Jewish, German, Czech, born a subject of the Habsburgs at ‘the heart of Europe’ in Bohemian Prague in 1883, died a citizen of Czechoslovakia on the outskirts of Vienna forty-one years later; a speaker of French and Italian in addition to his native German, Czech, and Yiddish, which he learnt as an adult; steeped in both Jewish lore and German literature and surrounded by the sound of Czech for most of his life, Franz Kafka was first and foremost an internationalist and a European. Since his death he has been claimed as one of the foremost Jewish authors of his age, as the greatest modernist prose writer in the German language, and – at least after 1945 – as an icon of both German and Austrian literature. More recently, though with less enthusiasm, he has been hailed in his homeland as a Czech, where his memory helped inspire resistance to Soviet dominance in the 1960s. One thing is certain: in his affiliations and the resonance of his writings Kafka is the most cosmopolitan of all German-language writers.

In a letter to Felice Bauer Kafka writes about the venue of his writing, explaining that his letter 'is no longer written from the office, for my office work defies my writing to you; that kind of work is completely foreign to me, and bears no relation to my real needs' (29.x.12; LF: 18). He refers in other letters to the 'particularly awful' and 'voracious world' (7.xii.12; LF: 96) of his office life, where his 'depressing office desk' (17/18.xii.12; LF: 109) 'is littered with a chaotic pile of papers and files; I may just know the things that lie on top, but lower down I suspect nothing but horrors' (3.xii.12; LF: 84). We know all too well from comments like these how troubling he found it to balance his 'day job' with his need to write the works for which he became famous.

While the ‘Kafkaesque’ experience is one in which the everyday becomes uncanny, weird, and anxiety-ridden, for Kafka, the everyday meant going to an office job he hated. It meant dealing with business matters that made him want to run away and at one point even to contemplate suicide. It meant living a double life, one during the day, the other during the night. But for Kafka day time was the dark side of existence.

The tribulations of Josef K., the protagonist of Kafka's second novel The Trial (Der Process), revolve around the clash between the inaccessible court's unspecified accusation and K.'s insistence on his own innocence. This irresolvable conflict forces K. to embark on an exploratory journey through the 'phantasmagoria' of the modern city, a space defined by surfaces, theatrical scenarios and unreadable representations. The novel stands clearly in the tradition of modernist city narratives, where urban space supplies the location for the disappearance of the alienated individual in the lonely crowd. Situated outside 'mainstream' German culture, the Prague Kafka knew is a particularly suitable backdrop and many readers have felt they have recognised it in The Trial. The city's tragic history, marked by national and social conflicts, reached into the present of its crooked streets and impenetrable courtyards and is reflected in a literature filled with madmen, eccentrics, cripples, prostitutes, and pimps.

How does Josef K. situate himself in this unstable, shifting space? One critic has seen him, unlike Karl Rosmann in The Man who Disappeared and K. in The Castle, as neither a traveller nor a foreigner but a socially successful and ambitious urban citizen. By contrast, another maintains he is Rosmann’s close relative because he finds himself, as it were, in exile in his own hometown. Alienated, arrested by an unknown but powerful authority and fearing punishment, suffering the intrusion of the faraway court into his private sphere and finding himself expelled into some quasi-foreign territory, K. shares many predicaments with real exiles. In order to mediate between such strictly literal and self-consciously metaphorical interpretations, I want to offer a new reading of The Trial by going back once more to one of Kafka’s earliest and most insightful commentators, Walter Benjamin.

The modern Western subject, the citizen-individual, is emancipated from the milieu of his birth, he sets his own values, and he exercises rights freely negotiated in the social contract. K., the hero of Kafka's third novel The Castle, lays claim to such rights, saying shortly after his arrival: 'I want always to be free' (DS: 14). He has left his place of origin, his 'little home town' or 'old home' (DS: 17), he has travelled as a free agent to take up a post in a new place, and asserts the right to negotiate terms: 'I want no grace and favours from the castle but my rights' (DS: 93). The German word he uses is Heimat, meaning home town or homeland, which designates a physical place, or social space, or bounded medium which links the self with something larger through a process of identification signified by a spatial metaphor. Since no single English word could convey the many associations, I shall use the German term. But if K. is a modern subject, he seems to have arrived at the wrong destination. In contrast to Kafka’s first novel with its New World setting and to The Trial set in a modern city of banks and proletarian suburbs, in The Castle only electric light and the telephone disrupt the otherwise vaguely feudal atmosphere of a village located under the shadow of a castle.

It is not always helpful to know what a writer thinks about the vocation and the act of writing, but in Kafka's case it may be. It may help us to read him better. In letters and diaries he says many things about writing in general and about his own in particular which, illuminating in themselves, may also do a real service. They may alert us to the peculiarity of his novels and stories, and so to how we might best try to read them. Certainly, there is no key to Kafka, but just as certainly there are better and worse ways of reading him. Had I needed a motto, I could have looked to some bleakly courageous little sentences in Beckett's Worstward Ho. They are: 'Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.' They seem to me a noble epitaph for Kafka's writing and a good injunction for our reading.

Writing

The premise is necessity. Writers have to write. They are not necessarily people to whom writing comes more easily than to others nor do they necessarily enjoy writing, in any usual sense of the word ‘enjoy’. They are people who have to write. Friedrich Hölderlin’s friend Christian Neuffer, who certainly thought of himself as a poet and wrote a great deal of verse, all of it bad, told Hölderlin one day that he was taking a break from poetry for a while – ‘hanging my harp up on the wall’ was his actual phrase. Hölderlin replied: ‘And that is fine, if you can do it without pangs of conscience. Your sense of yourself is founded on other worthwhile activities too, and so you are not annihilated if you are not a poet.’ Hölderlin knew he was ‘annihilated’ – vernichtet, made nothing – if he could not write poetry. And Tasso (Goethe’s at least) said:

For long bursts of his intensively creative life, from the autumn of 1912 until his death less than twelve years later, Kafka appears to have written every single day. He had been busy before this 'breakthrough', though much writing in the forms of both diaries and fiction he apparently destroyed. His last piece of writing is a letter - to his parents on the subject of his various ailments - which he composed less than twenty-four hours before his death in the hospital at Klosterneuburg on the edge of Vienna. Typically, he wants to put off a proposed visit by them, arguing that he is in an unfit state to be seen; typically too for his last years, he downplays the seriousness of his condition with self-deprecating humour. There are other familiar stylistic characteristics and thematic preoccupations: he straightaway gets down to the point, dispensing with preliminaries, as he invariably does in letters and postcards, though there is perhaps a weariness to the businesslike 'now about the visits'.

'We are reading a book. A novel, say, or a book of short stories. It interests us because it is new, because it is. . . novel, so we read on', says Sydney, the aspiring Kafka biographer in Alan Bennett's play Kafka's Dick, and continues:

In fact, Bennett’s play centres around one of the central myths of Kafka’s life: the relationship with his father. But is the audience’s myth-making due to the fact that Kafka’s life, as Sydney goes on to maintain, ‘conforms in every particular to what we have convinced ourselves an artist’s life should be’, or is it due to biographers who have over the years conditioned us to certain stories? To answer these questions this chapter will give a brief overview of Kafka biography and look at some of the larger and smaller myths about Kafka’s life.

Seasickness on terra firma

Kafka's earliest surviving short story, 'Description of a Struggle', contains a passage often quoted in discussions of the relationship between words and images in Kafka's writing:

The narrator’s sense of outrage at the linguistic quirks of the community is, as one commentator has put it, dismay at the ‘confusion metaphor poses for nomination’, the way in which each image substituted for the ‘true names of things’ leads further away from the object itself to a proliferation of meaning. Certainly, the reference to the Tower of Babel implies that metaphorical substitution is an essentially arbitrary act.

Manuscripts

The various bundles of handwritten pages that make up Kafka's literary legacy are remarkable for two antithetical qualities: a cryptic, idiosyncratic approach in combination with the almost childlike outward appearance of the surviving pages. The surviving manuscripts consist of notebooks in several formats, along with loose-leaf bundles and material in envelopes. These pages are covered in handwriting that varies from the neat and legible 'fair copy' to casual and messy jottings. Deletions and emendations are carefully executed, but the loose sides are rarely numbered. The author's handwriting changes noticeably over the years, and is sometimes replaced by that of another, most probably his sister Ottla, to whom Kafka sometimes dictated letters and messages. To describe the task of transcribing the manuscripts as daunting would be an understatement. It seems little short of miraculous that on these slender, unstable foundations rests a canonical oeuvre of unrivalled power and authority.

Scholars accustomed to the labyrinthine meanderings of Kafka’s prose have noted that a stark simplicity shines through the complexities of what has been written on the pages. The author’s preferred medium is the school exercise book in its most basic form: the small octavo booklets that were used by countless high-school fledglings as Vokabelhefte, handy pads and jotters for vocabulary and note-taking, and the larger quarto size, reserved for the young scholars’ exercises and homework. Sometimes, Kafka would avail himself of official headed stationery (Kanzleipapier).

Kafka configures gender roles in both familiar and unexpected ways. His characters, despite certain conformities with the stereotypes of his age, are in flux, calling to mind Otto Weininger's scale of masculinity and femininity. Gender boundaries in Kafka's writings of all periods are indistinct as are boundaries between species. For Kafka one is not born male or female, to paraphrase Simone de Beauvoir, one becomes one or the other or sometimes a mixture of the two.

As a recent critic has pointed out, his approach to gender was tied up closely with Jewish thinking on the subject. A close look at earlier and later works will reveal also that he did not revise his concepts of gender relations over time, contrary to Klaus Theweleit's assertion that by 1922 Kafka had achieved an understanding of women based on individuality, but rather that he 'de-essentialised' gender all along. Kafka derived gender models from a variety of sources all of which he approached in a critical, detached way. The diversity of the available models allowed him to recognize the relativity of each and, as Theweleit notes, to escape the exclusively heterosexual model which admits ‘only victors and victims . . . (not men and women)’.

Kafka's first novel, The Man who Disappeared (Der Verschollene), still better known in the English-speaking world at least under Max Brod's title, Amerika, is set against the realist backdrop of the most modern and technologically advanced society in the world, the USA. The America of this novel remains strangely hyper-real, however, in spite of Kafka's careful depiction of various icons of modernity. This strange encoding of reality, both mimetic and anti-mimetic, cannot fully be explained by Kafka's lack of first-hand experience of American life. Rather, it has to do with the way he employs modern America both as the main locus of social contest and as a metaphor. From the outset, the novel is characterised by the citation of cultural myths and stereotypical images of the American dream, such as the description of the Statue of Liberty in the opening paragraph and Uncle Jakob's life story, which seems to validate the all-American 'From Rags to Riches' fairy tale.

Kafka repeatedly evokes the great American myth of boundless opportunities: there is Uncle Jakob’s enormous steel residence in chapter 2, which, with its six overground and five underground storeys, its enormous lift and balconies, is a symbol of power and cutting-edge technology. In chapter 5 American architectural and technological modernity is further underlined by the multistorey Hotel Occidental, which contains a buzzing self-service restaurant and operates some thirty lifts. In addition, there is the detailed description of Uncle Jakob’s gigantic business enterprise, which, with its mechanical telephone operators, reads like an early version of the modern call-centre.

Gadamer's life and work is closely connected with and indebted to the life and work of Martin Heidegger. Gadamer's autobiography makes clear that the encounter with Heidegger in the early 1920s was quite literally fateful. Theirs was a lifelong personal and intellectual relationship. Throughout his published work and in his lectures and private conversation, Gadamer everywhere modestly acknowledges his deep debt to Heidegger. He tells us, for example, that Truth and Method, his magnum opus, was, among other things, an attempt to open the way for readers to the work of the later Heidegger. In honor of Gadamer's 100th birthday in February 2000, Hermann Heidegger, Martin Heidegger's son, dedicated the 16th volume of Heidegger's Collected Works to Gadamer, “the oldest loyal pupil of my father.” Yet in many significant and fundamental respects, Gadamer's thought, life, and work did not follow the path of Heidegger. As we shall see below, Gadamer learned and borrowed much from Heidegger, but Gadamer's own characterization of the relationship between himself and Heidegger as one of constant challenge and provocation is perhaps the best short characterization of this complex relationship. Stylistically and substantively, the difference between their two modes of thought is the difference between a meditative thinker (Heidegger) and a dialogical one (Gadamer). Not unrelated to this difference is Gadamer's refusal to take Heidegger's lead to a kind of thought that is postphilosophical. This refusal has many ramifications.

Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics is as much a reaction as an initiation: a reaction against a relativistic historicism that “locked” speakers and actors “inside” worldviews; a reaction against the overwhelming prestige of the natural sciences and the insistence on methodology inspired by that success; and a reaction against the “bloodless academic philosophizing” of neo-Kantian philosophy and its perennialist “great problems” approach to the history of philosophy. But in several of his autobiographical remarks, Gadamer singles out an opponent that seems to loom oddly large in his reminiscences about provocations. “Using Heidegger's analysis, my starting point was a critique of German Idealism and its Romantic traditions” (PG 27), he writes in one such recollection. And in the same essay, he writes of trying to avoid or to “forfeit” (einböußen) “the fundamentum inconcussum of philosophy on the basis of which Hegel had written his story of philosophy and the Neo-Kantians their history of problems - namely, self-consciousness” (PG 7).

“Hermeneutics,” “critical theory,” and “deconstruction” are the names of three intellectual orientations that have dominated continental philosophical debates during the latter part of the twentieth century. Although each of these orientations has its own complex lineage and affinities, they have nevertheless come to be associated with three outstanding thinkers: Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jöurgen Habermas, and Jacques Derrida. At the most abstract level, all three exhibit what has come to be called the “linguistic turn.” The concern with language is central to their philosophic investigations. Yet when we turn to what they mean by language, what they stress in their analyses, what consequences they draw from their reflections, their differences are initially much more striking than anything that they share in common. And even when one of these thinkers has addressed the concerns of the others, their encounters have often seemed more like nonencounters - like one of those surrealistic conversations where participants are speaking past each other. Yet there are not only striking differences among these three thinkers, there are also some important overlapping commonalities. It is best to look upon these three thinkers and their characteristic orientations as forming a tensed constellation - one in which their emphatic differences enable us to appreciate their strengths as well as their weaknesses. In this paper, my primary focus will be on Gadamer's philosophic hermeneutics, especially as it bears on questions of coming to grips with modernity and its discontents.

GADAMER’S PHILOSOPHICAL HERMENEUTICS

In 1960 Hans-Georg Gadamer, then a sixty-year-old German philosophy professor at Heidelberg, published Truth and Method (Wahrheit und Methode). Although he authored many essays, articles, and reviews, to this point Gadamer had published only one other book, his habilitation on Plato in 1931: Plato's Dialectical Ethics. As a title for this work on a theory of interpretation, he first proposed to his publisher, Mohr Siebeck, “Philosophical Hermeneutics.” The publisher responded that “hermeneutics” was too obscure a term. Gadamer then proposed “Truth and Method” for a work that found, over time, great resonance and made “hermeneutics” and Gadamer's name commonplace in intellectual circles worldwide. Truth and Method has been translated into ten languages thus far - including Chinese and Japanese. It found and still finds a receptive readership, in part, because, as the title suggests, it addresses large and central philosophical issues in the attempt to find a way between or beyond objectivism and relativism, and scientism and irrationalism. He accomplishes this by developing an account of what he takes to be the universal hermeneutic experience of understanding. Understanding, for Gadamer, is itself always a matter of interpretation. Understanding is also always a matter of language. “Being that can be understood is language,” writes Gadamer in the culminating section of the work in which he proposes a “hermeneutical ontology” (TM 432). For his concept of the understanding and the task of ontology, Gadamer relies importantly on Martin Heidegger's treatment of these concepts in Being and Time (1927).