simultaneity of media kafkas literary screen

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Simultaneity of Media: Kafka's Literary Screen

Author(s): Bianca TheisenSource: MLN, Vol. 121, No. 3, German Issue (Apr., 2006), pp. 543-550Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3840755 .

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Simultaneity of Media:Kafka's Literary ScreenBianca Theisen

A train appears at the horizon; we see the locomotive, expanding inour field of vision, suddenly emerging in front of us in a split-secondand coming to a stop at the station; a conductor hurries to open thecoach doors, passengers get off the train, rearrange their clothingand carry their luggage: their movements seem spontaneous andunintentional. And thus, as Henri Clouzot concluded in the descrip-tion he gave in a newspaper review of L'Arrivee 'un train en garea LaCiotatby the brothers Lumi&re,the new medium of film presents uswith life itself in its many-faceted and unpredictable appearances.lWhile Clouzot highlights the life-like quality and the reality contextof film, the medium's first audiences often reacted with panic whenthe represented objects seemed to move out of the depth of the cin-ematic screen toward them, only then to disappear from their fieldof vision. Or their reaction was one of horror and dread, triggeredby the close-up presentation of what appeared to be severed limbsand fragmented bodies for an audience not yet able to perceptuallyintegrate disjointed images into a coherent scene.2 "At the dawn ofcinematography,"Jurij Lotman writes, "moving images on the screenaroused a physiological feeling of horror in the audience (shots ofan onrushing train) or physical nausea (shots taken from a great

'Quoted in Jerzy Toeplitz, Geschichte esFilms,vol. 1: 1895-1928 (Berlin: Henschel-verlag, 1984) 18. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from the original are theauthor's own.2Bela Balazs, Theoryof theFilm (New York:Arno Press, 1972) 35.MLN121 (2006): 543-550 ? 2006 by TheJohns Hopkins University Press

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height or with a swaying camera). The audience did not distinguish,emotionally, between the image and reality."3But those reactions tothe new medium of film, both Clouzot's feeling of the life-like, realqualityof the "livingphotographs" ("lebend[e] Fotografie")4aswell asthe perceptual dread in the face of an almost fantastic disjointedness,betray a consciousness of the peculiar crosscutting of reality and fic-tion in film. While the spectators who rushed to the end of the roomas the train was moving toward them were aware of the illusionalcharacter of the represented event, they reacted to it emotionally asif it were a real event."The audience freezes as the train passes by," Kafka commentson the reaction of audiences spellbound by the film of the brothersLumi&re.5His laconic statement stands out as the first entry in hisnotebook from 1910 and specifies the contemporary observations ofthe first audiences' panic or perplexity in view of an illusional real-ity: with its emphasis on freezing and paralysis, it implies that theimmobilized spectator, transfixed by the image of the train passingby, becomes one with the statuary position of the camera in the Lu-mieres' film and sees the train from its perspective. Kafka formulateshis insight into the effects of the cinematic medium from the angleof reception, almost as if it were itself a camera set up behind theaudience watching the train on the screen: the notebook entry offersan observation on spectators who observe the camera's observations.As if miming the new cinematic medium itself, Kafka's commentpresents itself as the image of an instant, which oscillates betweenstasis and motion, audience and screen, reality and fiction. What thenotebook entry suggests, then, is not only Kafka's astute awarenessof the audience's involvement through the filmic medium, but alsohis attempt to simulate cinematic observation and the observation ofcinema in writing.Kafka's fascination with the movies is indicated in his diaries be-tween 1910 and 1913 as well as in his letters. Max Brod, with whomhe shared this fascination, noted that Kafkadragged along his siblingsand friends to the movies and would afterwards talk about nothingelse for hours. The early films Kafkarefers to, often only implicitly, in

3Jurij Lotmann, Semioticsof Cinema (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Contributions,1981) 10.4Toeplitz 17."Die Zuschauer erstarren, wenn der Zug vorbeifahrt."Franz Kafka, Tagebiicher,ds.H.-G. Koch, M. Muller and M. Pasley (Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 1990) 9.

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his diaries and letters include for instance Le galant de la Gardefran-(aise (France: Path6 1908), The WhiteSlave (Denmark: August Blom1910; lost), Une intrigue ti la cour de Henri VII (France: Path6 1913),Der Andere (Germany: Max Mack 1913), La Broyeusede coeurs (France:Valetta/Path6 1913; lost), and Endlich allein, oder Isidors Hochzeitsreise(Germany: Max Mack 1913). Hanns Zischler has traced this filmicmaterial, making the startling discovery that the title of DerVerschollene,on which Kakfa worked between 1911 and 1912, resonates with thetitle of a lost film, Der Roman eines Verschollenen,which he traced on thelist of a distributor. And it was with reference to this novel that Kafkamentioned to Janouch: "Iwas not describing people. I was telling astory. They are images, only images"6Zischler suggests, however, thatthe allure of film for Kafka is reflected primarily in autobiographicalmaterial, in the wayhe transforms and displaces cinematic images ontothe imaginary screen of his personal relationships. Kafka'sreference,for instance, to the lost film La Broyeusede coeurs n a letter to FeliceBauer, Zischler argues, draws his fianc6 into a cinematic fiction onwhich Kafka models his 'real' life.7YetKafka'spronounced interest in film, it seems to me, also exceedsautobiographical self-stylization. He projects the filmic medium ontohis narrative prose, without however simply translating the cinematicimages of certain films into his narratives. The bewildering array ofdetails, figures, and perspectives, the perplexing unrelatedness ofone event to the next, the paradoxical shifts from an assertion to itsnegation and its effect of uncertainty, and the quandary of realismand the fantastic in Kafka'sprose indicate his understanding of cin-ematic language and its shock-effect on the audience, an effect Kafkaduplicated in his fiction. With a stress on this shock-effect, Kafka'snarrative style does not simply coincide with the tradition of realistprose, with which it has occasionally been associated and which, espe-cially with Dickens, has been declared a precursor to film narrative.Griffith himself described his techniques of parallel montage andof switching-off as indebted to Dickens,8 and in an essay on Griffith,Eisenstein also pointed out the adaptation of Dickens' narrative prose

6GustavJanouch, ConversationswithKafka,trans. Goronwy Rees (New York:Praeger,1953) 34.7Zischler, Hanns, Kafkageht ins Kino (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1996).8Quoted in Graham Petrie, "Dickens, Godard, and the Film Today,"TheYaleReview64 (1975): 187.

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by film language.9 The peculiar conjunction of cinematic and nar-rative language in Kafkaalso differs from the intersections betweenfilm and prose that Pinthus spelled out in his Kinobuch, rom whichKafka is significantly absent. While the "Kinostuck,"an early versionof the film-script, was clearly distinguished from theater for Pinthus,it had a certain semblance to the novel: in the film as in the novel,the spectator or reader was drawn into the movement of the actorsand could, independent of spatial limitations, observe action in a"limitless milieu."'? In his contribution to the Kinobuch,Max Brodexplored the medium's parallelization of separated worlds and itspotential for the representation of the supernatural, which Pinthushad also underscored.11Brod's script couples a student's fantasyworldinduced by reading with the real world of school and family in sucha way that details of reality may suddenly give way to the fantastic, yetboth remain clearly distinct realms, even when at the end the student'sreading translates into a real-world detective plot. Kafka'snarratives,however, supersede such a simple parallelization where reality-contentor fiction still reside in the shot or the scene. Kafka'snarratives cross-cut the real and the fantastic in such a way as to call attention to thereality of the cut, as it is framed by fiction. He exploits the technicalpotential of the cinematic medium as it was still being discoveredaround 1910 and mobilizes the shock-value of cinematic language forits first audiences to create a form of denotation analogous to filmin narratives that then induces a corresponding bewilderment in itsreaders and necessitates different modes of observation.Kafkaalready experiments with a constant shifting between realityand fiction through displaced denotation in his early writings before1910. Description fa Struggle,written in two versions probably between1904 and 1910, opens with the scene of a comfortable bourgeois set-ting of an evening party as if in the tradition of realist narrative. Thenarrator, sitting alone at a side table sipping wine and eating cakes,positions himself as an observer who sees how the other guests andthe lady of the house act. He does not participate himself in the ac-tion until a new acquaintance he has met that evening appears ina doorway, as if on a stage, and draws him into increasingly unreal

''Sergej Eisenstein, "Dickens, Griffith und wir,"GesammelteAufsdtze (Zurich: Arche,1916) 60-136."'KurtPinthus, "Das Kinostuck,"Das Kinobuch Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 1983) 21."Pinthus 27: "Das Sch6nste im Kino ist das Wunderbare." Max Brod, "Ein Tag ausdem Leben Kiihnebecks, des jungen Idealisten," Kinobuch71-75.

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experiencing it simultaneously as an observed reality and as a realityof observation.Kafka puzzles the reader of Descriptionof a Strugglewith a similarconundrum of a fiction that invalidates reality, but does so precisely

by positing its own reality:the uncertainty of reality that this and otherKafka narratives underscore is generated by a reality of uncertainty.In Description f a Struggle, he narrator, first introduced as a detachedobserver of an apparently given reality, is increasingly drawn into thebewildering reality of his own observations when, shifting back andforth between his initial position of power and then one of almost totalsubjection, he finds it impossible to take leave of his acquaintance. Hesuspects that his acquaintance intends to murder him, and finallyurgeshis acquaintance not to fear him and to confide the entire story he atfirstdid not want to be trusted with. The constant shift of perspectives,which keeps redefining the 'reality' of the relationship in the firstsection of the narrative, is repeated in the following sections throughthe introduction of other narrators, the fat man and the praying man,and complicated in the text's second version through an elision of thesection on the fat man, due to which the narrator who engages withthe praying man seems to coincide with the initial narrator. Narrativeperspective, dialogues, and interactions that are riddled with responsestaken out of context and establish a different one; gestures that aredeeply ambivalent and do not function as a means to communicate,either because they do not communicate or communicate somethingother than what they seem to communicate: these all create a realityof uncertainty into which the reader is drawn.While the gesture of thesad look in Descriptionof a Strugglencites trust and mistrust betweenthe characters, it also spurs a narrative which cannot be trusted andwith which the overall narrative asks for disbelief as the appropriateresponse to the distinction between realityand fiction it struggles with.Yet in as much as the disbelief recommended to the reader is therebymade entirely believable and the evocation of his mistrust entirelytrustworthy, he narrativestages its own distinction between realityandfiction as a reality of its observations, its own as well as the reader's.Crosscutting trust and mistrust on the story and discourse level, thegesture of the sad look does not simply communicate what it seemsto communicate, namely an expression of sadness both inappropriateand appropriate in the sequence of events, it communicates that as ameans of sequentialization it does not communicate.Kafka uses gesture not as a means for the ends of expression orcommunication, I believe, but as a "pure means" that calls attention

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to its own reality and makes visible its own mediality12 similar to thetechniques of montage and the cut. Montage, Adorno remarked, is adeixis of the factual.13 In montage art defines itself with and againstwhat is non-art, with the cut-ups from newspapers, advertisements,or photographs it integrates what is heterogeneous to art. In short,montage does not only distort or displace the reality-content of theready-mades-such an interpretation of montage would still presup-pose an ontological reality-montage reframes, within art, the verydistinction between art and non-art, fiction and reality. As a deixis ofthe factual, montage makes facts speak by speaking in and throughdecontextualized 'facts' which indicate that they indicate somethingother than what they indicate, or, in the case of Kafka's gestures,communicate that they communicate something other than what theycommunicate. The severance and suture of montage, then, do notpoint to a reality that would reside in the representational characterof the cut-ups or shots it forces together in new, often violent, links.But the reality that montage points to also exceeds the allegoricalcharacter that has often been ascribed to it, when for instance AndreBazin emphasizes that in montage "meaning [is] not objectively con-tained in the images themselves but derived exclusively from theirjuxtaposition."'4 Bazin thus highlights that the juxtaposed images orready-mades in montage indicate something other than what they indi-cate. If we shift focus to the operation of indication itself, however,montage cannot only be understood as such a metonymic displacementof metaphoric reference. What montage would then indicate is notso much that it indicates something else, but that it indicates such anindication of something else. Just as a deictic use of language refers toitself as reference, the cut indicates its own operation of indication.The reality that the cinematic language of the cut references is thereality of its own operations.If the reality thus established is a reality constructed of observa-tions, the key to its explanation cannot be sought in the shift frommetaphoric reference to metonymic linking, a shift that has alsobeen described as one of Kafka's crucial strategies.15 The quandary

2On gesture as a "pure means" which (re-)presents but its own status of mediality,see Giorgio Agamben, "Noten zur Geste,"PostmodernendPolitik,ed. Jutta Georg-Lauer(Tubingen: Verlag Kimmerle, 1992) 97-107.3Theodor W. Adorno, AsthetischeTheorie Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1973) 233.14AndreBazin, What s Cinema, ssaysselected and trans. Hugh Gray,vol. 1 (Berkeley:University of California Press, 2005) 25.5Dieter Hasselblatt, Zauberund Logik. Eine Kafka-Studie Koln: Wissenschaft undPolitik, 1967) 129-132.

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of reality and fiction early film presented for its spectators and itssimulation in the cinematic prose of Kafka can be accounted forwith what Niklas Luhmann has described as the double-sidedness ofreality in mass media such as film or literature. On the one hand,their reality lies in their own operations. On the other hand, theirreality resides in "whatfor themor through them for theiraudiencesap-pears to be reality."16 he reality of media, then, rests not only on thesequence of its operations, it is moreover contingent on a sequenceof observations. In order to grasp the media's dual-sided reality ofobserved operations, Luhmann maintains, we have to observe theirobservers. Kafka's notebook entry on the audiences' reaction to thecinematic representation of the arrivalof a train offered such a sec-ond-order observation on observers. What interests Kafkain the newmedium of film, and what he adapts for his literary experiments, isits displacement of an ontological approach to reality and its shifttowards a reality constructed of recursive observations. The shock ofthe first spectators who did not understand the reality of observedoperations peculiar to cinema and thus could believe that a train onthe screen was coming towards them or that the close-up of a handindicated that it was severed, confounding the denotation of sizewith a cinematic denotation of significant detail or gesture,17recursin the shock and bewilderment of many Kafkareaders, who strugglewith narrativeswhich operationalize observations in such a way as topoint their readers to the pitfalls of their own observations. If oneof the gestures of Kafka's fiction is to communicate something otherthan what it communicates, and if it thus seems to open up a space oftheological, philosophical, existential, psychological, or biographicalsignificance, it is only to show its readers that the reality of their ownobservations calls forth such interpretations. The shock for the audi-ence, the audience of early film as well as of Kafka'snarratives, is theshock of seeing the reality of their own seeing framed by fiction.

'"Niklas Luhmann, Die Realitdtder Massenmedien(Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag,1996) 14.'7Lotman 27.

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simultaneity of media kafkas literary screen

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