[Nietzsche Circle][Reviews]

The Myth of Power and the Self
Essays on Franz Kafka

By Walter H. Sokel

Reviewed by Stanley Corngold (Princeton University)

In 1964 Walter Sokel published a masterful study of Franz Kafka entitled Franz Kafka—Tragik und Ironie, a book that has regrettably remained untranslated. And yet it has found readers on both sides of the Atlantic—readers who have marveled at this vast, original, synoptic enterprise that, for the first time, salvaged for criticism the full body of Kafka's work. Before Sokel, critics had found only relics on which to tag theorems: in 1953 Theodor Adorno pretended to read Kafka literally but produced only an anachronistic Marxist-Freudian fable of alienation; in 1957 Wilhelm Emrich found in Kafka a Heideggerian critique of our forgetfulness of Being. But Sokel, educated in Austria and America, and less ideology-maddened, read the whole of Kafka for the first time with a flair for Central European depth-psychology and a New Critic's alertness to figurative language. The Kafka that has emerged for all readers since—the dutiful Jewish son of a brutal father and the aggressive martyr of a passion for writing, the good friend and tormented lover and the ascetic bent on world-denial—was delivered by the maieutic arts of Sokel, so that it can be fairly said that all subsequent writing on Kafka has been but a footnote to Tragik und Ironie. And now, almost forty years later, we have Sokel's critical triumph The Myth of Power and the Self, in which he has written an exemplary footnote to himself.

This is a gathering of dense, rich essays on Kafka spanning four decades, produced from a relation of affinity between critic and author that may be without parallel in recent criticism. Sokel reads Kafka with so assured an understanding and with such an acknowledged accommodatingness to alternative readings that it is almost impossible to speak of its errors. Or if there are such things, they can have only the same effect as his powerfully true statements: they disclose something significant about the relation between Kafka, his texts, and his readers.

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The contents are appropriately varied: there are general essays, in fact remarkable for their detail, on Kafka's poetics and its constitutive tension between two views of poetic language. On the one hand, literature is truth; Kafka links truth to the outcome of an act of writing or to the integrity of the process on which it depends (72). On the other hand, poetic language deals in illusion; it cannot escape, as Kafka wrote, its "being dazzled by truth; the light on the flinching, grimacing face is true, and nothing else," though Sokel finds in this aphorism the attribution to writing of the power to "show the undoing of untruth" (93). No single utterance of Kafka about his art seems to have escaped the eye of this commentator. These essays throw a continual light on Sokel's more particular readings, where one is immediately struck by his decision to confront the most difficult texts (this is not generally the case among Kafka's critics). I find especially useful his reading of the story "Jackals and Arabs" in light of Nietzsche's master and slave moralities, with both terms relativized by the elusive position of the narrator (Sokel's fundamental passion for intellectual-historical thematic connections is tempered by his keen awareness of aspects of narration). And Sokel deals with those social-philosophical stories concerned with politics and government, like "An Old Manuscript" and "The Problem of Our Laws," noting how Kafka sees the benign and brutal aspects of authority as insidiously linked (319). These readings lead to powerful conclusions on the topic of Kafka's representation of power, which Sokel shows to be an affair of the cooperation of the subject in the view of himself that he has indeed been sinned against. Kafka is a great dramatist of power relations, which are again and again an affair of a sort of performative language spoken equally by victim and adversary and, in the latter case, accomplished by the willing self-executioner. Consider K. in The Castle.

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I shall presume to isolate a couple of "exemplary" errors, where matters in flux might be said to crystallize too soon. In his moving and very comprehensive introduction, Sokel writes about his earliest thoughts on the tension between Kafka's "worldly self" and his "ascetic" or "pure" "bachelor self" (19). He includes in these ratios the "true self," whose distinction from the posited "pure self" remains somewhat inscrutable, since writing is the locus of them both. Next, Sokel introduces an "absolute self," which appears to be a modality of the pure self bent on self-aggrandizement as well, but at this point the reader may feel a certain vertigo at the proliferation of selves, especially as we now appear to have left behind the anchoring term of the "true self." I should prefer Sokel to reflect on this very complication, with a view, perhaps, to concluding the extreme difficulty of coming to terms with Kafka on the grounds of a discussion of "self." "Writing" is not a category readily assimilable to that of the self, as Kafka seems to suggest in coining the category of "Schriftstellersein." Writing, for him, is a singular mode of being; the discussion about the self belongs to psychology, which for Kafka is an affair of appearances—or, worse, alibis. But one can now see how this very multiplication of entities does not take us away from Kafka but leads more deeply into his mystery. In reading Kafka through Sokel, the reader's self is itself dislocated, whereupon some manner of thinking further both "writing" and "the real self" becomes obligatory, if one is not to be crushed, in Adorno's phrase, by something "locomotive"-like in Kafka's stories, speeding down on you.

I shall pursue a possibly related "error" at the end; it is found in one of the very best of the essays: chapter fourteen, "Between Gnosticism and Jehovah: The Dilemma in Kafka's Religious Attitude." In a footnote Sokel writes that the scholar Werner Hoffmann "underestimates the continuity and consistency in Kafka's work and thought" in respect to the Gnostic strain in Jewish mysticism (308); Hoffmann is wrong, according to Sokel, to argue for a syncope in Kafka's relation to Jewish Gnosticism occurring around the time of his discovery of his fatal tuberculosis. In my inflection of his argument, Hoffmann claims that the gnostic sensibility that informs Kafka's early writing turns, at a time of desperation, into something doctrinal. I should prefer to approach Hoffmann more closely on this point and insist on the distinction, even within "a Gnostic sensibility," between a gnosticism that is bound to a justificatory world-denial through writing and a Gnosticism that offers salvation on theological terms—a doctrine with which Kafka, in 1917-1918, to use Sokel's phrase, quite seriously "experimented" (301). But none of these potential adjustments could have been made without the help of Sokel's own insights and formulations. This is simply the best book of criticism on Kafka's thought and work ever written.

This review originally appeared in Modernism/Modernity Volume Ten/Number Three (September 2003), 587-89. It is reprinted with kind permission from Stanley Corngold.

Walter H. Sokel’s new essay, “On the Dionysian: Monism and its Consequences”, is featured in our essay section. If you wish to respond to this review or Mr. Sokel’s essay, visit our discussion board.