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Kafka's Eternal Present: Narrative Tense in “Ein Landarzt” and Other First-Person Stories

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Dorrit Cohn
Dorrit Cohn*
Affiliation:
Indiana University, Bloomington
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Abstract

Many of Kafka's stories in the first person either use the present tense throughout or shift from past to present in the course of narration. The stories told entirely in the present render the inner monologue of a speaker caught in a durative psychic struggle; the stories in which the tense changes tell of a past calamity that leads to an everlasting predicament. “Ein Landarzt” is structured on an “einmal-niemals” pattern, and thus belongs to the second of these general types; but in this story Kafka also tries—again by shifting to the present tense—to achieve within the narration of past events the immediacy of present experience. He thereby effaces the demarcation between outer event and inner reflection and eliminates the temporal distance between the narrating and the experiencing self. This use of the present tense results in mutually exclusive verbal gestures and contradictory temporal references. The stylistic incongruities in “Ein Landarzt” thus point up the difficulties of rendering the immediacy of experience in a first-person narrative, and help to explain why Kafka usually preferred to use the third person in his novels and novellas.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 83 , Issue 1 , March 1968 , pp. 144 - 150
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1968

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References

1 The only previous mention of this fact is found in Keith Leopold, “Franz Kafka's Stories in the First Person,” Journal of the Australasian Universities Modern Lang, and Lit. Assoc. (1959), pp. 56–62: “Of the forty-five first-person pieces, well over half are entirely or mainly in the present tense: a vastly higher proportion than in the work of any other author” (p. 58).

2 Kafka's works will be referred to as follows: B = Beschreibung eines Kampfes. Novellen, Skizzen, A phorismen aus dent NachlaC (New York, 1946); E = Erzahlungen und Heine Prosa (New York, 1946); H = Hochzeilsvorbereitungen auf dent Lands und andere Prosa aus dem NacklaB (New York, 1953); T=Tagebucher 1910–1923 (New York, 1948).

3 Typische Formen des Romans (Gottingen, 1965), p. 33.

4 As other critics have pointed out, “interior monologue” must be distinguished from “stream of consciousness,” a vaguer and more inclusive term; cf. Robert Humphrey, Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel (Berkeley, Calif., 1954), p. 24, and Franz Stanzel, Die lypischen Erzahl-situalionen im Roman (Vienna, 1955), p. 149. I am using the term “interior monologue” to signify the technique for rendering a character's thoughts in direct discourse, referring to the self in the first person and to the present moment in the present tense. If it is defined in this manner, Leopold's opinion that “Kafka makes no use at all of … interior monologue” (p. 62) is obviously not tenable.

5 Cf. Heinz Hillmann, who describes the first-person stories written in the present tense as a milder variant of “prozessionale Erzahlungen” like Die Verwandlung (Franz Kafka: Dichlungslheorie und Dichlungsgestall, Bonn, 1964, pp. 176–177).

6 Cf. Leopold, p. 58. In addition to the texts discussed below, see also the past-present switches in the sketch “Meine zwei Hande …” (H, pp. 67–69), in two dreams (T, pp. 328–329, 491–492), and in the description of a real experience (T, pp. 485–486). A surprising tense change of the same kind also occurs in the unfinished third-person story “Blumfeld, ein alterer Junggeselle” (B, p. 143) and in one of the “Er” sketches (B, p. 279).

7 This story is not, strictly speaking, an Icherzahlung, but in its principal section, where the hunter is interviewed by the mayor of Riga, the first-person speech is almost uninterrupted.

8 LAPart du feu (Paris, 1949), pp. 15–17. In his diaries, Kafka describes his own state of being as a death in life: “es ist leider kein Tod, aber die ewigen Qualen des Sterbens” (T, p. 420). See also the three aphorisms on the nonexistence of death (H, p. 122). Obversely, a “successful” death takes on the aspect of a dionysian fulfillment in such stories as Das Urteil; cf. Walter Sokel's interpretation of this ending [Franz Kafka: Tragik und Ironie, Munich and Vienna, 1964, pp. 71–76), and Kafka's confession of the vicarious joy he experiences when writing death scenes (T, pp. 448–449).

9 The Novelist as Philosopher, ed. John Cruickshank (London, 1962), p. 157.

10 In Selected Stories of Franz Kafka (New York, 1952), pp. 148–156.

11 Among the twenty odd interpretations of “Ein Land-arzt” that I consulted, only the following three include comments on the narrative tenses: Maria Misslbeck, “Franz Kafkas ‘Ein Landarzt’,” Der Deulschunterricht, x (1958), 36–46; Hermann Servotte, “Franz Kafka: Der Landarzt,” Deulschunterricht fur Ausliinder, viii (1958), 33–38; and Eric Marson and Keith Leopold, “Kafka, Freud and ‘Ein Landarzt’,” GQ, xxxvii (1964), 146–160.

12 This has been the most frequent explanation for the tense changes in “Ein Landarzt.” Marson and Leopold, who interpret the story as a parody of a “Freudian” dream, attribute all the shifts to “the varying levels of immediacy and vividness that may occur within the same dream” (p. 160). Miss Misslbeck, in keeping with her interpretation of the story as the hallucination of an insane mind, sees the first present tense passage as a “Prasens der starken Erregung” (p. 36). Servotte relates the present tense to the speaker's loss of control over circumstances (p. 34); but since the doctor's bare escape is told in the preterite (E, p. 140), this connection is not consistent. His further suggestion, that the present tense in the epilogue refers to the same “Zeitebene” as the present tense in the body of the text, fails to take account of the einmal-niemals pattern we analyzed earlier.

13 Cf. Robert Petsch's verdict: “Eine ganz im Prasens ge-haltene Erzahlung gleicht einem Brief, in dem jedes Wort un-terstrichen ist” (Wesen und Formen der Erzahlkunsl, Halle, 1934, p. 190).

14 Sokel, p. 272; for a development of this idea, see pp. 253–262 and 261–281. Cf. also Hans P. Guth, “Symbol and Contextual Restraint: Kafka's ‘A Country Doctor’,” PMLA, LXXX (Sept. 1965), 427–431.

15 For Leopold, the use of the present tense in “Ein Landarzt” and other stories also creates the impression of “the narrator's inability to survey the whole of the action” (p. 58); “with Kafka it is as though his narrators are within the event at the moment of narration and are possessed of no more certainty of the future development of the pattern … than man possesses at any moment of existence” (p. 59).

16 Cf. Harald Weinreich's discussion of the narrative present in Tempus: Besprochene und erzdhlle Welt (Stuttgart, 1964), pp. 125–129; also Paul Imbs, L'Emploi des temps verbaux en franQais moderne (Paris, 1960), pp. 32,201.

17 A notable exception is the little story “Der Kiibelreiter” (B, pp. 124–126), where an eventful fantasy is told entirely in the first-person present tense. Here it is particularly difficult to decide whether the grammatical present should be understood as an interior monologue or as a historical present. The two uses of the past tense (“fragle” and “sagte,” B, p. 125) are, in my opinion, slips of the pen, which would indicate that Kafka used the present tense in its past meaning in this story. The last sentence is reminiscent of the “Landarzt” ending: “Und damit steige ich in die Regionen der Eisgebirge und verliere mich auf Nimmerwiedersehen” (B, p. 126); but here we have no temporal discontinuity between the story itself and its ending.

18 “Ein Landarzt” was written in 1917, after Amerika (1912, 1914) and Der ProzeB (1914), but before Das SchloB (1920–22). And, in general, first- and third-person stories alternate throughout Kafka's writing years. It is therefore not possible to establish a chronological development in his works from first to third person.

19 See Max Brod's “Nachwort zur ersten Ausgabe” in Das SchloB (New York, 1946), p. 529.

20 See, e.g., Jost Schillemeit, “Welt im Werk Franz Kafkas,” DVLG, xxxviii (1964), 177.

21 In Kate Hamburger's theory the preterite in all third-person fiction loses its past value (Die Logik der Dichlung, Stuttgart, 1957, pp. 27–72). Franz Stanzel has argued that this is true only in a narrative situation where the vision rests entirely with one character (Die typischen Erzahlsituotionen im Roman, pp. 37, 119, 152).

22 See Dorrit Cohn, “The Narrated Monologue: Definition of a Fictional Style,” CL, xvm (1966), 97–112.

23 See Friedrich Beissner, Der Erzahler Franz Kafka (Stuttgart, 1952), Martin Walser, Beschreibung einer Form (Munich, 1961), pp. 29–44, and Sokel, p. 11. A number of other critics have pointed out that there are some notable exceptions to this general rule, particularly at the beginnings and endings of Kafka's narratives; see Hillmann, pp. 175–176, and Winfried Kudszus, “Erzahlhaltung und Zeitverscheibung in Kafka's ‘Prozefi’ und ‘Schlofi’,” DVLG, xxxvm (1964), 192–207.

24 “Bei Kafka fehlt der Erzahler, also fehlt der zeitlich fixierbare Punkt, von dem aus erzahlt wird; da der Vorgang selbst ausserhalb jeder bekannten Vergangenheit spielt, gewinnen diese Romane eine Gegenwartigkeit, die der epis-chen Dichtung sonst fremd ist” (Walser, p. 42).