Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

Another Remark on the Necessity of Preserving Repetitions

A bit farther on the same page of The Castle: '… Stimme nach Frieda gerufen wurde. 'Frieda,' sagte K. in Friedas Ohr and gab so den Ruf weiter.'

Literally, this means: '…a voice summoned Frieda. 'Frieda,' said K. in Friedas ear, thus passing on the summons.'

The French translators want to avoid the triple repetition of the name Frieda:

Vialatte: ''Frieda!' said he in the maid's ear, thus passing on… '

And David:''Frieda,' said K. in his companion's ear, passing on to her…'

How false the words replacing Frieda's name sound! Note that in the text of The Castle, K. is never anything but K. In dialogue, others may call him 'surveyor' or perhaps other things, but Kafka himself, the narrator, never refers to him by the words 'stranger,' 'newcomer,' 'young man,' or whatever. K. is nothing but K. And not only he but all the characters in Kafka always have just a single name, a single designation.

Thus Frieda is Frieda; not lover, not mistress, not companion, not maid, not waitress, not whore, not young woman, not girl, not friend, not girlfriend. Frieda.

The Melodic Importance of Repetition

There are moments when Kafka's prose takes flight and becomes song. That is the case with the two sentences I have been considering. (Note that both of these exceptionally beautiful sentences are descriptions of the love act; this says a hundred times more than all the biographers' research about the importance of eroticism for Kafka. But let's go on.) Kafka's prose takes flight on two wings: intensity of metaphorical imagination and captivating melody.

Melodic beauty here is connected to the repetition of words; the sentence begins: 'Dort vergingen Stunden, Stunden gemeinsamen Atems' gemeinsamen Herzschlags, Stunden…' ('There, hours went by, hours of mutual breaths, of mutual heartbeats, hours … ') In nine words, five repetitions. At the

middle of the sentence: the repetition of the word 'Fremde' ('strange') and the word 'Fremdheit' ('strangeness'). And at the end of the sentence, yet another repetition: '… weiter gehen, weiter sich verir-ren' ('… keep going, keep going astray'). These multiple repetitions slow the tempo and give the sentence a yearning cadence.

In the other sentence, K.'s second coition, we find the same principle of repetition: the verb 'seek' repeated four times, the word 'something' twice, the word 'body' twice, the verb 'paw' twice; and lets not forget the conjunction 'and,' which, against all the rules of syntactic elegance, is repeated four times.

In German, that sentence begins: 'Sie suchte etwas und er suchte etwas …' Vialatte says something entirely different: 'She was seeking something and was seeking something again…' David corrects him: 'She was seeking something and so was he, on his part.' How odd: preferring to say 'and so was he, on his part' rather than to translate literally Kafka's beautiful and simple repetition: 'She was seeking something and he was seeking something…'

Repetition Skill

There's a skill to repetition. Because there certainly are bad, clumsv repetitions (as when, in the description of a dinner, the words 'chair,' 'fork,' and the like appear three times in two sentences). The rule: a word is repeated because it is important, because one wants its sound as well as its meaning to reverberate throughout a paragraph, a page.

Digression: An Example of the Beauty of Repetition

The very short (two-page) Hemingway story 'One Reader Writes' is divided into three parts: 1) a brief paragraph describing a woman writing a letter 'steadily with no necessity to cross out or rewrite anything'; 2) the letter itself, in which the woman speaks of her husbands venereal disease; 3) the interior monologue that follows it, quoted here:

'Maybe he can tell me what's right to do, she said to herself. Maybe he can tell me. In the picture in the paper he looks like he'd know. He looks smart, all right. Every day he tells somebody what to do. He ought to know. I want to do whatever is right. It's such a long time though. It's a long time. And it's been a long time. My Christ, it's been a long time. He had to go wherever they sent him, I know, but I don't know what he had to get it for. Oh, I wish to Christ he wouldn't have got it. I don't care what he did to get it. But I wish to Christ he hadn't ever got it. It does seem like he didn't have to have got it. I don't know what to do. I wish to Christ he hadn't got any kind of malady. I don't know why he had to get a malady.'

The entrancing melody of this passage is based entirely on repetitions. They are not a device (like rhyme in poetry), but they come out of everyday spoken language, thoroughly unpolished language.

In addition: this very short story, it seems to me, is a unique instance in the history of prose fiction where the musical intention is primordial: without that melody the text would lose its raison d'etre.

Breath

By his own account, Kafka wrote his long story 'The Judgment' in a single night, without interruption, that is to say at extraordinary speed, letting himself be carried along by a practically uncontrolled imagination. Speed, which later became the surrealists' programmatic method ('automatic writing')-allowing for the liberation of the subconscious from supervision by reason, and making the imagination explode-played roughly the same role in Kafka.

Roused by that 'methodical speed,' the Kafkan imagination runs like a river, a dreamlike river that finds no respite till a chapter's end. That long breath of imagination is reflected in the nature of the syntax: in Kafka's novels, there is a near absence of colons (except for those routinely introducing dialogue) and an exceptionally modest number of semicolons. The manuscripts (in the critical edition: Fischer, 1982) show that even commas seemingly required by the rules of syntax are often lacking. The texts are divided into very few paragraphs. This tendency to minimize the articulation-few paragraphs, few strong pauses (on rereading a manuscript, Kafka often even changed periods to commas), few markers emphasizing the text's logical organization (colons, semicolons)-is consubstantial with Kafka's style; at the same time it is a perpetual attack on 'good German style' (as well as on the 'good style' of all the languages into which Kafka is translated).

Kafka made no definitive version of The Castle for the printer, and one could reasonably assume that he might still have brought in this or that correction, including punctuation. So I am not enormously shocked (not pleased, either, obviously) that Max Brod, as Kafka's first editor, from time to time should have created a paragraph indentation or added a semicolon to make the text easier to read. Actually, even in Brod's edition, the general character of Kafka's syntax still shows