Meg Cook earned her M.A. in Liberal Studies from Reed College, where her scholarship focused on literary studies with an emphasis in critical theory. Her graduate work culminated in a thesis entitled Modes of Intersubjectivity in Kafka’s The Trial and Amerika. Cook is the co-editor of Fecund, an interdisciplinary digital publication of hybrid literature, new media, and fashion.
EXCELLENCE IN INTERDISCIPLINARY WRITING AWARD – 2020
Reception Theory and the Kafka Reader
Meg Cook, Reed College
In his essay “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach,” from his 1974 book The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett, Wolfgang Iser writes that “The phenomenological theory of art lays full stress on the idea that, in considering a literary work, one must take into account not only the actual text but also, and in equal measure, the actions involved in responding to that text.”[1] This phenomenological approach is the two-way relationship that forms our world: Broadly, intersubjectivity refers to the ways in which our consciousness is shaped by the myriad perspectives we interact with on a daily basis. Our perception forms through the people we meet, through shared mutual systems of signs, symbols, and language—in essence, we cannot escape the influence that sharing the world with others has on us (as much as we may sometimes want to think of ourselves as singular entities). Here, Iser furthers our intersubjective lived experience to include the relationship between reader and novel. Iser’s focus is precisely this relationship, between the reader and the text—rather than, for instance, that between the reader and the author. The implied reader is triggered through active involvement; an intersubjective reliance to make both the reader and the text come alive. Iser confronts the need for the text’s realization through the reader’s consciousness and the active involvement in the reading process. He continues:
If this [intersubjectivity necessary to “realize” the text] is so, then the literary work has two poles, which we might call the artistic and the esthetic: to the realization accomplished by the reader. From this polarity it follows that the literary work cannot be completely identical with the text, but in fact must lie halfway between the two.[2]
Iser focuses on reception theory—how the literary work is formed through this polarity between the active reader and the literary work itself. Iser knows the literary work is created in tandem with the reader; it does not precede the reader’s interaction with it. This mutual creation implies not only the active participation of the reader but also the reader’s crucial role in the actual formation of the artwork itself. This dual relationship means that the text is individually formed through the consciousness of its readers. Iser writes of this ever-evolving relationship through Edmund Husserl’s initial writings on phenomenological philosophy, whose discourse dictates that consciousness is produced through experience; one’s perception inexorably governs one’s consciousness, with the body as a tool with which to do so. Iser writes:
In describing man’s inner consciousness of time, Husserl once remarked: “Every originally constructive process is inspired by pre-intentions, which construct and collect the seed of what is to come, as such, and bring it to fruition.” For this bringing to fruition, the literary text needs the reader’s imagination, which gives shape to the sentences.[3]
The concretized temporal linearity of the novel, and how it is consumed, now has the capacity to move, change, grow, and overcome the supposed confines (temporal and otherwise) of the form. Iser concludes:
This is why the reader often feels involved in events which, at the time of reading, seem real to him, even though in fact they are very far from his own reality. The fact that completely different readers can be affected by the “reality” of a particular text is ample evidence of the degree to which literary texts transform reading into a creative process that is far above mere perception of what is written.[4]
Entering Kafka’s Novels
In Franz Kafka’s novels, each reader naturally tries to create a map or meaning within the looping hallways, sea sickness–inducing courthouses, and winding staircases of the plot. The author intentionally makes these landscapes confusing and disorienting, highlighting the psychoanalytic roots of the underlying power structures that Kafka works to reveal within his texts. Because there is no true empirical map with which to navigate Kafka’s novels, characters such as Josef K. (The Trial[5]) and Karl Rossmann (Amerika[6]) are forced to live out all the readers’ collective attempts at map-making—which, of course, are ultimately impossible and further the confusion and disorientation. Essentially, each reader enters the text through different means, building connections that are unique to her own perception of the novel—that are all “correct” in their own way (or, rather, are all legitimate ways of working through the novel).
Iser notes that in modern and postmodern works, the author recognizes the active participation and creation of the text in conjunction with the reader (whether reluctantly or not). Kafka’s goal in implicating the reader in the novels’ disorientation perhaps demonstrates his explicit knowledge of the reader’s participation and how he considers this additional in-text consciousness (of the reader) in his analysis of modernity and its power structures and oppressive linguistic, economic, and mechanical operations. In essence, perhaps the dynamic relationship between the Kafka reader and the Kafka novel is harnessed by Kafka himself to further complicate the power dynamics he tries to explore through the text itself. Iser writes:
In whatever way, and under whatever circumstances the reader may link the different phases of the text together, it will always be the process of anticipation and retrospection that leads to the formation of the virtual dimension, which in turn transforms the text into an experience for the reader. The way in which this experience comes about through a process of continual modification is closely akin to the way in which we gather experience in life. And thus the “reality” of the reading experience can illuminate basic patterns of real experience.[7]
“Experiencing” the text, in the way Iser describes, is perhaps a phenomenon of modernity. Kafka’s forward-moving push through the novel not only situates us breathlessly alongside its protagonists but also implicates the reader in the motion of the text—in its very form.
The form, then, is created through the act of reading—it is not an overarching and immovable force that precedes the reader’s interaction with the novel. The process of reading furthers Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological theories of intersubjectivity and consciousness-formation: The text alights when the reader’s consciousness actively forms alongside it, which is an exciting and transformative experience. But more than that, the text and its reader each come to the moment of reading through their own ever-evolving intersubjective memories. In Iser’s chapter “Grasping a Text” from his 1978 The Act of Reading: An Aesthetic Response, he writes:
Every reading moment sends out stimuli into the memory, and what is recalled can activate the perspectives in such a way that continually modify and so individualize one another. Our example shows clearly that reading does not merely flow forward, but that recalled segments also have a retroactive effect, with the present transforming the past. As the evocation of the narrator’s perspective undermines what is stated explicitly in the characters’ perspective, there emerges a configurative meaning, which shows the character to be an opportunist and the narrator’s comments to have a hitherto unsuspected individual connotation.[8]
Through this continual modification of the text, it seems possible to transgress the confines put forth by Kafka within his novels. In other words, we as readers participate in what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call a “minor” existence and thus create a rebellion within the text, responding to the oppressive bureaucratic, linguistic, and paternal structures put forth by the plot.[9]
Phenomenological and Psychoanalytic Doubling Between Reader and Protagonist
The intersubjective power that comes with Iser’s ideas of text formation is at odds with both the hyper-individualism necessary to thrive within the modern United States depicted in novels like Amerika and the oppressively hyper-organized court systems of The Trial. Iser writes that “it is clear, then, that the present retention of a past perspective qualifies both past and present. It also qualifies the future, because whatever modifications it has brought about will immediately affect the nature of our expectations.”[10] Our expectations of what a text is is ever-changing as a result of the intersubjective nature of our relationship with the novel as well as the act of reading it. Iser’s reception theory reiterates that the novel is not a simple physical object with a fixed temporal state.
Iser quotes Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception when working through the question of intersubjectivity and one’s conscious experiences:
The world appears absurd, only if a demand for absolute consciousness ceaselessly dissociates from each other the meanings with which it swarms, and conversely this demand is motivated by the conflict between those meanings. Absolute self-evidence and the absurd are equivalent, not merely as philosophical affirmations, but also as experiences.[11]
From Merleau-Ponty, we know that we cannot dissociate from other points of view when living in the world and understanding our experiences as reliant on others’; relying on any sort of “absolute self-evidence,” according to Merleau-Ponty, will absolutely result in an absurd consciousness experience. We know this from traversing through Kafka’s novels: K. and Rossmann’s rejection from modern society puts each of them in a disempowering individual state of minority. Although this minority also represents a rebellion from the oppressive power structures they inhabit, the lack of successful intersubjective interactions results in the disorienting rush of situations and people that threaten any notion of “true” reality. Iser notes that a consciousness that is purely in and of the self is possible, but unreliable, as it relies fully on the ego, which “gives rise to a reality that cannot be penetrated by human knowledge.”[12] Exclusively occupying the ego “can only be presented in the manner of absurdity, which indicates that self-evidence and knowledge exclude one another—or, in other words, that knowledge of self-evidence does not lend itself to be questioned.”[13] This sort of reality, detached from intersubjective human interaction, reminds us of the protagonists’ place (and struggle) within Amerika and The Trial; one cannot live purely within one’s ego or else the surroundings become blurred with distortion and cannot necessarily be trusted as reliable (or corroborated) lived experience.
Let us take a moment to define the Symbolic, a term used by psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to define the linguistic structure of symbols (language, social mores, and other systems that create a presupposed “order” in our society) that dictates the world we inhabit as socialized beings.[14] After entering this socialized state as young children, the now-formed ego subject is unable to retreat into a world unbounded by these symbolic structures—what Lacan refers to as the Real. Thus, everything the subject interacts with is through the guise of the Symbolic and all the underlying systems into which he is born; the subject cannot experience a thing in and of itself, as the formulation of his inherent subjectivity makes escaping the Symbolic impossible. For Lacan, the Father is the Primary Signifier: as the child enters the Symbolic, away from their pre-Oedipal connection to the mother and those primordial desires and towards the Symbolic realm encapsulated by language, the Father (the phallus) stands in for that replacement—moving through these Oedipal stages as he enters the Symbolic. The Father does not merely mean in the parental sense; it also entails all structures of power and authority that make up the Symbolic realm and dictate its structures.
Is there a modern impossibility of an affirmative intersubjective experience in the world, unbridled by the structural oppression of the Symbolic? Iser’s theories are seemingly affirmative in the Merleau-Pontian sense—in that they allow a reciprocal intersubjectivity unclouded by these structural oppressions, and in good faith—but it is unhelpful to theorize in this capacity if we do indeed, as readers, stand alongside Josef K. and Rossmann as they deal with distinctly modern forms of societal rejection. Josef K. and Karl Rossmann’s rejection from the Symbolic affects the very physicality of the novel’s story; the spatial distortion and hyper-real situations result from each man’s lack of an affirmative intersubjective experience in the world, which stems from their inability to achieve success within the linguistic confines of the intersubjective Symbolic. How does this, then, surface in the reader’s experience within the novel, if we understand Iser’s theory of active readership and the two-way interactions with the novel?
We turn to Ritchie Robertson, who recognizes the bewildering happenings of Kafka’s novels, especially with regard to its heroes: “Not only are the characters bewildered,” he writes, “so is the reader. As in the cinema, events are shown only from the viewpoint of the main character … We learn no more than the central character knows about his situation and therefore share his bewilderment.”[15] The prose of Amerika and The Trial stays very close to the reader’s consciousness throughout of the novels; both the end of Josef K.’s journey in The Trial (his dog-like, submissive death) and Rossmann’s in Amerika (his presumed death as he travels West with the Nature Theater of Oklahoma) signify the end of the reader’s involvement in the protagonists’ journeys. Note that both of these deaths are undignified and subhuman; if we conclude that a life beyond Lacan’s Symbolic is impossible, it follows that anyone rejected from it or pushed to its margins is, then, subhuman—and deserving of death.
In The Trial and Amerika, however, the reader’s allegiances are clearly demarcated, and the narration stays close to the protagonists for the entire plot (as opposed to the switch in narrative allegiance, from Gregor’s point-of-view to his family’s, after his death, in The Metamorphosis). For instance, we do not know what happens to K.’s mutilated body after he dies like a dog—The Trial ends when our connection with K. does. Because of these close ties to the protagonists that Kafka never severs, the reader is not in a position of pity for K. or Rossmann but rather an empathy of related experience. The close relationship of K. and Rossmann to the reader is also why the hyper-real experiences of the novel leave us flustered; we are unable to achieve any more clarity than the protagonists themselves. Iser writes about the reader’s implication in the novel specifically in the modernist realm of Joyce’s Ulysses, but his conclusions also can be applied to Kafka’s own modernity:
The reader is virtually free to choose his own direction, but he will not be able to work his way through every possible perspective, for the number of these is far beyond the capacity of any one man’s naturally selective perception. If the novel sometimes gives the impression of unreality, this is not because it presents unreality, but simply because it swamps us with aspects of reality that overburden our limited powers of absorption.[16]
Here Iser reiterates the same analysis of Kafka (or, in Iser’s case, Joyce), which explains the hyper-real situations. By hyper-reality, I mean that Kafka uses his matter-of-fact realist prose to construct a world with places, objects, and people who are almost believably real in their looks, actions, or mores but which instill in the reader a sense that something is a little off, uncanny, and unsettling. The term was originally used by Jean Baudrillard in his 1981 text Simulacra and Simulation. To Baudrillard, the modern simulation is a doubled existence: Our thoughts and desires constantly rendered through structural lenses such as capitalism, mass media, and advertising symbols. Eventually, modernity will result in a full-scale simulacrum with no connection to its underlying “reality.”[17]
The “reality” of Amerika and The Trial that Kafka “swamps” us with, the hellish bureaucracies and capitalist forces of modernity, distort our understanding of any semblance of “true” reality that could be depicted otherwise. Iser acknowledges this extreme subjective reality of the reader; there is freedom in this hyper-subjective reading experience, but it can also distort the reading experience. The reader becomes “minor” in relation to the novel, just as K. and Rossmann do within the confines of the plot. Iser continues:
Herein lies the main difference between Ulysses and the tradition of the novel. Instead of providing an illusory coherence of the reality it presents, this novel offers only a potential presentation, the working out of which has to be done actively by the reader. He is not led into a ready-made world of meaning, but is made to search for this world. Thus reading itself has an archetypal structure which, just like the archetypes in the text, is unable to lead to any defined goal.[18]
The “ready-made world of meaning” of the traditional (pre-modern) novel is not what we experience in the modern world Kafka builds; his texts, like Joyce’s, require the reader to actively make meaning with the “potential presentation” they are given, rather than be passively provided for with a more coherent “reality.” Both the Kafka reader’s relationship to the modernist novel and the protagonists’ relationship to their modern lives require an active awareness to not be completely subsumed, and both participants will be disappointed if they hope to find a neutral reality that can be synthesized without active participation. This is why, at the end of Amerika and The Trial, both protagonists can recognize a reality that would allow them peaceful existence and a life of acceptance, but that reality is merely a simulation—Iser’s “ready-made” world. Recall the inviting window that lures Josef K. at the end of The Trial; this moment may be the most palpable example of Josef K.’s actual yearning for the world he cannot fit into throughout the rest of the novel. In modernity, both in the context of the novel and through our own involvement while reading the novel, a conventional existence that also allows for our knowledge of our place within a simulacrum is impossible. K. and Rossmann’s status as rejected Other from the systems of modernity are doubled in the reader’s experience alongside them.
Intersubjective Tension: Reader–Text vs. Reader–Protagonists
Because of this affirming consciousness-creating experience that is inherent to the reading process, there also exists a palpable dissonance between the two intersubjectivities present in the reader’s interaction with Amerika and The Trial: On the one hand, there is the affirmative intersubjective consciousness-forming relationship between reader–novel, and, on the other, the failed intersubjective experience of the reader within the novel and alongside its protagonists (i.e. a doubled experience of rejection from the Symbolic that the reader feels alongside K. and Rossmann as we read the distorted hyper-reality of the two books). Why is it important to think about these twofold intersubjective experiences of readers of Amerika and The Trial? The two perspectives may seem dissonant, but both regard the reader’s position as outsider—as refusing the oppressive structures of the Symbolic—which can be its own kind of revolutionary counter-approach, allowing K.’s and Rossmann’s stories, despite their respective ultimate demise, to have a place beyond the power structures themselves—a quietly revolutionary position.
The Reader’s Ultimate Privilege
However, no matter how close the reader’s own consciousness comes to that of Josef K. and Karl Rossmann’s, or how implicated in the text we become based on Iser’s theories regarding the dynamic relationship between reader and text, or how revolutionary the minor status of K. and Rossmann can be, there still exists an undeniable privilege that the reader holds over these two protagonists. Even though there is much evidence that the reader is placed alongside the protagonists’ own consciousness—especially as the reader interacts with the distorted contents of the plot itself and the psychoanalytic reasoning that brings about that distortion, the reader is, in the end, granted an affirmative intersubjective experience in an essential way that K. and Rossmann are not. The reader’s affirmative intersubjective relationship with the novel as a whole, through Iser’s reception theories (and, further, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological philosophy), is one intersubjective experience that is present only to the reader herself; it is not given to the characters inside the novel. There exists an essential doubling between the consciousness of the reader as we rush forward through the text alongside K. and Rossmann, and even Iser writes of the moment the reader is absorbed in the images of the novel, saying that “we are no longer present in reality—instead we are experiencing what can only be described as an irrealization, in the sense that we are preoccupied with something that takes us out of our own given reality.”[19] This is why, according to Iser, there can be a jarring moment when the reader finally puts the book down after she finishes the novel; what she has just done is not passively consume an object; instead, she has had a fully realized conscious experience. In the case of our protagonists, this means that when we reside closely to their consciousness throughout the text, the hyper-real distortion of Kafka’s plots become alarming and disorienting for us in a real way. However, the experience we have with the text object allows us to form an overarching (and removed) affirmative intersubjective relationship with the act of reading the novel itself, not living alongside the protagonists but in consuming the text as a reader. In addition to the reader’s intersubjective relationship with the text, there exist myriad intersubjectivities allowed through the act of reading: the reader and novel, the reader and author, the reader and oneself (i.e. re-reading and the new perceptions that allows), and the reader and other readers, whose collective consciousness forms the text as it grows and lives. And because we as readers ultimately allowed these moments of affirmative intersubjectivity, despite how engaged in a certain reality we had been while engrossed in the novel, we ultimately hover above K. and Rossmann, asserting our dominance. When K. and Rossmann die, we feel the closeness of ourselves to them die too, which gives the final pages of The Trial and Amerika a credible pathos. It also implicates us in the larger conversation about oppressive power structures within Lacan’s Symbolic, especially in these two rich depictions of modernity and its discontents. But as close as we get, we are still given the opportunity to enter the text, insert our perspectives, and gain something critical in return—even if that thing is simply an active participation in the novel where we participate and grow from its myriad perspectives. We can exit the novel, but K. and Rossmann cannot put their own books down. They are forced to stay within the liminal struggle between the Oedipal pre-Symbolic self and acceptance into the Symbolic—but we, as readers, can choose to exit that space.
Notes
[1] Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 274.
[2] Ibid., 274.
[3] Ibid., 277.
[4] Ibid., 278–279.
[5] Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Breon Mitchell (New York: Schocken Books, 1998).
[6] Franz Kafka, Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared, trans. Michael Hoffmann (New York: New Directions, 2004), 115.
[7] Iser, 281.
[8] Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 115.
[9] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
[10] Iser, The Act of Reading, 115.
[11] Quoted in Iser, The Act of Reading, 295.
[12] Iser, The Implied Reader, 264.
[13] Ibid., 264.
[14] Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006).
[15] Ritchie Robertson, Kafka: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 26.
[16] Iser, The Implied Reader, 231-232.
[17] Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994).
[18] Iser, The Implied Reader, 232.
[19] Iser, The Act of Reading, 140.
Copyright © 2020 by Association of Graduate Liberal Studies Programs