¹ Franz Kafka, Der Prozeβ, ed. Max Brod (Frankfurt am Main : S. Fischer, 1965). For the translations of specific terms, I have relied upon the Muirs as the likely basis for the English reader's familiarity with the names and titles of the novel's characters, institutions, and places. Translations of sentences and phrases from the text are my own. My sincere thanks go to Dorrit Cohn and Stanley Corngold for their careful revisions and suggestions.

² See Allemann, “Franz Kafka: Der Prozeβ” in Der Deutsche Roman, ed. Benno von Wiese (Düsseldorf: Bagel, 1965), ii, 251, 261 (Allemann's description of the duplicity [“Doppelung”] involved in simultaneously observing and being observed makes the association of this duplicity with the pronounced theatricality of the novel's first scene inevitable); Benjamin, “Franz Kafka,” in Üher Literatur (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. 1969), pp. 163–65; and Kraft, “Der Mensch ohne Schuld,” in Franz Kafka (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968), pp. 24–25.

³ Sigmund Freud, General Psychological Theory, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier, 1972): So we learn that the unconscious idea is excluded from consciousness by living forces which oppose themselves to its reception, while they do not object to other ideas, the preconscious ones. Psychoanalysis leaves no room for doubt that the repulsion from unconscious ideas is only provoked by the tendencies embodied in their contents. The next and most probable theory which can be formulated at this stage of our knowledge is the following. Unconsciousness is a regular and inevitable phase in the processes constituting our mental activity; every mental act begins as an unconscious one, and it may either remain so or go on developing into consciousness, according as it meets with resistance or not. (from “A Note on the Unconscious.” p. 53)

But the repression, at first successful, does not hold; in the further course of things its failure becomes increasingly obvious. The ambivalence which has allowed repression to come into being by means of reaction-formation also constitutes the point at which the repressed succeeds in breaking through again, (from “Repression.” p. 114)

⁴ Although Ruth Tiefenbrun, A Moment of Torment: An Interpretation of Franz Kafka's Short Stories (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, and London : Feffer & Simons, 1973), pp. 13–20, 32–33, 52–56, has treated the question of homoeroticism in Kafka's writing, it is perhaps equally interesting to see where other critics have touched upon this issue without confronting it directly. See Walter H. Sokel, Franz Kafka: Tragik und Ironie (Munich: Langen-Müller. 1964), pp. 227–38; Heinz Politzer, Franz Kafka: Parable and Paradox (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1962), pp. 190–200; and Wilhelm Emrich, Franz Kafka (Bonn: Athenäum, 1958), pp. 239—41. Although Sokel provides a full treatment of the whipping scene, his reading limits itself to K.‘s ambivalent reaction to it, his desire both to conceal and to preserve access to the Court. Politzer goes so far as to trace the influence of Otto Weininger's misogynous Geschlecht und Charakter on Kafka's generation, noting passages that Kafka could have taken directly from Weininger—without, however, extrapolating homoeroticism from the degraded image of women. In assembling a composite image of the torturers in Amerika and Der Prozeβ (including the Hotel Occidental doorman, K.‘s guards, and the doorkeeper), Emrich even takes into account such suggestive details as the minute descriptions of moustaches and beards, without venturing into the homoerotic facet of the sadism. Suggestions of homoeroticism in Kafka's fiction find their most direct expression in “Erinnerung an die Kaldabahn” (Kafka, Tagebücher, ed. Max Brod, Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1970, pp. 302–11), but the full sexual vacillation evident in even such a standard piece as “Beschreibung eines Kampfes,” where the acquaintance/adversary's relation to the narrator is counterbalanced against his relation to the maid, goes largely ignored.

⁵ Such descriptions are not limited to this episode, as should be sufficiently evidenced by a single example, the perfumed moustache of the Italian businessman whose ostensible tour of the city is the disguised summons bringing K. to the Cathedral (p. 240).

⁶ Hand contact also figures prominently in the foreplay between K. and Leni: “... [Leni] ergriff K.s Hand, mit der er sie umfaβt hielt, und spielte mit seinen Fingern” (p. 132).

The hand becomes a more complex instrument of human commerce in Amerika, ed. Max Brod (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1966), pp. 44, 64, 205, 219.

⁷ For a characteristic Freudian description of the penetration of neurosis in psychoanalysis, see Freud, “The Technique of Psycho-Analysis,” in An Outline of Psycho-Analysis, ed. and trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton. 1969). p. 31 :

With the neurotics, then, we make our pact : complete candour on one side and strict discretion on the other… . what we want to hear from our patient is not only what he knows and conceals from other people; he is to tell us too what he does not know. ... He is to tell us not only what he can say intentionally and willingly, what will give him relief like a confession, but everything else as well that his self-observation yields him, everything that comes into his head, even if it is disagreeable for him to say it, even if it seems to him unimportant or actually nonsensical. If he can succeed after this injunction in putting his self-criticism out of action, he will present us with a mass of material—thoughts, ideas, recollections—which are already subject to the influence of the unconscious, which are often its direct derivatives, and which thus put us in a position to conjecture his repressed unconscious material and to extend, by the information we give him, his ego's knowledge of his unconscious.

This is not exactly the tendency in Kafka's fiction observed by Theodore Adorno in his “Aufzeichnungen zu Kafka,” in Prismen (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1963), pp. 256–57:

Anstatt die Neurose zu heilen, sucht er in ihr selbst die heilende Kraft, die der Erkenntnis: die Wunden, welche die Gesellschaft dem Einzelnen einbrennt, werden von diesem als Chiffren der gesellschaftlichen Unwahrheit, als Negativ der Wahrheit gelesen. Seine Gewalt ist eine des Abbaus. Er reiβt die beschwichtigende Fassade vorm Unmaβ des Leidens nieder, der die rationale Kontrolle mehr stets sich einfügt. Im Abbau—nie war das Wort populärer als in Kafkas Todesjahr —hält er nicht, wie die Psychologie, beim Subjekt inne, sondern dringt auf das Stoffliche, bloβ Daseiende durch, das im ungeminderten Sturz des nachgebenden, aller Selbstbehauptung sich entäuβernden Bewuβtseins auf dem subjektiven Grunde sich darbietet. Die Flucht durch den Menschen hindurch ins Nichtmenschliche—das ist Kafkas epische Bahn.

⁸ See Sokel, p. 44, Politzer, p. 64, and Emrich, p. 14. Critics have eagerly sought out those passages in the Tagebücher where Kafka identifies himself with his characters. Perhaps the closest parallel to naming one of K.'s guards Franz is the brief, almost gratuitous appearance of Franz Butterbaum, Karl's voyage chum, at the beginning of Amerika.

⁹ See Allemann, pp. 279–80. For Allemann, the infinite repeatability of this episode, a “Wiederholungszwang,” determines the temporal structure of the entire novel.

¹⁰ The importance of the verb räumen and its variants to Kafka's conception of spatiality as the arena for an unlimited series of replacements is emphasized by its appearance in three other crucial instances of succession in the novel : the removal of all evidence of the arrest from Frau Grubach's apartment (p. 29), the conversion of the usher's living quarters into a vestibule to the courtroom (pp. 65, 71), and the departure of Frl. Bürstner from her room to make way for Frl. Montag (p. 94).

¹¹ See Benjamin, p. 173: “In den Geschichten, die wir von ihm haben, gewinnt die Epik die Bedeutung wieder, die sie im Mund Scheherazades hat : das Kommende hinauszuschieben. Aufschub ist im ‘Prozeβ‘ die Hoffnung des Angeklagten —ginge nur das Verfahren nicht allmählich ins Urteil über.”

¹² The question of the extension of metaphor in Kafka's writing has been examined by Günther Anders, Franz Kafka. trans. A. Steer and A. K. Thorlby (London: Bowes & Bowes. 1960), pp. 44–54, and by Walter Sokel, Franz Kafka, Columbia Essays on Modern Writers, 19 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1966), p. 5. The conclusion reached in different ways by Anders and Sokel, that metaphor is literalized through this extended elaboration, is questioned by Stanley Corngold in his suggestive essay, “Kafka's Die Verwandlung: Metamorphosis of the Metaphor,” Mosaic, 3, No. 4(1970), 91–106, rpt. in Corngold, The Commentator s Despair (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1973), pp. 1–31. Corngold, who views Kafkan metaphor in the context of the distortion effected by fictive language, asks whether it is possible for a figurative process to encompass a literal facet, a problem also treated in my forthcoming essay, “The All-Embracing Metaphor: Reflections on Kafka's Der Bau,” Glyph i (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1977).

¹³ Kafka, Sämtliche Erzählungen, ed. Paul Raabe (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1970), p. 176.

¹⁴ Kafka's concern with stamina, both in writing and in meeting the demands of everyday existence, is reflected in the following passage from the Tagebücher. p. 163 :

Als es in meinem Organismus klargeworden war, daβ das Schreiben die ergiebigste Richtung meines Wesens sei, drängte sich ailes hin und lieβ alle Fähigkeiten leer stehn, die sich auf die Freuden des Geschlechtes, des Essens, des Trinkens, des philosophischen Nachdenkens, der Musik zuallererst, richteten. Ich magerte nach alien diesen Richtungen ab. Das war notwendig, weil meine Kräfte in ihrer Gesamtheit so gering waren, daβ sie nur gesammelt dem Zweck des Schreibens halbwegs dienen konnten.

¹⁵ See Adorno, p. 273: “Das Fragmentarische der drei groβen Romane, die übrigens kaum mehr vom Begriff des Romans gedeckt werden, wird bedingt von ihrer inneren Form. Sie lassen sich nicht als zur Totalität gerundete Zeiterfahrung zu Ende bringen.” See also Anders, p. 45.

¹⁶ See Allemann, pp. 243–44, 249, 256–57. Deception (“Täuschung auf Grund falscher Voraussetzungen”) is a conception central to Allemann's reading of the novel, “ein Grundgesetz der Prozeβwelt,” one which becomes elevated to a narrative principle (“Erzählprinzip”).

¹⁷ See Maurice Blanchot, “La Lecture de Kafka” and “Kafka et la littérature,” in La Part du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), pp. 9–34. Blanchot conceives of the movement of supplanting in Kafka's fiction as a succession of metamorphoses from which the possibility of any definitive resolution through death has been excluded :

Nous ne mourons pas, voilà la vérité, mais il en résulte que nous ne vivons pas non plus, nous sommes morts de notre vivant, nous sommes essentiellement des survivants. Ainsi la mort finit-elle notre vie, mais elle ne finit pas notre possibilité de mourir; elle est réele comme fin de la vie et apparente comme fin de la mort… . C'est la mort qui nous domine … de son impossibilité.

Le thème de La Métamorphose est une illustration de ce tourment de la littérature qui a son manque pour objet et qui entraîne le lecteur dans une giration où espoir et détresse se répondent sans fin. (pp. 16–17)

¹⁸ See Gerhard Kaiser, “Franz Kafkas ‘Prozeβ‘: Versuch einer Interpretation,” Euphorion, 52 (1958), 38, 42, 44–45, 48–49. Kaiser also reads the parable of the doorkeeper as a dramatization of the limits of human existence. He identifies the limits experienced by K. and the Mann vom Lande with the interpretative predicament of the reader of the novel without, however, regarding the liberties taken by the Court as a function of the interpretative multiplicity entertained by the law.

¹⁹ See Blanchot, p. 14 : “Ce qui rend angoissant notre effort pour lire, ce n'est pas la coexistence d'interprétations différentes, c'est, pour chaque thème, la possibilité mystérieuse d'apparaître tantôt avec un sens negatif, tantôt avec un sens positif. Ce monde est un monde d'espoir et un monde condamné, un univers à jamais clos et un univers infini, celui de l'injustice et celui de la faute.”

²⁰ Textual mediators are so crucial to Politzer's conception of the operation of Kafka's novels that he devotes three separate segments of his Franz Kafka : Parable and Paradox to these “Information Givers.” Politzer, pp. 148–50, 200–11, 252–62. See also Allemann, pp. 268–72.

²¹ The placement of the exegesis of the parable in the hands of a priest suggests Kafka's singular stance toward theology. For Kafka, logos, the text, usurps the superiority assigned to theos in traditional Western theology. In this displacement, Kafka is not far, however, from certain exegetical postures of Judaism. See Gershom G. Scholem, On the Kaballah and Its Symbolism (New York: Schocken, 1973), p. 12, and Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1973), pp. 11, 207–10. According to Scholem, God, for the Kaballists of the milieu that produced the Zohar, consisted of both a submerged facet (the En-Sof ) and an infinite world of splendid attributes (the Sefiroth). The En-Sof, like the interior of the law in the parable of the doorkeeper, comprises an absolutely exclusive and impenetrable domain, and, like the body of legends and superstitions surrounding the law in Der Prozeβ, a textual corpus provides the only existing access to this mystery. For a reading of the parable acknowledging not merely its theological impact, but also the mystical nature of its implied theology, see Ingeborg Henel, “Die Türhüterlegende und ihre Bedeutung fur Kafkas ‘Prozeβ,‘ ” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift, 37 (1963), 63–64. Henel's mysticism is theocentric and is not an outgrowth of exegetical procedure, as in Scholem's Kaballistic model.

²² See p. 214, where Block describes this insistence.

²³ In tracing the insurmountable attack upon individuality in advanced capitalism, which he observes Kafka's fiction to record, Adorno reaches a formulation applying as well to Block's personality : “den späteren psychoanalytischen Begriff des Ichfremden hat Kafka groβartig antizipiert. Aber der Landvermesser gibt jene Motive zu. Sein individueller und sein Sozialcharakter klaffen auseinander wie bei Chaplins Monsieur Verdoux; Kafka's hermetische Protokolle enthalten die soziale Genese der Schizophrenie” (p. 261).