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Symbol and Contextual Restraint: Kafka's “Country Doctor”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Hans P. Guth
Hans P. Guth*
Affiliation:
San Jose State College, San Jose, Calif.
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Extract

Modern criticism has frequently practiced symbolical analysis without developing the necessary procedural controls, without establishing clear criteria of relevance for suggested symbolical meanings and overtones. Such unrestrained symbolical analysis tends to suffer from two typical defects. First, it tends to slight the line-by-line texture of a work. In practice, if not always in theory, it tends to slight “surface” detail. “Overt” meanings become, in Freudian terms, “disguise,” to be unraveled as the deeper meanings come into focus “like repressed material under psychoanalysis.” Logical categories become, in Jungian terms, “rationalizations,” to be penetrated as the critic becomes “sensitive to the tap-roots below.” At the same time, unrestrained symbolical interpretation often does violence to the structure of a work. It threatens to destroy a work's unity of fable, theme, or tone. Programmatic announcements to the contrary, the prevailing practice of such criticism fails to pay sufficient heed to Henry James's claim that “in proportion as the work is successful the idea permeates and penetrates it, informs and animates it, so that every word and every punctuation-point contribute directly to the expression”; to E. M. Forster's requirement that “every action or word ought to count.”

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 80 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1965, pp. 427 - 431
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1965

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References

1 Francis Fergusson, The Idea of a Theater (Garden City, N. Y., n.d.), p. 29.

2 R. P. Blackmur, Language as Gesture: Essays in Poetry (New York, 1952), p. 398.

3 “The Art of Fiction,” in Criticism: The Foundations of Modern Literary Judgment, ed. Mark Schorer et. al., rev. ed. (New York, 1958), p. 52.

4 Aspects of the Novel (New York, 1927), p. 133.

5 Most published criticism of the “Country Doctor” assumes that the work has not only artistic unity but also paraphrasable symbolic meaning, whether one-dimensional and almost “transparent,” as in Eric Marson and Keith Leopold, “Kafka, Freud, and ‘Ein Landarzt’,” GQ, xxxvii (March 1964), 146–160; or multileveled and elusive, as in Basil Busacca, “A Country Doctor,” in Angel Flores and Homer Swander, eds., Franz Kakfa Today (Madison, Wis., 1958), pp. 45–57. For a notable dissent from the prevailing view see Heinz Politzer's discussion of the story as an artistic failure, the “literal transcription” of a nightmare rather than its “literary presentation”: “Its fragmentariness is not a structural principle but an artistic deficiency. The reader who finds himself unable to fathom its meaning need not blame himself for his lack of understanding” (Franz Kafka: Parable and Paradox, Ithaca, N. Y., 1962, p. 89). In emphasizing the “opaqueness” of the story, Politzer fails to recognize that Kafka's dream-technique here in its own way “clarifies” by concentrating on essentials: It filters out the irrelevant; like the dreamer, the author ignores much of the structure of intervening, merely instrumental and “realistic” experience, for instance the details of the doctor's journey: “als öffne sich unmittelbar vor meinem Hoftor der Hof meines Kranken, bin ich schon dort …”

6 Franz Kafka, Das Urteil und andere Erzählungen (Frankfurt am Main, 1952), pp. 106–114. Subsequent page references are to this edition.

7 Bloomington, Ind., 1963, p. 295.

8 Franz Kafka, Amerika (Frankfurt am Main, 1956), p. 234. This quotation is from Brod's “Nachwort” to the first edition.

9 Margaret Church, “Kafka's ‘A Country Doctor’,” The Explicator, xvi (May 1958), item 45. Reprinted with Kafka's story and other critical interpretations in Maurice Beebe, ed., Literary Symbolism: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Literature (San Francisco, 1960), pp. 138–139.

10 Willa and Edwin Muir, trans. Selected Short Stories of Franz Kafka (New York, 1952), p. 155.

11 Albert Camus, The Stranger, Stuart Gilbert trans. (New York, 1958), p. 152.

12 Stanley Cooperman, “Kafka's ‘A Country Doctor’: Microcosm of Symbolism,” UKCR, xxiv (Autumn 1957), 75–80; in Beebe, ed., Symbolism, p. 140.

13 Zweite Auflage (Frankfurt am Main, 1960), pp. 129–137.

14 Ibid., p. 136.

15 Franz Kafka, p. 8.

16 “All who knew Kafka personally have maintained that he was possessed of the gift of humor to a very high degree. … Generally speaking, Kafka's humor is derived from the extreme lack of humor displayed by his figures. Colliding with this deadly seriousness, the world reveals itself as nonsensical. Kafka's laughter is the response to this revelation” (Politzer, Kafka, pp. 353–354).

17 In Ronald Gray, ed., Kafka: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1962), p. 153.

18 Franz Kafka, Der Prozeß (Frankfurt am Main, 1960), pp. 7, 163.

19 In Gray, ed., Kafka, p. 124.

20 “Kafka's Distorted Mask,” in Gray, ed., Kafka, p. 146.