4 - Kafka as the Exemplary Subject of Recent Dominant Critical Approaches

Summary

“KAFKA AFTER KAFKA” DIRECTS US to the critical reception of Kafka's works after his premature death in 1924. This is a wide field, for Kafka's works have lent themselves to every major line of criticism in the decades following: psychoanalytical, existential, Marxist, mythical, and biblical-allegorical, among others. A gallery featuring the most striking readings of his works would illustrate the major critical movements of the last century.

His critical attractiveness has never abated. Today, his work is as prominent as ever before, offering itself as a subject matter admirably suited to recent dominant critical approaches. Two such lines stand out: deconstructive criticism and cultural studies.

In the first case, Kafka has been seen as even more than admirably suited to such analysis: in both his fiction and his confessional writings, especially his notations on poetics, Kafka anticipates many of the axioms and procedures of deconstructive criticism. Deconstructive readings highlight the self-reflexive character of complex literary texts, showing how they allude to the ordeal of their own coming to light. In the words of the Kafka scholar Benno Wagner, “Kafka's work has served as a touchstone for the leading theoretical approaches to literary studies … [because] his work displays … the fundamental character of modern writing, its self-reflexiveness, its way of leaving textual trace markers of its own production…. Hence, the many readings we have that treat the stories as protocols of their own coming into being.”

Kafka's editor Sir Malcolm Pasley was involved early in this exercise; although he would not have appreciated the distinction, he can now be seen as a deconstructionist-minded critic avant la lettre. This is to say that many of his discoveries bring Kafka's deconstructive sensibility to light. Consider some very telling details of Pasley's study of the “manuscription” of The Trial. By the latter term I mean the literal, word-by-word production of the manuscript, pen and pencil on paper, which, for the astute reader, reveals markers of the working consciousness of the author as manuscriptor, as technician of the first rank. In this connection it is interesting that Kafka never referred to himself as author (Autor) or inspired poet (Dichter) but rather, soberly, as writer (Schriftsteller: one who literally puts script [to paper]).