Kafka and Freudtag:blogs.qc.cuny.edu,2007:/blogs/dreams/aelbaum/2302007-05-07T15:07:10ZMovable Type Enterprise 1.02Kafka Meets Freud... and Whatever that Means: Introducing the link between them tag:blogs.qc.cuny.edu,2007:/blogs/dreams/aelbaum//230.21482007-04-18T00:44:49Z2007-05-07T15:07:10Z Those who are first exposed to Kafka's work often fall into one of two categories: some dive in with no orienting, no preconceived notions, no sense of what to expect, and swim amidst the bizarre and murky world he...Kilgore Trout
Those who are first exposed to Kafka's work often fall into one of two categories: some dive in with no orienting, no preconceived notions, no sense of what to expect, and swim amidst the bizarre and murky world he created grasping at straws, grappling for meaning. Others are guided by the ever-present, ever-ready psychoanalytic lens, and see Kafka's work as ripe for the Freudian picking. Both these approaches have limited the reader from relating to what Kafka has created- and often, those who belong to the first group drift into the psychoanalytic camp for some sense of stasis and grounding.
Yet Freud’s influence upon Kafka is more intricate, multifaceted, and sophisticated than previous (and numerous) attempts at interpretation of Kafka’s texts have attributed. Perhaps, the problem lies in attempting interpretation; the term, pregnant with psychoanalytic connotation, bellies an overly-mechanized approach to Kafka, where each word of Kafka has a one-to-one correlation to Freud’s work. This project attempts a short survey of popular Freudian readings of Kafka, a concise critique of those attempts' limitations, and an alternative way to imagine and relate to Kafka as someone who embraced the Dream as something integral to the whole self (whatever "self" means)
While anecdotal evidence documents how Kafka would refer to “his own ‘dreamlike inner life” and allude to concepts of psychoanalysis while discussing dream states, it does not elucidate the manner in which he held Freud’s theories (Campbell 426-428). Familiarity does not imply shared ideology, nor is it anything less than expected of a contemporary of Freud’s, whose literary and philosophical influences include Arthur Schopenhauer, Baruch Spinoza, Charles Darwin, Jules Verne, and Fyodor Dostoevsky (Baker ix).
While Kafka drew from many sources, several movements have hailed Kafka as one of their own. From the Existentialists and Surrealists to the Marxists and Zionists, the modern world seems to mesh well with Kafka- Psychoanalysis should be an easy fit. Kafka and Freud each crafted a world of dreams, they carved out a reality of the human mind by examining its intricacies. Freud’s world attempts analysis, contrast, comparison, everything that boils down to a hierarchical relationship between the dream and the individual. In the very first line of his Interpretation of Dreams, Freud states this motive:
I shall provide proof that there is a psychological technique which allows us to interpret dreams, and that when this procedure is applied, every dream turns out to be a meaningful physical formation which can be given an identifiable place in what goes on within us in our waking life.
Psychoanalysis demands that dreams be drilled, quarried, dissected for a greater good and this is where Freud and Kafka are ultimately divergent. For Freud, the soul is somehow outside the individual, he distinguishes between “self” and “soul” attributing the dream world to the latter. Dreams are valuable for the self because they make the soul more palpable; dreams are not part of the self, they are just a byproduct of it. Kafka understood dreams differently- as something more integral, almost more natural to the individual.
Franz Kafka was born July 3rd 1883, he lived in Prague for most of his life and died in Vienna, Austria in 1924.
Sigmund Freud was born in Austria in 1856 and lived there until 1938 when it was annexed by the Nazis The Kafka ProjectThe Freud Museum
]]>
Just what makes Kafka so Kafkaesque?tag:blogs.qc.cuny.edu,2007:/blogs/dreams/aelbaum//230.21532007-04-18T00:43:40Z2007-05-18T16:17:05ZKaf·ka·esque - [kahf-kuh-esk] - 1. of, pertaining to, characteristic of, or resembling the literary work of Franz Kafka: the Kafkaesque terror of the endless interrogations. 2. marked by a senseless, disorienting, often menacing complexity: Kafkaesque bureaucracies. [Origin: 1945–50 Kafka +...Kilgore TroutKaf·ka·esque - [kahf-kuh-esk] -
1. of, pertaining to, characteristic of, or resembling the literary work of Franz Kafka: the Kafkaesque terror of the endless interrogations.
2. marked by a senseless, disorienting, often menacing complexity: Kafkaesque bureaucracies.
[Origin: 1945–50 Kafka + -esque]
Kafka connotes a sense of strangeness, there is a quality about his work that is uniquely difficult to appreciate- his worlds are confusing and seemingly disorderly- his characters and settings difficult to place.
Kafka does not need to isolate a tenor and vehicle to convey an abstraction; he provides a setting of transition, of transformation where one thing does not exist merely to represent another- in turn, creating a text not quite ripe for a systematic, deconstructive interpretation. Yet Kafka's work, has been at the mercy of interpretation, subjected to readings that appreciate the implications and not the nature of the text.
It is for this reason that Kafka’s work is traditionally considered dire, hopeless, pessimistic and just plain depressing. It is also the reason why the first line of many introductions to his stories sounds something like “Franz Kafka’s fiction doesn’t make any sense” (Baker xv). The term “Kafkaesque” has even been coined to convey this sense of surreal disorientation, it has “transcended the literary realm to apply to real-life occurrences and situations that are incomprehensibly complex, bizarre, or illogical” (Freed 182).
When Kafka’s “A Country Doctor” is oriented in a Freudian milieu, it is merely a short story filled with sexual frustration, oedipal angst and psychosis- almost a simple dream transcription.
When The Metamorphosis is treated like one grand-scale nightmare, it’s a typical horror story, appealing to an instinctive fear of pain, disease and isolation
When The Trial is politicized to an extreme and its dreamlike quality is lumped into “style” and “tone” alone, it is reduced to simple face.
Kafka has become synonymous with alienation and absurdity because he has been read in the context of “interpretation” yet what Kafka describes (even advocates) is the capacity for transformation. By relating to the dream as an integral part of the self, not as a mechanism or byproduct, but an extension of the self that is valid in its own right, one can surpass the limitations (and alienation) of waking life.
When we write something… we have moved to the moon with everything we have, nothing has changed, we are there what we were here, a thousand differences are possible in the tempo for the journey, but not in the fact of the journey itself; the earth having shaken off the moon, holds more firmly to its own identity, we however have lost our identities for the sake of a home on the moon, not definitively, nothing here is definitive, but lost nonetheless - Franz Kafka
]]>
One popular (and quite possibly misguided) way of reading Kafka’s Dreams:tag:blogs.qc.cuny.edu,2007:/blogs/dreams/aelbaum//230.22232007-04-09T01:09:17Z2007-05-18T16:15:48ZWhile many superficial similarities between Kafka's fiction and Freud's theories are readily observable, some have ventured to extend psychoanalysis beyond the text and into Kafka's personal life. Because so many first person accounts of Kafka's life are available, and because...Kilgore Trout
An extreme, almost comical, attempt at tapping into the “real meaning” of Kafka’s stories is found in Calvin S. Hall and Richard E. Lind’s experiment of systematically, surveying the situations and images that are frequent in Kafka’s novels and dreams. Just how systematically? Through computer software that counts and categorizes the images it receives. “Seven themes stand out in Kafka’s dreams. These themes and the empirical data from which they have derived are as follows:” a preoccupation with the body, body disfigurement, emphasis on clothing and nakedness, scoptophilia, passivity, ambivalence toward men and women, masculinized women (Hall 36).
When they fail to find a direct correlation between his dreams and the subjects of his literature they offer that “A very creative and imaginative writer such as Kafka has access to a wide range of psychic material which he can work over and rearrange in an infinite number of ways. Awake the conscious ego is able to employ its capacities for discriminating, selecting, criticizing, reasoning, testing and positioning experiences in space and time. The writer exercises control over his material in a manner which the dreamer is unable to do” (Hall 67)
It is ridiculous to strive so hard to draw a Freudian connection between Kafka's dreams and his literature, such that any diversion from the content of his dreams needs to be justified. Additionally, a survey of Kafka’s dreams, shows them to be really quite normal: abstract, eerie, disorienting, yes, but overall - simply dreamlike-
and what else should dreams be?
Calvin and Hall's work is not without merit, nor is it wrong in its assumption that there is what to learn from Kafka's dreams. However, their singular drive to find a traceable correlation between his fiction and his dreams hinders the independant and unique quality of Kafka's stories.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bronze statue of Franz Kafka in Prague by sculptor Jaroslav Rona * and Official Kafka stamp issued in Czechoslovakia in 1969**
* http://german.about.com/library/gallery/blfoto_kafka02.htm
** http://www.jewishgen.org/BohMor/Stamps/KafkaStamps.html]]>
More than Metaphortag:blogs.qc.cuny.edu,2007:/blogs/dreams/aelbaum//230.22242007-04-08T01:09:46Z2007-05-07T16:05:13ZDreams as Metaphor: Understanding dreaming as a giant metaphor-machine alienates the dreamer from his dreams and, according to Kafka, his inner self. Critical theorist, Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst, Felix Guattari address the inclination to explain abstractions through metaphor, and its...Kilgore Trout
Dreams as Metaphor:
Understanding dreaming as a giant metaphor-machine alienates the dreamer from his dreams and, according to Kafka, his inner self. Critical theorist, Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst, Felix Guattari address the inclination to explain abstractions through metaphor, and its limitations. “‘Metaphors are on of the things that make me despair of literature.’[Kafka] Kafka deliberately kills all metaphor, all symbolism, all signification, no less that all designation. Metamorphosis is contrary to metaphor” (Deleuze 22). He does this by eliminating the need for a tenor and vehicle to carry meaning- he simply offers text which can be taken as is and affect the reader.
Deleuze and Guattari marked Kafka scholarship by acclaiming the positive and even joyous elements his work. Their undertaking of Kafka involved an immersion in his world, not a fight to relate it to ours, and without the fundamental bias that his is exclusive of ours. “We believe in a Kafka experimentation that is without interpretation or significance and rests only on tests and experience.” (Deleuze 7) “Experience” and “tests” are interactive; they are dependant on the fact that the things being tested exist in the same world as the tester or observer.
In his introduction to The Interpretation of Dreams Robertson hints at this point in the context of dreaming:
At least some dreams, however, have not only a function but also a meaning which may be apparent in the manifest content. There need be no universal key, no system of symbols to explain this meaning; a dream has been successfully interpreted when its meaning suddenly clicks for the dreamer (Robertson xxxii)
He makes room for such a reading of Freud, that there can be meaning without interpretation, as long as the dreamer (or reader in our case) finds a means to relate to the material. But Freud, in describing the unique quality of “dream-thought” as completely and singularity distinct from waking-thought, claims that “it is qualitatively something completely different from it, and so at first not comparable to it.” And that dream-thought “confines itself to reshaping” (329). Freud never found a way to relate without imposing a standard interpretation. Kafka’s texts have been the butt of hundreds of Freudian-guided interpretations, all of which in essence deny the “manifest content” of his stories.
Dreams are not objectified in Kafka’s work, they are not used. His relationship with dreaming is not rooted in some sympathy for the dream, nor is it the result of reckless anthropomorphization of the phenomenon. Kafka understands that the part of the self that is exhibited in the dream is indispensable and indiscernible from the whole of the person. He does not resort to allegory, even when a man wakes up one morning as a giant vermin, “Kafka’s animals… correspond solely to new levels, zones of liberated intensities where contents free themselves from their forms as well as from their expressions” (Deleuze 13).
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The original image for the cartoon can be found at http://lrrc3.sas.upenn.edu/popcult/metaphor/BACKSTAB.JPG
]]>
A Country Doctor: How Many Lit Critics does it take screw in some meaning?tag:blogs.qc.cuny.edu,2007:/blogs/dreams/aelbaum//230.22252007-04-07T01:10:28Z2007-05-07T16:08:29Z “A Country Doctor” depicts a physician who is summoned to the call of a sick child, yet is unable to accomplish any valuable action. He is surrounded by the absurd at every angle, yet accepts it as a standard-...Kilgore Trout
“A Country Doctor” depicts a physician who is summoned to the call of a sick child, yet is unable to accomplish any valuable action. He is surrounded by the absurd at every angle, yet accepts it as a standard- there is never any reflection on the logic of the events, merely the practical difficulties they cause. The story has been of particular interest for scholars seeking the trace the lines that link Freud and Kafka because of its seeming allusions to Freudian concepts like condensation and displacement.
Louis Leiter, writing in 1958, comments on the disorientation the reader faces “who like the psychoanalyst can approach dream only from a rational frame of reference” (Leiter 337) For Leiter, the doctor represents the figure of humanity when it fails in the face of conflict, to transcend absurdity: “As a doctor, he is a thing, an object, a tool; as a man he is nothing” (340)
Leiter believes that “To work from a psychoanalytical orientation in interpreting “A Country Doctor” is a valid means of procedure”- procedure- like at a dentists office- a mere conglomeration of applied techniques that reveal “truth” or “insight” (342). His mechanic treatment of the text accounts for his limited view of it.
Searching for a more concrete frame of reference for the Kafka-Freud connection, Eric Marson and Keith Leopold engage in a historical investigation of Kafka’s approach and attitude towards Freud. Through their intricate breakdown of the text, they read a severe criticism of Freud- establishing it as a parody of psychoanalysis. The doctor is the embodiment of the psychoanalyst himself as he is ultimately unable to “cure” any ailment with his choice of treatment. Once he finally reaches the boy, he reluctantly decides to appreciate the source of his affliction; apparently, this is the reluctance associated with a formation of a new science. It is only when the doctor finally sees the wound, pink and filled with worms that he appreciates the boys psyche. The story mocks psychoanalytic logic.
Hans Guth, in “Symbol and Restraint” is far less myopic in scope. He begins by criticizing the shortsighted earlier approaches to Kafka and his relationship to Freud, asserting that “unrestrained symbolical interpretation often does violence to the structure of a work” (427). Unfortunately, he too falls into the pit of interpretation by relating to characters and setting as metaphor. He is hard-pressed to find an instance of obsession over the incapacity to act- if anything there is a sort of calm that envelopes the doctor as the world around him unravels. In fact, at one point, the doctor is naked and describes it as “Then I’m naked, calmly surveying the people”(Kafka 127). And while Guth observes rather accurately that “The events of the story repeatedly frustrate the common human impulse toward effective control of experience” he attributes the doctor’s apparent lack of anxiety to the overall interplay of “attitude and thought” (428).
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
All the images on this page can be found at the wonderful Country Doctor Museum ]]>
Kafka on Trial: THE TRIAL and its Potentialitytag:blogs.qc.cuny.edu,2007:/blogs/dreams/aelbaum//230.22262007-04-06T01:10:57Z2007-05-07T16:12:34ZThe Trial conveys a sense of confusion and disambiguation, as the main character finds himself the subject of a trial for a crime whose nature he cannot fully comprehend or even remember committing. The main character is referred to throughout...Kilgore Trout
The Trial conveys a sense of confusion and disambiguation, as the main character finds himself the subject of a trial for a crime whose nature he cannot fully comprehend or even remember committing. The main character is referred to throughout the novel simply as “K”; the reader is never even privy to his last name while the rest of the characters are always addressed by their full names.
The first moments of action take place without the protagonist leaving his bed:
‘Who are you?’ asked K., and immediately sat halfway up in his bed. But the man ignored the question as if his presence would have to be accepted, and merely said in turn, “You rang?” “Anna’s to bring me breakfast” said K. (4) It takes several moments for K. to realize that something is not right before he leaves his bed. It seems that the protagonist chooses to linger in his sleep state before commencing to investigate the strange occurrences around him. He is not described as lazy, quite the opposite in fact- he is competent and diligent and at times very assertive, yet when a strange man enters his bedroom he lingers, as if trying to remain in the world that surrounds him during sleep.
The beginning of the story initiates a dialogue with the dream world by asserting that sleep is something that K. feels strongly tied to. Like The Metamorphosis, there is little mention of sleep, or dreaming, afterwards although there is more meditation on daydreams and lingering on certain thoughts or fantasies. Constantly, K is met with the advice: “We advise you not to waste your time in useless thought” and the almost prophetic instruction: “think less about us and what’s going to happen to you, and instead think more about yourself” (9, 14). The direction highlights a certain split of the self and a fragmented identity. K, while overwhelmingly concerned with looking for sense and reason, sees no logical problem with the split, and only resents being lectured “like a schoolboy” His apathy toward the trial in the early stages was constantly noted, “Your indifference is driving me crazy” (94). As K. begins to adapt to his situation he undergoes a sort of “metamorphosis”, his yielding to the system clouds his own sense of reason.
About half way through the novel, “The decision to take charge of his own defense appeared more momentous now than he had originally assumed” (131). After that point his concern for the logic of his world dissolved, he worked within the frame ascribed to him and his sense of reason disintegrated as well.
Towards the end, turning inward, K. tries to reclaim his sense of self, “The only thing I can do now is keep my mind calm and analytical to the last.” (228) K., whose life has been qualified by the intrusion of others, clings to his mind at the time of death.
]]>
Concluding (Somewhat) Inconclusivelytag:blogs.qc.cuny.edu,2007:/blogs/dreams/aelbaum//230.22272007-04-04T01:11:26Z2007-05-07T16:20:20ZReflecting on three stories that describe men lost in something they can’t control, and trying to assert that what they are secure in is themselves. I find it difficult to make any singular claim about Kafka and his relationship to...Kilgore Trout
Freud imbued dreams with the notion that through analysis, they can help solve the problems of waking life. Thus far, there has been little scientific proof for these claims and traditional psychoanalysis has been abandoned as a mainstream therapy. In response, dream theories began to take strict physiological bents- now dreams are not insightful, they are just “leftovers” from chemical processes. Kafka makes room for dreams to have a different sort of meaning, what they provide us with is a window into what cannot be clearly known, but what can be perceived and experienced- constituting a different kind of knowledge. He did not need to deconstruct the dream to find its meaning; he provided an array of characters that lived it. The dreams in Kafka’s journals, the references to dreams in his letters, the use of dreaming and dreamlike elements in his literature are not just vehicles for interpretation, but they are an indiscernible part of the whole of Kafka, and ultimately, his readers.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The picture is a clip from the Orson Welles' version of The TrialLe Procès, 1962
]]>
Further Readingtag:blogs.qc.cuny.edu,2007:/blogs/dreams/aelbaum//230.22282007-04-03T01:21:36Z2007-05-06T23:26:09ZKafka's literature includes nearly a hundred short stories, one comprehensive collection is The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka Click Here for a Complete Works Cited for this Project...Kilgore Trout
Kafka's literature includes nearly a hundred short stories, one comprehensive collection is The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka Click Here for a Complete Works Cited for this Project
]]>
About Metag:blogs.qc.cuny.edu,2007:/blogs/dreams/aelbaum//230.22522007-04-01T14:44:34Z2007-05-07T15:58:38Z Alex is hopefully graduating from Queens College in December of 2007 with degrees in English and Philosophy. She enjoys writing (except when that involves writing about herself in the third person), pumpkin pie, reading various forms of Sci-Fi, and...Kilgore Trout
Alex is hopefully graduating from Queens College in December of 2007 with degrees in English and Philosophy. She enjoys writing (except when that involves writing about herself in the third person), pumpkin pie, reading various forms of Sci-Fi, and watching the New York Rangers. She is not exactly sure of what life will bring after QC, possibly a Law Degree, possibly further study of English literature (and if the universe plays along, hopefully both) Alex is getting married on June 5th 2007 to a young man who will soon be an engineer; the two of them constantly debate whether science or humanities make the world go ‘round, and she hopes that this web project will help persuade him, and other misguided souls like him, that it is indeed the latter. She believes that if more people were dreamers (and if more people read Kafka) everyone could stop worrying about why the world doesn’t make any sense long enough to relax a little…
---
She also wants to thank everyone involved in making the English Honors Seminar a reality- it was a wonderful (and challenging, and worrisome, and beautiful) experience.
]]>
While anecdotal evidence documents how Kafka would refer to “his own ‘dreamlike inner life” and allude to concepts of psychoanalysis while discussing dream states, it does not elucidate the manner in which he held Freud’s theories (Campbell 426-428). Familiarity does not imply shared ideology, nor is it anything less than expected of a contemporary of Freud’s, whose literary and philosophical influences include Arthur Schopenhauer, Baruch Spinoza, Charles Darwin, Jules Verne, and Fyodor Dostoevsky (Baker ix).
While Kafka drew from many sources, several movements have hailed Kafka as one of their own. From the Existentialists and Surrealists to the Marxists and Zionists, the modern world seems to mesh well with Kafka- Psychoanalysis should be an easy fit. Kafka and Freud each crafted a world of dreams, they carved out a reality of the human mind by examining its intricacies. Freud’s world attempts analysis, contrast, comparison, everything that boils down to a hierarchical relationship between the dream and the individual. In the very first line of his Interpretation of Dreams, Freud states this motive:
Franz Kafka was born July 3rd 1883, he lived in Prague for most of his life and died in Vienna, Austria in 1924.
Sigmund Freud was born in Austria in 1856 and lived there until 1938 when it was annexed by the Nazis
The Kafka Project
The Freud Museum
]]>
It is for this reason that Kafka’s work is traditionally considered dire, hopeless, pessimistic and just plain depressing. It is also the reason why the first line of many introductions to his stories sounds something like “Franz Kafka’s fiction doesn’t make any sense” (Baker xv). The term “Kafkaesque” has even been coined to convey this sense of surreal disorientation, it has “transcended the literary realm to apply to real-life occurrences and situations that are incomprehensibly complex, bizarre, or illogical” (Freed 182).
When Kafka’s “A Country Doctor” is oriented in a Freudian milieu, it is merely a short story filled with sexual frustration, oedipal angst and psychosis- almost a simple dream transcription.
Kafka has become synonymous with alienation and absurdity because he has been read in the context of “interpretation” yet what Kafka describes (even advocates) is the capacity for transformation. By relating to the dream as an integral part of the self, not as a mechanism or byproduct, but an extension of the self that is valid in its own right, one can surpass the limitations (and alienation) of waking life.
Calvin and Hall's work is not without merit, nor is it wrong in its assumption that there is what to learn from Kafka's dreams. However, their singular drive to find a traceable correlation between his fiction and his dreams hinders the independant and unique quality of Kafka's stories.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bronze statue of Franz Kafka in Prague by sculptor Jaroslav Rona * and Official Kafka stamp issued in Czechoslovakia in 1969**
* http://german.about.com/library/gallery/blfoto_kafka02.htm
** http://www.jewishgen.org/BohMor/Stamps/KafkaStamps.html]]>
Deleuze and Guattari marked Kafka scholarship by acclaiming the positive and even joyous elements his work. Their undertaking of Kafka involved an immersion in his world, not a fight to relate it to ours, and without the fundamental bias that his is exclusive of ours. “We believe in a Kafka experimentation that is without interpretation or significance and rests only on tests and experience.” (Deleuze 7) “Experience” and “tests” are interactive; they are dependant on the fact that the things being tested exist in the same world as the tester or observer.
In his introduction to The Interpretation of Dreams Robertson hints at this point in the context of dreaming:
At least some dreams, however, have not only a function but also a meaning which may be apparent in the manifest content. There need be no universal key, no system of symbols to explain this meaning; a dream has been successfully interpreted when its meaning suddenly clicks for the dreamer (Robertson xxxii)
He makes room for such a reading of Freud, that there can be meaning without interpretation, as long as the dreamer (or reader in our case) finds a means to relate to the material. But Freud, in describing the unique quality of “dream-thought” as completely and singularity distinct from waking-thought, claims that “it is qualitatively something completely different from it, and so at first not comparable to it.” And that dream-thought “confines itself to reshaping” (329). Freud never found a way to relate without imposing a standard interpretation. Kafka’s texts have been the butt of hundreds of Freudian-guided interpretations, all of which in essence deny the “manifest content” of his stories.
Dreams are not objectified in Kafka’s work, they are not used. His relationship with dreaming is not rooted in some sympathy for the dream, nor is it the result of reckless anthropomorphization of the phenomenon. Kafka understands that the part of the self that is exhibited in the dream is indispensable and indiscernible from the whole of the person. He does not resort to allegory, even when a man wakes up one morning as a giant vermin, “Kafka’s animals… correspond solely to new levels, zones of liberated intensities where contents free themselves from their forms as well as from their expressions” (Deleuze 13).
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The original image for the cartoon can be found at http://lrrc3.sas.upenn.edu/popcult/metaphor/BACKSTAB.JPG
]]>
Louis Leiter, writing in 1958, comments on the disorientation the reader faces “who like the psychoanalyst can approach dream only from a rational frame of reference” (Leiter 337) For Leiter, the doctor represents the figure of humanity when it fails in the face of conflict, to transcend absurdity: “As a doctor, he is a thing, an object, a tool; as a man he is nothing” (340)
Leiter believes that “To work from a psychoanalytical orientation in interpreting “A Country Doctor” is a valid means of procedure”- procedure- like at a dentists office- a mere conglomeration of applied techniques that reveal “truth” or “insight” (342). His mechanic treatment of the text accounts for his limited view of it.
Searching for a more concrete frame of reference for the Kafka-Freud connection, Eric Marson and Keith Leopold engage in a historical investigation of Kafka’s approach and attitude towards Freud. Through their intricate breakdown of the text, they read a severe criticism of Freud- establishing it as a parody of psychoanalysis. The doctor is the embodiment of the psychoanalyst himself as he is ultimately unable to “cure” any ailment with his choice of treatment. Once he finally reaches the boy, he reluctantly decides to appreciate the source of his affliction; apparently, this is the reluctance associated with a formation of a new science. It is only when the doctor finally sees the wound, pink and filled with worms that he appreciates the boys psyche. The story mocks psychoanalytic logic.
Hans Guth, in “Symbol and Restraint” is far less myopic in scope. He begins by criticizing the shortsighted earlier approaches to Kafka and his relationship to Freud, asserting that “unrestrained symbolical interpretation often does violence to the structure of a work” (427). Unfortunately, he too falls into the pit of interpretation by relating to characters and setting as metaphor. He is hard-pressed to find an instance of obsession over the incapacity to act- if anything there is a sort of calm that envelopes the doctor as the world around him unravels. In fact, at one point, the doctor is naked and describes it as “Then I’m naked, calmly surveying the people”(Kafka 127). And while Guth observes rather accurately that “The events of the story repeatedly frustrate the common human impulse toward effective control of experience” he attributes the doctor’s apparent lack of anxiety to the overall interplay of “attitude and thought” (428).
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
All the images on this page can be found at the wonderful Country Doctor Museum ]]>
The first moments of action take place without the protagonist leaving his bed:
‘Who are you?’ asked K., and immediately sat halfway up in his bed. But the man ignored the question as if his presence would have to be accepted, and merely said in turn, “You rang?” “Anna’s to bring me breakfast” said K. (4) It takes several moments for K. to realize that something is not right before he leaves his bed. It seems that the protagonist chooses to linger in his sleep state before commencing to investigate the strange occurrences around him. He is not described as lazy, quite the opposite in fact- he is competent and diligent and at times very assertive, yet when a strange man enters his bedroom he lingers, as if trying to remain in the world that surrounds him during sleep.
The beginning of the story initiates a dialogue with the dream world by asserting that sleep is something that K. feels strongly tied to. Like The Metamorphosis, there is little mention of sleep, or dreaming, afterwards although there is more meditation on daydreams and lingering on certain thoughts or fantasies. 
Constantly, K is met with the advice: “We advise you not to waste your time in useless thought” and the almost prophetic instruction: “think less about us and what’s going to happen to you, and instead think more about yourself” (9, 14). The direction highlights a certain split of the self and a fragmented identity. K, while overwhelmingly concerned with looking for sense and reason, sees no logical problem with the split, and only resents being lectured “like a schoolboy” His apathy toward the trial in the early stages was constantly noted, “Your indifference is driving me crazy” (94). As K. begins to adapt to his situation he undergoes a sort of “metamorphosis”, his yielding to the system clouds his own sense of reason.
About half way through the novel, “The decision to take charge of his own defense appeared more momentous now than he had originally assumed” (131). After that point his concern for the logic of his world dissolved, he worked within the frame ascribed to him and his sense of reason disintegrated as well.
Towards the end, turning inward, K. tries to reclaim his sense of self, “The only thing I can do now is keep my mind calm and analytical to the last.” (228) K., whose life has been qualified by the intrusion of others, clings to his mind at the time of death.
]]>
---
She also wants to thank everyone involved in making the English Honors Seminar a reality- it was a wonderful (and challenging, and worrisome, and beautiful) experience.
]]>