and devastatingly delightful that it remains with him for the rest of his life, hovering at the threshold of consciousness, lingering in the labyrinth of the ear, and, above

all, setting the tone of his future investigations. As the adult narrator

recalls, "I had been running for a long time through the darkness, straying back and forth, blind and deaf to everything, led on only by

my uncertain craving, when I suddenly came to a stop with the sense

that here was the right place" (KSS 134, trans, mod.; GW8: 51). At this point and in this place, the little dog looks up. Seeing that

it is bright day, he greets the morning with uncertain sounds. Yet,

strangely enough, his greeting appears to miss the mark. Addressed to the light, it blindly makes its way instead into some unspecified place of darkness. As though itself endowed with dark powers, this



misdirected greeting seems to work like a charm, mysteriously conjur?

ing forth into the light seven dogs, dogs who are themselves said to

bring forth something unexpected?terrible noises such as the little hound had never heard. Like the little dog from whose perspective the

story is told, those whom he sees and hears are themselves conjurers. These "musical artists," as he calls them, "did not speak

. . . did not

sing, they remained generally silent, almost determinedly silent [fast mit einer gewissen Verbissenheit] ; but from the empty air they conjured up music [aus dem leeren Raum zauberten sie die Musik empor]" (KSS 134, trans, mod.; GW8: 51).

Coming out of nowhere, the music is suddenly everywhere. Indeed, the brevity of the three-word sentence "Alles war Musik" seems to reg? ister not only the abruptness of the change but the narrator's own

startled sense of transport. Like the hallowed atmosphere in which he suddenly finds himself, the music that fills it is indescribable. It is

music that floods the ears and saturates the body, moving it to dance.

And it is this dance performed by the seven dogs that the narrator

immediately goes on to describe, the cadences and intricate turns

of his own description seemingly patterned after the "complicated concerted evolutions" of the dance and the "unshakeable rhythms" of the music to which it is set.

[T]he lifting and setting down of their feet, certain turns of the head, their running and their resting, the positions the attitudes they assumed

toward one another, the combinations they formed with one another, like a round dance, as when, for example, one braced his front paws on the

other's back and then they all positioned themselves so that the first dog, erect, bore the weight of all the others, or as when, their bodies slinking close to the ground, they formed intertwined figures and never made a

mistake?not even the last one, wrho was a little unsure of himself, did not

always immediately hook up with the others, staggered a little, as it were, when the melody struck up, but was unsure only by comparison with the

magnificent certainty of the others, and even had he been much more

unsure, indeed utterly unsure, he would not have been ruined anything, since the others, great masters, were keeping time so steadily. (KSS 134-35; GW8: 51-52)

As though the scene were too much for the little dog to take in and, even with the distance of time, too much for his adult self, the mature

narrator, to remember, the description abruptly breaks off at this point.

Objecting to his own account, the narrator immediately adds:

But it is too much to say that one actually saw them, that one hardly saw

any of them. They had appeared, one inwardly greeted them as dogs; true,


MLN 1053

the clamor that accompanied them was wer}7 confusing, but they were dogs nevertheless, dogs like you and me; one observed them in the usual way, like dogs one happens to meet on the street; one wanted to go up to them,

exchange greetings, for they were also very close. (KSS 135; GW8: 52)

This sobering series of reflections, which I have cited only in part, moves gradually in the German from the impersonal pronoun man

into the first-person ich. The function of these reflections is at once to distance the narrator from his initial story, to detach the dazzled

spectator from the spectacle whirling before his eyes, and to affirm the separate identity of the protagonist/narrator. Such separations, however, cannot be maintained as the irrepressible music wells up

again. As it does so, the narrating "I" disappears from the story and

is replaced once again by a series of impersonal pronouns.

But while one was still involved in these reflections the music gradually took over, practically seized hold of one, swept one away far from these real

little dogs, and quite against one's will, struggling with all one's powers, and

howling as though some pain were being inflicted, unable to occupy oneself

with anything but the blast of music which seemed to come from all sides, from the heights, from the depths, from everywhere, taking the listener

into its midst, overwhelming him, crushing him, and even after annihilating him, still blaring its fanfares at such close range that they seemed far away and almost inaudible. (KSS 135, trans, mod.; GW8: 52-53)

As this and other passages make clear, everything in the text is a ques? tion of rhythm?not only that of the dance or the music to which it is set, but that of the narration itself. Just as the telling seems at times

to become immersed in?and engulfed by?the story told, so too

does the narrating "I" have a tendency to dissolve into an impersonal "one," only to resurface and reconsolidate itself time and again. Such

moments of dissolution are often associated with a loss of conscious

control, with a sometimes anxious, sometimes ecstatic feeling of being

swept away. This is apparently the case in the passage cited above. I

say "apparently" because what is so remarkable about it is the strik?

ing contrast between its descriptive precision and the overwhelming nature of the experience described.20 The narrative precision suggests not only the sharpness of the narrator's memory as he tells the story

many years after the fact but also his surprising presence of mind at

the time of the actual occurrence?at a time, that is, when he is said to have been crushed, overwhelmed, and nearly annihilated. It appears then that even in the midst of extreme dissolution, something of

the "I" remains. Yet, it endures, I would suggest, only as an infinitely



small point, as a point not unlike that of which Baudelaire speaks in his prose poem, "Conf?teor de Vartiste" "No point is sharper," he says, "than that of the Infinite."21

To elaborate this point, let us return to the question of pain touched

on in the passage quoted above. It is a pain, we are told, that keeps the listener acutely focused, that keeps him from occupying himself

with anything but the music coming from all sides. Crushed by this music, the listener not only has his breath knocked out (as the Muir translation would have it) but, like Georg Bendemann, is reduced to a one-dimensional point, an infinitely sharpened point of attention.

To be reduced to such a point by music coming "from all sides, from the heights, from the depths, from everywhere" is, as the text says, to

be taken into its midst. And to be taken in this way is to be forced to

undergo the vertiginous experience of being radically cut off from

any and all points of orientation. It is, quite literally, to be all ear, to have one's entire being brought to the point of a painfully sharpened ear, to be forced to listen mit gespitzten Ohren to penetrating sounds one cannot help but take in.

Tellingly, the reader of Kafka's text has no sense of what this ravish?

ing music actually sounds like. Indeed, its incomparability is such that we know it only through the immediate effect it has on the young dog and, less directly, through the swelling rhythms, anaphoric repetitions, surging clauses, and fanfare-like blasts of the long-winded sentence

in which its effects are described. Such a description implies that the music, which had so overwhelmed the narrator in his youth, still remains very much in the ear of the adult, dictating the cadences of

his speech, giving shape and measure to his phrases, and uncannily

setting the tone of his life-long investigations. It is the rhythms of these researches to which I now turn in conclu?

sion. Before doing so, however, let us recall the question posed by the

young dog to the seven musicians. It is a question to which he will receive no response, and, as such, it will remain for him a painfully

open, disturbingly active, and hauntingly resonant one. The question is prompted by the surprising courage of the seven dogs. "To tell the truth," the narrator notes,

I marveled less at the art of the seven dogs . . . than at their courage in

exposing themselves wholly and openly to that which they produced [ ?ber ihren Mut, sich dem, was sie erzeugten, v?llig und offen auszusetzen] and at their

power to endure it calmly without its breaking their spine [?ber die Kraft, es ohne, da? es ihnen das R?ckgrat brach, ruhig zu ertragen]. Of course, I now

realized, as I began to observe from my hideout that it was not so much


MLN 1055

calm as extreme tension with which they worked ... It could not be fear

of their success that so excited them; whoever dared such things, accom?

plished such things, could no longer be afraid?what, then, could they be

afraid of? Who was forcing them to do what they were doing here? And I

could no longer resist . . . and, so through all the clamor, I cried out my

questions, loud and demanding. But they?incredible, incredible!?they did not answer, acted as if I were not there. (KSS 135-36; GW 8: 53-34)

I would suggest that the "extreme tension" the young dog observes in the seven musicians, their "twitching" legs and "incessant anxious

trembling" has less to do with a sense of fear than with the musicians'

desperate struggle to hold themselves together, to somehow keep their backbones intact while utterly exposing themselves to the might of the music pressing through them. It is as though the excessive pres? sure of that which could not be gathered toward the mouth and fully discharged through it remained stuck in the body, causing the legs to

tremble, the spine to quiver, and the musicians to dance.

There is a great deal of pressure and, as we shall see, a considerable

amount of investigative interest, focused around the opening of the mouth in Kafka's text. Not only does this opening serve both as an

organ of expression and as a site of ingestion, but, more interestingly and enigmatically, as a place where verbal questions of speech and

silence are articulated in complex ways with nutritional questions of

eating and fasting. As these questions come increasingly to be posed in terms of each other, as each is held open by?and indefinitely suspended through?its relation to the others, the mouth is gradu?

ally freed from its more traditional functions and is thereby opened as perhaps never before to what is described at a certain point as the

"intervention of the true word" (KSS 148, trans, mod.; GW 8: 73). "Here and there," the narrator says, "we hear a suggestive word,

and we would jump to our feet if we did not feel the weight of the centuries upon us."

No, whatever I have to reproach my age with, earlier generations were

not better than the newer one; in a certain sense, in fact, they were much worse and much weaker. Even then, of course, miracles did not run freely through the streets for just anyone to catch, but dogs were?I cannot put it

any differently?not so currish as today; the structure of dogdom still had some play in it [das Gef?ge der Hundschaft war noch locker]; at that time the true word could still have intervened, tuning and retuning the structure

[den Bau bestimmen, umstimmen], changing it at will, transforming it into its

opposite; and the word was there, or at least was near, hovering on the tip



of the tongue [schwebte auf der Zungenspitze], anyone might have hit upon it. (KSS 148, trans, mod.; GWS: 72-73)

As the narrator makes clear, what in earlier times might have made

the intervention of the true word possible was a certain looseness,

play, and flexibility of the corporate structure of "dogdom." If such an intervention is indeed still possible?and this certainly and of

necessity remains an open question?the true word, it seems, cannot

be forced, cannot be conjured in any conscious or unconscious man?

ner. It can, however, perhaps be given place to, be given a chance to

intervene through a certain loosening or letting open of the canine

body, through a certain liberation of the mouth from its traditional functions and from its usual place in the structure of the body.

The first shift in the status of the mouth comes at the beginning of the protagonist's investigations when he turns from the overwhelming

music associated with sound and breath, silence and breathlessness, to

the question of what the canine race took as nourishment (KSS 138; GW 8: 58). The question of nourishment, however, is immediately connected to questions of speech and silence. Used not only to still one's hunger, food becomes a means of silencing the young investiga? tor and putting a stop to his impertinent questions.

Was it, then, that they were delighted by my questions, and they consid?

ered them especially clever? No, they were not delighted by my questions, and they considered all of them stupid. And yet it could only have been

the questions that attracted their attention. It was as if they would rather

do that monstrous thing of stuffing my mouth with food [mir den Mund

mit Essen zustopfen] . . . than endure my questions. (KSS 140, trans, mod.; GWS: 60-61)

As the mouth becomes imaginatively stopped up, it ceases to function

simply as a passage through which questions may be voiced or food

ingested. What was once an open conduit is now figured as a clogged and congested impasse, as a place where movement from the inside

out and the outside in is doubly suspended.22 Yet, because suspension in this text is itself a double movement, one that moves in place only to generate new, more vertiginous modes of suspension, the focus

shifts at this point to a new mode of hovering associated with the

lazy and loquacious race of Lufthunde Hanging about in the air and

detached from the nourishing earth, these dogs have renounced all

bodily exertion and talk incessantly (KSS 144; GW8: 66) .23 Here it seems the verbal expansiveness of the floating dogs is related

not only to their physical suspension but also to their renunciation of


MLN 1057

earthly nourishment. Finding new sustenance in the air, living quite literally on the air, they enact a certain hunger for speech. Whereas

in their case such hunger is perhaps nothing more than an insatiable

appetite for more speech, for endless talk, and for more of the same

talk, one is already invited to view this hunger in slightly different terms?that is, as a longing for speech that has a new unearthly quality, for speech that is no longer grounded in traditional sources of mean?

ing or nourished and irrigated by familiar channels of metaphorical association.24

It would appear, moreover, that only those who have experienced

crushing silence?the silence not only of the dumbstruck but of those who, like the Lufthunde seem to drone on ad nauseum?can know

such hunger. Thus, the narrator asserts, "We are those whom silence

oppresses, who long to break through because of a literal hunger for air [welche es f?rmlich aus Lufthunger durchbrechen wollen]" (KSS 146; GW8: 69). Once again, what is at stake here is not only a positive search

for a new ersatz source of nourishment, but a certain doubling and

suspension of the question of hunger itself. For, if hunger is in one sense a longing for the fullness of speech, for speech that no tongue can possess, for that "true word" which once "hovered on the tip of

the tongue" (KSS 148, trans, mod.; GW8: 73), then the only way to it, it seems, is by turning hunger back on itself, by making it an end in itself, by turning it, in short, into fasting. Such a turn is perhaps already adumbrated in the use of the term Lufthunger. While Lufthunger is still in a sense a longing for speech, a hunger

that still has speech as its object, in fasting it is hunger itself that is the

subject, hunger itself that speaks. Thus, the narrator notes:

The beautiful images gradually dissipated as my hunger grew more griev? ous; it was not long before my fantasies and higher feelings swiftly took leave of me, and I was alone with the hunger burning in my guts. "That is

my hunger," I said to myself countless times, as if I w7ere trying to persuade myself that my hunger and I were still two distinct entities and I could shake it off like a tiresome lover, but in reality we wrere utterly, painfully one, and

when I said to myself: "This is my hunger," it was really my hunger that was speaking [so war es eigentlich der Hunger der sprach] and this was its wray of mocking me. (KSS 155, trans, mod.; GW8: 83-4)

The locus of suspension has shifted here from the w7orld outside to

the narrator's own air-fed entrails. With this inward displacement, another mouth appears to open, speaking as though in the narrator's own voice, speaking with and to him. Yet, just as one voice appears



to speak through another, so too does an earlier, still essentially for?

eign and undigested experience seem to resonate through this one.

Remembering his period of fasting, the narrator seems also to recall

through it the traumatic musical experience of his youth. Speaking ostensibly about his fast, he says,

w7hen I think over those times?and above all else I enjoy pawing through them?I also think through the coming times threatens me. It seems that

almost a lifetime must pass before you recover from such an experiment; all the years of my maturity separate me from that fast, and I have still not

recovered. (ASS 155, trans, mod.; GW8: 84)

Like the voice of hunger that speaks with and to the narrator, dou?

bling his own voice and giving it an uncanny resonance, the memory of one irrecuperable experience resonates through the other. Each

experience is the uncanny repetition, the inner lining of the other.

To expose himself fully and openly to these unassimilated experiences which still inhabit and obsess him, the narrator must literally turn himself inside out. And this he cannot do without losing conscious? ness, without repeating the near-death experience of his youth. Only this time it is the music into whose midst he had been violently drawn in the past that now breaks out of him, violently breaking forth in a stomach-turning movement of unconscious vomiting. "But one

does not die as rapidly as a nervous dog imagines," the narrator says,

recalling this scene.

I merely fainted; and when I awoke and lifted my eyes a strange hound was

standing before me. ... a beautiful but not at all extraordinary hound . . .

I saw that and nothing else, and yet I believed that I saw something more

in him than usual. There was blood under me, at first I took it for food, but then I realized at once that it was blood that I had vomited, [da? es Blut

toar, das ich ausgebrochen hatte.] (KSS 157-58, trans, mod.; GW 8: 87-88)

Tellingly, what the narrator initially takes for nourishment is something he himself has expelled?and it is not only blood that he has coughed up. Indeed, what he is now made to confront in the form of a stranger

standing before him is the doubleness of that voice which had spoken inside him in the course of his fasting, that voice buried deep within his winding entrails which had spoken so strangely with and to him. WTiile vomiting might be described as a process of having one's insides turned outward, it is also in this case associated with the mouth being turned into a kind of vaginal opening or locus of birth.25

It is through this opening that the otherness within is turned literally inside out. The narrator now faces this intimate other as the stranger


MLN 1059

Standing before him, as the uncanny double to whom, in vomiting, he has just given birth. Yet, just as the experience of fasting was itself the reverse lining of another experience, so too does this traumatic

birth cause more than one voice to return in the body of the stranger. "A beautiful but not at all extraordinary hound stood before me," the narrator recalls. "I saw that and nothing else, and yet I believed that I saw something more in him than usual" (KSS 158; GW 8: 88).

The element of excess here suggests not only that the narrator sees

something more than the strange dog, but that this seeing is also and

above all a kind of hearing, that this beautiful vision is itself but the embodiment of something the narrator cannot bear to hear again. Thus, he continues:

My senses, sharpened through fasting, I saw or heard something in him; it was just beginning ... I noticed through intangible details, which perhaps no one besides me could have detected, that from the depths of his chest this dog was getting ready to sing. 'You're going to sing," I said. 'Yes," he said gravely, "I am going to sing; soon, but not yet." 'You are already begin?

ning," I said. "No," he said, "not yet. But get ready." "I can hear already hear your song in spite of your denials," I said, trembling. He was silent. And then I believe I perceived something that no dog had ever experienced before me; at any rate, cultural memory does contain even the slightest hint of it; and in infinite anxiety and shame I hurriedly lowered my face into the puddle of blood in front of me. What I seemed to perceive was that the dog wras already singing without his being aware of it?no, more than that: that the melody, detached from him, was floating through the air and then past him according to its own laws, as if he longer had any part in it,

floating at me, aimed only at me. (KSS 158-59; GW 8: 89-90)

The movement of suspension becomes especially vertiginous at this

point, for it is uncertain whether the beautiful stranger is about to

sing or has already begun to do so, whether the melody is a kind of unconscious utterance to which the singer unwittingly gives voice or

something that floats freely in the air, in accordance with its own laws, absolved from the very first of any connection with a determinate source. It is further uncertain whether the melody said to be moving toward the narrator, singling him out as its unique addressee, is not

something that comes exclusively from him, like the bloody birth in which he apparently had no part or like the strange voices he vomits up only to have them return to him through the equally unhinged mouth of another.26

Needless to say, such moments of vertiginous suspension cannot be

confirmed or denied, assimilated or rejected. Indeed, their precarious



freedom is such that they remain only in the mode of uncertainty. Tainted with the possibility of error, with error that nevertheless has about it "a certain grandeur," such moments, as the narrator says, are "the sole

reality, even if only an apparent reality, that I salvaged and brought back into this world from the time of my fast, and it shows, at least, how far one we can go bei v?lligem Aufier-sich-sein" (KSS 159; GW8: 90). I would risk translating this wonderfully resonant phrase not only as "when we are completely out of our senses," "when we are completely

beyond" or "out of ourselves," but "when we find ourselves turned

completely inside out." As though to underscore the importance of the phrase, the narrator immediately adds: "Und ich war wirklich

v?llig au?er mir" (GW8: 90). I have argued that such moments of vertiginous suspension are

associated in Kafka's text with a certain loosening of the space of the

mouth, its liberation from the functions it is traditionally assumed to

perform and from its usual place in the structure of the canine body.27 It is just this question of freedom that the narrator takes up at the end of the fragment in connection with a certain instinct and with a view toward a science still to come. "It was," he says, "this instinct that

made me?and perhaps for the sake of science itself, but a different

science from that of today, an ultimate science?prize freedom higher than everything else. Freedom! Of course, the freedom that is possible today?a stunted growth. But nevertheless freedom, nevertheless a

possession" (KSS 161, trans, mod.; GW8: 93). Yes, one might say, but the point of a coming freedom, the free?

dom toward which the text appears to open at its fragmentary close, is that it might somehow come unforced and unsummoned, without

any conjuring or incantatory violence, that it might, in short, free

itself from all possession.28 Is it perhaps in loosening not only the structure of "dogdom" but also that of the individual canine body and of this particular text, that a place is prepared for such freedom, for the intervention of a "true word," for a word that, as the text says,

might intervene in such a way as "to tune and retune the structure, to change it at will, and to transform it into its opposite"? Has such an intervention perhaps already begun?

In the end, the "true word" that, according to Kafka's dog, "hovered on the tip of the tongue [schwebte auf der Zungenspitze]" is perhaps to be understood less as a word close by than as a hovering language with no determinate place, the very language of suspension the text

enacts and to which its sharply tipped tongue reflexively points.

Rutgers University


MLN 1061

NOTES

I am grateful to Nicola Behrmann, Stanely Corngoid, John Hamilton, Jos Lager weij, Martha Heifer, Fatima Naqvi, Paul North, and Jared Stark for reading and

commenting on drafts of this essay. I also received crucial feedback from students and colleagues at The Johns Hopkins University, where I delivered a talk on which this essay is based. Most of all, I would like to thank the graduate students who participated in my 2008 Rutgers University seminar on Franz Kafka for their

insights and challenging questions. A portion of this text appeared in the Journal oftheKaflia Society of America, vol. 30 under the title "A Coming Freedom: Kafka's

'Investigations of a Dog'." 1 Franz Kafka, The Diaries 1910-1923 (New York: Schocken, 1948) 302, trans, mod.;

Franz Kafka, Gesammelte Werke in zw?lf B?nden, vol. 9 Tageb?cher 1912-1914, ed. Hans-Gerd Koch (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2002) 167. All references to the diaries will henceforth be denoted by the abbreviation D for the English and GW for the German followed by the volume and page number.

2 Henry Sussman, Franz Kafka: Geometrician of Metaphor (Madison, WI: Coda Press, 1979) 96.

3 Kafka's Selected Stories, trans. Stanley Corngoid (New York: Norton, 2007) 86; Franz Kafka, Gesammelte Werke in zw?lf B?nden, vol. 1 Ein Landarzt und andere Drucke zu

Lebzeiten, ed. Hans-Gerd Koch (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2002) 251. All references to the English (KSS) and German (GW) editions will henceforth appear in parentheses in the body of the text, the latter noting both volume and page number.

4 Walter Benjamin, "Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of his Death" in Walter

Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927-34, trans. Rodney Livingston, et al., ed. Michael Jenning, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999) 808, trans, mod.; Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, II.2, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Herman Schweppenh?user (Frankfurt am Main: Surkamp Verlag, 1977) 427. All page references to the English (SW) and German (GS) editions

will henceforth appear in parentheses in the body of the text.

5 Franz Kafka, The Castle, trans. Mark Harman (New York: Schocken, 1998) 41, trans, mod.; Gesammelte Werke in zw?lf B?nden, vol. 4, Das Schlo?, ed. Hans-Gerd

Koch (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2002) 55.

6 On the subject of air Kafka writes in a diary entry of January 21, 1922, "No one's task was as difficult, so far as I know. One might say that it is not a task at all, not even an impossible one, it is not even impossibility itself, it is nothing, it is not even as much of a child as the hope of a barren woman. But nevertheless it is the air I am meant to breathe, so long as I breathe at all" (D 402, GW11: 203).

7 Michael G. Levine, Writing Through Repression: Literature, Censorship, Psychoa?ialysis (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) 149-77. Unless otherwise

noted, English citations of The Metamorphosis refer to the Corngoid translation and will henceforth be denoted as M in the body of the text. Franz Kafka, The

Metamorphosis, trans. Stanley Corngoid (New York: Bantam, 1972) 3.

8 See Stanley Corngold's discussion of the question, "Am 1 well covered up [Bin ich gut zugedeckt]}" in Lambent Traces (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004) 29-30; Walter Sokel, "Perspective and Truth in 'The Judgment'" in The Problem o/The Judgment: Eleven Approaches to Kafka's Story, ed. Angel Flores (New York: Gordian Press, 1977) 225.

9 In the larger context of his discussion of the word Entfaltung (unfolding) in his Kafka essay, Benjamin draws special attention to the way the father throws off



the covers in which he had been wrapped, noting, "As the father throws off the burden of the blanket, he also throws off a cosmic burden [Der Vater, der die Last des Deckbetts abwirft, wirft eine Weltlast mit ihm ab]" (SW2 796; GS 2: 411). He does not, however, explicitly connect the force with which the covers are thrown off to the way they are transformed in flight, the way, that is, they unfold [sich entfalten] in a twofold sense, developing or blossoming into something else only by losing their folds and flattening out into the profoundly superficial space of the Plafond.

That Benjamin is nevertheless acutely sensitive to the interaction of these two re? lated senses of Entfaltung in Kafka's text is clear from his discussion of the parable "Before the Law" and its relation to The Judgment. "It looks as if the novel were

nothing but the unfolding of the parable," he writes. "The word 'unfolding' has a double meaning. A bud unfolds into a blossom, but the boat which one teaches children to make by folding paper unfolds into a flat sheet of paper" (SW2 802; GS 2: 420). Another figure that combines these two senses, and one Benjamin may well have in mind here, is the Proustian paper pellet that unfolds into A la recherche du temps perdu. "... comme dans ce jeu o? les Japonais s'amusent ? tremper dans un bol de porcelaine rempli d'eau, de petits morceaux de papier jusque-l? indistincts qui, ?

peine y sont-ils plong?s, s'?tirent, se contournent, se colorent, se diff?rencient, deviennent des

fleurs, des maisons, des personages consistants et reconnaissables, de m?me maintenant. .

.l'?glise et tout Combray et ses environs, tout cela qui prend forme et solidit?, est sorti, ville et jardins, de ma tasse de th?." Marcel Proust, Du c?t? de chez Swann (Paris: Gallimard, 1954) 61-62.

10 One might recall in this regard the palm-sized wound [handtellergrosse Wunde] that

opens in the right side of the bedridden youth in "A Country Doctor" ( CS 223; GW1: 204).

11 While I agree with Bernheimer's contention that the "old man's playing with

Georg's watch chain might indicate his actual senility," I take issue with his further

suggestion that it may also signify the father's "symbolic power over the son's life in time." Charles Bernheimer, Flaubert and Kafka: Studies in Psychopoetic Structure

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982) 175.

12 In the second paragraph of the story the friend is described as having "practically fled to Russia several years before," being dissatisfied with his prospects at home. "Now he was running a business in St. Petersburg, which having gotten off to a

good start, for a long time now seemed to be stagnating, as his friend complained during his increasingly less frequent visits home. So there he was, uselessly working himself to the bone in a foreign country. ... As he had told Georg, he had no real contact with the colony of his countrymen there, but he also had almost no social intercourse with local families, either, and so was settling into a terminal bachelorhood" (KSS 3; GW1: 39).

13 Such an exchange involves splitting the letter m in two, letting the latter part remain as an n while rotating the first part to form a u. Kafka alludes to the prox? imity of the words Freund Ana fremd early on in the story when he writes,

" Vielleicht

gelang es nicht einmal, ihn ?berhaupt nach Hause zu bringen?er sagte ja selbst, da? er die Verh?ltnisse in der Heimat nicht mehr verst?nde?, und so bleibt er dann trotz allem in seiner Fremde, verbittert durch die Ratschl?ge und den Freunden noch ein St?ck mehr entfremdet" (GW1: 40, emphasis added). As the story progresses, the friend's status as a litter of letters becomes increasingly apparent. Thus, the yellow skin

mentioned at the outset as an indication of his growing illness returns toward the end in connection with the crumpled-up sheet of old newspaper the father throws at Georg while verbally assaulting him with an image of the friend "going to pieces in Russia." "Three years ago," the father exclaims, "he was already yellowed enough to be tossed out [gelb zu Wegwerfen]" (KSS 12; GW I: 52). This transformation of the jaundiced friend into a sheet of newspaper yellow enough to be thrown away


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anticipates the metamorphosis of Gregor Samsa into "das Zeug von nebenan, [das]

weggeschafft werden soif (M 57; GWl: 156), that "completely flat and dry" thing aptly described by Wolf Kittler as "zugleich ein Abfall und ein Brief: a letter, a litter.'" Rittler, "His Master's Voice: Zur Funktion der Musik im Werk Franz Kafkas' in Franz

Kafka Schriftverkehr, ed. Wolf Kittler and Gerhard Neumann (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 1990) 383. Needless to say, in "The Judgment" this exchange of litter and letter, Abfall and Brief also involves an exchange of Brief and Buchstabe, letter and letter.

14 The deictic function of pointy extremities such as fingers and sharp-tipped tongues (to be discussed below) as well as prosthetic extensions of these extremities such as lances and swords is evident throughout Kafka's work. The latter are particularly apparent in "The New Lawyer" from the collection A Country Doctor where the narrator laments the current, all too atrophied and close-range use of hand-held arms. "To be sure, many know how to commit murder; nor is there any absence of skill in striking one's friend with a lance across the banquet table." By contrast, in the day of Philip of Macedonia, even though the gates of India were beyond reach, "their direction was indicated by the royal sword [ihre Richtung war durch den K?nigsschwert bezeichnet]. Today the gates have been carried off to another place entirely, farther away and higher up; no one shows the way; many carry swords but

only wave them in the air, and the gaze that tries to follow them grows confused [niemand zeigt die Richtung; viele halten Schwerter, aber nur, um mit ihnen zu fuchteln; und der Blick, der ihnen folgen will, verwirrt sich]" (KSS 60; GWl: 199).

15 The apron with which the charwoman covers her face as the Son passes is perhaps an allusion to the famous veil of Veronica. For more on the representational questions raised by efforts of such painters as Philippe de Champaigne to portray the face of Jesus as a true image borne neither exactly by the veil depicted in the

painting nor by the depicting surface of the canvas itself, see Louis Marin, "The

Figurability of the Visual: The Veronica or the Question of the Portrait at Port

Royal," trans. Marie Maclean, New Literary History, 22.2, "Probings: Art, Criticism, Genre" (Spring 1991): 281-96.

16 By contrast, those who see Georg's fall as complete also tend to view it as com?

pletely recuperable, as a fall that is graceful precisely to the extent that the death in question can be reworked into a traditional redemptive framework. Thus, Sokel argues that Georg sees his punishment "as an atonement and therewith a

symbolic reinstatement of the original harmony," adding that "the broken law of an original harmonious state cannot be restored in actual life. It is achieved only in representation on a token plane, by the protagonist's sacrificial death" and it is on this plane that "[ljove and genuine self-erasure are one," Walter Sokel, "Perspectives and Truth in 'The Judgment'," 231-35. Anderson articulates this

redemptive framewrork in aesthetic terms contending that "Georg Bendemann

plunges to his death, but the gymnast-writer comes to life," adding shortly there? after that "'traffic' provides the horizontal ground for the artist's vertical ascent." Mark Anderson, Kafka's Clothes (Oxford: Oxford University Press) 89-94.

In Corngold's reading this framework is developed in psychopoetic terms. Seek?

ing to reconcile "the horror of family execution" with "an ecstatic sense of relief Kafka is said to have felt upon completion of the story, he argues that Georg must be understood "as a figure for something not yet alive, something whose value is less than 'real life'; he must be an only factitious mask of the author." That

"something not yet alive" is an unrealized?and perhaps unrealizable?wish for the father's blessing of a certain kind of celibacy. "If the bachelor is the 'true son' of the father, then this father is the 'true father' of the writer. . . . And it is this being who loves and approves his son precisely on the condition that he be the bachelor, a condition of the possibility of being a writer. ... If only Kafka's true



father would bless his bachelorhood?his, in the family sense, sterility, yet, in the

extraordinary, literary sense, fertility." Corngold, Lambent Traces, 32-33. On the

figure of the "graceful fall," see Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984) 287.

17 As Bernheimer notes, "This is the only sentence in the story that is independent of Georg's perspective," adding that here the "infinite is compressed into the

momentary, the momentan' is expanded into the infinite. The normal course of time is suspended by a simultaneous movement in opposite directions. This

suspension is produced by the poles of psychopoetic tension that structure Kafka's text . . . [T]he narrator's final sentence affirms that his own writing traffics on a

bridge suspended between a finite moment and an infinite expansion." Flaubert and Kafka 185.

18 Cf. Kafka's use of the term ''schief in his early text, "The Wish to be a Red Indian"

["Wunsch, Indianer zu werden"] published in Meditations. "If one were only an

Indian, instantly alert, and on a racing horse, inclined in the air [schief in der Luft], kept on trembling briefly over the trembling ground [immer ivieder kurz erzitterte ?ber dem zitternden Boden], until one shed one's spurs, for there were no spurs, threw

away the reins, for there were no reins, and hardly saw the land before one as a

smoothly mown heath, with the horse's neck and head already gone" ( CS 390; GW 1: 30). "A great deal is contained in this wish," Benjamin observes (SW119; GSII. 2: 417). Yet, it is not, as one might expect, a wish merely to merge horse and rider, bearer and borne, in some kind of hybrid figure, a wish apparently fulfilled in the name of the hero of Amerika, Karl Rossmann, literally Karl Horseman, to which

Benjamin immediately refers. Instead, it is more equivocally and precariously a wish to open a doubly negative space of suspension, a space of the neither-nor, a

crooked, skewed, misaligned space hovering schief in der Luft between bearer and borne. Such a space is itself opened in Kafka's text by the double trembling of the verbal pair erzitterte and zitternden, a trembling that effectively shakes off both horse and rider, doing so, however, only for a tremulously brief instant. It is no doubt the fleeting quality of its fulfillment that sustains this wish, renewing it at each instant and calling for its incessant repetition; "immer wieder kurz erzitterend," as the text says.

The skewed [schiefe] relationship between horse and rider sketched in this early text is developed at greater length by Kafka in his 1919 story "The New Lawyer." For a superb reading of this text see Thomas Schestag, Parerga (Munich: Klaus Boer Verlag, 1991) 105-15.

19 1 discuss the temporal structure of this traumatic punctum in "Pendant. B?chner, Celan and the Terrible Voice of the Meridian," MLN, 122.3, German Issue (April 2007): 573-601. In a private communication John T. Hamilton has suggested a connection between the figure of the inclined plane in "The Judgment" and the notion of a "diagonal force" used by Hannah Arendt to describe the "gap be? tween past and future: the nunc stans" in her eloquent reading of Kafka's parable "HE." For Arendt this "diagonal force" is associated with the activity of thought and "the quiet of the Now in the time-pressed, time-tossed existence of man." Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, vol. 1, Thinking (New York: Harcourt Brace

Jovanovich, 1977) 202-13. While I see Hamilton's point and am very grateful to him for bringing Arendt's provocative meditation on "HE" to my attention, I would argue that the inclined plane of "The Judgment" is to be distinguished from the

diagonal force described by Arendt in a number of important ways: whereas the latter is associated with a certain nunc stans, understood by Arendt as a gathering presence, the former is associated with the stasis of compulsive repetition, the insistence of that which continues to ring incomprehensibly in the ears, and the non-presence of a traumatic puncture wound in time.


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20 While my own reading is concerned primarily with the acoustic dimension of this experience, it is important not to overlook its visual aspect?in particular the shamelessness of the musical dogs' performance?discussed with great subtlety by

Alice Kuzniar in Melancholia's Dog (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006) 68-69.

21 Charles Baudelaire, Twenty Prose Poems, trans. Michael Hamburger (San Francisco:

City Lights Books, 1988) 12-13. For a keenly sensitive reading of Baudelaire's

poem, see Peggy Kamuf, Book of Addresses (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005) 199-216.

22 Compare a related moment of suspension in Kafka's "In the Penal Colony." Start?

ing in the sixth hour of the machine's operation, a certain transformation of the condemned man's mouth is described as follows:

During the first six hours the condemned man lives almost as he did before, except that he is in pain. After two hours the felt plug is removed, since the man no longer has the strength to scream. Here, in this electrically heated bowl at the head of the bed, we put warm congee, from which the man, if he so desires, can have whatever he can lap up with his tongue. Not one of them passes up the opportunity. I know of no one, and my experience is vast. It is only around the sixth hour that he loses all pleasure in eating. At that point I usually kneel down here and observe this phenomenon. The man rarely swallows the last mouthful, he just rolls it around in his mouth and spits it out into the pit. Then I have to duck; otherwise it flies into my face. But how quiet the man becomes around the sixth hour! Understanding dawns even on the dumbest. It begins around the eyes. From there it spreads. A sight that could seduce one to lie down alongside him under the harrow. Nothing more actually happens, the man merely begins to decipher the script, he purses his mouth as if he were listening hard. You've seen that it is not easy to decipher the script with one's eyes; but our man deciphers it with his wounds. (KSS 44, trans, mod.; GWl: 173)

A pivotal moment in the story, the sixth hour is at once the midway point in a twelve-hour cycle and a point of no return. At this turning point, the mouth of the condemned man is made to suffer a curious alteration. Initially coded as an organ of expression, the mouth must at first be gagged to prevent the man from crying out. Yet, in the second hour when he no longer has the strength to scream, the gag is removed and the mouth is used only for eating. Once a locus of

expression, the mouth thus turns into a site of ingestion. Around the sixth hour, however, the space of the mouth begins to autonomize itself. No longer serving as a conduit for things passing either from the inside out or from the outside in, it turns into a space of play in which the last mouthful of rice pap is rolled around and toyed with before being spat out. Freed from its more traditional functions, the play of the mouth and teeth begins to figure a certain play in the toothed gears [Zahnr?der] of the machine. Indeed, the pivotal German term Zahnr?der itself begins to slip playfully in the direction of Zahnrede and, in doing so, to al? lude to the "tooth speak" of verbal parapraxis, to language loosened from the usual Zahnreihe, to lingual movements become like the "higher manner of obser? vation" described by Kafka in a diary entry of January 27, "more independent, the more obedient to its own laws of motion" (see fn. 30 below). Curiously, as the dulling gears begin to slip, the mouth itself is said to sharpen into a point.

The condemned man now not only "he purses his mouth as if he were listening hard," as the Corngoid translation would have it, but he brings it more literally to a point [er spitzt den Mund, als horche er]. Elongating itself into a pointy snout, the mouth in turn becomes a pricked up ear ("er spitzt die Ohren" as one says of someone wrho listens attentively). Only at this point does the man first begin to

decipher the wounding inscription on his body. "You have seen how difficult it is to decipher the script with one's eyes," the officer tells the visitor, "but our man

deciphers it with his wounds."



23 As has often been pointed out, the German Lufthund plays on the Yiddish term

Luftmensch, air person, a metaphor that is applied to those who have no income and must rely on the community for support. What interests me here, however, is the role the dogs play within the narrative logic of Kafka's text. For further discussion of the Lufthund/Luftmensch nexus, see Iris Bruce, Kafka and Cultural Zionism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007) 190; Peter Demetz, The Air Show at Brescia, 1909 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002) 112-25; Mark

Anderson, Kafka's Clothes, 90-91. For more on the narrative logic of the text and the way it is structured by the two musical experiences with which it opens and

ends, see John T. Hamilton, uCanis Canens Oder: Kafkas Respekt vor der Musikwis?

senschaff in Kafkas Institutionen, ed. Arne H?cker and Oliver Simons (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2007) 145-56.

24 Thus, Kafka writes in a famous diary entry dated December 6, 1921, "Metaphors are one among many things which make me despair of writing. Writing's lack of

independence from the world, its dependence on the maid who tends the fire, on the cat warming itself by the stove; it is even dependent on the poor old human

being warming himself by the stove. All these are independent activities ruled

by their own laws; only writing is helpless, does not dwell in itself, is frivolity and

despair" (D 398, trans'. mod.^GWll: 196-97).

25 "The puddle of blood" (KSS 159; GW8: 90) in which the dog lies recalls the well known comparison Kafka makes between the emergence from his depths of the

story "The Judgment" and the "reg

"A Place so Insanely Enchanting": Kafka and the Poetics of Suspension

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