The Issue of Repetitiveness in Kafka
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The Issue of Repetitiveness in Kafka Richard Müller Ústav pro českou literaturu AV ČR [email protected] https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5871-9304 THE ISSUE OF REPETITIVENESS IN KAFKA The paper inquires into the phenomenon of repetition in the works of Franz Kafka and in what ways it might characterize his way of writing (and his understanding of writing). Ibegin by making adistinction between three different planes of repetition, or repetitiveness: (1) as a‘method’ of production; (2) as asymptom of the characters’ situations; and (3) as arepresentation technique. First, there are different versions of the same text, equivalent in terms of finality, but perhaps also acertain existential rhythm (as exemplified by Kafka’s famous ‘schedules’). Isuggest that acomparative reading of Heinrich von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas (1810) could provide an insight into this feature of ‘productivity’. Second, repetitive characters’ situations create certain patterns and beg the question of their complex reader effects. Finally, and in addition to ‘classical’ discursive repetitions, there are minor textual recurrences (as in his ‘breakthrough’ story, “The Judgment”) and the question whether these can be related to an analogy in technical reproduction. Are they part of an experimental narrative method? Is there a‘sense’ to repetition in Kafka and can these provisional distinctions help us understand it? How should their entanglement be described? KEYWORDS: Repetition— Franz Kafka— writing— disorientation— technical reproduction DOI https://doi.org/10.14712/23366729.2024.1.3 My inquiry does not emerge from the question of what theory or concept of repetition1 should be employed to do justice to its function in Kafka’s writing, but rather: 1 E.g. Deleuze (1969; the generalized distinction between clothed and naked repetition). More specialized approaches are exemplified by Kawin 1972 (with afocus on literature and film); Kazalarska 2012 (the ‘emotional-textual’ approach); Kivy 1993 (the ‘ornamental’ approach). (On ornament and aestheticism in Kafka from the literary and art historical point of view see Anderson 1993.) For ashort general comparative overview Iam indebted to Josef Šebek and his 2016 unpublished paper “The Blurred Space In-Between: Repetition in Fiction and Affectivity” presented at the XXIst Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association in Vienna. OPEN ACCESS
RICHARD MüLLER 33 What approach to repetition does Kafka’s writing invite and, indeed, require, and within what structure of distinctions? What is the ‘sense’ of repetition in Kafka? Iwould like to start by making afew introductory general remarks. Repetition, whether concerning elements, events, situations, acts, rhythms, or repetitions themselves, seems, first of all, phenomenally ambivalent. One might associate repetition with predictability, sustainable processes, structure, and thus also growth, reproduction, and even will, resolution, and courage (later Iwill talk about von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas in this connection), but also exhaustion, dissipation, deprivation of meaning, overgrowth, fatigue, mechanism, and other negatively connoted phenomena.2 The relationship of repetition to meaning— or alack of relationship— is decisive. Repetition can be seen as abasic temporal phenomenon which gives, or deprives things of meaning, but also, let us admit, as something that just occurs without any direct relationship to intention, will, or orientation. The grounds for the last case are put forward, for instance, by Friedrich Nietzsche as he brings into focus the universe and natural ‘laws’ where “there is no one who commands, no one who obeys, no one who transgresses”.3 Let us consider, then, that repetitions might repeat themselves, resulting in the production of certain basic forms of recursion, and, moreover, that repetitions themselves can be seen as failures not to repeat. If it seems that my observations are too abstract, or associative, let me point out that they are actually grounded in the generalization derived from situations spanning not asmall ambit of Kafka’s textual universe. The perspective of failure seems particularly prominent. Walter Benjamin’s words to Gershom Scholem in aletter from 12th June 1938 support this observation: “To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and its peculiar 2 When words in verse structure are repeated (as in anaphora or epizeuxis, for instance), meaning and figuration are effected (giving rise to ‘structure’). When one keeps repeating the same difficult passage on the violin, the disposition of its reproduction takes root in mind and body, and the process is possibly experienced as pleasurable (exerting ‘will’, effecting ‘growth’). When Titorelli in The Trial presents to K. aseries of exactly the same paintings of aheathscape, asense of exhaustion and mindless replication is strengthened as similar situations seem to repeat themselves and pervade the storyworld (resulting in ‘dissipation’, ‘fatigue’, deploying ‘mechanism’). 3 Nietzsche’s critique of conceiving the ‘universe’ antropomorphically is articulated in the aphorism “Let us beware” (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, 1882) thus: “The total character of the world, by contrast, is for all eternity chaos, not in the sense of alack of necessity but of alack of order, organization, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever else our aesthetic anthropomorphisms are called. Judged from the vantage point of our reason, the unsuccessful attempts are by far the rule; the exceptions are not the secret aim, and the whole musical mechanism repeats eternally its tune, which must never be called amelody— and ultimately even the phrase ‘unsuccessful attempt’ is already an anthropomorphism bearing areproach. But how could we reproach or praise the universe!” (Nietzsche 2001, p.109). Not without acertain continuity with Nietzsche’s thought and pertinence to our topic, it has been argued by Gernot Böhme that there are certain entities such as ‘atmosphere’ that belong neither solely to the object (even if they consist of its features) nor solely to the subject (even if they are only co-constituted by the subjectivity of aperceiver), but “are situated on the borderline between object and subject” (Böhme 2001, p.54). On ‘atmosphere’ see also Gumbrecht 2012, on ‘atmosphere and repetition’ see Kazalarska 2012. OPEN ACCESS
34 SVĚT LITERATURY 69 beauty, one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the figure of afailure”.4 With that in mind, we can recognize that repeating failures to repeat as well as (repeating) failures not to repeat constitute firstor second-, or firstand second-order repetitions. (It is only when afailure to repeat fails to repeat itself, so to speak, that no repetition occurs.) failure not to repeat fails to repeat itself = first-order repetition = situation of discontinuity: the child inherits acertain psychic trait from his/her parent and decides to avoid becoming aparent him/herself failure to repeat repeats itself = second-order repetition = repeated failures, ‘Chinese whispers’: amessenger fails to repeat message Ato arecipient and the recipient fails to repeat message A’ to another recipient failure not to repeat fails not to repeat itself = firstand second-order repetition = repeated repetitions, the situation of encroachment: aslip of tongue keeps recurring and then repeats itself again during an attempt at correcting it Without adoubt, these types of repetitions, in the sense of paradoxical recursion (even if not necessarily symmetrically, formally organized), are especially significant in Kafka’s writing. For instance, in “The Judgement” (Kafka’s ‘breakthrough story’), Georg lets himself fall from the bridge and thus ultimately fails to replicate the trajectory of his father (taking over the business, getting married), which is repeated, on some level, in some sense, by Kafka’s recurring failure to follow in his father’s footsteps, which he famously reflects on in the Letter to the Father and in other writings.5 What Kafka deemed acontinuing series of failures in life— his unsuccessful attempts to get married, to finish his texts, to make decisions of various kinds—, however, should not be viewed as mere failures in the usual sense of the word.6 (Think, also, of Nietzsche’s deconstruction of the so-called ‘unsuccessful attempts.’) What are these failures, then, if their significance is not meant to be simply reversed and taken for success? Perhaps motifs, not scarce in Kafka’s texts, of trying to find away out or break free from acircle point us in the right direction.7 Here ahypothesis presents 4 Benjamin— Scholem 1997, p.226. 5 Notice the motif of literal steps: “It is as if one person had to climb five low steps and asecond person only one, but one which is, at least for him, as high as those five put together; the first person will not only manage the five but hundreds and thousands as well, he will have led agreat and very strenuous life, but none of the steps he has climbed will have had the significance for him as that one first, high step had for the second, which for all his strength was impossible to climb and which he cannot get up onto and which he naturally doesn’t get past, either” (Kafka 1998, p.57). 6 Asimilar observation— of Kafka’s ungrounded self-criticism— has been expressed many times (beginning with Brod); see Stach 2013, for instance, or Koch— Wagenbach 2002. 7 In “Decisions” from Contemplation: “But even when it turns out this way, with every mistake— and mistakes are inevitable— the whole thing, the easy and the difficult, will break down, and Iwill have to turn back into the circle” (Kafka 1997, unpaginated). In “AReport to an Academy”: “No, it was not freedom Iwanted. Just away out [Ausweg]; to the OPEN ACCESS
RICHARD MüLLER 35 itself: Do repetitions and failures combine to create apossibility of achieving some kind of solution or transcendence in an otherwise hopeless situation? Do repetitions entangled with failures paradoxically amount to finding away out of an impasse, to break free from acyclic repetition, from avicious circle?8 The question then is: Which levels or connection of levels may then establish such away out (Ausweg)? Proceeding from these observations, Iwill make adistinction between three major functions of repetition and repetitiveness in Kafka: (1) as a‘method’ of production; (2) as asymptom of the characters’ situations; (3) as arepresentation technique and experimental narrative method. Such acombination of ‘functions’, spanning different ontic levels, seems to correspond to the peculiar character of the relationship between Kafka’s writing and life, which Iwill discuss further below.9 1. REPETITION AS AMETHOD OF PRODUCTION As the critical and manuscript editions of Kafka’s works make apparent,10 textual fragments and variants tend to be characterized by potential sameness, alessened (if not negated) sense of hierarchy in terms of their proximity to completion. This concerns primarily, but not exclusively the texts unpublished during Kafka’s time. Even if this impression might arise only in hindsight, as aconsequence of the unusual ratio between the number of works published by the author during his lifetime and those published posthumously by editors, the fact that Franz Kafka tended to hesitate over publication11 suggests that this feature is part of aspecific approach to writing. It is something that Kafka himself reflects on in terms of failure, but it can also be seen as acertain feature of productivity. Sometimes, different versions have asimilar status (for example, the three versions of “Preparations for aWedding”, the two versions of “Description of aStruggle”), while ‘fragments’ are not necessarily more distant from completion. Sometimes, fragments seem to be equally related to apublished text (the three fragments connected to “AReport to an Academy”), at other times (and depending on our interpretation), crossed-out passages seem equally important as those which tend to remain (e.g. acrossed-out passage on the crossbreed’s communication by silence is often retained in readers’ editions);12 unfinished, apparently related texts span different notebooks. All this contradicts text canonically right, to the left, wherever; Imade no other demands; even if the way out should only be adelusion; my demand was small, the delusion would not be greater” (Kafka 2007b, p.80). 8 On such circle, think of the author’s remark on ‘original sin’: “Original sin, the old injustice committed by man, consists in the complaint unceasingly made by man that he has been the victim of an injustice, the victim of original sin” (quoted in Benjamin 2007, p.114). The vicious circle connects the father and the son as both perpetrators of sin (sinful complainants) and its (innocent) inheritors. 9 See also Koch— Wagenbach 2002. 10 As representative, consider, for example, Kafka 1990a, b, c (S.Fischer publishing house’s critical edition of The Diaries), or Kafka 1990d (the manuscript edition of The Trial). 11 See Brod 2009. 12 Kafka 1995a. OPEN ACCESS
36 SVĚT LITERATURY 69 understood in modern written cultures— defined, as it is, by aseries of oppositions, such as, and primarily, text for publication versus variants and preparatory notes. In this respect, the so-called Diaries are characteristic: They contain avariety of texts making no distinction between fiction and non-fiction, recordings of everyday experience, thoughts, ideas, excerpts, recordings of dreams, drafts of letters, drafts of fictional texts, notes on future work and the final-version texts, or at least something very close to it. Symbolically and materially, these texts create acontinuum: quarto and octavo notebooks filled with several independent texts written in parallel; texts repeatedly brought to ahalt and resumed again, rewritten on different material supports; parts of the material medium extracted from the whole. This is the case of The Trial manuscript, for instance, which was scribed on 160 pages ripped from ten octavo notebooks, where pages do not contain only the text of The Trial, but many other recordings and types of recordings.13 Underlying this is an understanding of writing as an existential activity,14 whose products need not pass through the filter of publication. Writing and life are not in opposition, it is more as if life constituted akind of shadow zone of writing capable of providing material to it with its shades and hues. Aparasitical relationship between both, which can be switched depending on the perspective. (This, by the way, marks the situation in “The Metamorphosis”: Of all people, one might expect asocial parasite, such as, perhaps, an artist or writer, to be associated with an insect. Instead, it is the heretofore provider for afamily who transforms overnight into “amonstrous vermin”, “ein ungeheueres Ungeziefer”.)15 Writing thus creates acontinuity on the predicament of life, and it is exactly this continuity that turns every work into afragment, an incomplete part of awhole, while constituting the very possibility of making sense. The continuity of writing is unhappily dependent on the continuing condition of life’s intermittence (the ‘bottom side’ of writing). By ‘life’s intermittence’ Imean that life interferes with, disturbs the power and purity of writing, the concentration needed to achieve such purity, and also that it is subject to definitive interruption, to end. This constitutes aparadoxical kind of ‘rhythm’ where, as in The Diaries, different forms acquire similar functions in acontinuous space, which is not aspace simply opposed to life, but where life is its reverse side, its shadow. In most simple terms: what Kafka so often asserts— I’m nothing but literature, Icannot be anything else (to Felice Bauer),16 Idieted in all directions but writing (diaries),17 and so on— should be taken as part of aspecific understanding of, or approach to writing. His ‘last will’ notes, which are sometimes understood in terms of 13 Pasley 1989. 14 On this, see also Koch— Wagenbach 2002. 15 Cf. Anders 1951. 16 “Ihave no literary interests, but am made of literature, Iam nothing else, and cannot be anything else.” Aletter from 14th August 1913, Kafka 1999, p.341. 17 “When it became clear in my organism that writing was the most productive direction for my being to take, everything rushed in that direction and left empty all those abilities which were directed towards the joys of sex, eating, drinking, philosophical reflection, and above all music. Iatrophied in all these directions.” Adiary entry from 3rd January 1912, Kafka 1976, p. 163. OPEN ACCESS
RICHARD MüLLER 37 asemantic or pragmatic contradiction (as saying one thing and meaning another, or as meaning one thing and doing another), should be taken more literally: When the continuity of writing is interrupted once and for all by the inherent intermittence of life, the relationship is irredeemably reverted, and fragments turn into what they always appeared to be— i.e. mere fragments. They simply cease to subsist on acertain process. Max Brod only briefly acknowledges and immediately rejects Kafka’s objection that “the publication of work he had done would lead him astray in his future work”. These are Kafka’s words: “What sense would there be in reviving such […] bungled pieces of work? Only if one hoped to create awhole out of the fragments, some complete work to which one could make afinal appeal, abreast on which Icould beat in my hour of need. But Iknow that is impossible here. So what am Ito do with the things?”18 At the very least, Kafka makes asort of global endnote: What you are reading is only part of something that is not present; ageneral condition of literature, of writing, of course, but by making these last will notes amatter of written record, Kafka marks his papers with the stigma of being destined to disappear. Through such lenses, one might perceive Odradek as the appropriate figure of such ‘suspended completeness’: “One is tempted to believe that the creature once had some sort of intelligible shape and is now only abroken-down remnant. Yet this does not seem to be the case; at least there is no sign of it; nowhere is there an unfinished or unbroken surface to suggest anything of the kind; the whole thing looks senseless enough, but in its own way perfectly finished” [das Ganze erscheint zwar sinnlos, aber in seiner Art abgeschlossen].19 Fragmentariness is thus the reverse side of the continuity of writing and asymptom that the wall between life and literature has been broken. Repetitiveness does not simply mean that life fails to sustain the continuity of writing (while writing has always failed to pass beyond the irrevocable intermittence of life), but also that writing stubbornly continues to fail— awill to the repetition of failure if you like. Repetitiveness also manifests itself in the temporal organization of Kafka’s life between ‘work’, ‘entertainment’ and ‘scribbling’. Iam referring to Kafka’s famous schedules as outlined in his letters to Felice: office, lunch, sleep, exercises, walk, dinner, writing, (lack of) sleep.20 Even if this description is afunction of Kafka’s (unsuccessful) attempt to persuade Felice to accept Franz’s terms of their future life together and is not to be taken too literally, the rigidity of this iterative structure is supposed to serve apositive function: in the first place, to sustain the activity of writing. Repeatedly beginning and returning thus signifies something else than amere failure to finish atext, but is afunction of a‘beautiful’ stubbornness, an unrelenting effort to reduce, that is, to concentrate life’s activity on textual creation. It can be argued that this is what attracts Kafka to Heinrich von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas (1810).21 There, astubbornness in the form of athirst for justice is provoked 18 Brod 2009, p.215. 19 Kafka 1995b, p.428. 20 Kafka 1999, pp.33–34, 477. 21 Kafka read von Kleist’s letters and his Anecdotes and he was interested in the way Kleist reflected on his life decisions. Kafka also (uncharacteristically) gave apublic reading of Michael Kohlhaas in the Toynbee Hall, and (characteristically) considered it ‘acomplete and OPEN ACCESS
38 SVĚT LITERATURY 69 by the absence of alegal warrant (atext), which sets the plot in motion. Before making some observations on the iterative situations in Kafka’s texts, let me briefly comment on Kleist’s novella. The Brandenburg horse dealer Michael Kohlhaas is illegally deprived of two horses when on his way to Dresden he passes through Junker Wenzel von Tronka’s fiefdom. He is told that he needs transit papers and is forced to leave two of his horses behind as collateral; when he arrives to Dresden, the capital of Saxony, his suspicion is confirmed that this claim for transit permission was false; upon arriving at von Tronka’s castle he finds his two horses gaunt and mistreated; his servant whom he had left there to take care of them was badly beaten and driven out. He files alawsuit in Dresden against von Tronka, but after ayear finds out the suit was suspended due to the influence of Wenzel von Tronka’s relatives (Hinz and Kunz) who are attendants to the Elector of Saxony. Kohlhaas persists and demands his rights, and is turned down; he gradually gathers aprivate army around him after his wife is struck down by aguard when she tries to deliver apetition to the Elector; later she dies of the injuries. New and new attempts by violence and written demands to answer the injustice are made by Kohlhaas, repeatedly returning to the basic claim: Make von Tronka feed my horses and pay for the medical treatment of my servant. Kohlhaas provisionally admits all other collateral damage and agrees that the whole case should be subject to legal proceedings. It would be abreach of civil agreement, to his inclusion in the community of the state, to his access to law, according to Kohlhaas, if his initial claim was not answered. Martin Luther intervenes on behalf of Kohlhaas, the matter reaches higher and higher circles, including other Electors and Princes until it reaches the court in Vienna, while the reputation of Kohlhaas as aleader of rebellion is becoming wider and wider. The recurrence of Kohlhaas’s attempts to achieve justice and his failures to do so is driven by his will to justice (in psychiatry, the behaviour is sometimes called ‘Michael Kohlhaas syndrome’)22 the character of which, in this story, but also in recognized psychiatric cases of litigious paranoia is almost impersonal or nonhuman: this will is a‘force’ which makes him pursue justice in spite— or rather exactly because— of the growing disbalance between gains and losses in the process; Kohlhaas loses everything in the course of his crusade. The stubbornness, the sense of principle is preconditioned on the continued suspension of written legal settlement. The continuing repetitive rhythm of claims to recovery and their denial begins with an absent document (the permit to demand the collateral by von Tronka) and ends with the disappearance of aprophetic text (apaper given to him by asoothsayer, aprophecy on the fate of the House of Saxony, which Kohlhaas reads and swallows before he is executed). In his essay “Incorporating the Text”, Clayton Koelb compares this logic of perpetuation by absence to Kafka’s story “An Imperial Message” claiming that in both cases “the ultimate guarantee of atext’s transcendent authority is unavailability”.23 Perhaps by denying the Elector the scriptural, legal verification of the fate of his dyutter fiasco’. “One of [the boys in the front row] tries to overcome his innocent boredom by carefully throwing his cap on the floor and then carefully picking it up, and then again, over and over [emphasis mine]” (adiary entry from 11December 1913, Kafka 1976, p. 246). 22 See Gerevich— Ungvari 2015, Ward 2021. 23 Koelb 1990, p.1105. OPEN ACCESS
RICHARD MüLLER 39 nasty, Kohlhaas seals the doom of the House of Saxony, becoming the maker of its further undisclosed fate. The denial of verification by written law is an aspect that the novella shares with Kafka’s The Trial. 2. REPETITIVENESS FOR CHARACTERS In fact, aseries of parallels and displacements characterizes the relationship between Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas and Kafka’s unfinished novel. The connotation of rebellion which pervades the world of Kohlhaas is ironically dispersed by the displacement of repetition to abureaucratic mode. Both Josef K. and Kohlhaas are exactly thirty when their ‘process’ begins; but if Kohlhaas is an ‘außerordentliche[r] Mann’ (an extraordinary man)24 (as we learn in the second sentence of the novella), K. (the alliteration marks another association between them) is perfectly unremarkable exactly until that moment when “he [is] arrested one fine morning” “without having done anything wrong”.25 The monotony of his previous life is only given ahint in the first chapter, and yet is unmistakable: it seems to have spanned between work, weekly visits to Elsa (an intimate companion to multiple clients), and beer-hall evenings at the regulars’ table— aschedule even more modest than that of the historical man. The arrest seems to institute adisruption to this routine (K., ‘aman without qualities’, scarcely even exists until that ‘unique’ moment); and yet no sooner has the arrest been executed than K. leaves to work in the company of three colleagues that he is incapable of distinguishing, Rabensteiner, Kaminer and Kullich. Aseries of further ‘singular events’ follows: the first interrogation, the visit to the Law-court offices, the whipper scene, the visit to the advocate, the inadvertent meeting in the cathedral. However, these seeming singularities are immediately entangled with motifs of replication: thus interrogations are announced to take place regularly (but fail to do so, thus paradoxically also failing to become the awakening singularity in K.’s life); K. witnesses how the guards are whipped in the lumber room of his bank and this ‘event’ strangely replicates itself afew days later; he meets the advocate, but the encounters with him turn into an exhausting, endless sequence of meaningless expositions on the difficulties of behind-the-scene proceedings; in the cathedral, the chaplain tells him the story of aman whose life is wasted by not being able to enter the door leading into the Law, where “from hall to hall, keepers stand at every door, one more powerful than the other”. The attempts to break free from the tendency of singularities to revert into repetitive series themselves acquire arepetitive character. The only singular event, to put it somewhat radically, free from this recursive structure is the final execution. The unbreathable, corrupt air that fills the Law-court offices in Chapter Four recurs in Titorelli’s studio, suggesting the omnipresence of the law. At the end of K.’s visit to Titorelli’s studio the painter presents aheathscape painting for sale; when K.accepts it, Titorelli presents another, and then yet another, and then awhole heap of them: “there was not the slightest difference that one could see between it and the other”, “it as not merely asimilar study, it was simply the same wild heathscape 24 Kleist 1967, p.3. 25 Kafka 2009, p.7. OPEN ACCESS
40 SVĚT LITERATURY 69 again”.26 Titorelli informs K. of the only two possible ‘outcomes’ of his trial: the apparent acquittal, or the indefinite postponement: in the context of the first, the trial begins always anew, again and again, with the second, the case is suspended in an early phase and there perpetuates itself. The definite acquittal is merely alegend, and as in the case of Michael Kohlhaas, it is preconditioned by the default non-existence of written documents (there are only rumours of their existence).27 The (mental) mechanism of the law seems to be that the more K. struggles to escape from its tentacles, the more deeply he is implicated and entwined with it. As Hermann Cohen notes on the idea of fate in antiquity (and Benjamin reminds us): “the very rules of fate seem to be what causes and brings about the breaking away from them, the defection”28. Moving between the ominous habit of marginalizing the trial (“[t]his legal action was nothing more than abusiness deal”) and the feeling of being consumed by it (“[t]he thought of his case never left him now”)29 defines K.’s horizon. Asimilar principle of repetitively thwarted attempts to reach the space of an obscure promise, or meeting piling-up obstacles that annul the possibility of progression can be found in many other works by Kafka such as The Castle, “The Hunter Gracchus,” “An Imperial Message,” etc. In “Poseidon,” the near infinity of little calculations and figures that the god of waters needs to process prevents him from seeing the seas in other than the most fleeting fashion and he postpones his quick roundthe-seas tour to just before the end of the world. Repetitiveness or repetitive motion, of course, is neither an overall storyworld principle nor aglobal technique of presentation in Kafka. The motif or theme of reaching dead ends or stases is particularly weighted, but it may avoid repetitive elements, or employ them to various degrees. For example, in “ACountry Doctor,” movement is suspended as the narrator realizes he will never “reach home” in his “earthly vehicle” drawn by “unearthly horses”30— an aimless, but not repetitive motion. The Hunter Gracchus, half-dead, half-alive, astray on his boat to the underworld, in contrast, sails from city to city, being brought “the morning drink of the country whose coastline [they] happen to be passing at the moment”.31 There are also, as we have already noted, ‘singular’ failures to repeat, so to speak: For instance, when the Officer in “In the Penal Colony” strips naked and offers himself to the apparatus, he is plainly killed by it, and the denial to experience the epiphany, or transformation, he craved 26 Kafka 2009, p.152. 27 As Walter Benjamin writes, “the written law is contained in books, but these are secret; by basing itself on them the prehistoric world [Vorwelt] exerts its rule all the more ruthlessly” (Benjamin 2007, p.115). This seems to reflect, indirectly, the importance of the rabbis’ oral teachings in Judaism, the halakha (legal teachings authoritative for religious life) and haggadah (amplifications of biblical texts in the form of stories, parables, allegories, and poetry); even if both traditions found their way, in part, into writing in the form of various biblical commentaries, or were codified in the Talmud and Mishnah, halakha especially is recognized as the means by which the written Torah is interpreted to new generations and remains to be referred to as oral law as binding as the Torah. 28 Benjamin 2007, p.115. 29 Kafka 2009, p.119, p.107. 30 Kafka 1995c, p.225. 31 Kafka 1995d, p.229. OPEN ACCESS