It is evident that to try to conceive of freedom without knowledge simply creates a contradiction. If we lack the essential understanding of where we stand before a decision to act or choice we make, we are not free. The world that Kafka explores in his fictions begins and continues with the contradiction of freedom in an inadequately or incompletely known world. In a world that retreats into obscurity before him, no version of Kafka’s protagonist is free. Dirk Oschmann makes much play and particular emphasis out of the image of K. as “Blindschleiche” (181 citing Kafka, 192, 199), not only helpless and formless, but bereft of the human knowledge that would endow him with assurance and identity.
The project addresses the novels only, which would suggest an artificial restriction in defining freedom through its appearances as a structural feature of a long narrative. One quickly notices the effect of this narrowing of the term to these contexts. The closing in of a frame defined as the “ästhetische Faktur des Romans” (185, my emphasis) which Oschmann describes—perfectly plausibly—as “Revision in Permanenz” runs counter to the critical power of reading through the full human concern with freedom and its failures, or, as we are shown, through the blinded eyes of K., the notion that he is free, but that this freedom has no value.
This paired misprision of an achieved freedom and its lack of value on the part of the protagonists in Der Verschollene, Der Proceß, and Das Schloß also establishes the theme of all Oschmann’s interpretations in this book. And of course, one is struck by the appearance of this dark experience in all three of Kafka’s novels. Perhaps even shocked. So how do we, as readers, respond to such figures whose sense of freedom and its value must surely diverge profoundly from our own? It is not clear that Oschmann ever arrives quite squarely before the question of how and why Kafka asserts this experience of an estranged freedom. At the same time we have to acknowledge the value of Oschmann’s having drawn attention to an idea to which Kafka’s text gives voice only sparingly and discreetly, and yet which gives determining shape to the narrative.
The world Kafka creates certainly leads us into the labyrinth of these disvalues. The fascination it exerts unfolds in his prose because the reader can both see it and not see it. It is both strange and familiar. But still seen at a distance. As though we see a man present a ticket for a train journey purchased for some other trip at some other time and now invalid. We might look again at our own ticket for reassurance, but reassurance is there. The difference in situation creates the mysterious beauty of this narrative anxiety.
Yet one cannot say that Oschmann addresses this anxiety with full appreciation of its aesthetics. Kafka’s reader experiences a unique displacement. The narration always follows in the closest proximity to the protagonist, and yet we cannot see through his eyes, only in a spellbound state of revelation looking over his shoulder, held at a distance no matter how close we might be. If in the end it is not freedom, we do not know what Kafka’s protagonists want. Moreover, as long as we do remain under the spell of Kafka’s prose and Kafka’s imagined world, the problem of freedom and knowledge that this review started out by declaring to be “evident” imposes itself in a manner that has no evident limit. It certainly goes beyond politics.
The deeper we look beyond the surface of what we assumed we knew about freedom from our own world, the harder it becomes to recall a coherent desire that we brought with us to these texts. And what Kafka reveals to us as we follow the always elusive thread of his narration is how much of this notion of freedom does not really come from our actual world, but from our imagined world. Where else do we find an author through whose creation we question both our knowledge of freedom and the value we ascribe to it in worldly relations? Had Oschmann lingered more with that set of questions concerning freedom and strangeness he would surely have opened a significant change in the development of Kafka scholarship.
Instead, this study restricts itself to compendiously and rigorously reiterating the sound commentary of the past on every reference to the concept of freedom in Kafka’s novels. We have had one hundred years now to ascertain the full aesthetic power of Kafka’s disruptions of narrative time and the rhythms of collapse in his protagonists’ struggles to proceed in their investigations. The clarity of vision in learned commentaries has presented a boundless record of discoveries in the way that a phrase may be mobilized anywhere in Kafka’s text to reveal the unclarity of vision Kafka portrays. Each new account reviews his protagonist’s attempts to maneuver in his particular locus and moment of “Fremdheit.” Oschmann in turn cites as many as his framework will bear. These references accumulate in a manner that for some terms might cause their presence to take on a new significance with quantity evolving into quality. To amass certain kinds of motif whose frequency of appearance had been underestimated or overlooked might in itself change a perception, but we need to discriminate in a different way with freedom, as we also do with the strangeness of estrangement. These are the great motifs of modernity. We know that. These are the great open spaces that we need to measure and subdivide.
Two contrasting passages illustrate the problem that Oschmann identifies. The issue shines out at the end of Chapter Eight of Das Schloß with K.’s sudden discovery of an abysmal eminence as he stands, drunk and cold, in the courtyard of the Herrenhof, completely isolated, and as he muses, victorious because the world around him seems to be in retreat. This sudden sense of an unbridgeable distance between him and the power of Klamm, the power he had hoped to waylay, strikes him, unaccountably, as a transcendent freedom. Yet the phrasing is quite odd. K. is “freilich freier” than ever before, or than any other before him (Oschmann cites the passage, 213). Kafka portrays him as feeling this way because he can stand in this otherwise forbidden spot as long as he wants. And yet he has no reason to want to. Freedom to do what one wants is not freedom if one is detached from any knowledge of what it signifies or what it might bring. And for that reason, the passage concludes, the sense of a victorious freedom is accompanied just as vividly by K.’s conviction that there was “nichts Sinnloseres, nichts Verzweifelteres als diese Freiheit.”
Certainly, one can imagine no passage in any fiction that draws a meaning of freedom so fearfully close to cold illusion. But this contrasts with another meaning entirely, with a feeling denoted with the same word, of the freedom vouchsafed by strangeness. K. in Der Proceß goes to consult with and dismiss his lawyer, and meets the tradesman Block. And again he thinks he sees, or rather feels, what he does not see as though it held the form of a freedom. In Der Proceß it does not appear, as it does in Das Schloß, reflected in the overwhelming impression of the setting. It is not conveyed in an outward scene, where the lights go out and the sleigh is backed away into its shed in the courtyard of the Herrenhof. In Der Proceß, Kafka offers us the simile of a generalized and quite distant scene: “Er fühlte sich so frei, wie man es sonst nur ist, wenn man in der Fremde mit niedrigen Leuten spricht” (Kafka, cited in Oschmann 156). When Oschmann quotes this passage, he does not register what makes it distinctive, nor does he recognize how so many other lines in which he finds a reference to freedom do not correspond to one another to make a coherent tapestry and sustain a consistent critique. It’s true that, here too, Kafka’s text describes a misprision, but a very different one from that represented in Das Schloß. The passage in Der Proceß goes on to expand an illusion of mastery compounded of class and indifference to a foreign place. Once could say that in these scenes in the two novels, only the absence of knowledge constitutes what the two instances have in common.
Kafka’s artistry depends on his ability to conjure up the experience of not knowing through the precision with which he renders appearances that refuse to reveal a genealogy or a destination. Yet Oschmann’s scholarly assembling of so many cases in which the word “freedom” or the alien setting appear misses the far more essential point about what is absent from those appearances, namely any coherence in conception that binds them together with their positive force. It’s a little emblematic of how inessential the words can be, how much they lack of positive conceptual force, when we see how easily they can under certain circumstances vanish. The Muirs don’t find “frei” a distinctive enough reference to render as “free” in their translation of that chapter of Der Proceß. They choose “at ease” for their version (Willa and Edwin Muir translation, page 168 of the 1968 edition).
Oschmann builds on the point that what we confront here is the condition of the petit-bourgeois individual under developed capitalism in his relationship to his work. Josef K. goes to his office at the bank to deal with the documents that locate other people’s money and determine the work that goes on in the world beyond. The land surveyor K. goes to the village to measure out other people’s land. He has to leave his home ground because in that profession, you don’t measure your own ground, or have a professional relation to it, any more than a bank official has a professional relationship to his own money. Such people are “free” in an extremely peculiar way, quite hard to penetrate. Critical minds among Kafka’s contemporaries, certainly going back to Georg Simmel, were the first generation to have made it their professional business to penetrate that exterior standpoint from which one might fail to know one’s own being. Kafka’s artistic achievement was not to document how his characters thought about freedom, but how they had lost the ability to do so and how they had lost the last whisper of tragic awareness when ground out of existence by this inability. Simmel appears in several of Oschmann’s footnotes, as in fact do other figures who could have lent a better framework to this enterprise if they had been intimately woven into the discussion.
There has been a lot of interest in recent years in exploring the line of division between the being of animals and the being of human individuals in Kafka’s work. He explores the issue of freedom and estrangement most vividly and painfully in “Bericht für eine Akademie” with the case of Rotpeter, an ape who has acquired human speech, and therefore a human conception of freedom applied to the existence of an animal. Clearly, if we say an animal is free we have yet to open the meaning of the word for ourselves. Restricting this study to the three novels, Der Verschollene, Der Proceß, and Das Schloß as a sequential development in the three primary chapters does close out this theme, except for a general setting of the scene in the early pages and an all-too-brief addition entitled “Die Freiheit der Tiere?” (223–30) that brings it back at the end. In that apparent afterthought one can surmise a missed opportunity. Perhaps a second volume might make it up.
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