Semiotic excess, semantic vacuity

True to the peculiar hermeneutics associated with his literary works Kafka's poetological utterances are both very infrequent and usually terse and indirect, taking on that familiar paradoxical form which characterizes the articulation of anything resembling a “statement” in his writing. Approached with the necessary caution however, certain of these utterances provide an interesting perspective firstly on the difficult problem of determining Kafka's poetics of representation and secondly on the complex relationship of his literary works to the tradition of realism, to the fantastic and to the historical avant-garde.

In a conversation with Gustav Janouch for example, Kafka allegedly played down the apparent plasticity of certain of his characters as a mere by-product, emphasizing that “he was not depicting people” but was involved only in “telling a story,” the characters being merely “images, only images.” Typically he went on to undermine even this modest claim by denying that the production of such images implies or encourages their visual perception (i.e. as part of the mimetic process of representation), and he added the anti-statement, “one photographs things in order to chase them out of one's mind. My stories are a kind of closing of the eyes.”