paul-denicola-literature-pure-mediality

that the notion of understanding results from a traumatic process of violent tearing and
laceration which forces meaning to appear. Both critique the problematic conception of
instrumental language which compels definitive intelligibility and meaning. Kafka
inherently allows for the possibilities of the traumatic in his writing. It is precisely this
allowance for the “horrors” of infinite play and the radically undecidable that constitutes
what Kafka saw as the necessary disruption – an opening or loosening of the rigidity of
conceptual language. As Kafka puts it metaphorically in a diary entry: “Books must be
the axe for the frozen sea inside us” (Diaries, 279).
Given what I have stated, it would be inappropriate to use the following interpretive
perspective: “Instead of…examining the meaning and function of the story’s enigmatic
quality, critics have tended to want a kind of translation into a more normal code. This
would imply that Kafka’s meaning is not radically different from anyone else’s but that it
is expressed in a kind of private code; one goes to the diaries and letters to get the code,
uses it to decode the works, and is then left with a meaning which is now independent of
Kafka’s style of writing” (Ellis, 74).
What I argue as my thesis is a reading of Kafka’s writing that would attempt a solution of
the text’s problems from within, by an investigation of its structure. I would add that
Kafka himself suggests such a reading in letters to Felice Bauer to whom he was engaged
at the time. Speaking of the short story “Das Urteil” he says that it “is a bit wild and
meaningless,” but that it has an “inner truth.” That is to say that my reading will present
Kafka’s writing as radically immanent – whose truth is not some transcendental referent,
but an aspect of the immanence that constitutes Kafka’s writing, that is, the infinite
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