Kafka Imagines His Readers: The Rhetoric of “Josefine die Sängerin” and “Der Bau”

Summary

KAFKA’S LAST STORIES, written in the knowledge that his life was not likely to last much longer, reflect an artist’s last attempts to come to grips with the question of the place of art in a world that by and large has other things to worry about. Even artists themselves have other things to worry about, and sometimes those things — things like dying — are extremely urgent. In the case of these late stories the urgency of the situation shows up not so much in the pace of the narratives, which are for the most part leisurely and even contemplative, as in their subject matter and narrative style. Subject matter and style actually merge here, for Kafka creates narrators whose apparently trivial discourse examines obsessively other trivial discourse which might, on second thought, be the most important thing in the world.

Both stories are first-person narratives, and though they were not Kafka’s first attempts at this mode of storytelling, they are nonetheless atypical of his usual practice. Normally he tended to adhere as much as possible to the erlebte Rede technique, the “free indirect style” made famous by Flaubert. This is the style of all the novels, of “Die Verwandlung” (The Metamorphosis), “Das Urteil” (The Judgment), “In der Strafkolonie” (In the Penal Colony), and indeed most of the classics of the Kafka canon. But such a style, though it looks initially very different, is in one regard not necessarily a very far step from the first-person narrative. Erlebte Rede, as has long been recognized, may have the form of a third-person narrative with an omniscient narrator, but its perspective is normally limited to the point of view of a single character (see, for example, Cohn). It is clear that, for Kafka at least, the boundary between the two was not very strong, as is evident from the manuscript of Das Schloß (The Castle). The opening of the novel was originally composed in the first-person, but Kafka changed his mind. He crossed out the first-person pronouns and inserted the familiar and personally resonant letter K. In their place, thus converting his novel to the erlebte Rede style with a few strokes of the pen.