We did not know the extent of Kafka's youthful drawing till the 2021 publication of Kafka's Die Zeichnungen (The Drawings). Despite the value of this volume, the editors overstate their case-arguing ...that Kafka's drawings remain an "enduring presence in his writing" throughout his life; that they appear whenever his writing hits a snag; and that they force us to understand his oeuvre as a mixture of literature and art. None of these assertions are true, and they distract from what Kafka's drawings really do show us: how ensconced he was in the culture of fin-de-siècle art and how he struggled to develop himself as a writer by leaving this behind. What is remarkable about Kafka's drawing is not its enduring presence but its stunning and abrupt disappearance. In this article, I uncover the meaning of this disappearance, arguing that it paradoxically confirms the importance of visual art for Kafka, albeit in ways not imagined by the editors of Die Zeichnungen. Visual art becomes for Kafka a "negative" force, which lurks powerfully behind his mature prose.
Kafka's drawing style, like his writing one, is abstemious in the extreme; the question is how to characterize his criterion of subtraction. Studying the diary drawings alongside the text in which ...they are embedded points toward a general dynamic of deactivation-an aesthetics of disillusion in the baroque tradition of desengaño-that can be seen more clearly than read. Kafka repeatedly draws and writes about thresholds. But while his diary writing tends to thematize a perceived failure to pass from one side to another, the accompanying drawings systematically eliminate this register, and with it, all sense of directional movement or striving. The drawings operate as emblems of a passage, and so also of metapherein, in all its most iconic shapes-ladders, gates, permeable walls-but of a passage suspended at the very apex of its arc, where failure is impossible to distinguish from success. The nihilistic thrust of an aestheticized despair is here in turn negated, and the result, like Wittgenstein's duck rabbit example, is in principle ambiguous. The essay argues that such structural ambiguity becomes a crucial feature of the literary works, which are constructed, as the diary entries themselves usually are not, in accordance with a similarly emblematic technique of double negation or "right despair."
The new edition of Kafka's Drawings adds new material to the well-known fact that, in addition to his interests in both art history and the art of his own time, Kafka was a highly original ...draughtsman himself. Yet, it also shows that he stopped practicing these skills well before time of what he called his breakthrough to "the only way writing could be done." Nonetheless, the pictorial arts kept playing a decisive role not only in his writings, but also for his writing. In his novel The Trial, caricatures, paintings, photographs, and even cinematographic techniques interrupt and divert the written word revealing hidden layers of the story. While still firmly rooted in the tradition of alphabetic writing, his work registers-like a seismograph-the effects of new media of data storage and transmission.
This essay emphasizes Franz Kafka's use of the page surface when analyzing the relationship between his draftsmanship and writing. The context of the page, including its size, orientation, margins, ...and blank spaces, becomes relevant when examining the mise en page, i.e., the placement of drawings and text on a page or sheet of paper. In the early twentieth century, the page and its characteristics, ranging from the materiality of the paper to the mise en page (the French term for "layout"), had been a focus in book design. However, in art history, this term is not commonly used to assess the composition of drawings, as often the type of paper, drawing instruments, or the paper's color and receptivity to ink have been foregrounded. In literary studies, and mainly in genetic criticism that analyzes drafts and other preparatory documents in addition to the finalized text, the mise en page is also not of primary interest. In Kafka's case, however, considering his use of the page surface extends existing analyses focusing on the text-image relationship regarding Kafka's draftsmanship. Furthermore, this focus on the mise en page demonstrates that examining the page's context can also enhance the study of sketches that other writers, such as Samuel Beckett and Paul Valéry, added to their texts.
This article makes a case for marginalia itself, arguing that precisely the peripheral status of these newly published sketches constitutes their contribution to Kafkan esthetics. Focusing on ...depictions of horses and riders will provide a fuller picture of the interpretative ambiguity of Kafka's art, revealing an esthetic that is at moments more ornamental than representational. What Judith Butler identifies as a desire to disappear into pure line tends toward abstraction and estheticism: the fleeting edges of the artwork redescribe the outlines of what it means to constitute a corpus in the first place.
Kafka in Motion Gellen, Kata
The Germanic review,
04/2024, Volume:
99, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Franz Kafka, intrigued by the possibility of representing movement in a still medium, made several drawings of galloping horses. This essay examines these drawings in the context of contemporaneous ...attempts to capture dynamic motion in visual media. Around 1900, artists and scientists experimented with various painting styles and photographic techniques to depict the movement of human and animal bodies in highbrow art, popular entertainment, and to advance the science of sport. Kafka's short literary work "Wunsch, Indianer zu werden" represents a related attempt to depict the movement of a horse and rider. This essay draws a parallel between the destabilizing effects of Kafka's visual and literary representations of a horse in motion, which reveal the productive tensions that arise from representing movement in each medium.
Reading Kafka's literature today, in Jerusalem/Al-Quds, presents us with a challenge. Reading Kafka 'here and now', following his 'messages', concealed in his prose, notes and letters, demands us to ...engage anew with our traditions. It calls us to reconsider the legacies of Kafka's own literature, revising European modernism, while studying Talmudic and Kabbalistic texts, learning Chassidic tales and reading Arabic and Persian stories. A 'Kafkan' reading thus demands a permanent interruption in our fields of study, reflecting the very idea of
Studium
(studying, Talmud). Kafka's Messenger, who carries with him-on an endless path-the secret of literature, invites us to a journey, a path of studying that spreads into a Eurasian map of readership. This method of reading, namely a reflection about 'the way', is perhaps the first (and most significant) lesson of Kafka's readers. Our own (rather short) journey will follow the figure of a Messenger, as it appears in Kafka's story 'An Imperial Message', turning, however, to the Talmudic legend and the Chassidic tale, and to a Sufi Persian epic poem, in a search for a proper echo of the untold secret. This study reflects not only the possibilities of the comparative approach but also the radical, 'messianic' potential, being kept on the paths of Kafka's writing.
