The Herald: A Reading of Walter Benjamin's Kafka Study Author(s): Henry Sussman Reviewed work(s): Source: Diacritics, Vol.

7, No. 1 (Spring, 1977), pp. 42-54 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/464873 . Accessed: 14/02/2013 08:21
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Diacritics.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded on Thu, 14 Feb 2013 08:21:52 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

TEXTS/CONTEXTS

I.,

THE
/'

HERALD:
WALTER

READING

OF
',..

BENJAMIN'S

KAFKA

STUDY

HENRY SUSSMAN

The intelligence that came from afar-whether the spatial kind from foreign countries or the temporal kind of tradition--possessed an authority which gave validity, even when it was not subject to verification. "The Storyteller," VI
1'",
' r,

His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past .... The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned... "Theses on the Philosophy of History," IX

I oI

ci!
'd(

ti~4.

(("

As if announcing its own breathless contortions and submerged twists of event, Walter Benjamin's essay, "Franz Kafka,"' begins with a story whose development may be best described as a trick. A surge of depression has removed Potemkin from his official functions and paralyzed the clockwork of government. Only too eager to win the favor of his superiors, the underling Shuvalkin takes it upon himself to remove the impasse by securing Potemkin's signature, which will set the delayed acts and documents of state again in motion. In contrast to the K. of The Trial or the more knowledgeable functionaries, Shuvalkin strides through the thresholds and passageways of the Kremlin without the least trace of compunction or retrospect; however, the bundle of documents with which he emerges, the impetus that will reactivate the machinery, has not been embellished with Potemkin's signature, but with the sign "Shuvalkin, Shuvalkin, Shuvalkin ...." This story, we are led to believe, stemming from the time of Catherine the Great, is like a herald dispatched
I Walter Benajmin, "Franz Kafka," in Uber Literatur [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970], pp. 154-85]. All citations of Benjamin and page numbers in this essay, however, refer to HarryZohn's fine translation in [Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), pp. 111-40].

42

DIACRITICS/March 1977

This content downloaded on Thu, 14 Feb 2013 08:21:52 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

two centuries beforehand to announce the appearance of Kafka'sfiction.2 Not only does this anecdote introduce the world of Kafka's fiction; it sets into motion the metaphoric reversal that will epitomize the movement of Benjamin's illumination. Regardless of its point of origin, whether in Benjafnin's essay or in its foregone history, the herald arrives before the text, breathless, delivering assurances that the textual trajectory will be consummated, Potemkin's signature will authorize the documents, the writing will be sufficiently identified to initiate the required procedure. But the herald arrives, inevitably, too late. Potemkin's self-propriety, the premise upon which the act of his signature inscription is conditioned, has already dissolved. He has lost himself. He desires to be Potemkin as desperately as the underling needs him to be in order to advance his own minor plots. But this desire and the overzealous attempt to force identity come too late, as does the premonition that the events of the present have already been anticipated in some indefinitely prior strife or drama. The need to envelop the text in a temporal insulation, to date it with relics surviving from prior ages, is retrospective to a loss, a violence which the text has already evidenced. Both Potemkin's depression and the inscription of the occasion for Benjamin's essay ("On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death") are modified by the predicate wiederkehren, to recur, etymologically, "to turn again." As we will see, the gesture of turning is crucial both to Benjamin's understanding of Kafka and in the repertory of gestures taken up by his essay. The need to date the text in an age external to the time registered on the narrow scale of experience is the most incriminating sign that the text is already a recurrence. If we did not possess some residual awareness of its violence, we would not welcome the proof of its foundation in the past and the promise of its place in the future conveyed by the herald. Perhaps it was we who dispatched him on his mission and have since overlooked the order. Perhaps we are doomed, like Shuvalkin, to read only our own names in a hand we have tried to force to fill in a missing identity. The repetition of the signature leaves us only with the persistence of a recurrent wish, a persistence owing to failure, the desire of an already too knowledgeable reader to inlay the text in the remoteness of history in order to secure the assurance implicit in the suggestion: "This story is like a herald racing two hundred years ahead of Kafka's work" [Benjamin, p. 112]. Benjamin's analysis drives deep inside the household of Kafka's fiction, unearthing there a both venerable and burdensome patrimony even older than the world whose remains survive in mythology: "Even the world of myth ... is incomparably younger than Kafka's world, which has been promised redemption by the myth" [p. 117]. And yet, this paradox, that a writing as dated in our time as Kafka's could function as the horizon toward which the myths of antiquity were directed, is only a particularized form of a paradox central to Benjamin's exegesis of Kafka and pervading the rhetoric of his essay. The legacy of burden, guilt, shame, loss, however reified through centuries of (Western) myth and legend (until gaining the plateau of objectivity accorded to "existential circumstance"), is, at least in the world of Kafka's fiction, to be thrust aside like an annoying blanket. Conversely, in the most everyday of acts, entire historical ages are wrenched into motion. "The man who whitewashes his epochs to move, even in his most insignificant movement" [p. 113].3 The themes and variations opened by the ironical interchangeability of promixity and remoteness are endless, like Kafka's novels. But in an essay such as Benjamin's, which seems at first to delimit as the extremities of Kafka's fiction the loss and redemption at the ends of Judeo-Christian history, such an interchangeability is decisive. If sinking under the weight of a preexisting burden and the "untrammeled, happy journey"
2A variant text of the story, entitled "Die Unterschrift," appears in Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. R. Tiedemann and H. Schweppenauser [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972], IV, pp. 758-59. The editors find a counterpart to this anecdote, entitled "Potemkins Unterschrift," in Ernst Bloch's 1930 book, Spuren [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969], pp. 118-19. 3 "We do not know the make-up of this unknown family, which is composed of human beings and animals. But this much is clear: it is this family that forces Kafka to move cosmic ages in his writings" /p. 130].

DIACRITICS/March 1977

43

This content downloaded on Thu, 14 Feb 2013 08:21:52 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

[pp. 119, 138, 139] signalling release4 are the extremities of Kafka's fiction, but are also contiguous; if the extremities also inhabit the interior, where they are neighbors, the history which Kafka's fiction might seem to retrace must twist itself in a knot. Its stage must be set for tricks. "It is possible to read Kafka's animal stories for quite a while without realizing that they are not about human beings at all" [p. 122]. The Potemkin anecdote furnishes not the only reversal inserted into a scheme of all-embracing paradox. The description of how Kafka adapts folk-tales and mythology applies as well to virtually all of the anecdotes set as if by chance into the surface of Benjamin's own text and seeming to bear no relation to the subject at hand or its interpretation: "Ulysses, after all, stands at the dividing line between myth and fairy tale. Reason and cunning have inserted tricks into myths; their forces cease to be invincible. Fairy tales are the traditional stories about victory over these forces, and fairy tales for dialecticians are what Kafka wrote when he went to work on legends. He inserted little tricks into them ... For Kafka's Sirens are silent . . ." [pp. 117-18]. And yet, it is precisely by means of such inlaid tricks that Benjamin drives at what is most textual in Kafkaand uncovers most tangibly the mecahnism of his own interpretation. It is not by chance that the anecdotes selected by Benjamin for this essay often lend themselves to the comfortable sort of interpretation in which each initially enigmatic character eventually corresponds, in the manner of a naive allegory, to some personage or concept made accessible to the general public by myth or legend. The all-too-readily available interpretation, sometimes relayed by Benjamin on behalf of his sources and sometimes supplied by himself, rejoins the hidden recesses of the parable as often as it unfolds them. In the middle of a passage in which he almost polemically denies any interest on Kafka's part in serving as a Religionsstifter, a founder or promulgator of religion, he offers us the following legend, "told by a rabbi in answer to the question why Jews prepare a festive evening meal on Fridays." The legend,
is about a princess languishing in exile, in a village whose language she does not her fiance has not forgotten her and is on his way to her. [p. 126]

understand,farfromher compatriots.One day this princess receives a lettersaying that

Although the rabbi could hardly hope to satisfy his interlocutor's curiosity with this fragmentary sketch, so remote and primitive that it may very well, as Benjamin suggests, originate in the village at the foot of the Castle Hill, it will serve him, like the markings on a stage, as a ground-plan upon which to set the properties of his own explanation. This arrangement will derange as much as it subdues into order. Like Potemkin, the princess of the parable suffers from the inability to close the circuits of reference and intentionality by means of language. In both cases, however, language is also the source of the hope seeming to point toward deliverance. One day, the princess receives, in writing, the assurance from her fiance (the engagement already being a declaration of intention) that their union will finally be consummated. In the case of Potemkin, only a slight misrepresentation-in the form of a few signatures attesting to his having attended to the matters at hand-is necessary to culminate an image of wholeness and well-being. This agonizing suspension between the despair and hope fostered simultaneously in deploying language as an instrument of desire and reconciliation is metamorphosed into something quite different by the rabbi's commentary, which assists in the kind of unfolding that sits the signification on the flat of the hand [cf. p. 122]:
The fiance, so says the rabbi, is the Messiah; the princess is the soul; the village in which she lives in exile is the body. She prepares a meal for him because this is the only way in which she can express herjoy in a village whose language she does not know. [p. 726]

In the same gesture with which he draws us nearer to the body of the text, identifying each one of its distant personages with a character in an allegory which we can
4

The release is figured in Kafka's fragment, "The Wish to Be a Red Indian."

44

DIACRITICS/March1977

This content downloaded on Thu, 14 Feb 2013 08:21:52 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

well recognize, the rabbi brings about a startling transformation. The fiance, instead of being a lover in the process of putting off his partner-to-be with a piece of writing, is now the Messiah, whose promise to return to a redeemed world is, according to the tradition, a certainty. The princess, no longer languishing in the indecision which is the limit of the letter's efficacy, is now the faithful soul, whose belief could not be shaken in any event. The village, whose proximity to the princess was a remoteness unmediated by language, now derives its nourishment from this belief; the soul functions as a philosopher's stone, alchemizing spiritual into bodily aliment. At the same time that it promises to render the primitive text less foreign, less threatening, the commentary subjects it to other laws, turns it into something unforseen and possibly monstrous. This possibility is taken up by Benjamin's contribution to the hermeneutic sequence:
This village of the Talmud is right in Kafka's world. For just as K. lives in the village on Castle Hill, modern man lives in his body; the body slips away [entgleitet] from him, is hostile toward him. It may happen that a man wakes up one day and finds himself transformed into vermin. Exile--his exile--has gained control over him. [p. 126]

The theological commentary, imposing upon the "naive" text the messianic union of body and soul, a coincidence between the "body" of the text and the "spirit" of the interpretation, is only one reader away from witnessing the body's going one turn further, becoming "hostile." Benjamin is this reader, but he conspicuously makes no effort to resolve, grammatically, the ambiguity posed by the independent clause, "[the body] slips away from him, is hostile toward him". Perhaps the body is not the hostile party. In reaching out, however lightly, to touch the body of the text with the discourse of criticism, the commentator is also turning the body. The text turns within the critical discourse. This turning can only be accentuated, perhaps rendered violent, by the fixity of the theoretical underpinnings bracing up the discourse. Because of this turning, the object under scrutiny can never be what it is, must always interpose some formerly concealed contour and derange apparent symmetry. "Er entgleitet ihm"; "entgleiten"; "to elude"; etymologically, "to glide away." The action signified by this verb is not unusually vigorous, and yet it characterizes, perhaps better than any other, the turning which is Kafkan "metamorphosis," whose interpretation is implicit in this passage. According to this interpretation, metamorphosis does not mark the rite of passage into another metaphysical or ontological order. It is not even the impossibility of undergoing a definitive death. It is a moment in the process of interpretation. The parable of the princess is not the only anecdote set into the surface of Benjamin's text whose effect is that what is foreign becomes master. Surely something turns inside Potemkin as he confronts the bundle of documents thrust into his hands, forcing him, in place of his own split character, to fill in the insignia of one whose mind and purpose are only too single, can only be too well represented by a mark of identification. As a biographical figure, Knut Hamsun threatens to "turn his back" on his home town because the authorities there have imposed too light a sentence on a servant-girl convicted of infanticide, but as a writer of fiction, he incorporates the event into one of his novels, where he makes it clear that she deserves no severer penalty [p. 127]. In perhaps the most pronounced case of all, the shabbiest beggar in the tavern of a Chasidic village, upon being asked what he would wish if his one wish could be fulfilled, wishes himself a powerful king reduced to abjection by invaders who strike in the middle of the night, driving him out of his palace with only the shirt on his back. " 'And what good would this wish have done you?' someone asked, 'I'd have a shirt,' was the answer" [pp. 134-35]. The reversals which these anecdotes instigate, deranging the polar alignments of "self" and "other" in the first case, "fiction" and "life" in the second, and "wish" and "fulfillment" in the third, describe not only the deformation of the Kafkan text effected in the course of Benjamin's interpretation, but also, as I have already noted, Kafka's impact on the history to which his fiction might seem so tightly bound as to be restricted from rendering any commentary. The passages immediately following the anecdote from the life of Knut Hamsun are aimed pre-

DIACRITICS/March 1977

45

This content downloaded on Thu, 14 Feb 2013 08:21:52 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

cisely at establishing, on a discursive level, the distance between Kafka's fiction and the allegory of loss and redemption which it seems only to reproduce. But this exposition comes almost as an afterthought, because the effective counterforce mounted by Benjamin to modify the identifications advanced in existential theologyinspired interpretations such as those by Willy Haas and Bernhard Rang has been the theater, not the theater as an Ersatz for theology, but as the hermeneutic event set in the text itself, whose occurrence alone is tantamount to a reversal:
heaven. On the other hand, this heaven is only background; to explore it according to its own laws would be like framing the painted backdrop of the stage and hanging it in the decisive thing, the center of the event. [p. 1217]

Thestage on which this dramatakes place is the WorldTheaterwhich opens up toward

a picture gallery. LikeEl Greco, Kafkatears open the sky behind every gesture; but as with El Greco-who was the patron saint of the Expressionists--the gesture remains The relation of the stage where the gesture unfolds to the theater afforded by the text is neither casual nor simply qualified. The heavens mirror the drama which each gesture claims for itself, but are, simultaneously, only part of the background scenery. They mirror, because the drama opens an expanded horizon for the gesture. In this expansion is all the promise of the Oklahoma Nature Theater or the "untrammeled, happy journey," the fulfillment of the wishes which the Kinderbild of Kafka, despite the theatrical setting of the nineteenth-century atelier, cannot help but betray, and the hope projected upon the "heavens" in the patrimony of Judeo-Christian theology. But the heavens have their own laws. The gesture reverberates through a series of successively widening thresholds: "Just as this bell, which is too loud for a doorbell, rings out toward heaven, the gestures of Kafka's figures are too powerful for our accustomed surroundings and break out into wider areas" [p. 121].5 As the gesture strikes outward against the horizon, however, it risks undergoing a deformation, in Benjamin's terms, it opens itself to the same diffusion that a piece of background scenery, transplanted into the intensity of a painting gallery, would be unable to withstand. The status of the gestic theater unfolding when the text assimilates its own interpretation is, then, irresolvably ambiguous. On one hand, in its own commentary, the text seems to point "beyond" itself to the anecdote, the allusion, the twist of event, whose "exteriority" qualifies it to render judgment. If a distance must be opened to accommodate the gesture of interpretation, the space in turn exposes the commentary to a possible deformation, to usurpation by alien laws, even if venerable. Unable, perhaps, to resolve this ambiguity, Benjamin points to where the action, in any event, takes place: " . . the gesture remains the decisive thing, the center of the event." Shifting away from the metaphor of the theater, the hermeneutic event retains its powers as a catalyst of reversal when it is compared with painting, or more precisely, with the framing of painted images. El Greco is the "patron saint" of gestic expressionism because his pictures not only inhabit a discrete frame within the gallery, but because their subject trespasses this plane, emerging from an incision apparently gouged into the canvas itself onto a further threshold. And yet, the freedom won by the image released from its frame, like that of the gesture overreaching its stage, is double-faced. This reversibility makes itself apparent in a passage where the relation between Kafka's parable, "Before the Law" and the novel in which it is eventually framed reveals the novelistic construction to be paradoxical: Take, for example, the parable "Beforethe Law."The readerwho read it in A Country
Doctor may have been struck by the cloudy spot in it. But would it have led him to the never-ending series of reflections traceable to this parable at the place where Kafka undertakes to interpret it? This is done by the priest in The Trial, and at such a significant moment that it looks as if the novel were nothing but the unfolding of the parable.
[p. 122]

s The reference is to the bell in Kafka's short story, "A Fratricide."

46

DIACRITICS/March1977

This content downloaded on Thu, 14 Feb 2013 08:21:52 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

It might at first appear that the parable has been invented to represent the novel as a whole, has been granted independence only to the extent that it submits a desired commentary. The opposite turns out to be true. The parable has lived a life of its own. The novel has crystallized only in the last possible moment to furnish the parable with an appropriate frame. The parable's independence emanates from its "cloudy spot," an interior space impenetrable more by virtue of emptiness than inscrutability. Freedom has not been wrested from the context of the novel. The parable's a priori freedom has instead submitted the novel to a retrospective ordering and in the process, has determined a place for the parable. The framework has crystallized only too late around the hole in the parable, whose space it can then only leave empty. This paradoxical conception of the construction involved in framing the parable requires a time scheme somewhat more complex than a linear development from past to future, for progress in time is no longer measured by growth in space, but in the completion and perfection of the insulation subsuming a void. The past is not a conveyance toward a future figured as unbounded space. Instead, it draws the circle of the horizon to a close. The temporal paradoxes implicit in the textual movement of framing are described by Benjamin when he characterizes Kafka's relation to the "Vorwelt," the repository of influences whose effect on the text might at first seem akin to that of the historical past on the present. According to Benjamin, only Kafka's literary remains afford us some clue to the prehistoricforces that dominated Kafka's creativeness, forces which, to be sure, mayjustifiablybe regardedas belonging to our worldas well. Whocan say prehistoricworldheld before him in the form of guilt he merely saw the future emergunder what names they appeared to Kafka himself? Only this much is certain: he did not know them and failed to get his bearings among them. In the mirror which the

ing in the form of judgment. Kafka, however, did not say what it was like. Was it not the Last Judgment? Does it not turn the judge into the defendant? Is the trial not the punishment? Kafka gave no answer. [pp. 128-29]

This passage opens in uncertainty and closes in paradox. The antecedents of Kafka's fiction are to be grasped only by means of what he left behind. And yet, even this circular reasoning cannot identify the "prehistoric forces" in any definitive way. Kafka "did not know them." The model substituted for this incomplete circuit of influence is one of paradox figured as reflection, not reflection as a duplicate in the form of an image, but as the crossing of disparate images in the same mirror. The repository of associations standing behind the text does not exercise any direct influence or contribute to a gradual evolution. Instead, the text's past and future join only in the center of a cross-reflection, where they participate in each other's capitulation. In the mirror which Benjamin holds up to Kafka's fiction the extremes of its development come together and usurp each other's place: "Was it not the Last Judgment? Does it not turn the judge into the defendant? Is the trial not the punishment?" The uncertainty which was earlier the limit of the attempt to identify the direct influences of the "earlier world" upon Kafka's fiction has now given way to positive identifications-but the identifications of paradox. Because the future of the text has imposed itself upon the formative stages, the judgment which was to culminate the construction has now been absorbed into the body of the text, where it, too, is subject to evaluation. Because the sentencing which, in the context of Judeo-Christian history, might be supposed to terminate the procedure, has also been digested by the body of the text, the trial becomes its own punishment. Such paradoxes emerge from the disruptions absorbed by the text as it assimilates its own commentary, whether the process be figured as a textual theater or as the framing of images.

We have already encountered, in the rabbi's interpretation of the legend of the princess, that sort of parabolic unfolding that lays the signification on the flat of the

DIACRITICS/March 1977

47

This content downloaded on Thu, 14 Feb 2013 08:21:52 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

hand. But the retrospective unfolding initiated by the process that we can now name with equal impunity either "staging" or "framing" is of an entirely different nature. "Kafka's parables, however, unfold . .. the way a bud turns into a blossom. That is why their effect resembles poetry" [p. 122]. The product of this kind of unfolding is neither reduction nor flattening, but something new, something unexpected, an authentic metamorphosis from one stage of crystallization to another. In this sense, the bloom is similar to the shirt in the beggar's story: however pathetically the wish implicit in the beggar's portraying himself as a king may reflect on his material conditions, the story does leave him, in the end, in possession of one unknown which previously could not have been in any way calculated, a shirt. The fictive process by which the beggar wins himself a shirt is similar to poetry. The story does not reproduce a history with which the reader may already be familiar, but instead throws something unforseen in its path. The poetry-resembling process, whether described as "staging," "framing," "unfolding," or "metaphor," is distinguished precisely by the inability of knowing in advance what it will produce and when the production will appear on the horizon. The symbol that Benjamin has chosen to represent this occurrence is a flower, a sign that might also be taken to harbor some dimension of innocence. The strains of innocence traced by Benjamin in the world of Kafka's fiction are not, however, like the innocence of the exiled princess waiting an eternity for the consummation of her lover's promise, that is, do not reproduce moments of innocence already accommodated within the pre-plotted course of Judeo-Christian history. The innocence isolated by Benjamin, bestowed upon the anecdotes framed within the galleries of his essay and permeating the very style of his discursive prose is not akin to naivete or the absence of experience, but rather to an experience situated only on the far side of writing, the inscription of new beginnings within the text itself. In this regard, Benjamin's pronounced interest in "The Great Wall of China" cannot be taken as accidental. Nowhere in Kafka's fiction does there appear a more instrumental key to the design that its own work of construction follows. The system which the narrator terms Teilbau, or construction by piece-work, according to which (as he claims) the Great Wall was erected, characterizes not only Benjamin's technique of inlaying seemingly unrelated allusions and anecdotes, but also the style of his prose. The development of this style is not marked by the consecutive consideration and illumination of the argumentative gaps contained in the overall scheme, but in the mounting reverberations set off in a succession of non sequiturs, the cumulative impact of declarations all reflecting in a certain way upon the "subject," but not necessarily aligned with one another. "The Great Wall of China" may be set in the remoteness of ancient China, but the single coherent explanation offered for its fragmentary construction is bound up most intimately with the preservation of a hope indigenous to quite another culture:
even years on end, in an uninhabited mountainous region, hundreds of miles from their homes; the hopelessness of such hard toil, which yet could not reach completion even in the longest lifetime, would have cast them into despair and above all made them less capable for the work. It was for this reason that the system of piecemeal building was decided on. [Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories (New York: Schocken, 1976), p. 237]

One could not, for instance, expect them to lay one stone on another for months or

But the breaches assimilated by Benjamin into both the framework and style of his text have little to do with the perpetuation of hope by blocking out the magnitude of the undertaking as a whole. His text arises, as it were, already from the holes in Kafka's fiction. His primary concern is not proving that such holes exist. Instead, the caesuras, gaps, leaps in Benjamin's text give entrance to a particularly fresh circulation, a hard-won innocence deriving not from insulation or blindness, but from the hermeneutic inclination to penetrate the textual machine and install there a slight irregularity, deranging its potentially mechanical and predictable function of deconstruction. In the world of Kafka's fiction, this disturbance intrudes itself in such

48

DIACRITICS/March1977

This content downloaded on Thu, 14 Feb 2013 08:21:52 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

unlikely situations as the hitch in Fraulein Montag's walk and in the congenital eccentricity impeding the instrument of execution on the Penal Colony. Whatever grotesqueness this irregularity may join to motion, however indefinitely the mechanical failure may draw out the prescribed retribution, this breakdown, adapted in the missed beats written into the rhythm of Benjamin's prose, is central to the only hope which he can distinguish in Kafka's writing or admit within the margins of his own criticism. This hope does not hinge on the fulfillment of any messianic promise, whether situated within the duration of history or postponed until its end. The possibility for a regeneration within the text itself is seeded throughout Benjamin's essay. At the beginning, the possibility appears in the form of Kafka's messengers and assistants: In Indian mythology there are the gandharvas,celestial creatures, beings in an unfinished state. Kafka's assistantsare of that kind: neither members of, nor strangersto, any of the other groups of figures, but, rather,messengers from one to the other.... Theyhave not yet been completely released fromthe womb of nature... It is for them and their kind, the unfinished and the bunglers, that there is hope. [pp. 116-7]6 By the end of the essay, it will be more akin to forgetting: "But forgetting always involves the best, for it involves the possibility of redemption" [p. 136]. Throughout its metamorphoses, however, the hope whose potentiality is conceded by Benjamin
~iFL~~.~I~ I~C.~~u C-;i ~q_;;; ;:;:1-~-?+;~ ,:,~, *, ~-a??"? I ~2:::h :i' ;$"r':'"' :,~:-IXC-;:~: ?~:-:I:???.;. ?:i~T Y~:nB~---*? .4 rX_ ?;:m:n?i-? ii~~~~l; R -a _ ;::::~~~~ w" ~~ ~-i~s~i~s,_ ;;-~ cl,::-:::::;; l-i--_ i-; ??a-: ,---i ?-; ? aia~s-~:~ ~~aa:i~.i ~~~_ ,:,,,, ~~ ~;-;1?; ~ ~;~;;; _ '~ S.lrT~ !:* f* ia:~~? ~~ii;~M~ 6~-(i~ ~"?:Jc~ " ~~s~~? a ~'""~~~ Sr? ;:? oi~ ~a:w :;:_;,~~ ??-?n?-.:i-~c?; ?;?;??;-;-::??i ~"~~P ,,

:~iQ-c ~""' ?aal?-I~ ~,s;: ??* "x-i~?;:

i_:.Mn~~~

maintains the character of a lapse. The conditions set out in the description of the gandharvas will hold true of the entire essay. Regeneration, if it is to take place within the text, will do so only by virtue of imperfection and bungling. Those entrusted with this task will be amorphous beings who have been backed into a posture of unmitigated neutrality, somewhere between "the abortive and overripe elements" [p. 126]. It cannot be gratuitous that Benjamin draws these figures from non-occidental culture. Perhaps it is their very indifference to the history whose fate might seem to hang in the balance of Kafka'sfiction that makes them particularly suited as the instruments of Benjamin's commentary, whose own efficacy consists in intruding upon and bungling what would otherwise be only too self-evident.
6 Kafka's assistants' status as members of an exclusively transitionalrealm is reinforcedand elaborated only a few lines from where the gandharvas are introduced: "None has a firmplace in the world, firm,inalienable outlines. Thereis not one that is not either risingor falling, none that is not tradingqualities with its enemy or neighbor, none that has not completed its period of time and yet is unripe, none thatis not deeply exhausted and yet is only at the beginning of a long existence. To speak of any order or hierarchyis impossible here" [p. 117].

DIACRITICS/March1977

49

This content downloaded on Thu, 14 Feb 2013 08:21:52 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

The lapses in memory and efficacy intruding themselves into Benjamin's text as the only possible future do not occur entirely free of volition. With great deliberateness, Benjamin distinguishes forgetting from any simple lapse of consciousness: "To believe in progress is not to believe that progress has alreadytaken place. That would be no belief." Kafkadid not consider the age in which he lived as an advance over the beginnings of time, His novels are set in a swamp world.... The fact that it is now forgotten does not mean thatit does not extend into the present. On the contrary: it is actual by virtueof this very oblivion. [p. 130] It becomes evident in this passage that if forgetting entails a loss of contact with prior stages of crystallization, this does not preclude the possibility of a remembrance made all the more vibrant in its re-emergence. We have already observed how insulating the story of Potemkin in the remoteness of two centuries disarms the resistance that might be mounted against its claim. In forgetting, this process is inverted: a predetermined distance dissolves. Whether history is remembered in the opening of a fictive distance or forgotten in collapsing this space, however, the play is always calculated. Kafka's assistants may be, by virtue of their innocence, incapable of such machination. They are, according to Benjamin, blood relatives of Kafka's students, whose life's work is marked by systematic denial: creaturesthere is a clan which reckons with the brevityof life in a Among Kafka's peculiar way .... But there is more to this clan . . . Actually,the students who appear in the strangest places in Kafka'sworks are the spokesmen for and leaders of this clan. ... Whilethey study, the students are awake, and perhaps theirbeing kept awake is the best thing about these studies. The hunger artistfasts, the doorkeeper is silent, and the students are awake. Thisis the veiled way in which the great rules of asceticism operate in Kafka. Theircrowning achievement is studying. [pp. 135-36] These examples of self-denial and voluntary self-consumption attest to the deliberate nature of the empty spaces filling the world of Kafka's fiction, evident in both the logical incompleteness of the novels as wholes (in the void separating their ultimate and penultimate chapters) and in the inability of certain particular extended metaphors (such as those of construction in "The Burrow" and "The Great Wall of China") ever to reach culmination. Through these gaps the only notion of hope admitted by Benjamin within the compass of his own text enters. This hope is embodied perhaps most appropriately in the figure of semi-voluntary forgetting, an indifference bespeaking not the obliteration of the text but rather a resumption of its workings made possible by a release from itself. The regeneration breaking down the repetitive cycles to which the fictive text and even the aware critical discourse may find themselves confined has been seeded throughout the argumentation, dramatized in the sudden reversals in the anecdotes set in the background of the discursive passages, and is to be sharply distinguished from regressive thrusts toward nostalgia and mystified innocence resulting from the suppression of discrepancy. III In dramatizing how the textual movements of staging and framing culminate in reversal, Benjamin has exposed the distortion effected by an interpretation whose pronounced aim was to render the text accessible. But in tracing the migration, in Kafka's text, of the extremities of Judeo-Christian history to an indifferent Zwischenwelt7 and the resulting break in progress toward any predetermined destiny, Benjamin salvages a certain potentiality for regeneration from the very history which he has twisted into a knot. In both of these separate but complementary movements, the interpretation proceeds by a gesture of turning. If the agent of turning is the
7 "Oblivion is the container from which the inexhaustible intermediate world in Kafka's stories presses toward the light" [p. 131].

50

DIACRITICS/March1977

This content downloaded on Thu, 14 Feb 2013 08:21:52 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

commentator, whether Kafka or Benjamin, the instrument of turning is the back. Knut Hamsun turns his back on the town that greeted the murder of a child by its mother with relative indifference, but the world of his fiction assimilates the event as it happened. In the same story which the beggar spins to characterize his most ardent wish, he fabricates a shirt to cover his back. "Among the images in Kafka's stories, none is more frequent than that of the man who bows his head far down on his chest ... " [p. 133]. The horseback ride in which Benjamin sees the most vigorous expression of Kafka's optimism consummates the release of the functionaries of whom this posture is most typical from their particular burdens: "Could they be the descendants of the figures of Atlas that support globes with their shoulders?" [p. 112]. The most agonizing strain placed on the back in the course of this essay is twisting it until the blind side of the body assimilates the faculty of vision, what was until then the remote and exclusive property of the frontal face. According to Benjamin, this is the torture performed on the Penal Colony: " . . an archaic apparatus which engraves letters with curlicues on the backs of guilty men, multiplying the stabs and piling up the ornaments to the point where the back of the guilty man becomes clairvoyant and is able to decipher the writing from which he must derive the nature of his unknown guilt. It is the back on which this is incumbent" [p. 133]. It is no accident that the image selected by Benjamin as the essay's culminating figure for the distortion mutually worked upon each other by the body of the text and the commentator is the "little hunchback," the forgotten enigma reasserting its presence through those breaks in co-ordination when a child's assurance in the conjunction between its own movements and those of the objects in the world around it is also, at least momentarily, shattered. It is indeed on the back that the burden ot interpretation is incumbent, because, as I have tried to demonstrate, the essential activity of exegesis characterized in this essay is turning. "Reversal is the direction of learning which transforms existence into writing" [p. 138]. The back also gives evidence of indifference, the indifference conveyed in the gesture of turning away. A rhetoric of indifference, most openly visible in a series of allusions to Tao, Hindu, Confucius, and China, not only as they play in Kafka's fiction, but also in texts by Franz Rosenzweig and Metchnikoff, has threaded the entire essay. As suggested earlier, the indifference of Oriental religion and legend to the personal and historical destiny weighed in the trial of Judeo-Christian theology makes the East a particularly fitting image for the distortion effected in the course of interpretation, the interpretation in which both Kafka and Benjamin are engaged. The figure of the Orient as an agent of neutrality exercises its influence even where China and the Eastern religions do not enter the discussion directly, in the themes of inscrutability and impersonality running through the essay. The doctrine which Kafka's parables might be supposed to "interpret and which K.'s postures and the gestures of his animals clarify . .. does not exist" [p. 122]. Benjamin also finds a singular impersonality to inhabit Kafka's fiction, an apt motto for which he borrows from Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption: ". . . the idea of the wise man, of which Cpnfucius is the classic incarnation, blurs any individuality of character; he is the truly characterless man, namely, the average man ... What distinguishes a Chinese is something quite different from character . . ." [p. 120]. In a similar fashion, shame, described as Kafka's strongest gesture, is limited to the public arena: "Shame is not only shame in the presence of others, but can also be shame one feels for them. Kafka's shame, then, is no more personal than the life and thought which govern it ... " [pp. 129-30]. Even nearer to the heart of the argument, the forgetting that will figure as the text's in-built possibility for continuing is stamped with the character of impersonality: "What has been forgotten-and this insight affords us yet another avenue of access to Kafka's work-is never something purely individual" [p. 131]. The strain of indifference whose impact on the text is, in the end, so crucial, thus encompasses an inscrutability admitting the limits of knowledge and an impersonality accommodating even the lapses and cross-reflections in the text. And yet, it is precisely the discontinuities and discordances put into play in the act of interpretation that rob the text of any aura of completion that it might have otherwise claimed.

DIACRITICS/March 1977

51

This content downloaded on Thu, 14 Feb 2013 08:21:52 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Far from being any theoretical formula for the culmination of texts, indifference is only as far as this particular text happens to go. Study is the "crowning" image of this indifference. During the course of my own analysis, we have been concerned essentially with only one textual movement, viewed from two sides. From the perspective of the figure "set off," "staged," or "framed" within the context, we have observed that in the same motion by which the gesture "releases" itself from its background, it wins a freedom itself ambiguous and self-negating. We have also viewed the process from the perspective of the space opened up by the figure, the lapse in memory or efficacy enabling the text to break the rhythm of its own (self-negating) cycles, and in so doing, to re-commence. Piecemeal building, the hunger artist's fasting, the doorkeeper's silence, and the students' wakefulness are all figures from the world of Kafka'sfiction bespeaking the deliberateness of the lapses absorbed into the text. There is, however, a limit to the degree to which a lapse can be deliberate before it ceases being a lapse. It is significant, then, that having brought us through the complexities brought into play by the Gestus, having laid the groundwork for an encompassing neutrality with such components as the cloudy spot on the inside of the parable and the string of references designating the East as an impartial mediator, Benjamin culminates the strain of indifference developed in the course of the essay with the figure of study both as a fanatical gesticulation and "nothing." This image also requires the observation of one movement from two sides at the same time: Perhapsthese studies had amounted to nothing. Butthey are veryclose to that nothing
which alone makes it possible for something to be useful-that is, to the Tao. This is what Kafka was after with his desire "to hammer a table together with painstaking

and, at the same time, to do nothing-not in such a way that someone craftsmanship could say 'Hammeringis nothing to him,' but 'To him, hammeringis real hammering and at the same time nothing,' which would have made the hammeringeven bolder, more determined, more real, and, if you like, more insane." This is the resolute, fanaticalmien which students have when they study; it is the strangestmien imaginable. The scribes, the students are out of breath; they fairlyrace along. [pp. 136-7]

Benjamin's characterization of study and its particular variety of indifference derives largely from a reflection by Kafka concerning what is involved in the act of putting a table together. In this seemingly straightforward act, Kafka finds two possible approaches to the nothingness of which he, like Tao, is in pursuit. According to the first postulation, the hammering is nothing. For Kafka, however, it is insufficient to concede that the negation of the construction is contained in the act itself. To vacillate between construction and negation is to accept the limitations imposed by a history that develops according to orderly evolutions and distinguishable causalities, a history whose moments ar'e discrete from one another because they are each defined by a single function with respect to rise or fall. The indifference with which Benjamin wishes to infuse the figure of study cannot be represented by the identification of the act with its negation. The more complex model that is required is also furnished by Kafka: the hammering and its absence are related not by reciprocity but by simultaneity; not by alternation, but by ongoing dissonance. The moments of Kafka's preferred way of putting a table together are blurred because their activity is differentiated, their cross-purposes continuous. In finding a model of indifference for the act of interpretation in Kafka's second hammering, a model indeed worthy of the comparison with Tao, Benjamin once again suggests how the hermeneutic event transforms (or distorts) evolutionary and causal concepts of history. The temporal juxtaposition of hammering and nothing does not, however, attest to a condition of passive tolerance. Fanaticism derives not from the remoteness, but the proximity of the evidence negating belief. Alongside of nothingness, the hammering becomes "bolder, more determined, more real, and, if you like, more insane." If Kafka's students display such a "resolute, fanatical mien" in their studies, perhaps they are simultaneously contemplating the inconsequentiality of their work. And yet, if the juxtaposition of the extremes has set the stage for the hermeneutic event, the energy released by the gesture can still not save the students from exhaus-

52

DIACRITICS/March1977

This content downloaded on Thu, 14 Feb 2013 08:21:52 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

tion. "The scribes, the students are out of breath." This reference evokes the passageways of the Court and offices of The Trial, where, perhaps more than anywhere else in Kafka's fiction, the exhausted atmosphere in which the uninitiated is overcome by fits of dizziness and fainting reflects language's succumbing to its own involutions in the formulation of its apparent laws. As I have already suggested, the choice of the first model of hammering over the second, a gesture adapted by Benjamin in order to define the study which "culminates" the strain of indifference in his essay, reproduces certain movements already apparent in his inlaying of anecdotes and his analysis of the staging and framing of the hermeneutic event. The mention here of the students' breathlessness recalls the self-negating character of the "release" which the gesture seems at first to win for itself. And yet, if the figure of study turns out to be merely another stage for the enactment of reversal in the text, the strain of indifference will have proven itself open to further elaborationbut incapable of culminating at any higher plane of objectivity. At the end of a reading whose primary function and effect may be described as reversal, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to fabricate a satisfactory motive for the reversal's sudden termination. Cognizant himself of this difficulty, Benjamin remarks it in admitting, almost at the end of his text, "But once we have reached this point, we are in danger of missing Kafka by stopping here" [p. 139]. In another example of simultaneity which Benjamin provides as an explanation for linking the figure of study with the complex model of hammering and the gestic theater, his recalling of certain of the text's central movements, as well as the difficulty of breaking the cycle of reversal, become much clearer. This further elaboration also furnishes a context for what might be taken as the retrospective motto for the entire essay, "Reversal is the direction of learning which transforms existence into writing" [p. 138]. It may be easier to understand this if one thinks of the actors in the Nature Theater.
Actors have to catch their cues in a flash, and they resemble those assiduous people in actor would forget a word or a movement. For the members of the Oklahoma troupe, actors have been redeemed ...[p. 137]

other ways as well. Truly,for them "hammering is realhammeringand at the same time nothing"--provided that this is part of their role. They study this role, and only a bad however, the role is their earlier life; hence the "nature"in this Nature Theater. Its

Benjamin elucidates the fanaticism and negation which are joined in the act of study by recalling to the reader an activity itself requiring instantaneous recall, a movement already characterized by his essay, acting in the theater. The apprehension of hammering both as an authentic hammering and nothing is already built into the vocation of the theater. Just as study acquires the intensity of fanaticism through the simultaneous contemplation of its absolute inconsequence, the success of the theater depends on the actor's maintaining his stage role directly alongside of his others. The acting loses its credibility not when the actor sustains the duplicity built into his role, but when he forgets, when he lapses into the one side of the tension or the other. Bad acting, then, like Kafka's first description of building a table, equates the hammering with the nothing, and cannot maintain the mutually-negating activities simultaneously. In recalling the essay's central figures for textual activity to characterize the indifference which seems to culminate the hermeneutic event, Benjamin hints at the extreme difficulty of ascertaining any progress made by the interpretative instrument itself. To be sure, as defined here by Benjamin, the figure of acting does reproduce the discrepancy-maintaining indifference of study. The actor studies his duplicitous role just as the student also studies, with an extreme intensity, what his study is not. But this illumination also serves to reverse what the essay has established. Forgetting, in the context of this passage, suggests not the deliberate installation of a lapse in the text's deconstructive functioning, but the repression of discrepancy in the wake of a failure to maintain indifference. The Nature Theater players have been "redeemed" not through their bungling or forgetting, but because they have remembered the self-contradiction of their art. The analysis of acting has indeed

DIACRITICS/March 1977

53

This content downloaded on Thu, 14 Feb 2013 08:21:52 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

carried the figure of study further, but even in advancing the indifference necessary for the continuation of interpretation, the interpretation has continued to turn on its own formulations, to derange the regularity of movements that would have otherwise become only too effortless and self-perpetuating. Perhaps this is why the Nature Theater has served as such a central figure for the interpretative act throughout the essay. Like the text, its players have gone themselves one turn further. Their "nature" is already the synchrony of simultaneous and mutually-negating acts. The duplicitous role upon whose maintenance the success of the act depends is already one of their prior incarnations. Benjamin's study heralds further readings of Kafka because it is built into the very clefts which Kafka's "reason and cunning have inserted" into myths. Absorbing the reversal which he observes in Kafka's text into the argumentation and even style of his own analysis, he still maintains the lapse in reasoning and efficacy allowing the text to bypass the full implications of its own logic and begin again. Reversal is in fact the ground where the parable's all but unforseeable product, whether figured as a bloom or an unexpected turn of event, unfolds, in an event "resembling poetry." The unforseen, then, is not excluded from the criticism which proceeds by penetrating and deconstructing the apparently consequential thematic and dramatic developments "represented" by the text. The hermeneutic event occurring both in and beside the text, whether described as "staging," "framing," or "metaphor," effects both the deconstruction of the surrounding context and the emergence of something new on the horizon, something that a theory limiting its constructs to a known set of negative attributes cannot take into account. Like Sisyphus, the interpretative text comes only before or after its object. Too early, because it was anticipated from the very beginning, in the inconsistency flawing even the deepest strata of the text which it accompanies; too late, because when it finally arose, the lines of stress had already determined the course of history. With the explosive spontaneity of the gesture in the Chinese theater, the interpretative text throws off the burden of its patrimony-only to be caught up in the cycles of its In our own text, these mutually-negating own mechanism. interpretative functions-reversal and repetition-have gradually edged toward a confrontation. Kafka anticipated their dissonance in his second variety of hammering. Benjamin carried the paradox a step further, infusing it into the discursive, dramatic, and stylistic functions of his own analysis. The direction of this continuity is indifference, although the critical text's striving toward indifference guarantees neither against contradiction nor repetition. The burden of interpretation will be borne on the back of the unidentifiable beast in which the alien functions have crossed. at the Humanities CenteroftheJohns Hopkins Sussmanisa MellonScholarinthe Humanities Henry University.

54

DIACRITICS/March1977

This content downloaded on Thu, 14 Feb 2013 08:21:52 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions