Franz Kafka’s “Eine alltägliche Verwirrung” ‘An Everyday Confusion’ is a skeletal, or “poor,” text in that one code of reading—the referential—dominates it, while other codes present in a classic, or “rich,” text are almost absent. Using a method freely adapted from Roland Barthes’s S/Z, my article closely examines the referentiality of Kafka’s text, juxtaposing the proverbial (or common-language) response evoked by the text with the personal reactions of a single reader. Kafka’s theme, the inability of common, proverbial language to make real communication possible, is allegorized in the brief tale of A and B, whose comings and goings are mirrored, and at times interfered with, by the language in which these events occur.

Samuel Beckett, early in his career and on James Joyce’s advice, read Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache ‘Contributions toward a Critique of Language,’ the three-volume, 2,200-page work written between 1903 and 1923 by the Austrian philosopher of language Fritz Mauthner. Significantly influenced by the work, Beckett gave literary shape to several of Mauthner’s ideas: the correlation between thinking and speaking; the denial of any certainties outside language, even certainty about the existence of self; and the impossibility of overcoming the limits of language. Both authors place language at the center of their works, subsume all knowledge under it, and then systematically deny its basic efficacy, thus using language to indict itself.

As a literary realist Twain was a practicing empiricist; as a humorist he was a practicing philosophical idealist. Often the two intellectual postures existed side by side within the same work—in A Tramp Abroad, for instance—but they did not enjoy a peaceful coexistence. As a consequence his career took on a pattern of great significance. In Huckleberry Finn he carried commonsense empiricism as far as it could go. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, a genuinely pivotal work, he discovered, and contended with, not only empiricism’s radical limits but its inherent contradictions as well. Hence he evolved his peculiar (and perverse) form of idealism, of which The Mysterious Stranger is the (unfinished) consummation.

“Unimpersonated artistry,” the idea that narrators in the Canterbury Tales are intermittently replaced by the voice of the poet, is a notion common in Chaucer criticism. The idea arises from a confusion of voice with presence, and this confusion leads critics to posit preexisting characters and a preexisting poet whose combined traits constrain the meaning of the text. On the contrary, the poem is conspicuously textual, and the voices of the text create the characters and the narrator. Only by treating the pilgrims as the products, rather than the producers, of their tales can we construct their personalities. Similarly, we must construct the poet from his poem. The general narrator is not a naive “Chaucer the pilgrim” but a complex and sophisticated impersonator who withholds himself and directs us to the roles he plays in order to create himself as fully and complexly as possible in his poem.

The life of Boswell’s Johnson, with its manifold successes, is largely decided by others—the interested volunteers who, governing singly or collectively, control most of his conversation, writing, charities, frolics, trips, meals, and encounters. Johnson is a character whom experience befalls and who (between interruptions) is lost in “languor and dejection.” He is aware that “external authority” is his prime mover. His operating unit is himself plus one (or more). This dependence on his associates bears on the pessimism of the protagonist Johnson and perhaps has implications as well for the author Johnson and for his own volumes. Boswell is most original, potent, and subtle in rendering the part that other characters perform in the making of his hero, showing their role to be an ultimately integrating and exalting force both in individual scenes and in Johnson’s career as a whole.

Little Dorrit is both a narrative about authority and an examination of the authority of narrative. The novel links vocation with sonhood and storytelling with fatherhood and self-generation. Little Dorrit, however, tells a double story, of a daughter as well as of a son. If the son’s story relates the search to replace the father and to discover paternal authority, the daughter’s story details the horrors and consolations of incestuous desire and generational collapse. Storytelling that seeks the father as origin reveals paternal deception and inauthenticity; incestuous structures of desire attempt to collapse genealogy on the hero and heroine, making paternal origin unknowable and creating an overdetermined narrative ending. Dickens’ double story, then, identifies yet questions genealogy and the patriarchal family as metaphors for narrative structure.