Tomáš Koblížek

Petr Koťátko (eds.)

Lessons from Kafka

Philosophical Readings

of Franz Kafka’s Works

Filosofia

Praha 2021

This volume appears with financial support
from the Czech Academy of Sciences

Reviewed by:

Mgr. Roman Kanda, Ph.D.

doc. Mgr. Josef Fulka, Ph.D.

LESSONS FROM KAFKA

Philosophical Readings of Franz Kafka’s Works
Tomáš Koblížek, Petr Koťátko (eds.)

Published by Filosofia, Prague (Czech Republic),

the publishing house of the Institute of Philosophy

of the Czech Academy of Sciences,

as Filosofia’s 561st publication

Peer reviewed by Mgr. Roman Kanda, Ph.D.,

and doc. Mgr. Josef Fulka, Ph.D.

Responsible staffer Pavla Toráčová

Index Tomáš Koblížek and Matěj Kuruc

Cover and typography Markéta Jelenová

Typesetting of the printed book Jana Andrlová, 5. května 111, Mělník

Electronic formats made by KOSMAS, www.kosmas.cz

First electronic edition

Prague 2022

Editors © Tomáš Koblížek, Petr Koťátko, 2021

Copyright © Josep E. Corbí, Michaela Fišerová, Bohumil Fořt,
Simon Glendinning, Stanley E. Gontarski, Petr Koťátko, Gregg Lambert,
Jerrold Levinson, Richard Müller, Anders Pettersson, Göran Rossholm,
Eyal Segal, Daniela Šterbáková, 2021

Cover and Typography © Markéta Jelenová, 2021

© Filosofia, the publishing house of the Institute of Philosophy
of the Czech Academy of Sciences, 2021

ISBN 978-80-7007-723-8 (Epub)

ISBN 978-80-7007-724-5 (Mobi)

ISBN 978-80-7007-722-1 (PDF)

Preface

Given the vast amount of Kafkian literature, it seems daring or even pretentious to come up with another book on this author. Here are some reasons why we still hope for reader’s interest. Our book collects original articles approaching Kafka’s work from the perspectives of several philosophical disciplines (ontology, epistemology, philosophy of language, ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of literature and aesthetics). Needless to stress, their authors’ achievement cannot consist in a mere subsumption of the “Kafkian material” under the conceptual schemes of these disciplines: the very nature of this “material” would resist such a treatment. Hence the starting point cannot be theoretical aspirations stemming from the authors’ long-term work in these disciplines but creative reading of Kafka’s texts. On this basis, the articles collected in this volume offer original, sometimes polemically focused views both on Kafka’s work and on influential interpretations or tendencies prevailing in the Kafkian interpretive tradition.

The thematic and methodological variety of the articles is no less noticeable than the diversity of the research profiles of their authors. They include detailed interpretations of particular works (The Burrow, The Judgement, the aphorism Before the Law, The Castle) as well as thorough analyses of characteristic features of Kafka’s texts: their fragmentariness (and resistance to closure); the function of elaborate explanations of the system and detailed situation analyses provided occasionally by Kafka’s characters and, as the other side of the coin, permanent demonstrations of the unsurmountable limits of rationality and understanding; the role of animality and of the motif of „becoming-animal“ in the presentation of the states or situations in which Kafka’s heroes find themselves; the specific nature and functions of indeterminacy and incompleteness in (and of) Kafka‘s fictional worlds, etc. A prominent role in some of these analyses is reserved for confrontations with other writers (such as Beckett, Bernhard or Balzac), with influential Kafka’s interpreters (including Derrida, Foucault or Deleuze), with a renowned adaptation of Kafka’s work (Welles’ movie The Trial) or with ongoing debates on related topics in various disciplines (current discussions about rationalizing explanations in ethics and theory of action, dealing with narrative gaps in the fictional worlds theories, discussions about the relevance of the law of the excluded middle in various kinds of discourse, the role of the concept of „noise“ in semiotics and information theory, the Quinean thesis of the inextricability of meaning as a model for dealing with other phenomena).

The editors highly appreciate the opportunity to publish a volume on Kafka’s work in a publishing house located in the very centre of the Old Prague, where Kafka spent a substantial part of his life (his birth house is a two-minute walk from there and the house of his closest friend Max Brod is just across the street). We hope that the reader will feel this closeness to Kafka’s world whenever she opens the book.

The Editors

Part 1

The Structure of the World and the Limits of Knowledge

KAFKA’S UNDERGROUND MAN
Reflections on The Burrow

Jerrold Levinson

1

Kafka’s unfinished story, The Burrow (1923),[1] is an enigmatic and suggestive work, as enigmatic and suggestive in its own way as the better known narratives, The Metamorphosis and The Trial. My objective is not to wholly dispel its enigma, or to detail all of its suggestions, but more modestly, to sketch some approaches to interpreting it, to situate it in relation to three other literary works, one by Kafka, one by Dostoyevsky and one by Oliver Wendell Holmes, and lastly, to highlight what seems to me the most central of the themes with which it engages.

Let me begin with a brief description of the story, as it is not one of those which everyone at all familiar with Kafka will know. Its form is that of a first-person interior monologue, one which we overhear in the usual unexplained manner, delivered by an unnamed protagonist who seems to be some sort of animal, though one possessed of a recognizably human consciousness and repertoire of psychological responses. In other words, though the Burrower, as I will call him, is clearly an animal in terms of the physique and actions attributed to him, he is just as clearly all-too-human in terms of manifested psyche, with hopes, fears, and insecurities equal to those of the most neurotic among us. There are no other characters, and thus no dialogue, except of the internal sort wherein the protagonist poses questions to himself and entertains answers to them.

One’s first impression of the Burrower is of self-satisfaction with his dwelling and the skill that went into its construction. But one quickly senses a deep insecurity underneath that self-congratulatory veneer. In the story the Burrower describes, with a spectrum of emotions going from evident pride to smug satisfaction to nagging worry to bitter regret, the burrow he has laboriously created as his bulwark against the world. He describes the phases of its building, its many chambers and passageways, his motivations for undertaking its construction, his greatest successes and worst setbacks, his false starts and happy accidents, his visions for future improvements. Described in greatest detail is the burrow’s largest chamber, the Castle Keep, a sort of combination throne room and food depository, on which the Burrower places the utmost importance, and which took the most out of him. Building that stronghold, he notes, required the most wearying labor of all, since for the hardening of loose earth in order to make its thick walls the only tool the Burrower possessed was his forehead. We might see in this a reminder of how comparably poor and only marginally adequate are the tools that human beings possess for battling and comprehending nature.

But over all this, even the ostensibly joyful portions of the Burrower’s ruminations and recollections, hangs a pervasive sense of anxiety and gloom. And what is its source? Jumping ahead, what I propose as its source is the Burrower’s unceasing demand for epistemic certainty and the ontological security that is expected to provide – a demand that can in principle never be satisfied. On a more mundane level, the Burrower exhibits a bundle of psychopathologies – most prominently paranoia, megalomania, narcissism, and obsession-compulsion – that might also be said to account for the aura of oppressive angst that the narrative exudes.

As already noted, the identity of the animal protagonist of The Burrow is to a certain extent indeterminate. Although a variety of animals create burrows, including rabbits and foxes, many details of the descriptions in the story, especially those concerned with the making of the burrow and the Burrower’s imagined encounters with possible intruders, point to mammals of a different order – squatter, bulkier, more powerful, more pugnacious. Something like a mole or a badger, or perhaps a marmot or groundhog. But why refer to the creature as him and not her? Its gender is no more indicated than is its specific animal nature, yet it is almost impossible not to conceive of the creature as male. This has perhaps two justifications. The first is the natural default identification of Kafka’s protagonists with Kafka himself. The second is the coarse, aggressive, reckless, and violent character the Burrower most often displays in his thoughts and recollections, which one thinks of as more male than female. For instance, the Burrower admits to occasionally indulging in episodes of gluttony, wildly falling on his stores and gorging himself to the limit, riskily exposing himself to danger while in the lethargic state that results from such indulgence.

The original German title of Kafka’s long story is Der Bau. But while “Bau” can mean “burrow”, in the sense of an underground dwelling such as various animals are given to making, “Bau” is also inherently more abstract than “burrow”, meaning in most cases something like “building” or “construction” or “structure”. This greater abstractness of “Bau” as opposed to “burrow” should be borne in mind, since it reinforces the aptness of the more metaphorical and metaphysical readings that Kafka’s story invites.

Note that a burrow – a house or dwelling that is under and of the earth, unlike a house or dwelling of the more usual sort – has no natural boundary or limit. The whole earth is in effect comprised within the burrow. Otherwise put, the Burrower’s house is continuous with the earth and blends into it, whereas a human house, at least since the beginning of recorded history, is normally discontinuous with and set off from the earth. What significance might one attribute to this in interpreting Kafka’s story? Perhaps that it was composed in the final, darkest period of Kafka’s life, when he was beset by terminal illness, thus making thoughts of the earth – or as the Bible has it, dust – from which we spring and to which we must return especially prominent. Perhaps also that feature of a burrow, its continuity with the earth as a whole, adds to our license to see the burrow in symbolic or metaphysical terms, as in effect a world or universe.

1 All references to this work are to the English edition of the story in the volume Kafka, F., The Great Wall of China. Stories and Reflections, transl. by W. and E. Muir, Schocken Books, New York 1970, pp. 44–82 (= Kafka, F., The Burrow).

2

Consider now what a burrow literally is at the most abstract level of description. At such a level the burrow in The Burrow might be characterized as:

a) a construction or structure;

b) consisting of many parts or components;

c) with differing functions or uses;

d) whose overall purpose is one of shelter, security, and storage;

e) and which is indefinitely expandable and thus uncompletable.

In light of that abstract characterization, what might the burrow conceivably be seen as an image or symbol? Some options are these: a) a self or psyche; b) an individual set of beliefs; c) human knowledge as a whole; d) a religious system or worldview.

Let’s see how this could be developed in the case of the first option, the burrow as self or psyche. First, a self or psyche is something constructed, over time, though not out of whole cloth, since certain materials and constraints are given at the outset and must be accepted and exploited, just as the burrow assumes a shape in part due to the choices of the shaper and in part due to fixed features of the terrain. Second, a self or psyche has parts or divisions, some of them more accessible than others, some of them more central and some of them more peripheral, something manifestly applicable to the burrow as well. Third and fourth, the parts of the self have different functions, ones that assure the overall purposes of the self, which purposes can be correlated – albeit roughly – with those of the burrow: shelter is provided by the ego, which organizes and preserves the self as a whole, storage of experiences is afforded by the memory, while the security of the self is assured, naturally enough, by psychic defense mechanisms. And lastly the self, like the burrow, is a continual work-in-progress, constantly evolving, but always bearing traces of its checkered history.

Moreover, the burrow was not built solely for reasons of shelter, security, and storage. Rather, it seems clearly to underwrite the Burrower’s identity and to justify his existence, and constitutes an inalienable source of pride: „here is my castle, which I have wrested from the refractory soil with tooth and claw, with pounding and hammering blows, my castle, which can never belong to anyone else and is essentially mine”.[2] The Burrower’s identity seems indissolubly tied to the burrow, with the distinction between dweller and dwelling blurring to some extent, inviting us to regard the burrow as an extension or externalization of the Burrower’s self, in something like the sense that contemporary theory of intelligent agents enshrines as the embodied mind. Although later in the story the Burrower berates himself for thinking primarily of defending himself and not the burrow, this self-accusation is unfair. For the Burrower and the burrow are effectively one and the same, inseparably united, and stand or fall together.

So seeing the burrow as an image of the self, one whose vulnerabilities and potential fractures are on full display, or as the Burrower writ large, his extended body-mind, has a lot to be said for it. The same might be said for the burrow as a religious worldview or system, one aimed at quieting the fear of mortality and achieving a measure of reassurance about the cosmos and our place in it. But I will not pursue those interpretations further, instead choosing to foreground the middle options above, those that see epistemic concerns as at the heart of the interiorized drama of The Burrow. For what end is served by a coherent set of beliefs or even the whole of human knowledge? Above all, that of survival, of coming to terms with the world, of successfully managing it, of dominating nature if at all possible, rather than being forever at its mercy. And that is more or less the Burrower’s deepest need. But it is a need, we learn, that is ultimately unassuageable, since coherent beliefs and real knowledge are only chimeras at which we grasp in vain.

2 Kafka, F., The Burrow, p. 61.

3

Before developing in detail the epistemic concerns at the heart of the narrative on my reading of it, I want to relate The Burrow to two other literary works that it calls to mind. The first of these is Dostoyevsky’s novella Notes from Underground. There is evidence from Kafka’s private library and other sources that Kafka was well-acquainted with Dostoyevsky’s works. In a 1913 letter to his fiancée he wrote that “four men, Grillparzer, Dostoyevsky, Kleist, and Flaubert” were the four authors he considered “to be his true blood-relations”.[3] So though I have not been able to confirm whether Notes from Underground (1864) is explicitly mentioned anywhere in Kafka’s extant writings, it seems highly probable he was familiar with that work.

In any event, there are marked similarities between Kafka’s Burrower and Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man. Most obviously, both are subterranean, the Burrower literally and the Underground Man metaphorically. Second, the two protagonists share a pervasive anxiety about their situations. Third, they are both ceaseless excavators, the Burrower of his never-ending burrow, which inherently resists completion, and the Underground Man of his hyperactive mind, which finds no resting place in its endless search for some sort of volitional or motivational bedrock. Fourth, they are both inveterate second-guessers, never sure they have made the right move or chosen the right action, never secure in the defenses they have erected against what threatens them from without. Finally, relating The Burrow to Notes from Underground is not a mere literary conceit, as The Burrow might very well also have been titled Notes from Underground, since that is precisely what it is.

Here is one clear parallel in The Burrow to Dostoyevsky’s novella, concerned with the mysterious sound that so occupies the mental life of the Burrower, and which we will dwell on at length later on. The Burrower at one point resolves to construct a trench aimed directly at the apparent source of the sound, in order to get at the truth about its nature, for better or worse. But at the very same time the Burrower admits he has no faith in that endeavor, and cannot bring himself to begin. Nothing is more characteristic of Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, perhaps, than the inability to settle on a course of action and stick to it, due to over-thinking that saps the force of any resolution provisionally adopted. The Underground Man’s incessant undermining of his agency by questioning the rightness of his motivations, burrowing beneath any and all tentative decisions to act, issues finally in wholly impulsive action, “against the laws of reason”, “against one’s own advantage”, and “in spite of everything”.[4] The paranoid reflections and opposing suppositions of Burrower may be compared to the obsessive ruminations and ceaseless self-questioning of Underground Man in his attempt to act truly freely, and not as a machine or organ stop or piano key. Both are clearly hamstrung by their obsessive thought processes, paralyzed into inaction by their overactive, restless minds, for which every conclusion, every decision, every resolve with an appearance of stability is soon swept aside and discarded, having been countered by alternatives just as plausible.

Here are some other examples of the Burrower’s inability, reminiscent of that of Underground Man, to persist in or fully embrace any position or assessment once arrived at. Reflecting on the inadequacy of an early labyrinth constructed near the burrow’s entrance, “a little maze of passages” intended to confuse would-be intruders, the Burrower now dismisses that effort as a frivolous “tour de force”, incapable of averting a serious attack, and engages in back-and-forth, inconclusive reasoning on the advisability of attempting to reconstruct and strengthen his youthful creation. In a similar vein are his obsessive, fruitless ruminations regarding the pros and cons of being out of the burrow; on the one hand, this gives access to better food and fresher air; on the other hand, it involves greater danger and requires the effort of hunting. Lastly, the Burrower regularly assumes an external perspective on his dwelling by exiting it and contemplating it from without, both in order to the reassure himself of the security it affords and to relish from the outside the sanctuary it represents. But once more inside the burrow that reassurance and relish fades, and he is assailed by doubts that surge up anew and cannot be suppressed.

3 Kafka, F., Letters to Felice, transl. by J. Stern, Schocken Books, New York 1973, p. 201.

4 Dostoyevsky, F. M., Notes from Underground, in: The Best Short Stories of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, transl. by D. Magarshack, Random House, New York 2001, pp. 113, 116, 121.

4

There is a resonance worth noting between Kafka’s The Burrow and Oliver Wendell Holmes’s poem The Chambered Nautilus (1858), though it is highly unlikely Kafka was alluding to or even aware of Holmes’s poem. The chambered nautilus is an unusual mollusk, found mainly in the South Pacific Ocean. As it grows in size it inhabits different segments of its nacreous shell, continuously constructing new and larger chambers, into which it moves its internal organs as it matures. The smaller chambers, once uninhabited, are used by the nautilus to descend or ascend at will through control of the density and volume of the liquid within them. Now for the resonance I wish to put in evidence. The Nautilus, like the Burrower, is engaged in extending and elaborating his home, his bulwark and defense against the world, but with many differences between them.

Firstly, and most obviously, the Nautilus builds his home, his expanding, many-chambered shell, out of his very own substance, while the Burrower builds his out of the surrounding earth extrinsic to himself. Secondly, the Nautilus’s successive expansions are magnifications of his dwelling, and necessary to his biological growth, while the Burrower’s continuing additions to his realm are only more of the same, and afford him no real reassurance of being safe from threat or invasion. Thirdly, the ethos of Kafka’s story and that of Holmes’s poem are almost diametrically opposed, the one evincing an untamable existential dread and claustrophobic atmosphere, the other a noble and uplifting optimism. Plus their literary styles could hardly be more contrasting, Kafka’s pithy and matter-of-fact, Holmes’s flowery and impossibly high-minded.[5] And yet it is interesting to juxtapose the two works.

5 This excerpt from Holmes’s poem gives an idea of its grandiloquent style: “Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, as the swift seasons roll! Leave thy low-vaulted past! Let each new temple, nobler than the last, shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast.” Holmes, O., The Chambered Nautilus, in: English Poetry, III, From Tennyson to Whitman, XLII, ed. by Ch. W. Eliot, P. F. Collier & Son, New York 1910.

5

A last work I will put into relation with The Burrow is one of Kafka’s, namely the story entitled The Great Wall of China, composed shortly before The Burrow (in 1917). Its central idea, the incompletability of the Wall and the piecemeal nature of its construction, is most likely intended as an image of the incompletability of the enterprise of human knowledge, the piecemeal nature of whose pursuit is undeniable, and emblematized in the proliferation of scientific disciplines, a something-ology for every conceivable aspect of the world, with little hope of a unifying theory encompassing them all and intelligibly relating them to one another.

The themes of a task that is in principle unending and in which progress becomes difficult to measure, of the increasing estrangement between the center and the periphery of a domain, of the impossibility of certainty about one’s world and its inhabitants, and of the unattainability of an objective god-like viewpoint on one’s situation, are also front and center in Kafka’s elegant Asiatic parable. The overlap in explicit concerns between The Burrow and The Great Wall of China lends support to an interpretation of the former in which epistemological and ontological themes are taken as central.

6

And now for what I see as the heart of The Burrow. As mentioned already, the Burrower’s overriding practical concern in the story is a new, or at least newly noted, whistling sound in the burrow, one about which the Burrower strives unceasingly to attain knowledge. And the basic dilemma that the Burrower confronts, in terms familiar from philosophy of science, is that of observationally equivalent hypotheses about his situation that no evidence, no perception, no closer attention to what is perceptually given can resolve. What follows is a broader sketch of the epistemic quandary in which the Burrower finds himself and the existential distress that that occasions, in which clear cases of this basic dilemma may be noted.

The idea of a potential invader of the burrow, or Enemy, which the whistling sound raises the possibility of, is invoked by the Burrower almost from the start, though the Burrower claims to be able to live in peace despite that troubling idea when in the innermost chambers of his home. This is partly due to an assumed epistemic equivalence between Burrower and Enemy, to the effect that Enemy’s knowledge of Burrower and Borrower’s knowledge of Enemy are on a par, perhaps in both cases amounting to nothing. Still, as the Burrower reflects, there is no limit to what he doesn’t know about the Enemy he is driven to posit, the thought of which progressively overtakes his mind and brings him to the brink of despair. It bears underlining that the Burrower’s only way to gather information about potential threats to the Burrow is through the senses of hearing and smelling, since vision is of little use in such a dwelling, and if one assumes the Burrower is something like a mole, his sense of vision is probably relatively undeveloped.

However, prior to becoming wholly preoccupied by an Enemy or Enemies operating on more or less his own plane and responsible for the sound, the Burrower alludes in an offhand manner to enemies that might possibly threaten the burrow from below, enemies of an almost unimaginable sort, deeply subterranean (or “internal”) as opposed to superficially subterranean (or “external”) enemies. Though he can form no conception of such “internal” enemies, the Burrower is certain that if they exist they would have complete dominion over him and his dwelling, the burrow being in effect an illegitimate structure erected in their territory without permission. This fantastic hypothesis, one neither suggested nor supported by anything in the Burrower’s experience, has a chilling effect on the Burrower entirely out of proportion to its plausibility. But fortunately it makes no further appearance in the Burrower’s thoughts and conjectures, which are henceforth relatively more down to earth.

The Burrower’s first less-than-fantastic hypothesis about the source of the whistling sound, call this Hypothesis 1, is that animals of a kind the Burrower labels „small fry” have burrowed a new channel somewhere, intersecting existing ones and making a new connection to the surface, where these “small fry” seem to be something on the order of mice or shrews. This hypothesis has a bad side, since it promises the continuation of the sound, but also a good side, since it means increased ventilation in the burrow. This is quickly followed by an observation that adds to the Burrower’s difficulty in figuring out what is going on: the sound seems to shift both its perceived quality, as between a whistling and a piping, and its apparent location, while remaining equally loud everywhere in the burrow. The Burrower prides himself on his fine ear, allowing him to distinguish all the nuances of the sound and so form a clear image of it, and also on his powers of inference, capable of deducing the cause of the sound from its perceivable character. But again and again this goal proves elusive, once other hypotheses consistent with the perceptual data come to mind and impose themselves.

Which brings us to Hypothesis 2, that there are two new sounds, at some distance from Burrower, whose combined effect is roughly the same as he moves around the burrow so long as he doesn’t get significantly closer to one rather than the other. But this hypothesis would be more likely if Burrower could discern a difference in tone between these putative two sounds, which unfortunately he cannot. All he can affirm at this point is that the sound or sounds have made it impossible for him to enjoy the “murmurous silence” of the Castle Keep, his principal glory and refuge. Then a third possibility presents itself, Hypothesis 3, that the sound or sounds is that of the small fry tunneling away, and not that of newly created channels of air. But if so, then why has he never heard such a sound or sounds before? Hypothesis 4 arises in response to that question, which is that, contrary to the usual course of nature, perhaps his hearing has become more acute with age. Then a thought of a different sort occurs to him, Hypothesis 5: Perhaps some animals intermediate in size between the “small fry” and the Burrower are the source of the sound or sounds. Then a contrasting supposition is entertained, Hypothesis 6: Perhaps the source are animals even smaller than “small fry” but capable of making louder sounds.

Before recounting the further hypotheses, the Burrower’s restless mind generates, consider how many and various are the dimensions of the Burrower’s uncertainty: Does the sound signify a threat or not? If a threat, is it an animate or an inanimate one? If animate, does it emanate from familiar or unfamiliar enemies? Whether of familiar or unfamiliar sorts, how many are there? Where is this enemy or these enemies located? What is the size of this enemy or enemies? What powers does this enemy or enemies possess? Are the threatened intrusions into the burrow of a purposeful or an accidental nature? If purposeful, what are the intentions of the intruder or intruders? There is no end of possibilities to entertain, most of them unsettling, and so no way to stem the tide of rising angst.

At some point Burrower has the impression that the sound has grown louder. This leads to a new round of hypotheses, such as Hypothesis 7: the source is animate, and is coming closer. But equally likely is Hypothesis 8: the animate source is no closer, but is producing a louder sound. This is perhaps the clearest instance of the problem of observationally equivalent hypotheses for our bedeviled Burrower. If the annoying sound grows louder, as it sometimes seems to do, is this because (1) the Enemy remains at the same distance from the Burrower, but is making a louder sound? Or because (2) the Enemy is making the same sound but reducing his distance from the Burrower? It is impossible to tell, and maddeningly so.

The Burrower, becoming increasingly distraught, now entertains the thought that in order to assure his safety he should reconstruct the burrow from scratch, but quickly sizes that up as hopeless, and proposes to just accept what fate has in store. The Burrower next revisits the opposition between the supposition of a single large animal and the supposition of a band of numerous small animals. But how can one decide between these hypotheses, on which one’s life may depend? And now a further conjecture, Hypothesis 9, is offered in passing: Perhaps the troubling noise is neither a whistling nor a piping nor a tunneling, but instead a gurgling, from some burst water pipe.

Towards the end of his inconclusive reflections the Burrower finds himself increasingly favoring the hypothesis of a single, large, advancing beast, one with possibly malevolent intent, the most unsettling of the possibilities his epistemic situation allows him, one he comes to regard as almost inevitable: “Had I hoped, as the owner of the burrow, to be in a stronger position than any enemy who might appear? Simply by virtue of being owner of this great vulnerable edifice I realize I am defenseless against any serious attack.”[6] At the end of his rope, so to speak, the Burrower finally reaches the stage of seeming no longer to wish to have certainty about the annoying noise or its source. He then decides, though always provisionally, to just freely enjoy his store of food as long as possible. And on the supposition of a single, powerful, steadily approaching creature – the long-feared Enemy – as the source of the sound, the Burrower entertains various possibilities about its motives, and envisages what might happen if and when it finally breaks into the burrow and encounters the Burrower: peaceful sharing; cautious negotiation; uneasy standoff; or mortal struggle. Not wanting to lull himself with false assurances, the Burrower regards the last of these upshots as the most likely. Yet maybe a confrontation with this supposed Enemy is not inevitable? Maybe the creature is simply constructing its own burrow in the same neighborhood? Maybe it knows nothing of the Burrower and his burrow, has not detected him at all? Unanswerable, all these questions… And here Kafka’s narrative breaks off.

6 Kafka, F., The Burrow, p. 77.

7

Let me now ask, as I near the end of my own reflections, perhaps no less inconclusive than those of Kafka’s protagonist, whether the epistemic quandary of the Burrower and its implied lesson about the limits of human knowledge is just that, or does it have a further significance? It is tempting to think so. What I am inclined to suggest in that vein is that the Burrower’s manifest epistemic quandary is at the same time also a trope for the more fundamental human condition of unavoidable uncertainty about what attitude to adopt to the world, about what one should commit oneself to, about how one should act or conduct oneself – uncertainty, in short, about how to live. The degree of anxiety manifested by the Burrower – notre semblable, in Baudelaire’s memorable phrase – seems commensurate with doubts and concerns of this broader and more profound sort, not only those of the narrower and relatively superficial sort with which the narrative is explicitly concerned.

Finally, let us ask whether The Burrow would be a better story with a continuation, and in particular, one recounting a confrontation of the Burrower and some powerful Enemy, which as the story stands, is only one plausible continuation among others? There’s little reason think so. For one, the openness and indeterminacy of the Burrower’s situation where the text stops gives the narrative a certain quality – a quality which strengthens the theme of epistemic uncertainty and its broader variant, the impossibility of definitively resolving the problem of life, of how to live and for what. For another, it is far from clear how continuing the story could have been accomplished technically within the basic framework of the narrative, which is that of a first-person interior monologue, since formulating and conveying intelligible thoughts and reflections is incompatible with engaging in a fight-to-the-death combat.

8

I have long been struck by Kafka’s memorable image of a successful work of literature as one that can serve as „an axe for the frozen sea within us”. But not until recently had I come across the full passage in which that image occurs, in a letter written to a friend, with which I would like to conclude. Here it is.

If the book we are reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy even if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be an axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief.[7]

I’m not sure I’ve managed to convey as much in my somewhat flat-footed approach to The Burrow, but that singular narrative, as much as The Trial, The Castle, The Judgment, and The Metamorphosis, undoubtedly possesses that shattering power.

7 Kafka, F., Letters to Friends, Family and Editors, transl. by R. and C. Winston, Schocken Books, New York 1990, p. 16.

Appendix: Additional observations

The burrow has a false entrance as well as a true entrance. The former is easily visible and designed to mislead potential invaders, being merely a hole that soon ends in a cul-de-sac, while the latter is well disguised, entirely covered with moss, and hard to spot from outside. The Burrower notes that a more solid or more substantial door to his burrow was not possible, since it had also to serve as a quick means of exit if necessary.

The burrow contains many small, round cells, good for curling up and napping in. The Burrower congratulates himself on having a comfortable, extensive, well-hidden home, while others are at the mercy of the elements and the good will of their fellows.

The Burrower experiences unavoidable angst, each time he is faced with ending an above-ground vigil, about unavoidably exposing himself to attack once his back is turned to reenter the burrow, leading him invariably to postpone those returns.

The Burrower expresses fear of the possible existence of one of his own kind, a fellow burrower, who would like nothing more than to co-opt the burrow for his own without having labored to construct it. He also entertains the idea of a reliable confederate who could watch over the entrance for him, but realizes this is unworkable, a chimera, and soon put aside.

References

Dostoyevsky, F. M., Notes from Underground, in: The Best Short Stories of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, transl. by D. Magarshack, Random House, New York 2001.

Holmes, O., The Chambered Nautilus, in: English Poetry, III, From Tennyson to Whitman, XLII , ed. by Ch. W. Eliot, P. F. Collier & Son, New York 1910.

Kafka, F., Letters to Felice, transl. by J. Stern, Schocken Books, New York 1973.

Kafka, F., Letters to Friends, Family and Editors, transl. by R. and C. Winston, Schocken Books, New York 1990.

Kafka, F., The Great Wall of China. Stories and Reflections, transl. by W. and E. Muir, Schocken Books, New York 1970.

KAFKA’S EXCLUSION OF THE LAW OF THE EXCLUDED MIDDLE
Prolegomenon to any Kafka Interpretation

Göran Rossholm

In the first chapter of J. M. Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello. Six Lessons the writer Elizabeth Costello receives a literary award. Her obligatory acceptance speech is announced as being about realism, but surprisingly it commences with an analysis of a short story by Franz Kafka, A Report to an Academy (Ein Bericht für eine Akademie), representing a lecture given by the speaking ape Red Peter. Costello stresses the unanswered and unanswerable questions about the identity of the protagonist that the story gives rise to:

We don’t know. We don’t know and will never know, with certainty, what is really going on in this story: whether it is about a man speaking to men or an ape speaking to apes or an ape speaking to men or a man speaking to apes (though the last is, I think, unlikely) or even just a parrot speaking to parrots.[8]

In Costello’s reading, we are not sure whether the protagonist is an ape, a human or something in between, and whether the members of the academy addressed are humans or apes. And worse still, we will never know, nor can we ever construe a method for finding out which alternative is the right one. The very idea that the protagonist is either an ape or not seems to lack sufficient support. Using logical jargon, we may say: the law of the excluded middle does not apply in this case. Costello does not use this terminology, but this is the essence of her argument – and I agree. Her lecture on realism ends in radical scepticism, with particular stress on identity issues.

In what follows, I will give similar examples from several of Kafka’s narratives, but I will not interpret them as amounting to a declaration that Kafka is a radical sceptic. Costello (and Coetzee) are writers with a licence to take the bold step from text to truth and reality with less hesitation than a literary scholar. I have a more cautious attitude towards questions about realism and reality, preferring a more roundabout way, via logic and the theory of fiction, to characterize Kafka’s way of making literature.

Kafka’s prose is characterized by polarities similar to the ape-human dichotomy in A Report to an Academy. In the Kafka scholarly literature his works are described as filled with conflicts, contrasts, paradoxes, contradictions, contraries and ambiguities. In this paper they are studied under two headings: violations of the law (or principle) of the excluded middle and instances of incompleteness. The alternatives are not so apt, being too weak or too strong. On the one hand, almost any writer uses contrasts and ambiguities frequently, and conflict is often regarded as the essence of literary narrative; on the other hand, far from all observations in the following text can be regarded as contradictions or contraries or paradoxes. Several works will be used to provide illustrations. In addition to A Report to an Academy, I will present examples from the novels The Trial (Der Prozess) and The Castle (Das Schloss), and the short stories The Judgement (Das Urteil), The Burrow (Der Bau), In Our Synagogue (In unserer Synagoge), A Crossbreed (Eine Kreuzung), The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung), Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk (Josefine, die Sängerin oder das Volk der Mäuse), and The Village Schoolmaster (Der Dorfschullehrer), Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor (Blumfeld, ein älterer Junggeselle) and Before the Law (Vor dem Gesetz) in the novel The Castle. The feature in focus in this essay is certainly not confined to these twelve texts, but I do not claim that it is a characteristic of everything Kafka wrote.[9]

The first term, “violation of the law of the excluded middle”, is borrowed from logic, referring to one of Aristotle’s logical laws; the second term, “incompleteness”, sometimes used in the theory of fiction, refers to a presumed state of affairs in fictional worlds. The interest in this latter issue has two philosophical backgrounds: Roman Ingarden’s phenomenology and, more recently, the incorporation of possible-worlds semantics into the theory of fiction.[10] As I will argue, in the present context, violation of the law of the excluded middle and incompleteness are only different aspects of the same phenomenon. For reasons of convenience, I will also use a third term, “indeterminate” (and “indeterminacy”), as synonymous with the two already mentioned, but neutral between the two aspects of classical logic and of possible-worlds theory.[11]

8 Coetzee, J. M., Elisabeth Costello. Six Lessons, Vintage Books, London 2004, p. 19.

9 The English citations are from the translations by Tania and James Stern (Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor and A Report to an Academy), Willa and Edwin Muir (all the other short texts and The Trial) and Anthea Bell (The Castle).

10 See Lewis, D., Truth in Fiction, in: Philosophical Papers, I, Oxford University Press, Oxford – New York 1983, pp. 261–275; Ryan, M.-L., Possible Worlds. Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory, Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1991; Ronen, R., Possible Worlds in Literary Theory, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1994; Doležel, L., Heterocosmica. Fiction and Possible Worlds, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore – London 1998.

11 One more philosophical context announces itself: Søren Kierkegaard’s existentialism. Most of the present essay may be summarized as being about how Kierkegaard’s “either–or” is transformed into “neither–nor” by the Kierkegaard reader Franz Kafka.

1. The law of the excluded middle

The law of the excluded middle, stating that any proposition is either true or false, is generally recognized as the third and final of the basic laws of classical logic. The earliest known discussion of the law is found in Aristotle’s On Interpretation, Chapter 9. However, this text is not only the first known formulation of the law of the excluded middle as a valid foundational principle of logic; it also presents the first articulated questioning of its universal validity. Aristotle’s problematic example is a statement about a future event:

A sea-fight must either take place tomorrow or not, but it is not necessary that it should take place tomorrow, neither is it necessary that it should not take place, yet it is necessary that it either should or should not take place tomorrow.[12]

A little later he rephrases the case in terms of potentiality and actuality:

It is therefore plain that it is not necessary that of an affirmation and a denial, one should be true and the other false. For in the case of what exists potentially, but not actually, the rule which applies to that which exists actually does not hold good.[13]

Aristotle’s comments cannot be called a repudiation of the third law of logic. More radical questionings appeared during the first three decades of the twentieth century, that is, during Kafka’s adult life. In 1920 the validity of the principle of the excluded middle was rejected by the logician Jan Łukasiewicz. With a reference to the passage in Aristotle’s On Interpretation quoted above, he created a non-classical, many-valued logic, a system admitting an “excluded middle”. More than a decade before that, L. E. Brouwer denied the principle of unlimited application in mathematics in his dissertation Over de Grondslagen der Wiskunde (On the Foundations of Mathematics), and, somewhat later, his pupil Arend Heyting did the same with regard to logic. Logical positivism (or “logical empiricism”), emerging in the same period, is normally not associated with any general repudiation of the principle of the excluded middle. However, the verificationism of logical positivism – the idea that a meaningful statement is always an empirically provable or disprovable statement – may inspire examples in conflict with the principle. It might be argued that several categories of statements may express unprovable propositions – in addition to Aristotle’s statements about future events, counterfactual statements, statements about dispositions – and that these statements, being impossible to affirm or deny convincingly, constitute counterexamples to the law of the excluded middle. Later, the linguistic turn of philosophy has put more focus on the ambiguities and vagueness of language as it is actually used, and the latter term, vagueness, has sometimes be conceived of as a threat to the law of the excluded middle; in certain cases we can neither affirm nor deny that the person we meet is bald, and this lack of certainty cannot be cured by more information.

The reason for this brief exposé is twofold: firstly, to remind us of the fact that a repudiation of the law of the excluded middle cannot be considered a clear sign of irrationalism, as it can often be taken as an increased critical intellectual attitude; and, secondly, to point to the fact that Central Europe was the main scene for these ideas during the first decades of the twentieth century. Kafka’s closeness to these movements in time and space is illustrated by the fact that his chemistry teacher was a pupil of Ernst Mach, one of the founding fathers of logical positivism.[14]

12 Aristotle, On Interpretation, transl. by E. M. Edghill, in: The Works of Aristotle, I, Encyclopaedia Britannica , Chicago – London – Toronto 1952, 19a.

13 Ibid., 19a–b.

14 See Stach, R., Kafka. The Years of Insight, transl. by S. Frisch, Princeton University Press, Princeton – Oxford 2013, p. 257.

2. Incomplete fictional worlds

The third law of classical logic and the idea of world completeness are closely tied together. If every imaginable meaningful statement is either true or false, then our world is complete; if there are meaningful statements that are neither true nor false, our world is incomplete. The same can be said about fictional worlds. This means that the law of the excluded middle and world completeness are exchangeable locutions.

The first explicit expression of the idea that fictional narratives portray incomplete worlds was, as far as I know, made by Roman Ingarden. He says that if a table is mentioned in a fictional narrative without any information about the material of the table, then it is not made of any particular material.[15] If the same text is factual, the reader is not informed about the material, but it goes without saying that the table is made of some unmentioned material. Thus the truth of a sentence applying the principle of the excluded middle, for instance “The table is made of oak or it is not made of oak”, is not questioned. The real world referred to by the factual narrative is not incomplete in the sense of containing a table made of no material.

Petr Koťátko argues that this idea about fictionality in general is wrong.[16] He gives us a question about a character in Balzac’s novel Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes: Was Mme d’Espard’s gall bladder (at a certain time) in good condition? Since nothing is stated or presupposed about the condition of her gall bladder, it follows from Ingarden’s idea that this organ was in no condition at all. Koťátko comments: “A novel whose world would be inhabited by such bizarre creatures ought to aspire to some genre rather different from ‘scenes from Parisian life’.”[17] I agree; the very idea that Balzac’s fictional worlds are inhabited by incomplete persons is absurd. Our knowledge about them is incomplete, but they are not incomplete themselves. Incompleteness is epistemic, not ontological; in Koťátko’s words: “It is [then] right to say that our construction of the character is incomplete – but the incomplete construction of a character is something very different from the construction of an incomplete character.”[18]

Koťátko points to a circumstance in connection with Balzac’s fictive world, a circumstance which has bearing on the present essay. He says that even if we – that is, the readers – get any information about the condition of Mme d’Espard’s gall bladder, we have so to speak counterfactual access to relevant facts in the case. If a skilled medical doctor, with a modern medical education and with modern medical equipment, were to examine Mme d’Espard’s gall bladder, he or she would be able to tell whether it was healthy or not.[19] Balzac’s world is like our own world in that respect.[20]

The same can be said in terms of indeterminacy. A description of Mme d’Espard may leave out any specification of the condition and the existence of her gall bladder, but this does not mean that her inner organs are themselves undetermined in the strong sense: they are not in principle undetermined; we, and maybe everyone else, just don’t know.[21]

15 Ingarden, R., Das literarische Kunstwerk, Max Niemeier Verlag, Tübingen 1960, pp. 264 f.

16 Koťátko, P., Who is Who in the Fictional World, in: Koťátko, P., Pokorný, M., Sabatés, M. (eds.), Fictionality – Possibility – Reality, aleph, Bratislava 2010.

17 Ibid., p. 97.

18 Ibid., p. 99.

19 Ibid., pp. 97 ff.

20 There is no general agreement among literary theorists about this question. According to Lubomír Doležel (Heterocosmica) fictional worlds are incomplete possible worlds, while Marie-Laure Ryan (Possible Worlds) argues contrariwise.

21 Most of this brief exposé of fictionality and (in)completeness is drawn from Rossholm, G., Contribution to Fictional Epistemology, Organon F 22, 2015, Supplementary issue, pp. 133–144.

3. The Trial and The Judgement

However, Koťátko admits that there are incomplete fictional worlds; he mentions the universe of Beckett’s trilogy (starting with Molloy) as an example.[22] The same can be said about Kafka’s fictional worlds.

According to most commentators, the protagonist Josef K. of Kafka’s novel The Trial (Der Prozess) is arrested at the beginning of the first chapter of the book. But how does this happen? Only one utterance made by a man – obviously, or should we say, seemingly an employee of the Court – provides the appearance of an arresting procedure; he says: “Sie sind ja verhaftet.” Nevertheless, such a formulation rather presupposes that K. is already under arrest; to perform the speech act of arrest, one should say “Sie sind verhaftet” and nothing more. Moreover, after this scene, that is, after having been arrested – if he is – Josef K. is free to go. Observations of this sort give support to an interpretation according to which it is neither true nor false that he is under arrest.[23]

If we try to apply a counterfactual reasoning in line with Koťátko’s suggestion with respect to Mme d’Espard’s gall bladder about the arrest – or non-arrest – in the first chapter of The Trial, we will fail. No counterfactual procedure, no thought experiment available (that is, imaginable) will decide the question about the arrest/non-arrest. And it might be argued that this amounts to saying that this incompleteness is ontological. So there is a fundamental difference between Kafka’s and Balzac’s worlds. There are many other examples of indeterminacy in The Trial, for instance the death of Josef K. A common reading of the killing of K. is that he is executed after having been found guilty by the Court, but Lubomír Doležel has pointed out several circumstances that indicate that we do not witness an execution but a slaughter with no explanation.[24]

These two examples may be elaborated to comprise all important juridical moments in the novel. Both examples illustrate what I have called indeterminacy, or incompleteness or the exclusion of the excluded middle. The following two applications of the logical law may seem truistic, but in the world of The Trial they are not even true: Josef K. is arrested or it is not the case that Josef K. is arrested. Josef K. is lawfully punished or it is not the case that Josef K. is lawfully punished.

In the short story The Judgement, written in 1912, two years before The Trial, the protagonist and narrator, Georg Bendemann, tells his father that he has written a letter to his friend in St Petersburg; he is informing his friend about his plans to get married. Now, Georg wants to have his father’s opinion about telling the friend about his marriage plans. The father answers that he has never heard of this friend. The son insists: the father has not only heard of him, he has met him. The father now suddenly admits that this is true. He also declares that his son has been very ruthless and cruel to tell the friend of his marriage plans, and adds that he, the father, would very much have preferred to have the friend as his son. The father expresses contradictory memories. This does not mean that the text is contradictory; however, such mentally embedded contradictions may give rise to breaches of the law of the excluded middle, both from the point of view of the reader and of the characters of the narrative. In this case, the question whether it is true or false that the father remembers the friend is left unanswered and unanswerable. The logic is of another kind: the father rejects his son again and again, and the rejections grow more and more cruel. In the end, the son drowns himself, seemingly as a consequence of a death verdict expressed by his father.

The father’s indeterminate memory of the friend may look like a minor detail in the story as a whole, but it is only one of many examples of a violation of the principle of the excluded middle. Russell A. Berman questions the certainty of most of what seems to be conveyed as (fictional) facts, even the death of the protagonist;[25] Walter H. Sokel does not question that Georg Bendemann dies but the presumed cause of his death: “the father’s surprising and puzzling assault upon his son only apparently triggers the latter’s self-liquidation. […] it is the self alone that carries out his punishment.”[26]

These passages, from The Trial and The Judgement, are also examples of Kafka’s black humour and of the often mentioned dream-likeness of his narratives. During a sleep dream we do not experience the world as complete. All of us probably have memories of dreams in which the law of the excluded middle is violated.[27]

22 Koťátko presents an elaborated version of this idea in his Beckett essay Narrator in Decay, in: Koblížek, T., Koťátko, P. (eds.), Chaos & Form, Litteraria Pragensia Books, Prague 2016, pp. 229–247.

23 Cf. Kafka, F., Die Romane. Amerika. Der Prozess, Das Schloss, S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1965, p. 4. The English translation made by Willa and Edwin Muir runs just “you are arrested”. To convey the same implications as the German original, an English translation has to be much more wordy and also circumscribed, as in expressions like “you are arrested, as you know/as is generally known/as follows from what is already said etc.”

24 Doležel, L., Heterocosmica, pp. 195–196.

25 Berman, R. A., Tradition and Betrayal in “Das Urteil”, in: Rolleston, J. (ed.), A Companion to the Works of Franz Kafka, Camden House, Rochester (N.Y.) 2003, pp. 85–100.

26 Sokel, W. H., Beyond Self-Assertion. A Life of Reading Kafka, in: Rolleston, J. (ed.), A Companion to the Works of Franz Kafka, p. 44.

27 I thank Marie-Laure Ryan for pointing out to me that sleep dreams are plausible candidates of incompleteness, and, consequently, as potential violations of the law of the excluded middle and of any logical law, for that matter.

4. Kafka’s Zoo

But not all violations of the law of the excluded middle in Kafka’s works have this character of a sleep dream. In the story The Burrow from the end of 1923, all examples have to do with the safety of the narrator, an unspecified animal. Here are four of them: 1) This animal has dug out a vast and complex subterranean system with one entrance. On the one hand, this entrance is necessary if the animal has to escape from subterranean attacks; on the other hand, the entrance is also a great danger, since it can let enemies in from above. 2) To protect itself from the intrusion of enemies through the entry, the animal spends a lot of its time hidden outside, watching the entrance from outside. It goes without saying that this strategy is very risky. 3) The animal keeps its killed prey in an open area. The animal calls it “the courtyard”. The animal weighs this arrangement against the alternative of many smaller extensions, but finds the pros and cons to be of equal weight. To build several courtyards is no option – the animal does not have the energy to do so. 4) The oldest part of the system is the part closest to the entrance. The animal constructed it as a labyrinth; hence, the walls between the passages are very thin here. On the one hand, the labyrinth has the advantage of making the presumed enemies’ attack more time-consuming, but on the other hand, the thin walls make this part of the burrow easy to destroy.

These four examples are all taken from the first six pages of the story, which, in my edition, comprises thirty pages. And the narration goes on like this. All these alternatives are evaluated with respect to the animal’s safety, and all the pairs of alternatives seem to be equally bad or good. They may all be given the form: Option A would, if realized, increase the safety of the animal, or option A would not increase the safety of the animal.

No counterfactual expertise, like the hypothetical doctor in Balzac’s world, would settle the case, but, contrary to The Judgement, there is nothing dreamy about these safety problems. At the end of the short story, one more instance of indeterminacy appears. The animal hears threatening whistling sounds, emanating from something he tries in vain to locate. Again he presents a number of unverifiable hypotheses about whether the intrusion is made by a number of small animals or by one big animal, whether the intruder can hear him moving around in his burrow or not, whether the source of the sound is an intruder or not, and so on. The superordinate unanswerable questions about the sound are never given by the animal himself, but by the reader: Does the sound originate in the surroundings or does it not originate in the surrounding? Are the sounds hallucinated or are they not?

Talking, and more generally anthropomorphic, animals are standard literary motifs; they give the impression of constituting parallel species to ordinary dogs, cats, rabbits and the like. However, there is another feature of the protagonist and narrator of The Burrow worth mentioning: his (or “its”) indeterminate species. There are more creatures of this kind in Kafka’s short pieces. One example is the animal in the text In Our Synagogue. It dominates the narrative completely, but we are never told what species it is. All that is said is that it as big as a marten. This creature is seemingly an animal outside the system of species.[28] We also have instances of zoological specifications that are dubious because the animal is a hybrid. In the short text A Crossbreed the narrator has “a curious animal, half kitten, half lamb”.[29] The most famous Kafka example is Gregor Samsa, the man who becomes an insect. The title of the story The Metamorphosis is ambiguous: it can refer to the transformation which has already happened before the first sentence of the text – Gregor Samsa has become a big insect – but also to the change he undergoes during the story. First he seems to be a human imprisoned in the body of a giant insect. As the narrative progresses, he becomes step by step less human, and in the end, after his (or “its”) death, he is looked back upon, by his own family, as a piece of trash they have got rid of. The violation, or at least questioning, of the law of the excluded middle may be phrased like this: It is not the case (or it is not obviously the case) that Gregor Samsa is a human being or that Gregor Samsa is not a human being; neither is it the (obvious) case that he is an insect or not an insect. The successive metamorphoses running through the whole course of events yield an array of similar cases of incompleteness: It is (not obviously) the case that Gregor Samsa has now become an insect or that he has not (yet) become an insect.

Tzvetan Todorov has compared Kafka’s narrative to specimen of the genre “the fantastic”, a genre characterized by making the reader “hesitate” between two conflicting interpretative strategies: the events told are natural, or the events are supernatural.[30] Usually this hesitation and this conflict develops gradually during reading. In The Metamorphosis the supernatural shock comes in the first sentence, and in the following course of events the reader, influenced by the reactions of Gregor himself and the characters around him, becomes successively more and more accustomed to the fact that the human being Gregor Samsa has taken the shape of (or even become) an insect.[31] Still, I believe that no reader lets go of the initial wonder that a human being can be changed into an insect. We are never quite convinced that the metamorphosis is explainable, or that it is not. Gregor’s own reflections increase this indeterminate attitude: he wonders whether the same metamorphosis may occur to the chief clerk: “one really could not deny that it was possible”.[32] This challenge – concerning explainability – of the principle of the excluded middle is one of the most frequent ones in Kafka’s works; it applies to The Judgement (Is it a dream or not? A real course of events or not?) and to the experience of the threatening sounds at the end of The Burrow.

Kafka’s last finished work, the short story Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk, begins:

Our singer is called Josephine. Anyone who has not heard her does not know the power of song. There is no one but is carried away by her singing, a tribute all the greater as we are not in general a music-loving race.[33]

This praise is seemingly contradicted by the following remarks:

Among intimates we admit freely to one another that Josephine’s singing, as singing, is nothing out of the ordinary.[34]

So is it singing at all? Is it not perhaps just a piping? And piping is something we all know about, it is the real artistic accomplishment of our people, or rather no mere accomplishment but a characteristic expression of our life.[35]

When Josephine’s claim to receive recognition of her art by being freed from work is denied by her fellow mice, she answers (according to some rumour) by cutting short her grace notes. However, the narrator “has observed no difference in her performance”.[36] Thus we have seemingly two pairs of embedded contradictions, one about the aesthetic quality of Josephine’s singing and one about the presence of “grace notes” in her performances. Both leave unanswered the question whether Josephine just peeps, like all mice, or not, the other whether there is any change with respect to “grace notes” in here singing or not.[37]

In the short story The Village Schoolmaster (Der Dorfschullehrer) we also meet an animal motif. A gigantic mole, hyperbolically estimated as two metres long,38 that is, the size of an adult human being, has been found in a small, remote village. The local schoolmaster makes it the mission of his life to spread the sensational news by writing a book about the discovery. As in the The Metamorphosis, the line between species is transgressed or at least made vague by making us apprehend the animal as anthropomorphized but not familiarized; on the contrary, we may experience it as uncanny. However, the central theme of the story is another one. The narrator, a town merchant, writes another book in defence of the schoolmaster’s publication, which has been exposed to scorn by the world of science. But instead of being grateful to the narrator, the schoolmaster sees him rather as his enemy. (A reservation: the two latter sentences are true according to the unreliable narrator; no objectively correct résumé can be made without prefacing every single statement with phrases like “According to …”.) The careful reader cannot possibly take a stand in this conflict between the two men and their respective writings on the question of the giant mole. This short (and unfinished) story is indeterminate with respect to many details relating to this conflict – too many to be addressed here – details that give rise to two unsettled questions about the value of the two books: Is the narrator’s publication about the mole and the schoolmaster true and justified, or is it not? Is the schoolmaster’s publication true and justified, or is it not? These questions are not only left without answers in Kafka’s text, they seem to be unanswerable, even for the two protagonists, and no hint of how to get an answer in principle is suggested.

28 There is a more extreme example of lack of specificity in Kafka’s oeuvre, the thing or being named Odradek in the short story The Cares of a Family Man (Die Sorge des Hausvaters); however, Odradek is too unspecific to be placed in a zoological garden.

29 Kafka, F., Die Erzählungen und andere ausgewählte Prosa , ed. by R. Hermes, Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2014, p. 456.

30 Todorov, T., Introduction à la literature fantastique , Editions de Seuil, Paris 1970.

31 Ibid., chap. 10.

32 Kafka, F., The Complete Short Stories, transl. by W. and E. Muir, T. and J. Stern, E. Kaiser and E. Wilkins, Vintage Random House, London 2005, p. 101.

33 Ibid., p. 386.

34 Ibid., p. 387.

35 Ibid.

36 Ibid., p. 401.

37 In Willa and Edwin Muir’s translation Josephine’s singing is referred to as “piping”. However, as it does not differ from the sound produced by other mice, I prefer to use “peep” and “peeping”. Kafka uses “pfeifen” which means to whistle in German today. However, in the nineteenth century you could write die Mäuse pfeifen meaning the mice peep. I thank Michael Knight and Hannah Hinz for linguistic consultations.

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