Intertextuality in Franz Kafka’s works

Abstract

Texts are transcendental in a at least two ways. On one hand, they are transcendental through the language – the substance of texts – which by constituting diachronic relationships and functioning in synchrony transcend – to use Karl Jaspers’ term – past reality in the form of the then existing signs and their meanings into future then unknown from that perspective, and thus also the present as known to us. On the other hand, texts interact with each other and as it were, create hypertexts in time and space. There also exists a third dimension – the author and the reader (each independently) whom the text allows, to quote Gerhard Kurz, to go ‘beyond oneself’ because only then we experience the need to return to ‘one’s own I’, rejecting on the way a successive mask (Greek and Latin persona). In this article the concept is illustrated in the context of Franz Kafka’s texts. Among the multitude of themes presented, let us limit ourselves to the topos of the Sirens who lured sailors with their singing. In Kafka’s works the Sirens no longer sing, so Odysseus need not have asked to have his ears blocked with wax. At that point Kafka only completed the process of change, for already earlier in German literature the singing had grown quieter and quieter. Thus in Heine’s well­known song “Loreley” the poet is no longer convinced about the effectiveness of the mermaid’s singing – he only wishes to believe in it: “I think that the waves will devour the boatman and the boat as one” (as translated by A.Z. Foreman). Because in times of nihilism the singing – and art in general – had lost their power. In Goethe’s “Fisherman” the mermaid still triumphs, but not because of her singing. Her song dominates in the second verse (“She sang to him, she spoke to him” as translated by John Storer Cobb), but the fisherman immerses himself in the abyss of the sea only in the fourth verse which is dominated by verbal persuasion (“She spoke to him, she sang to him”). This inversion – nota bene lacking in the Polish translation by Hanna Januszewska in “Dzieła wybrane” J.W. Goethe (PIW 1983) – could not have been accidental: it symbolizes the reversed image typical of a mirror reflection – in reality the fisherman had seen his own reflection in the water and mistook it for the image of a mermaid. His death in the abyss of the sea was a price paid for lack of self­knowledge. It was not without reason that the inscription on the Temple of Apollo in Delphi read: “Γνῶθι σεαυτόν (Gnothi seauton) – Know thyself!”.