Alan Saunders: Franz Kafka author of The Trial, in which a man is unjustly accused and tried and Metamorphosis in which a man becomes a giant insect, is perhaps the modernist author most often discussed by philosophers. From Benjamin and Adorno to Blanchot, Derrida and Deleuze to mention just some of the most prominent philosophers, Kafka has been the subject of many essays and books. What has been so alluring about Kafka that philosophers have a compulsion to return to his writings? Well recently a seminar at the University of Western Sydney called ‘Kafka and Philosophy’, tried to answer this question. And we’ll have a go this week on The Philosopher’s Zone. I’m Alan Saunders and my guest is one of the stars of the show, Henry Sussman, visiting professor in German language and literature at Yale University and one of the world’s great Kafka scholars. Henry, welcome to The Philosopher’s Zone.

Henry Sussman: It’s a great honour to be here.

Alan Saunders: Perhaps we might begin just by situating Kafka as a writer. Can we say where he comes from or was he a complete one-off?

Henry Sussman: He was part of a small Jewish minority in Prague that was itself a fragment of a slightly larger German-speaking population in the Habsburg Empire so he came from a minority within a minority. He was a prodigy as a student. He studied Law after completing gymnasium and after that led somewhat of a double life. He worked as an official both in state and private insurance companies, mostly related to workers compensation by day. And by night he created some of the most innovative and prophetic works of modernism and indeed postmodernism.

Alan Saunders: And where did these works come from? I mean did he have influences?

Henry Sussman: His influences are very interesting. In some ways much more at the universal level of world literature than the local level of German letters. Although Heinrich von Kleist was clearly a major influence from German letters but Kafka in a way looked at the world from a broad perspective of world civilisations and therefore the Bible was extremely important to him and classics such as Robinson Crusoe and Alice in Wonderland.

Alan Saunders: Alice in Wonderland is interesting because it’s a 19th century book but the great Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges has written an article about Kafka’s influence on Lewis Carroll.

Henry Sussman: That’s right. Kafka creates the kind of virtual feedback loop in which the present and the future have as much an influence on the past as vice versa.

Alan Saunders: We think of him as a rather grim figure but I gather that he often laughed aloud when writing. Is there a significant comic element in his work?

Henry Sussman: Very very strong; very ironic, very much poking fun at official institutions and the discourse of official institutions and when he read as a young man…when he read his works including the growing manuscript of The Trial to his friends, it was amid raucous laughter.

Alan Saunders: You said that he had a background in the law. Did he have any sort of philosophical background himself?

Henry Sussman: I’m sure that that was part of his gymnasium studies. He went to the elite German-speaking gymnasium in Prague and received a first-class education.

Alan Saunders: And why have so many philosophers been so interested in him?

Henry Sussman: On one level he stages the direct encounter between the modern subject and the superior domains of law and discourse as demarcated in the distinction between the empirical and the transcendental in Kant. But in a very modern framework what would ordinarily reside in the stately ordered domain of the transcendental is completely arbitrary, self-contradictory, destructive; these are precisely the encounters that his major literary protagonists in The Trial, Josef K and in The Castle, now just abbreviated to K, the letter K. These are the kinds of encounters that these figures have with the institutions of order and law.

Alan Saunders: Well we’ll come back to the law very shortly. You want to argue that there’s a virtual element to Kafka’s literary scenes, because they absorb and enmesh us within their parameters with the insistence of virtual reality comprising the free-standing self-referential world to which all readers have access. Can you enlarge on that?

Henry Sussman: The other side of the equation that you began to articulate when you mention that after Borges the present can turn back and reconfigure the past, the other side of that equation is Kafka’s uncanny sense of developments in politics and administration and law and I would argue—at least in the way that the novels and the late animal parables are structured—that Kafka anticipated what the great theoreticians of cybernetics like Douglas Hofstadter and Anthony Wilden have called isomorphism. Isomorphism is a zipper. It is what powers all of our cybernetic devices and the World Wide Web and artificial intelligence and virtual reality. It is literally a zipper that connects one register that is calculable, that can count, that can be articulated in numbers but it zips it to another form of input whether musical notes or poetic intonations or sensations—it renders in fact virtually everything in the world calculable and operational and that is the major episteme or ideological state apparatus or what I like to call, a prevailing operating system, under which we all live. So in the great opportunity that was accorded to me to participate in the Sydney seminar on Kafka and philosophy, I described how this story is programmed, it is the ruminations of a somewhat paranoid subterranean rodent who at the same time that it kills many little animals and obsesses on where to store them and how to distribute them, worries that it is being invaded by a foe, a foe that may either be singular or may be countless aggressive creatures and I read the architecture of this construction and its obsession with numbers as an isomorphic text; a text that opens a cybernetic domain.

Alan Saunders: You mentioned rodents; what about insects? Are you describing the condition of Gregor Samsa who wakes up one morning and finds that he’s become a giant insect?

Henry Sussman: Well for Kafka, that’s a very very interesting question. For Kafka consciousness is by no means exclusively anthropocentric, it is by no means exclusively the property of human beings, which is why somewhere deep in his imaginary he could also begin to imagine machines that could think. He certainly imagines animals that think and he imagines thinking as an essential feature of animality. The huge underlying joke of The Metamorphosis is that once we accept its grounding premise, that a man has been metamorphosed into an insect, that in fact the novella is a highly realistic tale. Its characterisation of how the animal would get up out of bed, where it would wander, how it would hang suspended from the ceiling like another very important character in Kafka’s short fiction, a trapeze artist who has a crisis because he can’t hang suspended simultaneously from two trapezes at one time…once we accept the premise—and it’s in this regard that some of Kafka’s fictions argue as philosophical syllogisms or arguments—once we accept the premise, it’s in fact a highly realistic tale. It’s also highly realistic in the interpersonal and sociological implications of what would happen through a kind of major disfiguration or transformation in a human being.

Alan Saunders: There’s a nice passage in Vladimir Nabokov’s lectures where he talks about Gregor Samsa once he has become an insect, getting some pleasure out of scuttling around the floor in the dust, which is very moving.

Henry Sussman: The story actually does succeed in at least intimating some of Gregor’s underlying motives. And it indicates very clearly that Gregor is the single operational member of his family, he provides the income, he sends his younger sister Greta to her music lessons at the conservatory. Interestingly after Gregor has been taken out of the picture, the family becomes much more functional; people go back to work, the young sister at the end of the story stretches in the bloom of health. So in some ways Gregor has a motive to become this monstrosity, this Ungeziefer, he’s getting a bit of come-uppance to his exploitative family.

Alan Saunders: Ungeziefer? Wasn’t this a word that the Nazis employed of Jews?

Henry Sussman: I don’t know about that…

Alan Saunders: Ah…

Henry Sussman: …specifically, but it well could have been and I take the sense of your question. The fact that Kafka particularly in The Man Who Disappeared, otherwise known as Amerika, that Kafka somehow brilliantly succeeded in anticipating the ‘camp’—as it’s discussed by Giorgio Agamben. The ending episode of that novel is called the ‘Nature Theater of Oklahoma’, and what it turns out to be is a kind of utopian detention centre in which every inmate somehow is paired up with the work or employment that they had been dreaming of their entire life, but this nonetheless under the guise of a confining camp environment; where there’s sorting and selection.

Alan Saunders: On ABC Radio National, you’re with The Philosopher’s Zone and I’m talking to Henry Sussman from Yale University about Franz Kafka. Henry, Kafka seems to have had issues as a writer with metaphor. What were they?

Henry Sussman: I think he was a great configurer, again…and this is his immediate debt to literary history, the fascination with the image that drove so much of great romantic literature, whether in the English language or in the German language…and so Kafka was a brilliant programmer of encompassing metaphoric spaces in which many anomalies could transpire or anomalies that would enable one to think about the ideology of reality and truth.

Alan Saunders: And there is a self referential aspect of his writing isn’t there?

Henry Sussman: Absolutely. So both the burrow creature in the story that I explicated at the Sydney seminar and the three protagonists of the great novels become absorbed in their narrative; they learn in the course of the narrative, they eventually reflect back on the encompassing circumstance and image in which they find themselves.

Alan Saunders: Let’s look again at The Trial. Few writers of fiction have anticipated the preoccupations of 20th century culture—we’ve already mentioned this—with violence, derangement and language with the lucidity that Kafka achieves in this book. We get the dull hammering of dread and loneliness in daily life, the work at the office of Franz K, anonymous menace, bureaucratic complexity, isolation, punishment without crime. They give a distressing snapshot, not just of the author’s time and place but of the whole of the 20th century. Perhaps we might ask though given that Kafka was trained in law, what was his relationship with the law of his time?

Henry Sussman: He was in the avant-garde of workers compensation, of statistical accounting for accidents; he was part of a movement in insurance and government that would have brought greater responsibility towards workers in their predicaments and in the things that would limit them. So he played law two-sidedly if you will; that in his work he mastered the discourse and was somewhat of a reformer and in his fiction he pulled out the cork of the closures implemented by the law as what we would now call a closed system.

Alan Saunders: And there’s another story I can’t remember the name of it where a man spends his entire life waiting for somebody to open the door for him. It’s a legal situation and if…actually the door is unlocked and he finds this out just as he’s about to die.

Henry Sussman: Indeed. And that is the famous parable, ‘Before the Law’ which is the culminating episode of The Trial. What’s particularly interesting about that episode is that it is enunciated by a priest in a cathedral where K has been invited on false pretence and if one looks at the placement of the episode it is between a series of encounters with information-givers who give different absurd accounts of the law, whether his attorney Huld or whether the court artist Titorelli, and the story is enunciated however just before he is executed in a quarry pit. If one attends carefully enough to the placement of the episode—in a way the parable which is an allegory of interpretative open-endedness—the place that this narrative fills, it is his sentence before he is sent off to his death. So if you look at the narrative development of the novel, this story which indicates that each enigmatic tale or fiction in the history of the culture is an open-ended generator of variations and possibilities. It’s like a cubist painting; it’s a modernist artefact, in a way what Josef K is granted on the way out to his barbaric death, is a modernist understanding of reality whether it is the themes and variations of jazz, the fragments of cubism or whether it is a Borgesian novel as in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius that pursues every permutation of its plot.

Alan Saunders: You mentioned the fairly considerable literary influences on Kafka. In The Trial, can we see—since he’s celebrating his 200th birthday at the moment—Dickens? Can we see Bleak House?

Henry Sussman: There have been wonderful studies. There is a book by Mark Spilka called Dickens and Kafka and not only is there the endless Jarndyce case in Dickens’s novel of that name but there are the slums and the tenements; there is the urban realism of Franz Kafka that I think he very very much owes to Dickens and whose ironic treatment he owes to Flaubert. I think it’s a very very fair comment on your part that he was strongly influenced by 19th century English and French novelists.

Alan Saunders: Your book about The Trial is subtitled Kafka’s Unholy Trinity. What is the trinity in question?

Henry Sussman: I have to struggle to remember that. But he was certainly a son. He was certainly an interpreter and I’m not even sure that I remember what the third element that he was but he was certainly a vivid participant in his time and I think that what I was trying to reach toward in that book was his multiple personas in approaching the world of letters and culture.

Alan Saunders: Just finally, let’s have a look at books themselves. You’ve said there’s something irreducibly tactile about books. Why does this matter and is it still true in the age of Kindle?

Henry Sussman: Wonderful question, I think of great concern to all of our auditors and on the one hand it does behove us to import some of the cybernetic thinking that we do almost unconsciously in our understandings of literature and culture. On the other hand it behoves us to understand that we are under the domination of media that may not allow us to concentrate, to interpret, to elucidate with the same kind of concentration that was afforded by the medium of books which are good objects; they are tactile objects. I like to think of them as holding us back as we hold them. Books are bound at their binding and in that regard they verge toward closed systems but as they open up they insist in their multiplicity of meaning on the possibility of opening and open systems. So that we need to maintain them in our grasp in whatever medium—whether it is a Kindle or whether it is a bound copy of a book—it’s extremely incumbent upon us to maintain our citizenship and empowerment in the domains of literacy and book reading.

Alan Saunders: Well Henry Sussman we’ll get back to our books. Thank you very much for being with us today.

Henry Sussman: It’s been a total pleasure.

Alan Saunders: Henry Sussman is Visiting Professor in German Language and Literature at Yale University. The sound engineer on The Philosopher’s Zone is Luke Purse. I’m Alan Saunders and I’ll be back next week.