Impossible Metamorphoses: Reflections on Kafka’s Jewish Modernity — Léa Veinstein
Kafka is often described as a “great writer of modernity.” This belongs to those ready-made expressions one accepts without understanding them, without even pausing over them or questioning them. It belongs to the order of the incontestable, however vague or hazy it may be.
In the same way, Kafka is sometimes defined as one of the “great Jewish writers of the twentieth century.” Jewish how? Is this Judaism a religious, cultural, or affective identity? A root or an uprooting? The expression does not specify, but it has imposed itself: on a large dictionary of “Jewish literature,” I remember seeing Kafka’s face very large, filling the entire cover. He alone has become the image, the face of a Jewish literature that I would nevertheless be hard pressed to define.
What we can be certain of (citations are available to demonstrate it) is that Franz Kafka struggles ceaselessly with and against these two affirmations: whether it is a matter of integrating into a modern, new world, or of fixing a Jewish identity within himself, the undertaking is for him painful, complex, and even impossible. This is what we shall try to unfold here, by scrutinizing two declarations of Kafka’s as close as possible to their literality, their rhythm, and their philosophical stakes. While keeping in mind that to reflect on what, in Kafka, a Jewish modernity might be presents itself, to say the least, as a challenge.
In a sentence reported by Gustav Janouch, Kafka attempts to articulate these two notions: Jewish identity on the one hand, and the relation to history and to modernity on the other:
“We Jews, in truth, are not painters. We do not know how to represent things in a static way. We always see them flowing, moving, undergoing metamorphosis. We are narrators (…) What can I say, I am still a captive in Egypt.
I have not yet crossed the Red Sea.”1
What does this intense, very rich sentence teach us about Kafka’s Jewish modernity? Let us first note the wholly unequivocal and clear character of the expression of his Jewish identity: here, Kafka says “we,” he insistently reiterates this first-person plural speech. Until the very last sentence, where he isolates himself from the collective to return to “I,” the sentence has a declarative character: this is what defines us, we Jews.
We are thus — an assertion rare enough in Kafka to be underlined here.
We shall see that this almost peremptory transparency will not be long in becoming opaque.
Who, then, is this “we” that would define Jewish identity? Kafka advances by proposing a strong opposition between “what one is not” and “what one is”: between painters and narrators. To begin with, we Jews are “not painters,” he says. The painter would be the one who has a “static” vision of things, capturing them in an instant that fixes them (today we would no doubt choose the image of photography, opposing it to cinema). The painter does not narrate a movement but reproduces an instant that he thus fixes on a straight line, granting it abscissa and ordinate — and thereby imprisoning the time that moves ceaselessly in all things. When Kafka writes that Jews are not painters, he therefore means that the relation to time inscribed in being-Jewish is contrary to this fixity. Judaism would imply the acceptance of a moving temporality: “to flow, to move, to undergo metamorphosis.” Kafka takes as his own a historicity that can be called Heraclitean: a liquid history, like the famous image of the river into which one cannot step twice (fragment 912), bound to the idea of a permanent flowing not only of time but of being, which must be defined as becoming.
To flow, to move, not to fix what one represents in a static pose: to further clarify what is taking shape as a Kafkaesque philosophy of history, the thought of Stéphane Mosès is of precious help.
In L’Ange de l’histoire (The Angel of History), starting from a short story by Kafka, “The City Coat of Arms,” Mosès deploys the hypothesis of a philosophy of history rooted in a crisis of modernity: gathering texts by Kafka, Benjamin, but also Scholem, Freud, and Rosenzweig, he makes the figure of the “angel of history,” drawn by Paul Klee and taken up by Walter Benjamin, into a generational matrix. We then understand better what makes up Kafka’s opposition to the figure of the painter, who would freeze the instant: it would lodge within itself a critique of historical Reason: “This figure (…) indeed implies that time is no longer thought as an oriented axis, where the after inevitably succeeds the before, or as a river flowing from its source toward an estuary, but as a juxtaposition of instants each time unique, not totalizable, and which, consequently, do not follow one another as the stages of an irreversible process. The past, the present, and the future no longer follow one another here as on a straight line that a spectator could observe from outside, but coexist as three permanent states of consciousness.”3
History knows within itself a rupture, a discontinuity, a break, which forbid us from continuing to figure it as a straight line directed toward progress. What is “interrupted” is the historical Reason issued from the Hegelian philosophy of history. And this interruption, the point of departure for a new “modernity,” must be understood, according to Mosès, through the prism of the First World War, which sapped all hope in progress.
This total event, which also crossed Kafka’s singular trajectory, determined an absolutely new relation to the present, interruptive and always moving. In our citation reported by Janouch, this Kafkaesque thought of history seems to be written through these three verbs: “to flow, to move, to undergo metamorphosis,” opposed to the fixity of classical painting.
Later, it will be articulated to Jewish philosophy and to “messianic time,” as Stéphane Mosès shows, with the support of Gershom Scholem, in the continuation of his book.
But let us remain with this fascinating sentence. After having initiated this definition of Judaism as a relation to time — and, this is our hypothesis, to modernity — Kafka ceases to say “we” to isolate himself from the group and return to “I,” to a form of existential solitude that surges forth through an allusion to the biblical episode of the Crossing of the Red Sea (Exodus 14:15-31): “I am still a captive in Egypt, I have not crossed the Red Sea.” Why this return to “I”? Why this biblical episode, and what does it teach us about what is taking shape of a Jewish modernity in Kafka?
Unlike the others of his community, Kafka would have remained in a kind of past: he would not have known the liberation from Egypt, which changes the people of the Hebrews from slaves into free men guided by Moses. Not having crossed the Red Sea, he would have remained alone in slavery. This assertion destabilizes us, not only because Kafka, in saying this, cuts himself off from the group with which he has just identified himself, but also because he affirms having remained in the past, which seems to contradict his previous thought… according to which the straight line of time would have become impossible. By separating himself from others and from his community, by thus remaining in a kind of past, is he not himself the painter who fixes a moment on the line of time?
It is by drawing on Walter Benjamin’s thought that, in my view, one can shed light on this reversal — and progress in our apprehension of Kafkaesque modernity. In his 1931 essay on Kafka, Benjamin also attempts to extract from Kafka’s texts a thought of history, by analyzing the relation to time and to existence woven therein. According to Benjamin, the Kafkaesque universe corresponds to an “archetype of deformation.” First because everything concerning time in Kafka (whether the experience of a temporality or a thought of History) finds itself disturbed, even disfigured. Benjamin’s general hypothesis touches on the articulation of the concepts of modernity and metamorphosis: it is because Kafka describes the crisis of modernity that “no phenomenon” can appear otherwise than “deformed in the description he gives of it”: “Kafka’s work is of a prophetic nature. The very precise strangenesses he describes must be understood by the reader as signs and symptoms of the displacements the writer senses beginning in every domain, without himself being able to integrate into the new structures. Thus he can only respond by astonishment — an astonishment to which a panicked terror is admittedly mingled — to the almost incomprehensible deformations of existence that betray the advent of these laws.”4
We can henceforth understand in this way the sentence reported by Janouch:
Kafka refuses that time be thought in terms of progress or of fixity of instants, but he does not quite manage to merge into a ceaselessly moving temporality. In other words, he does not manage to integrate himself into the new world, such as it appears before his eyes. Faced with the “deformations” of modernity, he looks on in astonishment, he describes without integrating. Kafkaesque modernity must therefore be defined as deformation and as source of astonishment — a magnificent term found by Benjamin, which perhaps sums up all of Kafka.
Judaism determines a relation to time that cannot be fixed in a frozen present. Jewish modernity, such as Kafka encounters it in a kind of shock, would then lodge itself in this movement that Kafka already calls, in the sentence reported by Janouch, “metamorphosis.” From the archetype of deformation to metamorphosis, what is the path one can, with him, take?
Modernity deforms. So be it. But Kafka goes further by affirming that it undergoes metamorphosis; and even that it is a metamorphosis — not simply a becoming, but a radical change of form and of kingdom. For metamorphosis is nothing other than this: an animal-becoming that contaminates the human. We think obviously of Kafka’s eponymous story, which describes the whole physical and psychic process. But it is remarkable, moreover, that Kafka uses this schema of metamorphosis (as
1 Ibid.
“becoming-animal” 5) in many other texts, to make explicit his relation to modernity — to the crisis of modernity such as he lived it himself, as a Jewish writer.
In continuity with the sentence reported by Janouch, let us now pause on this excerpt from a roughly contemporary letter that Kafka addressed to his friend Max Brod in 1921: “Better than psychoanalysis, what pleases me here is the observation that this paternal complex, on which more than one feeds spiritually, does not bear on the innocent father but on the father’s Judaism. What most of those who began to write in German wanted was to leave Judaism, generally with the vague approval of the fathers (it is this vagueness that is revolting); they wanted it, but their hind paws still stuck in the father’s Judaism and their front paws found no new ground.”6
Kafka here evokes the minority of which he is part, that of Jewish writers of his generation living in Prague — that is, living in a very singular linguistic and political situation: neither German nor Czech, they are “Jewish,” that is, stuck between impossible identities. This Judaism, far from defining them here in a transparent or unequivocal way, can be lived only in the form of a crisis, which Kafka tells us bears on “the fathers.” Not on the father as a psychoanalytic entity, but on the father as the entity of a religious identity coming from the past, become incompatible with what one could here call “modernity.”
Let us allow ourselves a brief biographical detour to better understand the stakes underlying this sentence. Kafka was born into an assimilated Mitteleuropa family, with a father distant from all practice — a father against whom he would nourish a resentment made famous by the Lettre au père (Letter to the Father). He developed from this a very complex feeling regarding Judaism, whose trace he wanted to recover, but without going through religion — which modernity
Kafka, pour une littérature mineure (Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature), Paris, Minuit, 1975.
had already rendered obsolete. To unfold this knot, it is useful to return to Stéphane Mosès’s book on the philosophy of history. In a chapter titled “Kafka, Freud and the Crisis of Tradition,” Mosès draws the common traits of a generation that includes Kafka as well as Freud and Scholem. It is a generation of “sons” who underwent the “disordering of the processes of transmission in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Judaism,” an effect of “the entry of Western Jews into modernity.” The sons will rebel on the one hand against this assimilation, and on the other hand, against the persistent demand, formulated by the father, of a certain fidelity to Jewish law emptied of all content: “It is the ambiguities of the father with regard to his own Jewishness, the inconsistencies of a demand in the name of which the son is invited to remain faithful to values that the father has not managed to transmit to him (nor, a fortiori, to legitimate) that deprive paternal discourse of its credibility.
Double bind that reflects the uncertainties of a generation of transition, torn between its attachment to the past and the attraction of assimilation, and where paternal authority is irremediably devalued.”7
In La Lettre au père (Letter to the Father), Kafka retraces very precisely the three “moments” of this relation to the father’s Judaism, which he himself says is in no case an “isolated phenomenon” but “the situation of a generation of transition.”
Across these three moments, one sees incomprehension shift, remaining the common trait of these different attitudes. The first moment, which corresponds to adolescence, is that of the incomprehension of reproaches, which seem to arise from a contradictory demand on the father’s part: “As an adolescent, I did not understand how you, with the phantom of Judaism you had at your disposal, could reproach me for not making efforts (I should have made them, if only out of respect, you said) to develop something equally phantomatic.”8
Later, Kafka says he understood where these traces of Judaism came from — that is, from his father’s past. He could then understand the father’s desire for transmission to the son he was. Incomprehension nevertheless remained
— but it now bore on the possibility of this transmission: how could it have taken place when no meaning accompanied it?
“You had indeed brought back a little Judaism of this sort from that kind of rural ghetto from which you came […]. But it was impossible to make a child observing everything with the excess of acuity born of fear understand that the few trifles you accomplished in the name of Judaism, with an indifference proportionate to their futility, could have a higher meaning. For you, they had the value of small souvenirs of a bygone era and that is why you wanted to propose them to me, but since you did not yourself believe in their proper value, you could only do so through persuasion or threat.”9
The third and final moment, which seems to be still current at the time Kafka imaginarily addresses his father, also contains a strong incomprehension. It now bears on his father’s reaction to the interest Kafka eventually came to take in Judaism. Far from bringing them closer or making the old reproaches of indifference disappear, this interest will provoke from the father a violent rejection, which Kafka describes on numerous occasions as “disgust”: “For it was indeed a Judaism issued from your Judaism that was stirring to be born, and with it, the possibility of new relations between us […].
But, through me, Judaism became odious to you, you judged Jewish writings unreadable, they ‘disgusted’ you.”10
Kafka’s path makes it possible to shed light on the complexity of the relation to Judaism that will be woven among this generation of sons, of whom Kafka writes in 1921 that they are like animals torn apart. And if we now well understand how their “hind paws” could at once desire to save themselves and remain as if stuck in the mud of the paternal past, it remains for us to interpret how “their front paws,” for their part, “found no new ground.”
Modernity, infinitely moving, seems to provoke a kind of landslide, a permanent earthquake, which prevents this anchoring in time, in space, and in community. This is why Jewish modernity in Kafka is always written in an animal form: it is intrinsically and fundamentally a metamorphosis. It is humanly impossible to live; only the line of flight toward the animal world allows us to describe the experience of it. Jewish modernity in Kafka would therefore be a metamorphosis. And this metamorphosis is literally a being-torn-apart.
We may finally ask in which fiction these various schemas we have encountered and tried to clarify (modernity, temporality, community, history, metamorphosis, being-torn-apart, lack of ground) appear in Kafka. One can think of a text rather apart, which in my view brings together the whole of these motifs as if fiction and writing managed to weave them into a strange but clear canvas: Les Recherches d’un chien (Forschungen eines Hundes; Investigations of a Dog). The manuscript, found in one of Kafka’s octavo notebooks, was probably written in 1922, at the moment when he was stalling on the completion of Das Schloß (The Castle).
This long first-person narrative (one of Kafka’s longest, if one excepts the novels) tells the story — which is not really one, all the more so since the narration is rather loose and distended, made of digressions and flashbacks11 — of a dog who has isolated himself from his “people” (from the “canine race”), and who, in this isolation, searches and questions. As the title indicates, one should actually accept that this text tells no story, but is given to be read as the report of this dog’s investigations. Kafka places side by side, at the very heart of the genre he invents, the dog and the investigation. The whole undertaking of this text can be summed up by this strange juxtaposition between the quest for meaning, for truth, for answers, and the fact that it is borne by a dog (we can recall the sentence cited as epigraph to this third part: “What is there outside the dogs? Whom else can one invoke in the vast empty world? All knowledge, the whole of all questions and all answers, is contained in the dogs”12).
The text begins by laying out the “change” that has occurred in the life of the narrator-dog since his childhood: the theme that launches the dog’s reflection is that of his relation to his fellows, from whom he feels, at the moment he is speaking, radically distant. Do we not hear in this a troubling echo of the sentence according to which Kafka alone would have remained “a captive in Egypt”?
“What a change in my life, and yet how little, at bottom, my life has changed! When I think today of the past and remember the times when I still lived in the midst of canine society [inmitten der Hundesschaft lebte], a dog among dogs, sharing in all the cares of others, I find, looking more closely, that always something limped; there was a small fracture [eine kleine Bruchstelle].”13
If there is thus at once a change and an absence of change in his life, it is because the solitude that is his at the moment he speaks has always existed, at least in potential or in root, insofar as even when he lived in community with his “fellows,” an imperceptible gap already separated him from them — something that tore the community a little, pierced it, or made it walk askew.
In other words, at the end of the path we have just taken: if modern Judaism were a dog, it would be torn apart — and it would limp.
G. Janouch, Conversations avec Kafka (Conversations with Kafka), trans. B. Lortholary, Paris, M. Nadeau editions, 1978, p. 202. The conversations would date from 1920-1921: it was in 1920 that Gustav Janouch, a young student of 17, sent his first poems to Franz Kafka, the young author of Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis), recently published. Several meetings between the two men followed, which Janouch transcribed as they occurred. The first publication in German dates from 1951, well after Kafka’s death.↩︎
Heraclitus, Fragments, introduction by Marcel Conche, Paris, PUF, “Épiméthée,” last edition 2011.↩︎
S. Mosès, L’Ange de l’histoire (The Angel of History), Paris, Gallimard, 2006, “Folio,” p. 26.↩︎
G. Janouch, Conversations avec Kafka (Conversations with Kafka), trans. B. Lortholary, Paris, M. Nadeau editions, 1978, p. 202. The conversations would date from 1920-1921: it was in 1920 that Gustav Janouch, a young student of 17, sent his first poems to Franz Kafka, the young author of Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis), recently published. Several meetings between the two men followed, which Janouch transcribed as they occurred. The first publication in German dates from 1951, well after Kafka’s death.↩︎
The expression “becoming-animal” comes from the book by G. Deleuze and F. Guattari:↩︎
F. Kafka, Œuvres complètes (Complete Works), volume III, trans. M. Robert, C. David, J-P. Danès, Paris, Gallimard, Pléiade, pp. 1086-1087 (hereafter OC followed by the volume).↩︎
S. Mosès, L’Ange de l’histoire, op.cit., p. 303.↩︎
F. Kafka, Lettre au père (Letter to the Father), trans. M. Robert, in OC IV, p. 861.↩︎
Ibid., p. 862.↩︎
Ibid., p. 864.↩︎
Claude David, in his notice, notes that the narrator himself deplores this loosening in the narration when he says: “disorder has entered into my investigations; thus I slacken, I tire; I do nothing more than trot mechanically,” in OC II, p. 699.↩︎
Ibid., p. 686.↩︎
Ibid., p. 674.↩︎