Reading Kafka Visually: Gothic Ornament and the Motion of Writing in Kafka's Der Process (original) (raw)

Franz Kafka’s novel Der Process (The Trial), written in 1914–15 and first published in 1925, emerged within the context of modernism in art and the nascent avant-garde movements convulsed by the fight against ornament, commonly identified with the aestheticism of Decadence. But what precisely does ornament mean in the configurations of modernism? And what are the ways an ornament can perform and shape the modernist literary text? In order to answer these questions, this paper examines one chapter of Der Process, ‘Im Dom’ (‘In the Cathedral’), through a particular visual mode that shapes Kafka’s writing in this text. That mode is Gothic cathedral architecture — more precisely, art historian Wilhelm Worringer’s influential 1911 formulation of Gothic architectural principles embodied in the figure of ornament. This stage-managed encounter between the language of literature and Gothic space as two phenomena that contribute to shaping each other constitutes a kind of experiment, a way of focussing not on the content or context of the work but on what could be called the ‘motion of the writing’ that runs through the text; on recording its visual quality and how it resonates with the space in which it is set. Drawing on the methodological fusion of visual anthropology, visual studies, and deconstructivist close reading, I argue that such transhistorical principles as dynamic and complex current, a chaotic tangle of lines, expression prevailing over meaning, an absent center, vertigo, and pathos are shared by both, Worringer’s Gothic and Kafka’s writing. A dynamic and complex current; a chaotic tangle of lines; expression prevailing over meaning; an absent center; vertigo and pathos — these are the principles shared by Worringer’s Gothic and Kafka’s writing.