Straight into the Bliss of Knowing

Søren Kierkegaard's Influence on Franz Kafka

Isak Winkel Holm

[uredigeret kapitel; vil blive trykt i Dan Ringgaard og Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Danish Literature as World Literature, Bloomsbury Academic 2016]

"You […] evidently feel as I do that one cannot evade the power of his terminology, of his conceptual discoveries. I think, for instance, of his concept of the dialectical, or his division into 'knights of infinity' and 'knights of faith,' or even the concept of 'movement.' From this concept one can be carried straight into the bliss of knowing, and even a wingstroke further." In the winter of 1917-18, after having been diagnosed with tuberculosis and having moved to Zürau, a village in the Bohemian countryside, to convalescence from his haemorrhage, Franz Kafka, in his own words, "really lost his way in Kierkegaard."1 In two letters to his friend Max Brod from March 1918, Kafka describes how Kierkegaard's terminology, and first of all the concept of movement, has carried him straight into the bliss of knowing, "and even a wingstroke further."

It is difficult to tell whether this wingstroke further than knowing leads Kafka to believing, to acting, or to writing, and whether these differences really matter. More alarmingly, however, it is also difficult to grasp the precise nature of the Glück des Erkennens, the bliss of knowing or, perhaps more precisely, the bliss of discovery into which Kafka is carried by Kierkegaard's concept of movement. Just as the concepts of the knight of infinity and knight of faith, the concept of movement — Bevægelse in Danish, Bewegung in German — plays a central role in Fear and Trembling, a book that Kafka seems to have just finished reading when he wrote the letters to Brod. Under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio, Kierkegaard polemically opposes philosophical mediation and existential movement, first of all the movement of infinity in which the individual resigns and feels the pain of renouncing everything, and the movement of faith in which the individual grasps everything

1 Throughout this chapter I quote from Kafka's two letters to Brod from March 5 and March 26 or 27 1918 without references (Kafka Letters to Friends 199-200; Kafka Briefe 1918-1920 30-36). I modify the English translation when necessary.

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again by virtue of the absurd.2 However, Kafka does not discuss Kierkegaard's use of the concept of "movement" in Fear and Trembling; neither does he adopt the concept by re-using it in his notebooks and letters. Nothing indicates that Kafka's use of the German word Bewegung from 1918 and onwards should be influenced by Kierkegaard's concept.

Kafka cannot evade the power of Kierkegaard's terminology, he confesses in the letters to Brod — but how does this power impact on Kafka's writing? So much light radiates from Kierkegaard "that some of it penetrates even to the deepest abysses," he adds further down in the same letter — but what does this light enable him to discover? These are not just questions about the relation between Kierkegaard and Kafka, but also questions about the relation between philosophy and literature. Kafka was well read in philosophy, first of all in the works of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, but except for the handful of letters and notes he wrote on Kierkegaard, he never discussed philosophical issues in writing. Instead, he stylized himself as incapable of philosophical thinking. In a letter to his fiancée Felice Bauer from 15 June 1913, four years earlier than the letters to Brod, he wrote: "I am unable to think, in my thinking I constantly come up against borders; certain isolated matters I can grasp in a flash, but I am quite incapable of coherent, consecutive thinking" (Kafka Letters to Felice). To make matters worse, Kierkegaard, too, is strangely unphilosophical, according to Kafka. In the letters to Brod, he comments upon the lack of coherence in the works of the Danish philosopher: "They are not unambiguous and even when later he develops himself into a kind of unambiguousness, this is also just part of his chaos of spirit, mourning, and faith." Thus, Kierkegaard's influence on Kafka is the influence of a work that is chaotic and ambiguous on a mind that is incapable of coherent, consecutive thinking: the bliss of knowing emerges where chaos meets incoherence.

In order to grasp the bliss of knowing in Kafka's encounter with Kierkegaard, I will explore not the abstract philosophical concept of movement but, rather, the concrete literary images by which Kierkegaard and Kafka flesh out this concept. In Fear and Trembling, Johannes de Silentio focuses on the story about Abraham at Mount Moriah when discussing the "double-movement" of giving up Isaac and getting Isaac again by virtue of the absurd. In his notebooks from the winter 1917-18, Kafka rewrites the Abraham story, not discussing the abstract concept of movements but describing

2 Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans., C. Stephen Evans and Sylvia Walsh (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 34.

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concrete physical movements such as Abraham emigrating from the transient world with his furniture wagon or Abraham using a springboard to jump back into the world.3 A few years later, Kafka imagines a series of moveable Abrahams in a letter to his young friend Robert Klopstock: "I can imagine another Abraham …" (Kafka Letters to Friends). However, Kafka's re-imagining of Kierkegaard's Abraham story is too complicated to be explored in a single chapter. Instead, I will hone in on the movement of an enchanted castle that wakes up and comes alive. Visibly inspired by the Grimm brothers' fairy tale "The Briar Rose" (also known as "The Sleeping Beauty"), Kierkegaard wrote a diary entry about sleeping castle in his journal in the autumn of 1854, one year before his death. As we shall see, a substantial part of this enchanted castle diary entry is quoted in Kafka's letters to Brod, and it comes to play an important role for his relation to Kierkegaard's works in general and to his understanding of the concept of movement in particular.

Semantic preliminariesIn Schopenhauers Bedeutung für die moderne Literatur (Schopenhauer's Significance for Modern Literature, 1998), professor of German studies David Wellbery explores the connection between Schopenhauer's thinking and modern literature, exemplified by the works of Samuel Beckett and Jorge Louis Borges, but also by Franz Kafka's unfinished novel The Castle. On the first pages of this slim, perceptive book, Wellbery contends that in order to explore this specific relation between philosophy and literature,

it is not sufficient to point out Schopenhauerian philosophical ideas in the texts. This way of referring literature back to its underlying propositional content is theoretically primitive, and, moreover, it is unable to grasp the secret of Schopenhauer's literary influence. (Wellbery 14)

If we want to grasp the secret of Schopenhauer's literary influence on modern literature, Wellbery adds, it is necessary to view the literary work not as "an allegorization of philosophical theses, not as a proposition about the essence of the world wrapped up in fiction" (50).

Wellbery's critique of the allegorization approach to the relation between philosophy and literature could be directed toward a large 3 For Abraham's furniture wagon, see (Kafka The Blue Octavo Notebooks 101). Abraham's springboard is only mentioned in a sentence that Kafka later deleted, see the notes to the critical edition (Kafka Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente, bd. 2. Apparatband, 239).

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part of the extensive research on Kafka and Kierkegaard.4 In the afterword to the first edition of The Castle, published posthumously in 1926, Max Brod recalls his friend's letters from Zürau and mentions Fear and Trembling, a work that "Kafka was very fond of, often read, and commented upon profoundly in many letters (Kafka Das Schloss 352). According to Brod, Kierkegaard's conceptualization of the relationship between man and God, "the incommensurability of earthly and religious action: this leads directly to the center of Kafka's novel" (Ibid.). This approach perceives the novel as an allegorization of Kierkegaard's philosophical ideas; its conceptual center is merely illustrated in fictional characters and episodes. As a consequence, Brod writes, "the seemingly bizarre form of the novel" makes perfect sense when seen in the light of Kierkegaard's philosophy (353). Following Brod, most early Kafka researchers studied Kafka's literary works as if their center consisted in philosophical terminology. One researcher was even able to identify a Kierkegaardian center in The Trial, a novel Kafka wrote in 1914, several years before his serious encounter with Kierkegaard's philosophical works in the winter of 1917-18 (Kelly).

A second phase of research stressed Kafka's critical stance toward Kierkegaard's philosophy, pointing out that Kafka's comments on Kierkegaard's works do not only express his bliss of knowing but also his skepticism toward the Dane's religious ideas. Methodologically, however, this body of research, too, approached Kierkegaard's influence on Kafka as a question of adherence or non-adherence to philosophical ideas, as if Kafka were perfectly capable of coherent, consecutive thinking. Only recently researchers have suggested that Kierkegaard's influence should not be seen as a philosophical discussion, i.e. that the power of Kierkegaard's terminology might not only be transmitted through the medium of philosophical concepts.5

Wellbery can help us to understand how. In order to grasp the secret of Schopenhauer's literary influence, he suggests that we view the philosophical text as a set of "semantic preliminaries" or "semantic prototypes" (semantische Vorleistungen or semantische Vorgaben). By semantic preliminary, he means a configuration of meaning that happens to trigger the literary production of meaning. In Kierkegaard's case, Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac and the coming alive of the enchanted castle are examples of semantic preliminaries. The point Wellbery stresses is that the Schopenhauerian

4 For overviews over the research in Kafka's encounter with Kierkegaard, see (Nagel; Eilitta ; Miethe; Irina).5 See (Lange; Eilitta )

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preliminaries enable a specific kind of thinking, namely the literary work's thinking about its own problems of literary form:

Through the different phases of modernity, the potential of Schopenhauer's philosophy, actualized again and again, can be found in the fact that it contains semantic preliminaries that contribute to the articulation of a formal issue corresponding to the level of reflection of modern art. (Wellbery 15)

Thus, traveling from Schopenhauer to Beckett, Borges, and Kafka, the "philosophical theses and insights are transformed into formal problems" (55). In the following, I will apply Wellbery's approach to the question of Kierkegaard's influence on Kafka. The point I want to make is that Kierkegaard's configurations of meaning function as "interpretative patterns for the formal problems" of Kafka's writing (45).

The research in Kierkegaard's influence on Kafka tends to conclude that Kafka either misunderstands or criticizes Kierkegaard's interpretation of Abraham.6 However, to see Kafka's relation to Kierkegaard as a misunderstanding or a critique is to presuppose that Kafka is talking about the same subject in the same language as Kierkegaard does. As I view it, Kafka does not enter into a philosophical discussion of the Abraham story; rather, the Abraham story is to be seen as a semantic preliminary that enables Kafka's literary self-reflection. He redirects the power of Kierkegaard's terminology so that it points toward his own writing. As we shall see in the following, the same goes for Kierkegaard's short narrative of the enchanted castle.

From next-door neighbor to some kind of starKafka's encounter with Kierkegaard is, in fact, two separate encounters, with the first focussing on the biography of the author and the second on the content of the works. In 1913, Kafka read Buch des Richters. Seine Tagebücher 1833-1855 (Book of the Judge. His diaries 1833-1855), a somewhat chaotic selection of Kierkegaard's papers translated by Hermann Gottsched in 1905. In a diary entry from August 1913, Kafka noted: "Today I got Kierkegaard's Buch des Richters. As I suspected, his case, despite essential differences, is very similar to mine, at least he is on the same side of the world. He bears me out like a friend" (Kafka Diaries 6 For example: "In these often very sarcastic remarks Kafka repeatedly mocks Abraham's mental faculties and motivations" (Eilitta 156). Or, more recently: "what [Kafka] is equipped to do is to show how the interpretation of Abraham does an injustice to Abraham’s experience" (North 140).

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298). Presumably in the same period, Kafka also read another selection of diary entries on Kierkegaard's relationship with Regina Schlegel named Sören Kierkegaards Verhältnis to zu "ihr" (Søren Kierkegaard's Relationship with "Her", 1905).7 The summer of 1913 was a particularly troubled phase of Kafka's troubled relationship with Felice Bauer, so the two very similar cases mentioned in the diary entry are, respectively, the case of Kierkegaard's broken engagement with Regina and the case of Kafka's soon-to-be broken engagement with Felice. Kierkegaard bears out Kafka like a friend because they are located on the same side of married life.

More than four years later, after the diagnosis of tuberculosis and the end of the relationship with Felice, Kafka re-reads Kierkegaard while living with his favorite sister in Zürau, this time not focussing on Kierkegaard's biography but, rather, on the content of his works. In November 1917, he starts out reading Either-Or, the first volume of which he confides that he cannot read "without repugnance." In February 1918, he goes on to read Fear and Trembling, The Repetition, and the polemical broadsheet The Moment (or The Instant). In the March 1918 letters to Brod, Kafka takes stock of this second encounter with Kierkegaard:

The 'physical' similarity to him that I imagined I had after reading that little book Kierkegaard’s Relationship to 'Her' […] has by now entirely evaporated. It’s as if a next-door neighbor had turned into some kind of star, in respect both to my admiration and to a certain cooling of my sympathy.

Apparently, Kierkegaard's transformation from next-door neighbor to some kind of star creates space for critical reflection. Kafka's comments upon Kierkegaard's works can be found not only in the letters to Brod but also in Kafka's re-imagning of the Abraham figure in nine notebook entries, a small subset of the more than 300 so-called Zürau Aphorisms that Kafka wrote during his sick-leave.

At first glance, the tuberculous Kafka reading Kierkegaard in a distant Bohemian village seems to confirm the mythological image of the lonesome Kafka facing the realm of existential truth, but nothing could be less true of Kafka's encounter with Kierkegaard. In the winter 1917-18, the reception of Kierkegaard was a collective endeavor of a small group of Jewish writers and intellectuals — in addition to Kafka and Brod, the group consisted of the novelist Oscar 7 In fact, Kierkegaard mixes up two similar books about Kierkegaard's relationship with Regina, (Kierkegaard Sören Kierkegaards Verhältnis to zu "ihr" and {Kierkegaard, 1905 #11). According to the editors of the critical edition of his works, he presumably read both books (Kafka Briefe 1918-1920 421).

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Baum and the philosopher Felix Weltsch — who kept up a lively exchange of letters about Kierkegaard and books by Kierkegaard between Prague and Zürau. The Kierkegaard reception of the so-called 'Prague Circle,' again, formed a part of the early wave of Kierkegaard influence in Germanic countries before World War One. Thanks to a recent series of anthologies, it is now possible to get a panoramic view of Kierkegaard's influence outside Denmark (Stewart Kierkegaard's International Reception vol. 1-3; Stewart Kierkegaard's Influence on Literature, Criticism, and Art, vol. 1-5). Seen from a high altitude, it is possible to distinguish between three major waves in Kierkegaard's influence on world literature.

The initial wave of influence was Scandinavian. The first book ever to be written on Kierkegaard, Søren Kierkegaard, written by the Danish scholar of comparative literature Georg Brandes and published in 1877, was translated into Swedish in 1877 and German in 1879. In the same years, a number of Danish and other Nordic writers inspired by Kierkegaard found European fame, most prominently the Norwegian Henrik Ibsen and the Danish novelists J.P. Jacobsen and Henrik Pontoppidan. Half a century later, Karen Blixen, writing in English under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen, was an avid reader of Kierkegaard and should be interpreted as an important part of Kierkegaard's influence on world literature.

The second wave of Kierkegaard's influence on world literature was Germanophone. After the translations and introductions by the theologians Hermann Gottsched and the controversial Christoph Schrempf in the last third of the 19th century, Kierkegaard came into fashion in the fin de siècle generation of German intellectuals. Surprisingly, the cross-over from protestant theology to modern literature was made by a Catholic essayist and novelist. In the well-written and widely read article "Sören Kierkegaard — Aphoristisch," published in the important literary journal Die neue Rundschau in 1906, Rudolf Kassner gave an enthusiastic account of Kierkegaard and his oeuvre, an impressive introductory work considering the state of Kierkegaard translations and Kierkegaard research available at the time. According to Kassner, Kierkegaard has nearly no terminology but is, in return, "definitively the biggest artist among all philosophers" (Kassner 42)8 Inspired by Kassner, the young Hungarian literary scholar Georg Lukács wrote an essay on Kierkegaard's broken engagement in 1909, published in Die Seele und die Formen (Lukács, 1974 #24). The poet Rainer Marie Rilke read the German translation of Kierkegaard's Christian Discourses in

8 For the relation between Kierkegaard, Kassner and Kafka, see (Tullberg) (Schulz).

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1901, even before becoming a close friend to Kassner, and soon set out to learn Danish in order to be able to read Kierkegaard and the novelist J.P. Jacobsen in the original. While traveling in Denmark and Sweden some years later, Rilke even began translating into German the letters of Kierkegaard. Also Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, and Karl Kraus contribute to the Germanophone "prereception" of Kierkegaard (Malik 393), the intense literary reception leading up to Kierkegaard's massive influence on twentieth-century philosophy and theology.

The third wave of influence was French. Interestingly, the French existentialists after World War Two became aware of Kierkegaard thanks to the work of Kafka. According to Jean-Paul Sartre, it was "through the atmosphere of Kafka that the French got access to Kierkegaard, and after him to Hegel" (Goth 138). This wave of influence was driven by the philosophical interest by the existentialist philosophers, but it also spilled over into literature through the literary works of Sartre and Camus and through the literary criticism by Maurice Blanchot.

Apart from these major waves of influence, a large number of smaller and less distinct waves brought Kierkegaard to Anglophone literature (e.g. W.H. Auden), to Spanish language literature (e.g. Miguel de Unamuno), and to other literatures. In general, the international reception of Kierkegaard, just like Kafka's personal reception, seems to move from Kierkegaard as a next-door neighbor to Kierkegaard as some kind of star, starting out with the peculiarities of Kierkegaard's biography and ending up with the power of Kierkegaard's terminology.

However, by pointing out a general movement from personal conflicts to philosophical content we have not yet begun to grasp the secret of Kierkegaard's influence on modern literature. Building on Wellbery, my contention is that modern literature, at least to a great extent, transforms Kierkegaard's philosophical theses and insights into formal problems. Kassner's influential essay can serve as an example. In its concluding chapter, "Die Form," Kassner discusses human life as "expression and form." Whereas Pascal found his form in the cloister, Nietzsche in the overman, and Plato in the ideas, Kierkegaard found his form in "the individual" (im Einzelnen) (Kassner 92). Through the form of the single individual, Kassner writes, Kierkegaard was able to give meaning to a lawless and shapeless modern world. Thus, by stressing the concept of form, he turns Kierkegaard's question of religious existence into a question of aesthetic expression: Kassner the writer uses the concept of the individual as a semantic preliminary with which to articulate the

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nature of writing. In order to hone in on this kind of self-reflective re-functioning of Kierkegaard's theses and insights, I will take a closer look at Kafka's two March 1918 letters to Brod.

A man who brings a primitivity with himIn the last letter to Brod from March 1918, Kafka ends the correspondence about Kierkegaard by quoting a diary entry about an enchanted castle that he read four years earlier in Bunch des Richters. In Kierkegaard's diary Journalen from the autumn 1854, the enchanted castle diary entry has the proverbial title "One Must Take the World as It Is." Buch des Richters only translates a part of Kierkegaard's diary entry, and Kafka, again, quotes only a part of the German text:

But as soon as a man comes along who brings a primitivity with him, so that he does not say that one takes the world as it is (the sign of passing through freely like a stickleback) but says: Whatever the world may be, I relate to an original principle which I do not intend to change at the world's discretion — the moment this word is heard, a transformation takes place in the whole of life. Just as in the fairy tale when the word is spoken and the castle which has been under a spell for a hundred years opens up and everything comes alive, just so life becomes sheer awareness. Angels get busy, watch curiously to see what will come of it, for this interests them. On the other hand, the somber, grumbling demons, proper limbs of the devil, who for a long time have been sitting inactive and chewing their fingernails, leap to their feet for here is something to do, they say, and they have waited a long time for that.9

In this quote, the movement is imaged as a "transformation" or a "metamorphosis" in the whole of life; Kierkegaard uses the word en Forvandling, and Kafka uses the word ein Verwandlung. In the non-translated part of the diary entry, Kierkegaard actually writes that the arrival of the man who brings a primitivity with him "sets both heaven and earth in motion." Kierkegaard's own semantic preliminary is the Grimm fairy tale "The Briar Rose" (or "The Sleeping Beauty"). When the young prince arrives, the hundred years of enchantment have passed and the sleeping castle is transformed by coming alive: "Indeed, the fire flared up and cooked the meat until 9 I cite Hong and Hong's translation of Kierkegaard's journal entry (Kierkegaard Søren Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers 632f, t.m.). For Kierkegaard's text in Danish, see (Kierkegaard Journalerne NB 32, 214). For a thorough English translation of Kafka's quotation from German, see (North 143).

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it began to sizzle again, and the cook gave the kitchen boy a box on the ear, while the maid finished plucking the chicken" (Grimm and Grimm 164). In Kierkegaard's rewriting of the fairy tale: "Just as in the fairy tale when the word is spoken and the castle which has been under a spell for a hundred years opens up and everything comes alive, just so life becomes sheer awareness."

This transformation in the whole of life can only be triggered by a man who brings a primitivity with him, not by men who pass freely like sticklebacks. In the first part of the text, untranslated in Buch des Richters, Kierkegaard describes the stickleback-man as the "specimen-man" (Exemplar-Msk; "Msk" is an abbreviation for "man," Menneske) who takes the world as it is. According to Kierkegaard, there are millions of these philistine specimen-men who "find everything given: concepts, ideas, thoughts, likewise custom and usage, in short, everything is given — the specimen-man brings nothing with him." These human beings are likened to sticklebacks because they pass freely through the fishing net set for "bigger fish." By the way, the Danish word for stickleback, hundestejle, has a dehumanizing ring to it because it contains the word for dog (hund).

On the other hand, the man who brings a primitivity with him does not say: one must take the world as it is. "Primitivity" (Primitivitet), then, is to be understood as some kind of ethical standard with which to correct the ethical and political order of a given community. In the margin, Kierkegaard adds: "And ethically, as pointed out elsewhere, primitivity means to put everything into it, to risk everything, the kingdom of God first and foremost." Here, Kierkegaard refers to an earlier diary entry in Journalen where primitivity is defined as "potential for 'spirit'" (Mulighed af "Aand") (Kierkegaard Journalerne NB31, 55). Apparently, it is the individual's radical insistence on his religious spirit that triggers the coming alive of the sleeping castle.

However, Kierkegaard describes the transformation of the castle not just in religious but also in political terms. In a section of the enchanted castle diary entry translated in Buch des Richters, but not quoted by Kafka, Kierkegaard reuses a formulation from St. Paul the Apostle and writes that the man who brings a primitivity with him is not "struggling with flesh and blood but with principalities and powers" (Eph. 6,12). The stickleback-man finds everything given, "likewise custom and usage" (ligesaa Skik og Brug). In Kierkegaard's Hegelian terminology, Skik og Brug refers to a people's Sittlichkeit, most often translated as moral substance. Thus, to take the world as it is is to accept the written and unwritten laws that govern human life. A world in which everything is given is a world devoid of

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political change. By contrast, the man who does not take the world as it is performs a revolutionary act that contests the given order of things. Kierkegaard wrote the enchanted castle diary entry in late October or early November 1854, i.e. in the latency period after he had heard his former tutor H. L. Martensen refer to the late bishop of Zealand J. P. Mynster as a "witness to the truth" at the funeral in February 1854 but before he unleashed his all-out assault on the Church with the polemical broadsheet The Moment. In other words, Kierkegaard's reflection upon the man who brings a primitivity with him is a prognosis of his own role in his upcoming attack on established Christianity. This explains the shrillness of the diary entry in which Kierkegaard portraits himself as a "bigger fish" while more or less the rest of humanity is described as shoals of innocuous sticklebacks: "one specimen-man and one million have equally little effect on life, which pours out of that kind as from a horn of plenty." 10

Unfortunately, Kafka quotes Kierkegaard's diary entry without commenting upon it. Instead, he ends the letter with another short quotation from Buch des Richters (to which I will return) and a handful of practical remarks. Hence, it is the task for the interpreter to reconstruct Kafka's understanding of the enchanted castle diary entry: Why did he chose this little-known text? And what role does it play in the discussion with Brod?

The first thing to note is that in March 1918 Kafka is 34 years old. At this late moment, he has already written the bulk of his authorship, and due to the tuberculosis he suspects that his authorship has come to an end. In other words, Kafka's encounter with Kierkegaard is not at story of a young man who becomes a Kierkegaardian, un fils spirituel de Kierkegaard, as suggested in the old Kafka research (Rops). It is, rather, a story of a mature writer who uses the power of Kierkegaard's terminology for his own purposes.

More specifically, Kafka has shown a strong interest in movements and transformations even before reading Fear and Trembling. As I have argued elsewhere, Kafka, throughout his entire authorship, circulates around the idea of a political event in which the collective discuss and reform the order of things (Winkel Holm). In the autobiographical "Researches of a Dog," a fragment of a story written during a break in the work on The Castle in July 1922, the

10 After having finished the diary entry, Kierkegaard seems to become aware of its arrogance and adds that he, "assuredly never was among the arrogant minds that overlooked other human beings" (Kierkegaard Journalerne 26,216).

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protagonist, a researcher dog, situates the miraculous political event in early history of the dog people:

at that time the true word could still have intervened, determined the construction, changed its tune, changed it at will, turned it into its opposite, and that word was there, or at least was near, hanging on the tip of everyone's tongue, everyone could receive it; where has it gone today? (Kafka Selected Stories 148, t.m.)

In the terminology of Hannah Arendt, this potential miraculous event is an action, an acting in concert that breaks with a petrified order of things and recreates the foundation for the political community: "The miracle [is] the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born" (Arendt 247). In Kierkegaard's enchanted castle diary entry, Kafka happens to stumble over a description of a political event of this kind: an image of a transformation in the whole of life. In other words, Kierkegaard's concept of movement is carrying Kafka into the bliss of knowing because it enables him to articulate a political problem with which he has been struggling for years.

To reconstruct Kafka's understanding of the enchanted castle diary entry, then, is to grasp the difference between Kierkegaard's notion of the miraculous event that transforms the whole of life, and Kafka's. In order to do so, I will situate the diary entry in two different contexts. First, I will delve into the immediate context, i.e. the two Kierkegaard letters to Brod. Second, in the last section of this chapter, I will suggest interpreting Kafka's third unfinished novel, The Castle, as Kafka's elaborate response to Kierkegaard's diary entry. After quoting Kierkegaard's description of the sleeping castle in March 1918, Kafka starts mentioning castles in his notebooks and diaries, until he finally sets out writing The Castle in January 1922.

The striving manIn his letter to Kafka in March 1918, Brod characterizes Kierkegaard's way to God as "negative" because he obtained certainty about God by afflicting himself with pain. In the first of the two letters to Brod, Kafka corrects his friend's characterization of Kierkegaard:

But he certainly cannot be called merely negative […] In Fear and Trembling, for example (which you ought to read now) his

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positivity [Positivität] is going toward the monstrous and only stops at the perfectly ordinary taxman [gewöhnlichen Steuereinnehmer]. What I mean is, the positivity becomes objectionable when it reaches too high. He doesn’t see the ordinary man (with whom, on the whole, he knows how to talk remarkably well) and paints this monstrous Abraham in the clouds. But all the same one cannot call him negative on that account […].

Brod and Kafka are not disagreeing about Kierkegaard's positivity but are, rather, talking at cross-purposes. Brod uses positivity as a psychological concept, i.e. as the opposite of "negative" phenomena such as melancholy and self-afflicted pain. A couple of years later, Brod insists on characterizing Kierkegaard as negative because he views Christianity as a religion of Diesseitsverneinung, of negation of the finite world (Brod Heidentum Christentum Judentum 284). Kafka, on the other hand, uses positivity as an epistemological concept, i.e. as a concept denoting a certain knowledge. Kierkegaard's positivity is going toward monstrous and "only stops at the perfectly ordinary taxman," Kafka writes, referring to the "knight of faith" described by Johannes de Silentio in Fear and Trembling as looking, surprisingly, like a philistine tax collector: "Dear me! Is this the person, is it actually him? He looks just like a tax collector!" (Kierkegaard Fear and Trembling 32). The translator H.C. Ketels translates the Danish word for tax collector, Rodemester, by the German Steuereinnehmer (Kierkegaard Furcht und Zittern), which is also the word Kafka uses. Johannes de Silentio acknowledges he has no access to certain knowledge about this tax collector's relationship to the divine. In Kierkegaardian terminology, de Silentio approaches "the paradox of faith," which is "that there is an inwardness that is incommensurable with the outer" (Fear and Trembling 60). After the exclamation "Dear me! Is this the person," de Silentio expands upon the incommensurability of the relationship to the divine:

Nevertheless it really is him. I draw a little closer to him and pay attention to the slightest movement to see whether a little heterogeneous fraction of a signal from the infinite manifests itself – a glance, an air, a gesture, a sadness, a smile that betrayed the infinite in its heterogeneity with the finite. No! I examine his figure from head to foot to see if there might not be a crack through which the infinite peeped out. No! He is solid through and through. (Fear and Trembling 32)

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According to Kafka, however, Kierkegaard's monstrous positivity only stops at the perfectly ordinary taxman. Except for this taxman, Kafka suggests, Kierkegaard claims to have positive knowledge about the infinite in its heterogeneity with the finite. To be monstrously positive is to claim to be receiving some kind of optical telegraphy from the infinite.

This idea of Kierkegaard's positivity is developed in the second letter to Brod where Kafka addresses the question of religiosity. Brod, enthusiastic as always, has become a follower of Kierkegaard, but Kafka is more reserved: "Kierkegaard’s religious situation doesn’t come across to me with the extraordinary clarity it has for you." Once again, Kafka points out a problem that has to do with the incommensurability of the individual's relationship to the divine:

For the relationship to the divine [das Verhältnis zum Göttlichen] evades any outside judgment, as K[ierkegaard] sees it; perhaps this is so much so that Jesus himself would not be permitted to judge how far a follower of his has come. To K it seems to be, so to speak, a question of the Last Judgment, which is to say answerable — insofar as an answer will still be needed — only after the end of this world. Consequently the present external image of the religious relationship has no significance.

So far, Kafka is in accordance with Kierkegaard's idea of a religious interiority that is incommensurable with exteriority and therefore, like the interiority of the tax-collector, impossible to judge from the outside, even when it is Jesus who judges from the outside. In the following sentence, however, Kafka reverses the Kierkegaardian negativity into positivity. There is no positive answer to the question of the indvidual's relationship to the divine, but Kierkegaard's trick is to somehow tilt this negativity into positivity:

However, the religious relationship wishes to reveal itself, but cannot do so in this world; therefore striving man must oppose this world in order to save the divine element within himself. Or, what comes to the same thing, the divine sets him against the world in order to save itself. Thus the world must be raped by you as well as by Kierkegaard, in one place more by you, in another place more by him.

Per definition, the incommensurable religious relationship cannot be revealed. Nevertheless, Kafka's argument is that it still wishes to

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reveal itself (sich offenbaren), and that it is forced to do so by opposing the world. Seen in this way, the striving man is positive because he is polemical; he "saves" his religious relationship by assaulting the world.11

It is highly probable that Kafka found this argument in Rudolf Kassner's essay on Kierkegaard. The paradox, Kassner writes, is the contradiction between the individual and the surrounding world: "the beauty and the goodness of the individual is of its own kind, and therefore he lives against the opinion of the others. The individual is his form, but the form in which the others understand him, is the contradiction, the paradox" (Kassner 93). In Kassner's words, Kafka's argument is that striving man needs to live against the opinion of the others: his wish to reveal himself is forcing him to provoke a contradiction with the surrounding world. Kafka uses a remarkably strong word for this positivity through provocation: striving man is constrained to "overpower" or even "rape" the world in order to save the divine element within himself (so muß die Welt vergewaltigt werden). The monstrous positivity is an abusive positivity because it is has to do violence to the world.

At the very end of the last letter to Brod, Kafka once more addresses the question of positivity through provocation by quoting another passage from Buch des Richters:

I share the assumptions that Christianity makes (suffering in more than the ordinary measure and guilt of a special sort) and I find my refuge in Christianity. But authority [Myndighed] or directly proclaiming it to others — this I cannot properly do, for I cannot provide them with the assumptions. (Kierkegaard Buch des Richters 114; Kierkegaard Journalerne NB 32, 23,272).

This time, the question of positivity is framed as a question of authority, a question that was central to Kierkegaard during his polemical assault on Danish Christendom in 1855. According to Kierkegaard, his role is to proclaim Christianity "without authority," as he states several times. In the German translation Kafka used, Kierkegaard writes that he cannot "proclaim it peremptorily" (gebieterisch … verkündigen). According to Kafka, however, Kierkegaard's peremptory positivity is not only to be found in the

11 This logic of turning negativity into positivity is described by Paul North who describes Kafka's critique of Kierkegaard as a critique of a "fake withdrawal": "If the withdrawal of meaning can be given meaning, if it is the withdrawal of meaning as a reaction to some human fault, for some divine purpose, in view of a future return, and so on, then meaning has not actually withdrawn" (North 146).

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direct proclamation of Christianity but also, indirectly, in the provocation of Christendom.

Kafka's quotation of the enchanted castle diary entry is found between the two quotations discussed above, i.e. between Kafka's remarks about the striving man and the Kierkegaard quote about the lack of authority. As I mentioned earlier, Kafka does not comment upon the enchanted castle diary entry, but it seems obvious that it should be interpreted on the background of the surrounding discussion of positivity. Put into this conceptual context, Kierkegaard's "man who brings a primitivity with him" equals Kafka's "striving man." And Kierkegaard's "primitivity" is more or less synonymous with Kafka's "positivity." In both cases, a single individual assaults the world on the mandate of some kind of religious truth. This conceptual context turns the enchanted castle diary entry into a complicated image. In Kafka's letters, the diary entry reads like a story of a metaphysical drug rape in which an individual at the same time wakes up and rapes a sleeping castle. Surprisingly, the young prince of the fairy tale turns out to be a rapist.

As far as I can see, there are fundamentally two ways in which to reconstruct Kafka's understanding of the enchanted castle diary entry. One interpretation would claim that Kafka dismisses the coming alive of the castle altogether. If the transformation in the whole of life needs a striving man who, as Kierkegaard writes, relates to an original principle, then this transformation is an act of violence that should be evaded. Several researchers interpret Kafka's relation to Kierkegaard's positivity this way, i.e. as an expression of skepticism toward the very possibility of a political transformation. The problem is that this interpretation does not fit in with Kafka's formulation about his being carried straight into the bliss of knowing from the concept of movement. If Kafka is enthusiastic about the concept of movement it is highly improbable that he should quote a lengthy passage from Kierkegaard's Journal just in order to criticize this very concept.

Another interpretation would claim that Kafka does not dismiss the coming alive of the sleeping castle as such. Instead, he is hinting at another notion of coming alive. This alternative transformation in the whole of life would not be triggered by the self-confident positivity of the striving man, as in Kierkegaard, but comes into being in some other way. In order to explore this other kind of movement, I will leave behind Kafka's letters to Brod and turn to The Castle.

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The melancholy residentIn the village below the castle in Kafka's last unfinished novel, The Castle, the villagers take the world as it is. Frieda, the barmaid who quickly becomes the girlfriend of the protagonist, K., has "intimate knowledge of local affairs" in comparison to K., the foreigner (Kafka The Castle 125). The other villagers, too, not least Gardena, the gigantic innkeeper's wife, keep stressing that to them, the order of things is a matter of course. This taking the world as it is has made the world fall asleep like the castle in "Briar Rose." When K. arrives on the first pages of the novel, most villagers are fast asleep, and throughout the entire novel, the castle authorities have the remarkable habit of lying in bed when they are negotiating with K.12

However, the arrival of K. makes the people aware. At the night of his arrival, K. is awakened by the young Schwarzer, the son of a castle sub steward, who, due to his unpleasant behaviour and his ominous name, is easy to identify as one of the somber, grumbling demons of the enchanted castle diary entry. The following day K. encounters the angelic messenger Barnabas who is "dressed almost entirely in white" and is flying at high speed when he walks (25). At the end of the novel, K. inadvertently enters in to the room of the castle official Bürgel, who, waking up from sleep, immediately sets out to give a detailed account of the bureaucratic procedures of the castle. While K. is falling asleep, Bürgel gives his private version of the enchanted castle diary entry with angels and demons waiting for the striving man. According to Bürgel, the desperate castle official "sits there waiting for the party’s plea, knowing that one must grant it as soon as it is uttered, even if it should, at any rate insofar as one can perceive this oneself, literally tear apart the official system [die Amtsorganisation förmlich zerreißt]" (269).

On the other hand, K. does not say that one takes the world as it is. Instead, he keeps asking annoying questions about things that the villagers perceive as matters of course. In the words of the enchanted castle diary entry, and its allusion to St. Paul the Apostle, K. is "struggling with flesh and blood but with principalities and powers." At the night of his arrival, K.s affirms that he is the land surveyor sent for by the Count who owns the castle. In this context, it is important to note that land surveying is a politically charged work to the extent that a surveyor does not take the spatial distribution of the world as it is. This political aspect of land surveying becomes clear already at the night of the arrival: "He watched the peasants gathering timidly and conferring [sich

12 This goes for the village council chairman in chapter 5, for the innkeeper's wife in chapter 6, and for the castle official Bürgel in chapter 23.

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besprechen], the arrival of a land surveyor was no trifling matter" (3).

The arrival of a land surveyor is no trifling matter because it might entail a transformation in the whole of life, as Kierkegaard wrote in the enchanted castle diary entry. As the official Bürgel explained, the individual party’s plea could, if put rightly, "literally tear apart the official system," thereby opening up the castle. It is remarkable, too, that some of the villagers have high hopes for the deeds of the land surveyor. From her tiny, dark chamber the low-ranking barmaid Pepi, for instance, perceives K. as "a hero, a rescuer of maidens" (290). K.s power to trigger a transformation in the whole of life is underlined by the fact that the Hebrew word for Messiah, mashiah, is nearly identical to a (not much used) Hebrew word for land surveyor, mashoah.13

To be sure, the transformation of village life does not take place in the novel. K. never gets to do the job as a land surveyor or a rescuer of maidens. Instead, he ends up in a lowly position as a stableman, and according to Brod, Kafka planned that K. should die soon after (Brod "Nachwort" 3476). However, the introductory chapter contains an important scene in which we see the castle opening up. After his first night in the village, K. wakes up at the village inn and sets out walking through the deep snow toward the castle. On his way, he stops and sees the castle for the first time, sharply outlined in the clear air. As K. continues, he makes a detailed comparison between the church tower in his homeland and the tower of the castle. These important pages have received much interest in Kafka research, and rightfully so, but in this context, I will have to restrict myself to the concluding description of the castle tower:

The tower up here — it was the only one in sight — the tower of a residence, as now became evident, possibly of the main Castle, was a monotonous round building, in part mercifully hidden by ivy, with little windows that glinted in the sun — there was something crazy about this — and ending in a kind of terrace, whose battlements, uncertain, irregular, brittle, as if drawn by the anxious or careless hand of a child, zigzagged into the blue sky. It was as if some melancholy resident, who by rights ought to have kept himself locked up in the most out-of-the-way room in the house, had broken through the roof and stood up in order to show himself to the world. (8)

13 This relation was pointed out by (Beck 195).

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The mysterious description of "some melancholy resident" (irgendein trübseliger Hausbewohner) becomes less mysterious when we take into account Kafka's inspiration by Kierkegaard's enchanted castle diary entry. In "Briar Rose," the princess pricks herself on a spindle when visiting an old woman locked away with a key in a little room at the end of a narrow staircase in an old tower. (It is, in fact, an open question whether the old woman is the fairy who had to be excluded from the feast at the beginning of the tale, and who threw her spell over the new-born baby.) The melancholy resident is kept locked up in an out-of-the-way room similar to that of the old woman. Just like the old woman, but in a different way, the melancholy resident challenges the order of things, in this case the local version of justice that determines where he "by rights" (gerechterweise) should be located in the social order. The melancholy resident stands up in order to show himself to the world, and like the English "standing up," the German sich erheben not only refers to a physical movement (in latin tollere, according to Deutsche Wörterbuch by the same Grimm brothers), but also to a political movement (surgere), the movement by which a people claims its rights.

Thus, both the enchanted castle diary entry and the passage about the melancholy resident describe a transformation in which a castle opens up and comes alive. Indeed, the melancholy resident literally breaks through the roof of the castle. However, there are some crucial differences between these two movements. In Kierkegaard, the transformation is triggered by the opposition between the single individual and the world. The man who brings a primitivity with him founds his revolutionary mission on an original principle, a primitivity, which he does "not intend to change at the world's discretion." As Kafka argued, the Kierkegaardian striving man is forced to oppose the world in order to save the divine element within himself. In Kafka's novel, on the other hand, the transformation of the castle is triggered not by the opposition between individual and world, but by the exposure of the melancholy resident: he breaks through the roof in order to show himself to the world. What we see in the novel, is an alternative transformation in the whole of life, a movement that is not founded in any positivity. This political event is not a fight between antagonistic forces but, rather, a falling apart of a given structure, a kind of accelerated crumbling of the castle tower. Some lines above the melancholy resident, it is said that the stone of the tower "seemed to be crumbling," as if K. was watching the castle disintegrate under his very eyes.

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I suggest interpreting the description of "the tower up here" as a description of modern art and, more specifically, of Kafka's own writing. The melancholy resident not only refers to the old woman in "Briar Rose," but also to Gregor Samsa in Kafka's story "The Metamorphosis." He, too, is by rights kept locked up in an out-of-the-way room so that he does not bother the rest of the Samsa family with his disgusting beetle shape. In general, the idea of being locked up in a distant room is prominent in Kafka's autobiographical and fictional writing (Stach). The comparison between the two towers is, first of all, a comparison between two kinds of endings, of two different Abschlüsse. The church tower back home was "ending by a wide roof with red tiles" (breitdachig abschließend mit roten Ziegeln); "the tower up here," on the other hand, is "ending in a kind of terrace" (einem söllerartigen Abschluß). This terrace-like or balcony-shaped ending of the castle tower can be interpreted as an image of a fractured and fragmentary ending of the work of art. Kafka's notebooks are full of unfinished and fragmentary fictional stories, and also of poetological reflections upon his own incapacity to finish his stories. Indeed, Kafka's novel The Castle is, in itself, an unfinished and fragmentary castle tower.

When Kafka writes that there is "something crazy about" the castle tower, and that its battlements are "uncertain, irregular, brittle, as if drawn by the anxious or careless hand of a child," he is, I contend, describing his own work as a writer of modern fiction. The church tower back home had a much more direct movement, it aimed "tapering decisively, without hesitation, straightaway toward the top." As many Kafka researchers have pointed out, this can be seen as a description of the institution of traditional religion, first of all the religion of the Eastern Jews living in the shtetls of Poland, Russia, and Hungary, and among others, described by Martin Buber and Kafka's friend Jitzhak Löwy.14 And, one could add, the decisive, straightaway movement of the church tower might also refer to the religion of Søren Kierkegaard, based as it is on the positivity of an original principle. By contrast, the castle tower can be seen as an image of the institution of modern literature in its uncertain, irregular, and brittle movement. Still, it is important to note that even the crumbling castle tower is moving upwards, although in a much more indirect way. The melancholy resident breaks through the roof and stands up in order to show himself to the world. And the battlements of the tower "zigzagged into the blue sky" (in den blauen Himmel zackten), moving in jags or in notches, but nevertheless moving upwars into the blue sky.14 See, among others, (Robertson 241; Dowden 127).

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The end or the beginningA week before writing the first Kierkegaard letter to Brod, in a notebook entry dated 25 February 1918, Kafka compares his own literary writing with Kierkegaard's religious writing:

The slight amount of the positive, and also of the extreme negative, which capsizes into the positive, are something in which I have had no hereditary share. I have not been guided into life by the hand of Christianity — admittedly now slack and failing — as Kierkegaard was, and have not caught the hem of the Jewish prayer shawl — now flying away from us — as the Zionists have. I am an end or a beginning. (Kafka The Blue Octavo Notebooks 98-99)

In this chapter, I have explored how Kafka, in his comments upon Kierkegaard, hones in on the Danish philosopher's hereditary share of the positive. According to Kafka, Kierkegaard was positive because he was guided by the hand of Christianity, even if it was already slack and failing, just like Kafka's Zionist friends were positive because they had managed to catch the hem of the Jewish prayer shawl, even if this positivity too was already vanishing. As we have seen, Kafka characterizes Kierkegaard's version of positivity as an extreme negativity that has somehow capsized or tipped over into the positive (zum Positiven umkippenden Negativen): the negativity of the indvidual's incommensurable relationship to the divine is tilted into the positivity of certain knowledge.

In the metaphorical language of The Castle, discussed in the previous section, Kierkegaard can be likened to the old church tower that was "tapering decisively, without hesitation, straightaway toward the top." Kafka, on the other hand, is "uncertain" (unsicher), his work irregular and brittle because not founded on any political or religious positivity.

If this is so, one might expect that Kafka would finish the notebook entry by describing himself as a historical endpoint: Ich bin Ende. Emulating the Lord in the Christian Revelation, however, Kafka writes "I am an end or a beginning" — more insecure and ambivalent than the Lord, to be sure, but also more self-confident than we normally imagine him. According to Kafka, modern literature, too, could be a beginning. In Arendt's words about the political event, he perceives literature as a miraculous action, as "the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born" (Arendt 247).

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Thus, Kierkegaard's diary entry offers an opportunity for Kafka to reflect upon the function of modern literature. In contrast to Kierkegaard's self-confident view of his mission to transform the whole of life, Kafka perceives his role as a modern writer as creating another kind of transformation, a political event not dependent on a single individual who relates to some positive original principle. Instead of Kierkegaard's decisive, straightaway movement toward the top, Kafka tries to imagine a way of zigzagging into the blue sky — a fine description of the precarious transcendence of modern literature. In Wellbery's words, the enchanted castle diary entry as semantic preliminary contributes to the articulation of the very core of Kafka's literary project.

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