Kafka and Hofmannsthal

Author(s): Dorrit Cohn

Source: Modern Austrian Literature , 1997, Vol. 30, No. 1 (1997), pp. 1-19
Published by: Association of Austrian Studies

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 Kafka and Hofmannsthal

Dorrit Cohn

There once was a time when Kafka was regarded as incomparable —

spontaneously generated and inimitable. That time is no longer. He is now
the heir of many and has many heirs — the words "Kafka and" figure in
countless titles. Looking merely at those that point backwards, they affiliate
him most prominently with E.T. A. Hoffmann, Kleist, Poe, Dickens, Flaubert,
Dostoevsky. Not, however, with the name featured in my own title, though
Hofmannsthal (Vienna, 1874-1929) was far closer to Kafka (Prague, 1883
1924) in space and time than the writers just named.1 This may be due to
the fact that my title designates a relationship that involves neither of the
two genres — drama and lyric poetry — that Hofmannsthal is most famous
for, but fictional narrative, a relatively minor part of his oeuvre and much
of which remained unfinished.
This relationship has not passed entirely unnoticed. It has most notably
intrigued Walter Benjamin and Hermann Broch, two of the most authorita
tive thinkers of our century, who were, as it happens, among the happy few
who recognized Kafka's importance early on. Their rather cryptic comments
will be my starting point.

I.

Benjamin's comment is found in a veiy late (1940) letter addressed to

Adorno, in which he reacts to the latter*s essay on the correspondence be
tween Stefan George and Hofmannsthal. After expressing his admiration for
this essay — "das Beste was Sie jemals geschrieben haben" —, Benjamin
adds the following qualification: "Es bleibt eine Seite an Hofmannsthal unbe
rührt, die mir am Herzen liegt." He now illustrates this "side" of Hofmanns
thal by referring to two moments from his writings, one from the so-called
"Chandosbrief," the other from the late drama Der Turm. What leads to the
comparison with Kafka is Benjamin's sense that Julian — one of the main
characters of the drama Der Turm — is a self-portrait of its author, for the
latter, like the former, commits an essential act of betrayal: "Julian verrät
den Prinzen: Hofmannsthal hat sich von der Aufgabe abgekehrt, die im
Chandosbrief auftaucht. Seine 'Sprachlosigkeit' war eine Art von Strafe. Die

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2 MODERN AUSTRIAN LITERATURE

Sprache, die Hofmannsthal sich entzogen hat, dürfte eben die sein, die um
die gleiche Zeit Kafka gegeben wurde. Denn Kafka hat sich der Aufgabe an
genommen, an der Hof mannsthal moralisch versagte und darum auch dichte
risch."2
Though on the face of it this comparison is negative (the younger writer
succeeded where the older one failed), it nonetheless stresses that one "side"
of Hofmannsthal, the one that surfaces ("auftaucht") in the "Chandosbrief,"
interfaces with Kafka. The implication is that this work (and perhaps others)
do incarnate a moment of supreme dedication — "Hingabe . . . , um des
Höchsten teilhaftig zu werden." It takes the form of a language that Hof
mannsthal later cast away — "die Hofmannsthal sich entzogen hat." And it
is this veiy language that, at just about the same time, was donated — "ge
geben" — to Kafka. (Note how the grammar relating the writer to his task
— that is, to his language — in this passage keeps changing from active to
passive, on a pattern that opens to profound ambiguities concerning Benja
min's own language, too profound to investigate in the context of this es
say.3 The passage quoted above is closely followed by a sentence that in
sists on Hofmannsthal's sense of guilt at having abandoned his highest cre
ative potential (i.e. his potential of becoming Kafka), even as Benjamin
proposes as the reason for this failure his superabundant performative facil
ity: "Die ungewöhnliche Versatilität geht bei ihm [Hofmannsthal], wie mir
scheint, mit dem Bewußtsein zusammen, Verrat an dem besten in sich geübt
zu haben."
Questionable as Benjamin's diagnosis may be, it coincides remarkably
with the one Hermann Broch was to make a few years later, in an essay on
the narrative oeuvre of the Austrian writer.4 Here we find this same curi
ously contrary-to-fact notion that, if Hofmannsthal had had certain qualities,
and if he had not had others, he would have become Kafka.
Broch's statement to this effect is cast in seemingly different terms from
Benjamin's and occurs in an entirely different context: a discussion of the
attempt on the part of modern novelists to create what Broch calls the "Ge
gen-Mythos," the modern counterpart for ancient myths representing man's
primordial existential anguish. According to Broch it is not Joyce — who
on the face of it would seem to be the most "mythical" of modern novelists
— but Kafka who has in fact moved in this direction: "Es ist die Situation
einer äußersten Hilflosigkeit, und Kafka, nicht Joyce ist ihr gerecht gewor
den: in Kafka finden wir die Ansätze zu dem ihr adäquaten Gegen-Mythos,
... die Symbolisierung der Hilflosigkeit an sich, kurzum die des Kindes."
Returning to the principal subject of his essay, Broch relates Hofmanns
thal to this complex as follows:

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 Kafka and Hofmannsthal 3

Hofmannsthal aber, dank dichterischen Irrationalwissens näher zu

Kafka als zu Joyce, hat das gleichfalls gespürt: hätte er sich der fa
talen Bühnenkostümierungen, die ihn mit ihren livrierten Bedienten
usw. allüberallhin als dauernde Hemmung verfolgten, zu entledigen
vermocht, es wäre die gegenmythische Kraft eines Stückes nach der
Art des Nächtlichen Gewitters, das er geraume Zeit vor Kafkas er
sten Publikationen geschrieben hatte, deutlich und fruchtbar gewor
den. Und das nämliche gilt erst recht für den Andreas,5

Leaving aside for the moment the two different fictional narratives to which
this passage refers, the broader context of this statement reveals that what
Broch here calls Hofmannsthal's "fatale Bühnenkostümierungen" is not in
fact very different from what Benjamin calls his " Versatilität." Indeed Broch
sees Hofmannsthal's inclination to "costume" his conflicts dramatically as the
immediate result of his refusal to express his own intimate self (his Ichver
schweigung) and of his compensatory and quite extraordinary retentiveness
of all visual impressions (Visualität, Visualgedächtnis), especially those he
experienced in the theater: "Theaterszenen und -Szenerien, die schon dem
Kind allertiefster Eindruck gewesen waren, all das ist faibenfett und plastisch
festgehalten."6 It is to this hypertrophied visuality that Broch ultimately at
tributes Hofmannsthal's failure to attain Kafka's ability to create the modern
myth: "Der Mythos verträgt nicht die in jeder Beschreibung steckende Ratio
nalität; Kafka beschreibt nicht, Hofmannsthal kommt davon nicht los... ,"7
In sum, here again, as in the Benjamin passage, Hofmannsthal is pre
sented to us as a potential Kafka in whom something — wilfully or not —
got in the way of actualizing this potential. At the same time, however para
doxically, Broch, even more strongly than Benjamin, concedes that certain
Hofmannsthal texts come very close to Kafka. Broch mentions neither the
"ChandosbrieF nor Der Turm in this context — though what he says about
these works in the preceding and following sections of his essay may well
imply this analogy8 — but two unfinished and posthumously published nar
rative texts of very uneven length: the first, "Nächtliches Gewitter," is a veiy
short (four-page) fragment followed by notes, which deals with a young
boy's nocturnal adventures;9 the second is the much longer novel fragment
Andreas. I do not believe, however, that it was solely their fragmentariness
that reminded Broch of Kafka in these texts but also thematic and structural
features that are found in some of Hofmannsthal's completed stories as well.
It is in fact curious that this long essay devoted to Hofmannsthal's narratives
mentions only in passing, and in a different context, the two stories pub
lished in the 1890s that seem to me the most manifestly "kafkaesque" in all

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4 MODERN AUSTRIAN LITERATURE

of Hofmannsthal's oeuvre: Das Märchen der 672. Nacht and Reiterge

schichte.
There is reason to believe that this omission is not due to Broch's having
nothing to say on the subject of these two stories, but to his having too much
to say. When his publisher requested further comments on one of them (Rei
tergeschichte), Broch replied: "das scheint mir hier unmöglich zu sein, weil
das zu weit führen würde; in der Geschichte sind nämlich Kafkasche Ele
mente enthalten, und wenn ich da hineinsteige wird es maßlos."10 As this
remark suggests, Broch felt that his Hofmannsthal essay barely scratches the
surface of the analogies he sensed between the early narratives of the Vien
nese and the mature narratives of the Prague writer. And this holds true even
more tantalizingly for Benjamin's comments in his letter to Adorno.

II.

Before following Benjamin's and Broch's pointers, some historical data

need to be summarized. I will also touch on the presumed influence of Hof
mannsthal on Kafka's juvenalia, notably on Beschreibung eines Kampfes.
It will hardly suiprise anyone familar with the early history of Kafka
reception that his younger colleague was, to all appearance, totally unknown
to Hofmannsthal, even though most of Kafka's works — including the three
posthumously published novel fragments — were published well within the
Viennese author's lifetime.11 How would he have reacted to them? Per
haps, in view of his generally conservative stance in the years following the
World War, not unlike Goethe to the writers of the Romantic generation (no
tably Kleist), and with the same reluctance to being reminded of his own
boldly innovative youthful creative ventures. But this remains an idle, if in
triguing, speculation.
Just as predictably, by contrast, Kafka knew many of Hofmannsthal's
works,12 and Max Brod mentions how greatly he admired them: "Unter
den zeitgenössischen Wiener Dichtern war nur einer, der ihn beschäftigte,
den er geradezu liebte: Hofmannsthal. Mit welcher Begeisterung hat er mir
einmal das 'Gespräch über Gedichte' vorgelesen — oder den Schlußabsatz
(nicht nur ihn) im Dialog 'Über Charaktere im Roman und im Drama.' Fer
ner den 'Bassompierre."'13 From 1903, when he gave Max Brod one of the
early dramas — Das kleine Welttheater — to 1912, when he saw a perfor
mance of Jedermann, Kafka clearly kept his eye on Hofmannsthal's dramatic
production. His diaries furthermore record that he attended one of Hof
mannsthal's Prague readings in 1912, reacting rather less favorably to the
person than to his works.14 As for Hofmannsthal's narratives: most schol

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 Kafka and Hofmannsthal 5

ars believe that Kafka read the "Chandosbrief" in a collection of Hofmanns

thal's stories published in 1905, at about the time he began writing Beschrei
bung eines Kampfes}5 What has not been noted is that this collection also
contained Das Märchen der 672. Nacht and Reitergeschichte (the former
being in fact the titular story of the volume), so that it seems veiy likely —
even in the absence of more direct evidence — that Kafka came to know
these two stories early on as well.
Kafka critics have almost exclusively referred these data to what they
deem to be the influence of Hofmannsthal on Kafka's earliest creative at
tempts, especially on Beschreibung eines Kampfes}6 But to my mind the
thematic parallels to which they have pointed remain rather weak, concern
ing as they do problems that pervade turn-of-the century literature — notably
the disturbed relationship of the self to the external world and the problem
atization of language. These readings of Kafka's Beschreibung in a vaguely
Hofmannsthalian light fail to delve below the interfacial surface between
these two writers. One cannot but agree with Walter Sokel when he writes
(in a footnote to one of his own discussions of this same early Kafka text):
"Eine gründliche Behandlung des wichtigen Themas Hofmannsthal-Kafka
steht noch aus."17

III.

That the comparative ground between Hofmannsthal and Kafka is a mul

tiply reverberating terrain can be gathered from several further, casual and
wildly disparate, remarks in the critical literature. One echo, to which I will
myself lend an ear merely in passing, concerns Hofmannsthal's Andreas and
Kafka's Amerika. These two abandoned fragments were, as it happens,
written just about simultaneously (late 1912 or early 1913). But they occupy
diametrically opposed positions in the careers of the two writers: Andreas,
Hofmannsthal's only attempt at writing a full-length novel, is one of his
latest narrative texts, whereas Amerika is the earliest of Kafka's three unfin
ished novels.
The protagonists of both works are very young men from middleclass
backgrounds and central European cities (respectively Vienna and Prague),
who have been unwillingly packed off by their parents to foreign places (An
dreas to Venice, Karl Rossmann to New York). As we meet them, they try
vainly to cope with destabilizing, wholly incomprehensible and shocking st
ations: chaotic urban settings, unfamilar social conventions, inexplicable,
seemingly unmediated happenings, male figures who misguide them, promis
cuous women who may or may not be trying to seduce them. Both works

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6 MODERN AUSTRIAN LITERATURE

contain moments of heavily perverse sexuality, ranging from the homoerotic

to the sado-masochistic.18 Both furthermore sketch out Utopian closures
that deconstruct the initial impression that they aim to renew the tradition of
the Bildungsroman.
These analogies in theme and overall structure are compounded by anal
ogies in the narrative mode that renders them. Neither work includes a
narrator who provides any measure of omniscient stability, so that we appre
hend the strange fictional worlds entirely by way of the bewildered protago
nists' own uncomprehending perceptions. This narrative mode in both works
at times imbues the fictional world with an anguishingly oneiric quality:19
seemingly disconnected details cumulatively produce and obsessively repro
duce uncanny figures and cyphered spaces, creating a nightmarish atmos
phere.
This atmosphere is known, of course, as Kafka's trademark; it pervades
almost every page of his later fictions and particularly Der Prozess and Das
Schloss. The early Amerika, however, is rightly regarded as his most "tradi
tional" work, only sporadically fantastic in the manner of his later novels and
stories. But this alternation or ambiguity between realistic and surrealist
strains is precisely what solidifies the ground for comparison between Ameri
ka and Andreas. The remarkable thing, however, is that Kafka and Hof
mannsthal traversed this ground in opposite directions: Kafka on his way in
to the domain that was to become his own; and Hofmannsthal on his way
out from the domain of his early narrative fictions. At the time he wrote An
dreas, he had begun — especially in his theatrical works — to divorce the
realistic from the surreal. In the years immediately preceding and following
the time when he worked on Andreas, this resulted to one side in such "real
istic" comedies us Der Rosenkavalier, Der Schwierige and Der Unbestechli
che, to the other side in such mythical and allegorical dramas as Ariadne auf
Naxos and Jedermann, as well as such Märchen-dramas as Die Frau ohne
Schatten. In this respect, the "kafkaesque" moments in Andreas appear to be
vestiges of (or final attempts at) moods and modes with which he experi
mented in his earliest years.
The preceding remarks, then, while they offer a mere glimpse at the An
dreas-Amerika relationship, will explain why I have chosen a different focus
for my comparative approach. Indeed the common devices that strike me in
these two works — tenuous plot-sequence, psychogenic space, focalized
narration, dream-likeness — are far more pronouncedly and consistently de
ployed in the pair of stories by each writer that will be my concern in what
follows: Hofmannsthal's Das Märchen der 672. Nacht (l%95) and his Reiter
geschichte (1898), Kafka's Das Urteil (1916) and Ein Landarzt (1919). Per

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 Kafka and Hofmannsthal 7

haps the most obvious characteristic that these four stories share is their re
markable density: within their brief compass — all are less than twenty
pages long — they accumulate mysteriously significant details with such in
comparable intensity that any interpretive net that is cast over them always
strikes one as too loosely meshed to catch the specific gravity of their textual
moments. I will take up further common denominators between these stories
under three headings: plot structure, narrative situation, dream-likeness.

IV.

All four of our stories begin with a seemingly minor mishap or misdeed
in the lives of their protagonists and end with their punishing death (or, in
the case of Ein Landarzt, a state of death-in-life). In Hofmannsthal's Mär
chen der 672. Nacht, the Kaufmannssohn receives a letter accusing his be
loved male servant of an unnamed crime; in the course of investigating this
crime, the Kaufmannssohn receives a fatal blow from a horse and dies
cursing his existence: "Er haßte seinen vorzeitigen Tod so sehr, daß er sein
Leben haßte, weil es ihn dahin gefuhrt hatte."20 A horse is also the imme
diate cause for the death of Wachtmeister Lerch in Reitergeschichte: his su
perior shoots him for his momentary refusal to part with the mount of an en
emy officer killed in combat. In Kafka's Urteil, Georg throws himself into
the river after his father, for reasons related to the son's successful accession
to manhood, condemns him to death by drowning: "Ein unschuldiges Kind
warst du ja eigentlich, aber noch eigentlicher warst du ein teuflischer
Mensch! — Und darum wisse: Ich verurteile dich jetzt zum Tode des Ertrin
kens."21 The narrator of Ein Landarzt, having answered a call from a
patient he is unable to help, is fated to wander eternally through a snowy
landscape: "Niemals komme ich so nach Hause; . . . Betrogen! Betrogen!
Einmal dem Fehlläuten der Nachtglocke gefolgt — es ist niemals gut
zumachen" (128).
Though there is not, in any of these four stories, a legal or logical fit
between crime and punishment (of the sort notably evoked by plots of trage
dy), they are nonetheless far from creating a sense that their fatal endings are
absurdly aibitrary or accidental. This is evident from the critical literature,
where readings primarily center on relations of cause and effect, reaching for
notoriously variedexplanations: religious,socio-political,existential,psycho
analytic.
Of these four stories, two — one by each author — lend themselves
with particular ease to psychoanalyic interpretations: those in which we have
at the same time the strongest accents placed on the protagonist's conflict

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8 MODERN AUSTRIAN LITERATURE

with authority figures and on his erotic desires; I mean of course Das Urteil
and Reitergeschichte. Georg's plans for marriage to Frieda are clearly fore
grounded as a (if not the only) cause for his father's enmity, and Lerch's fan
tasies about a life of leisure and love with Vuic (a former mistress he briefly
encounters during his ride through Milan) are foregrounded in the silently
rebellious mood his commander reads in his eyes at the moment he shoots
him to death. But although this pair of psychoanalytic mainstays is less obvi
ously displayed in Märchen and Landarzt, here too the male and female fig
ures can be read into ominously powerful oedipal triangles.22 All four sto
ries, in other words, strongly hint that the fatal punishments they impose on
their main characters correspond to the deep-seated sense of guilt they car
ried through their lives.
One could add numerous further analogies that apply to the content of
at least one of the Hofmannsthal-Kafka pairs in our quartet of stories: the fa
tal role played by horses in Ein Landarzt and both of the Hofmannsthal sto
ries;23 the thematic importance of servants — and especially female ser
vants — as locus of guilt and desire in Märchen and Landarzt-, the common
merchant-profession of the fathers in Märchen and Urteil, from whom the
sons inherit the privileges and spoils of their upper-class lives; the parallel
epilogic return of the world to normalcy that follows the death of both Lerch
and Georg: in Reitergeschichte, to the normalcy of war, where the com
mander now "seine Pistole ruhig versorgend, die . . . Schwadron dem ...
Feinde aufs neue entgegenführen konnte" (131); in Das Urteil to the normal
cy of peace, with the famous last words that follow Georg's fall into the riv
er: "In diesem Augenblick ging über die Brücke ein geradezu unendlicher
Verkehr" (32).

V.

The epilogic sentences I have just quoted bring us to the second compa
rable feature in our stories: narrative style. Indeed the final obliteration of
their protagonists' minds brings about a striking departure from the mode of
telling that prevails up to the penultimate point of Reitergeschichte and Ur
teil and that, in Märchen and Landarzt, is maintained to the bitter end: the
rendering of space, other persons, and events by way of the apprehending
consciousness of the principal character.
This fictional technique—variously called (internal) focalization, figurai
narration (personale Erzählsituation), or limited perspective — was not new
with Hofmannsthal. It had gradually developed in the course of the nine
teenth century, increasingly taking the place of so-called omniscient nar

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 Kafka and Hofmannsthal 9

ration. But its single-minded use is rare in fictional works published before
1900. Kafka's admiration for Flaubert and the French novelist's stylistic in
fluence on him may well be due to the fact that no other nineteenth century
writer used focalized narration more widely and more successfully.24 Kaf
ka himself is universally credited with having been the first to effect this
narrative mode in its purest form in Germanophone literature, in all three of
his novels and in many of his shorter works. Das Urteil is the earliest story
where he employed internal focalization throughout, and Ein Landarzt the
story where he most daringly experimented with a first-person variant of this
technique.25 It is not generally acknowledged that Hofmannsthal anticipat
ed Kafka in this respect. Yet, with the possible exception of a couple of
Schnitzler's early stories, Märchen and Reitergeschichte are among the most
remarkable works that employ this narrative mode, as the following two quo
tations will illustrate. The first, from Märchen, tells about the Kaufmanns
sohn's walking along some greenhouses as he explores a strange garden:

Wie er so spähend an den Glaswänden des zweiten langsam vor

überging, erschrak er plötzlich sehr heftig und fuhr zurück. Denn ein
Mensch hatte sein Gesicht an den Scheiben und schaute ihn an.
Nach einem Augenblick beruhigte er sich und wurde sich bewußt,
daß es ein Kind war .... Aber als er jetzt näher hinsah, erschrak
er abermals .... Denn das Kind, das ihn regungslos und böse
ansah, glich in einer unbegreiflichen Weise dem fünfzehnjährigen
Mädchen, das er in seinem Haus hatte. . . . Alles war gleich, nur
daß in dem Kind das alles einen Ausdruck gab, der ihm Entsetzen
verursachte. Er wußte nicht, wovor er so namenlose Furcht empfand.
Er wußte nur, daß er es nicht ertragen werde, sich umzudrehen und
zu wissen, daß dieses Gesicht hinter ihm durch die Scheiben starrte.
(56)

The following passage, from Reitergeschichte, tells about Letch rejoining his
regiment after a detour to an abandoned village:

Wie nun zugleich aus der Brust seines Pferdes ein schwerer röhren
der Atem hervordrang,... bemerkte er jenseits der Steinbrücke und
beiläufig in gleicher Entfernung von dieser als wie er sich selbst
befand, einen Reiter des eigenen Regiments auf sich zu kommen,
und zwar einen Wachtmeister, und zwar auf einem Braunen mit
weißgestiefelten Vorderbeinen. Da er nun wohl wußte, daß sich in
der ganzen Schwadron kein solches Pferd befand, ausgenommen

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10 MODERN AUSTRIAN LITERATURE

dasjenige, auf welchem er selbst in diesem Augenblick saß, er das

Gesicht des anderen Reiters aber noch immer nicht erkennen konnte,
so trieb er ungeduldig sein Pferd sogar mit den Sporen zu einem
sehr lebhaften Trab an, worauf auch der andere sein Tempo ganz im
gleichen Maße verbesserte, so daß nun nur noch ein Steinwurf sie
trennte, und nun, indem die beiden Pferde, jedes von seiner Seite
her, im gleichen Augenblick, jedes mit dem gleichen weißgestiefel
ten Vorfuß die Brücke betraten, der Wachmeister, mit stierem Blick
in der Erscheinung sich selbst erkennend, wie sinnlos sein Pferd
zurückriß und die rechte Hand mit ausgespreizten Fingern gegen das
Wesen vorstreckte, worauf die Gestalt, gleichfalls parierend und die
Rechte erhebend, plötzlich nicht da war. (128)

I have deliberately quoted the two "doubles" scenes from these Hofmanns
thal stories. Such scenes are of course a thematic mainstay of fantastic tales,
found, among others, in E.T.A. Hoffmann, Poe, Dostoevsky, and Henry
James. As Tzvetan Todorov has shown, the reduplicating vision in such
scenes, unconfirmed by a distanced narrator's omniscience, is solely referred
to the subjectively biased perceptions of the protagonist. Kafka persistently
creates the uncanny instability featured in these doubles scenes by way of
the same focalizing techniques: as when Georg successively sees his father
as a giant — "Mein Vater ist noch immer ein Riese" (26) — and as a small
child whom he can cany in his arms and who plays with his watch chain;
or when the country doctor first perceives his patient to be a healthy boy —
"der Junge ist gesund . . . und am besten mit einem Stoß aus dem Bett zu
treiben" (126) — and immediately thereafter sees this same boy as the bearer
of a fatal wound crawling with worms.
This figurai subjectivity of the narration pervasively destabilizes not only
the secondary figures in these texts, but also their time and space. In Reiter
geschichte Lerch at a certain moment of his ride feels "ein solches Nicht
vorwärtskommen,... als hätte er eine unmeßbare Zeit mit dem Durchreiten
des widerwärtigen Dorfes vollbracht" (128). In Ein Landarzt the distance be
tween home and the patient's house, initially traversed in no time at all —
"einen Augenblick" (125), is extended to infinity at its end — "Niemals
komme ich so nach Hause" (128).26 Temporal and spatial realities don't
merely shorten and lenghten in a manner one might realistically attribute to
the mode of transportation, they shrink and grow to the unreal limits of zero
or infinity.
Clearly, in this and other respects the memorably disturbing uncanniness
of all four stories depends on the manner of their telling quite as much as

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 Kajka and Hofmannsthal 11

on the matter told. This manner, moreover, combines with its matter to en
able the very special effect created by each of these stories and that brings
out the strongest kinship between them: their dream-likeness.

VI.

What gives a story the appearance of being dream-like? Even though we

often hear it said that "novels are like dreams," most novels are not in the
least dream-like, and don't try to be. Fiction — and certainly fiction that
qualifies as realist — most often aims at the analogy with real life, with the
world we know from our waking, not from our sleeping experience. This
holds true even (and perhaps above all) when characters in novels fall asleep
and the stoiy explicitly separates their dreams from their waking lives — in
Crime and Punishment, for example, or Anna Karenina. Fiction that, locally
or in its entirety, aims at analogy with our nocturnal lives, with the psychic
adventures the mind produces in sleep, conforms to quite distinct criteria, in
both content and structure.
The plot structure of dream-like fiction, for one thing, generally departs
from the cause-and-effect sequences we know from real life (and from realist
fiction). It tends instead to progress along the kinds of non-sequiturs we
sometimes refer to as "dream-logic": by aligning enigmatic, uncoordinated,
inconsistent events, they produce in the reader disorientation, puzzlement,
shock. Dream-likeness is inevitably enhanced by such surreal events as meta
morphoses or living encounters with persons certifiably dead; but such the
matic overlaps with ghost stories and fairy tales are occasional, and by no
means essential.
What is essential for the production of dream-likeness is the strict adher
ence to a single consciousness on which the events impact as immediate, un
accountable experiences. And the device that creates this impression of un
mediated psychic involvement and virtual presentness is precisely the fo
calized narrative situation I have described earlier. On account of the abrupt
and unaccountable events that characterize their plot structure, focalization
in dream-like narratives typically takes sudden unexpected turns, often punc
tuated by instantaneous temporal adveibs (now, then, suddenly), as it speeds
the experiencing consciousness through a hectic series of motions and
emotions:

Der Wagen wird fortgerissen, wie Holz in die Strömung; noch höre
ich, wie die Tür meines Hauses unter dem Ansturm des Knechtes
birst und splittert, dann sind mir Augen und Ohren von einem zu

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12 MODERN AUSTRIAN LITERATURE

allen Sinnen gleichmäßig dringendem Sausen erfüllt. Aber auch das

nur einen Augenblick, denn, als öffne sich unmittelbar vor meinem
Hoftor der Hof meines Kranken, bin ich schon dort.
Sein Pferd ging schwer und schob die Hinterbeine mühsam unter,
wie wenn sie von Blei wären.... da er sich aufrichtete, ging dicht
vor seinem Pferde eine Frauensperson, deren Gesicht er nicht sehen
konnte. . . . Unter einer Türschwelle zur Linken rollten zwei
ineinander verbissene blutende Ratten in die Mitte der Straße . . .
und nun war die Frau in einem Hausflur verschwunden, ohne daß
[er] hatte ihr Gesicht sehen können.
[Er] fühlte sich aus dem Zimmer gejagt, den Schlag, mit dem der
Vater hinter ihm aufs Bett stürzte, trug er noch in den Ohren davon.
... Aus dem Tore sprang er, über die Fahrbahn zum Wasser trieb
es ihn. Schon hielt er das Geländer fest, wie ein Hungriger die
Nahrung. Er schwang sich über . . .
Unschlüssig ging er vor, da war die Mauer zur Rechten in Manns
breite durchbrochen, und aus der Öffnung lief ein Brett über leere
Luft nach einer gegenüberliegenden Plattform .... So groß war
[seine] Ungeduld, aus dem Bereich seiner Angst zu kommen, daß
er sogleich einen, dann den anderen Fuß auf das Brett setzte und,
den Blick fest auf das jenseitige Ufer gerichtet, anfing hinüber
zugehen. ... Er kniete nieder und schloß die Augen; da stießen
seine vorwärtstastenden Arme an die Gitterstäbe. Er umklammerte
sie fest, sie gaben nach, und mit leisem Knirschen, das ihm, wie der
Anhauch des Todes, den Leib durchschnitt, öffnete sich gegen ihn,
gegen den Abgrund, die Tür, an der er hing; . . .

I have replaced names by personal pronouns in the above quotations, so as

to make it more difficult (at least for readers who don't know or remember
these stories verbatim) to recognize which oneiric passage is from which au
thor.27 In all of them the self reacts with helpless passivity, coerced by
forces that dictate its motions and emotions. Space, minutely observed pre
cisely because it has lost all predictable coherence, is so closely tied to the
anguish of the perceiver that it is impossible to tell whether it is the cause
or the result of psychic conflicts. Needless to say, these conflicts themselves
cannot be apprehended by the reader from brief extracts of this kind. Indeed
they cannot be read out of the stories as a whole with any measure of cer
tainty, a fact that is amply displayed by the divergent psychological interpre
tations they have received.
While the dream-likeness of Kafka's stories is a critical common-place,

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 Kafka and Hofmannsthal 13

readers of Hofmannsthal's early stories have generally failed to draw this

analogy. A striking exception is one of the Märcheris first readers, Hof
mannsthal's friend Arthur Schnitzler. In a letter written shortly after the first
publication of this story, Schnitzler wrote to the author: "Die Geschichte hat
nichts von der Wärme und dem Glanz eines Märchens, wohl aber in wunder
barer Weise das fahle Licht des Traums Sobald ich mir die Erlebnisse
des Kaufmannssohnes als Traum vorstelle, werden sie mir höchst ergreifend.
... Auch ist nicht zu vergessen: die Empfindungen des Kaufmannssohnes
sind wie im Traum geschildert."28
After further detailing this story's dream-likeness, Schnitzler insists: "Sie
haben die Geschichte gewiß als Traum erzählt." He even went so far as to
advise Hofmannsthal to write a new version with a happy end: "Ihre tiefere
Bedeutung verliert die Geschichte durchaus nicht, wenn der Kaufmannssohn
aus ihr erwacht, statt an ihr zu steiben."
There is no evidence Hofmannsthal ever contemplated making this dras
tic change in his Märchen. It may seem like an overstatement to say that this
change would have erased its Kafka-likeness with one stroke. Yet it is
precisely Hofmannsthal's positing unbridled oneiric surreality as fictional re
ality that makes his narratives appear as radical experiments even as they ap
pear as préfigurations of the fictional world Kafka began to create some
twenty years later.

VII.

This brings me, in conclusion, to a question for which I have no conclu

sive answer—a question I ask with a view to placing the Kafka-Hofmanns
thal connection in a broader context: What is the most meaningful con
ceptual term to designate the type of relationship I have described? It is per
haps significant that I vainly tried to subtitle my essay with the phrase "A
Case or — something; but what? influence? intertextuality? kinship?
affinity?
In the old days, "influence" would no doubt have been the word: a
standard concept of traditional literary history, it designates a unidirectional,
diadic movement that explains the likeness between an earlier and a later au
thor. But with the raising of our theoretical consciousness that word has long
since lost its critical innocence. Even at its most innocent, of course, an ar
gument for "influence" had to be validated by positivistic data. The ones I
produced earlier — the likelihood that Kafka had read both Das Märchen
der 672. Nacht and Reitergeschichte several years before he began to write

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14 MODERN AUSTRIAN LITERATURE

his mature works — would probably have been sufficient to build a case.
But nowadays, even if Kafka's knowledge of these Hofmannsthal stories
could be convincingly documented, a modern critic would still hesitate to
speak of their "influence" on him.
One reason is that the concept implies a hierarchical structure of sorts:
a relation of high to low (by way of its etymology), of original to imitation
(by way of its early — eighteenth century — use).29 These undertones in
evitably cling to the word "influence"; they may well be a reason why we
tend to avoid it in our more equalitarian age. As I have suggested, I am re
luctant even to apply it to Kafka's juvenalia, at least without strong qualifica
tions: qualifications that would cast the "influenced" artist in a more active,
more original role than the traditional uses of the word imply.
Another reason why "influence" is no longer a secure critical concept is
that we have become aware of the function of the reader in our shaping of
literary history. As Hans Robert Jauss puts it: "Literature and art only obtain
a history when the succession of works is mediated not only through the
producing subject but also through the consuming subject."30 Statements
of this kind have alerted us to the extent that "influence" works backward,
not forward. In an essay entitled "Kafka and his Precursors," Jorge Borges
writes: "If Kafka had never written a line, we would not perceive this [kaf
kaesque] quality [in earlier texts]; in other words, it would not exist The
fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our
conception of the past, as it will modify the future."31 This "retroactive in
tertextuality," as Ingeborg Hoesterey has called it,32 is certainly at work
in my own essay, even though I would maintain that Hofmannsthal's experi
mental departure from the narrative norms of his time could be recognized
and described by critics who don't acknowledge its resemblance to Kafka's
innovations.
Is the less authoritarian, less uni-directional term "intertextuality" then
the word I want for the Kafka-Hofmannsthal connection? This concept,
which has for some time served to designate a writer's relation to past (as
well as contemporary and future) contexts acting on his work, has none of
the drawbacks of "influence." But, referring as it does to an impersonal field
of anonymous textual codes, it has drawbacks of its own, especially for dis
cussions of the historical interrelations between individual writers or
texts.33 This is not to say that the discursive space of the pre-war Austro
Hungarian Empire shared by Hofmannsthal and Kafka is not immensely im
portant to our understanding of both writers. Quite to the contrary, I feel
that, with the exception of the Freud connection, the Vienna-Prague axis has
not been sufficiently explored for its relevance to Kafka's work. The sense

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 Kafka and Hofmannsthal 15

of the dream-likeness of life, in particular, was in the Prague air no less than
in the Vienna air during this period. But an "intertextually" oriented cultural
study of such atmospheric conditions would not be designed to pinpoint the
transformations they can effect in literature, in the structure of a literary
genre like narrative. Its net would be cast too widely, its meshes too loose
to catch the specific aspects of the relationship I have tried to pin down.
Having dismissed "influence" and "intertextuality," what about terms like
"kinship," or "affinity" for my potential subtitle? Despite — because of? —
the fact that neither of these terms is backed by any manner of theoretical
precision or critical tradition, both come closer to signifying, at least vague
ly, the likeness I perceive in the works of my two authors. But these terms
are misleading in one important respect: they fail to convey the extremely
limited nature of this relationship, the fact that the zone of the overlap ex
tends only over a very slim slice of Hofmannsthal's large and extremely var
ied oeuvre, whereas for Kafka it is fairly representative of the unique crea
tive domain he was to explore throughout his life. The fact that Hofmanns
thal briefly stepped into this domain before Kafka makes him perhaps into
a momentary precursor, his stories into experimental préfigurations — these
are unwieldy terms, but they may well be the most accurate for this kind of
relationship.
Though it does not seem to have a good, simple name, it is not an alto
gether infrequent phenomenon Innovations are often tentatively introduced
by young writers when they are boldly exploratory, more or less "wildly" ex
perimental in the process of shaping experience into language, when they try
out different directions, often quite fleetingly, without, at any rate, necessari
ly adhering to them in later life. Their abandonment of these directions may
well be due to the non-reception they receive (Schnitzler's advice to Hof
mannsthal being a case in point). In the case of the dreamlike fictional reali
ty that Kafka developed, it took a writer quite unusually unconcerned with
reception to adhere to this tendency, not one who, like Hofmannsthal, was
over-concerned with decorum. That may well be why this tendency in him
went underground with the abandoned Andreas fragment.
Which brings me, by way of a final question, back to Benjamin and
Broch. Can we, do we agree with their implied regret that Hofmannsthal did
not develop into Kafka? That, at a certain moment of his career, he decisive
ly changed directions? Do we want, do we need, more than one Kafka? Each
reader will of course have to answer this question for himself. But he will
have to do so with full awareness of the fact that, had Hofmannsthal contin
ued in the Kafka-vein of his early narratives, our literary consciousness
would have to live without Der Rosenkavalier, Ariadne auf Naxos, Der

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16 MODERN AUSTRIAN LITERATURE

Schwierige, and most of the other works he wrote after the so-called Chan
dos-crisis.

Harvard University

Notes

1. To my knowledge, the only titular exception is an article by Ludo

Veibeek, "Scheidewege am Jahrhundertbeginn: Zu Hofmannsthal und Kaf
ka," in: Littérature et culture allemande: Hommages à Henry Plard, eds.
Roger Goffin, Michel Vanhelleputte, and Monique Weyerbergh-Boussart
(Brussels, 1985), pp. 271-282. Veibeek here reiterates the presumed influ
ence of Hofmannsthalian ideas — expressed mainly in "Ein Brier and "Das
Gespräch über Gedichte" — on Kafka's "Beschreibung eines Kampfes" (see
below), without concern for the pervasive structural analogies pointed up in
the present study.
2. Walter Benjamin, Briefe, Vol. 2, eds. G. Scholem and T.W. Adorno
(Frankfurt am Main, 1978), p. 852.
3. For some interesting remarks concerning the Benjaminian implications
of this passage, see Rainer Nägele, "Die Aufmerksamkeit des Lesers: Auf
klärung und Moderne," in: Hany Kunneman, Hent de Vries, eds, Enlighten
ments (Kampen, The Netherlands, 1993), p. 178.
4. "Hugo von Hofmannsthals Prosaschriften," Schriften zur Literatur 1
(Frankfurt am Main, 1975), pp. 300-332.
5. Ibid., p. 315.
6. Ibid., p. 313.
7. Ibid., pp. 318-319.
8. See ibid., pp. 305-311 for the discussion of the "Chandosbrief," pp.
323, 326, and 327 for passing comments on Der Turm.
9. This text was published posthumously under the title "Dämmerung
und nächtliches Gewitter," though Hofmannsthal also referred to it as "Kna
bengeschichte." Broch reiterates its Kafka-likeness in a letter: "this dream
like prose poem has in spots the same kind of an approach to a second reali
ty that Kafka has." Briefe 3 (Frankfurt am Main, 1981), p. 289.
10. Briefe 3, p. 517.
11. As far as we know, Hofmannsthal made no mention of Kafka, public
or private. His library, according to Michael Hamburger, contained none of
Kafka's works (see Verbeek, [note 1], p. 278, note 12).

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 Kafka and Hofmannsthal 17

12. For the principal data, see Klaus Wagenbach, Franz Kafka: Eine
Biographie seiner Jugend (Bern, 1958), pp. 102-103, 121; also see Kafka
Handbuch I, ed. Hartmut Binder (Stuttgart, 1979), pp. 312-313.
13. Max Brod, Franz Kafka: Glauben und Liebe (Munich, 1948), p. 108,
note.

14. "Hofmannsthal liest mit falschem Klang in der Stimme. Gesammelte

Gestalt, angefangen von den an den Kopf angepressten Ohren." Tagebücher
(New Yoik, 1948), p. 252.
15. Cf. Gerhard Kurz's statement to this effect in his introduction to Der
junge Kafka, ed. Gerhard Kurz (Frankfurt am Main, 1984), p. 19: "Ganz si
cher hat er den Brief in Hofmannsthals Das Märchen der 672. Nacht und an
dere Erzählungen von 1905 kennengelernt."
16. See especially Klaus Wagenbach, Franz Kafka: Eine Biographie sei
ner Jugend (Bern, 1958), pp. 122-123; Kafka-Handbuch I, p. 315, Veibeek,
pp. 272-274 and 279-281; Der junge Kafka, pp. 20-21.
17. "Narzißmus, Magie und Funktion des Erzählens in Kafkas Beschrei
bung eines Kampfes," in: Der junge Kafka, p. 136; this remark is followed
by the cryptic note, "Die erstaunlichen Parallelen, die z.B. zwischen der Fi
gur des Dicken [in Beschreibung eines Kampfes] und Hofmannsthals Der
Kaiser von China spricht und dem Märchen der 672. Nacht bestehen, wären
einer eigenen Behandlung wert." See also Walter Sokel, "Kafka's Begin
nings" in Kafka and the Contemporary Critical Performance, ed. AlanUdoff
(Bloomington, Indiana, 1987), p. 109.
18. For the erotic themes in Andreas, see W. G. Sebald, "Venetianisches
Kryptogramm," an essay concluding that this text is "eine pornographische
Etude auf dem höchsten Niveau der Kunst" (Die Beschreibung des Unglücks
[Salzburg and Vienna, 1985], p. 65). The sexually loaded moments in
Amerika have been stressed by, among others, Heinz Politzer {Franz Kafka:
Parable and Paradox [Ithaca, N. Y„ 1962], pp. 116-162).
19. The likeness of Hofmannsthal's "dream-mode" to Kafka in the Vene
tian scenes of Andreas has been noted in passing by David Miles; see Hof
mannsthal's Novel "Andreas": Memory and Self (Princeton, N. J., 1972), pp.
180-181 and 185.1 agree with Miles that this likeness is most striking in the
scene of Andreas' encounter with Maria-Mariquita.
20. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Erzählungen, erfundene Gespräche und
Briefe, Reisen (Frankfurt am Main, 1979), pp. 62-63. All subsequent quota
tions from Hofmannsthal refer to this edition, with the page numbers provid
ed in parentheses.

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18 MODERN AUSTRIAN LITERATURE

21. Franz Kafka, Sämtliche Erzählungen (Frankfurt am Main, 1970). All

subsequent quotations from Kafka refer to this edition, with the page
numbers provided in parentheses.
22. See, for example, Dorrit Cohn, "'Als Traum erzählt': The Case for
a Freudian Reading of Hofmannsthal's 'Märchen der 672. Nacht,,H in: Deut
sche Vierteljahrsschrift 54 (1980), 284-305; and Walter Sokel's comments
on Ein Landarzt in: Franz Kafka: Tragik und Ironie (Munich and Vienna,
1964), pp. 267-281.
23. Michael Lakin—"Hofmannsthal's Reitergeschichte and Kafka's Ein
Landarzt," in: Modern Austrian Literature, Vol. 3, No. 1 (1970), 40 — has
called attention to the comparable importance of the horses in these two sto
ries.
24. Referring to the principal technique that effects focalization, Charles
Bernheimer writes: "Eine stilistische Analyse von Flauberts Einfluß würde
sich zweifellos auf die Haupttechnik seiner unpersönlichen Erzählweise
konzentrieren, den 'style indirect libre.'"("Psychopoetik. Flaubert und Kafkas
Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande," in: Der junge Kajka, p. 156).
Though Kafka never commented on his own style, his critical remarks on
other writers reveal his strong dislike of obtrusively opinionated narrators;
see Hartmut Binder, Motif und Gestaltung bei Franz Kajka (Bonn, 1966), pp.
189-191.
25. The narrative mode of Ein Landarzt is examined in Dorrit Cohn,
"Kafka's Eternal Present: Narrative Tense in Tïin Landarzt' and Other First
Person Stories," in: PMLA 83 (1968), 144-150.
26. This analogy has previously been pointed out by Michael Lakin,
(note 23), 44.
27. The first and third quotes are Kafka's (125, 32), the second and
fourth Hofmannsthal's (126, 58-59).
28. Hugo von Hofmannsthal - Arthur Schnitzler, Briefwechsel, eds.
Therese Nickel and Heinrich Schnitzler (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer,
1964), pp. 63-64 f. For an interpretation that follows up on this idea, see
Dorrit Cohn, "'Als Traum erzählt': The Case for a Freudian Reading of Hof
mannsthal's 'Märchen der 672. Nacht,'" in: Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift 54
(1980), 284-305.
29. See Susan Stanford Friedman, "Weavings: Intertextuality and the
(re)Birthof the Author," in: Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History,
Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein, eds. (Madison, Wisconsin, 1991), p. 151.
30. "Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory," in: Toward an
Aestetics of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis, 1982), p. 15.

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 Kafka and Hofinannsthal 19

31. Jorge Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (New
Yoik, 1964), p. 201.
32. "The Intertextual Loop: Kafka, Robbe-Grillet, Kafka," in: Kafka and
the Contemporary Critical Performance, ed. Alan Udoff (Bloomington, Indi
ana, 1987), p. 64.
33. A probing discussion of the pros and cons of the concept of "inter
textuality" may be found in the introductoiy chapter to Influence and Inter
textuality in Literary History, pp. 3-36. See also Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit
of Signs, pp. 103-104.

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