KRI DRISCOLL

Columbia University

Copia Nostri: Echoes of a Poetic Self in Kafkas

Der Ausflug ins Gebirge
Nothing will come of nothing: speak again.

William Shakespeare, King Lear 1.1

Franz Kafkas early works, from Beschreibung eines Kampfes (190411) up to
and including the eighteen short prose pieces published in Betrachtung (1913),
are, to a great extent, concerned with the figure of the double and the doubling
of the self. These doublings result principally from the self s inability to establish and maintain a connection to a desired other, whereupon the self retreats
within itself and creates a series of imaginary others who will mirror the self s
desire back at it. Yet this process is always ultimately untenable and breaks
down, leaving the self even more profoundly alone than before.1 The illusion
of a progression towards another, towards sociability and community, reveals
itself to be nothing but stagnation and isolation. By the beginning of
Unglcklichsein, the final text in Betrachtung, this state of affairs has become
unertrglich. The narrator, alone in his apartment, is desperately seeking a
way out, but instead of heading outside into the beleuchtete Gasse, which
frightens him, he finds a new goal in der Tiefe des Zimmers, im Grund des
Spiegels,2 and cries out um nur den Schrei zu hren, dem nichts antwortet
und dem auch nichts die Kraft des Schreiens nimmt, der also aufsteigt, ohne
Gegengewicht, und nicht aufhren kann, selbst wenn er verstummt (Drucke
3334). And yet this cry does provoke a response, in the form of a visitation by
the ghost of a child, which, it is strongly implied, is in fact a projection of his
former self.3 This encounter takes place in the depths of the narrators mirror,
in the imaginary space inhabited by his reflection, but it is the result of a failed
act of communication. The narrator issues a cry solely in order to hear the
sound of his own voice, not in order to receive an answer, which, it seems,
would strip the cry of its power. So long as it retains its power by virtue of not
being answered, this cry ascends unhindered and cannot subside, even after it
has fallen silent. When, suddenly, the ghostly child appears, the cry finds its
Gegengewicht and is pulled back down to earth. Nor is this visitation truly
unexpected: on the contrary, it is an allerdings erwartete[r] Besuch (34).
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Thus, on some level the narrator himself knows that this powerful, infinite,
unanswered cry is an illusion: every cry desires an echo.
The text thus stages a scene of narcissistic self-confrontation, in which the
narrator encounters another in the mirror and gradually comes to realize that
this other is himself. This division of the self is precisely that which the narrator sought to avoid when longing to hear the sound of his unanswered cry. As
Mladen Dolar observes, hearing the sound of ones own voice constitutes a
rudimentary form of narcissism insofar as it is the first self-referring or
self-reflective move, but it is an auto-affection that is not re-flection, since
it is seemingly without a screen that would return the voice, a pure immediacy, where one is both sender and receiver of ones pure interiority. As soon as
there is a screen or a surface to return the voice in the form of an echo, the
voice acquires an autonomy of its own and enters into the dimension of the
Other, it becomes a deferred voice, and the narcissism crumbles (1314). This
is why the story of Narcissus is coupled with the story of Echo: it is as much
about the relation to the Other as it is about the relation to the self. The mimetic doubling of the self is always implicitly predicated on loss. The power of
the cry which Kafkas unhappy bachelor emits and which he wishes to preserve indefinitely as a pure, indivisible mark of subjectivity returns as an
Other which now wields that power. The original speaker, in turn, is rendered
powerless.
This exchange is explicitly played out in Ovids version of the story of Echo
and Narcissus in Book 3 of the Metamorphoses. Echo, a gregarious mountain
nymph, has been cursed so that she can only ever repeat the words of others.
When she spies the beautiful Narcissus alone in the forest, she immediately
falls in love with him, but her nature forbids her to approach him with alluring words and soft prayers. It does, however, permit her to await the
sounds to which she may give back her own words (3.378, emphasis added). In
returning these sounds, Echo is able to take possession of them and use them
to further her own ends. For a time, Narcissus is enchanted by the responses he
receives from the surrounding woods, but when Echo steps into view and attempts to wrap her arms around the youth, he rejects her and declares that he
would sooner die than let her have him. As always, she must respond in kind,
and in doing so grants him precisely that which he explicitly repudiates.
Ille fugit fugiensque manus complexibus aufer:
ante ait emoriar, quam sit tibi copia nostri.
Rettulit illa nihil nisi sit tibi copia nostri. (3.39092)

In order to explore the multiple layers of meaning at work here, let us consider
two different translations of this same passage. In one version (Brookes
Mores), we read: He flies from her and as he leaves her says, / Take off your
hands! you shall not fold your arms / around me. Better death than such a one
/ should ever caress me! Naught she answers save, Caress me! In Frank J.

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Millers translation, by contrast, Narcissus says Hands off! embrace me not!

May I die before I give you power oer me! To which Echo necessarily responds I give you power oer me! This discrepancy highlights a crucial facet
of the echo, namely that through mimetic repetition it necessarily produces
difference. But how does a caress become an act of subjugation? The answer
lies in the different valences of the word copia, which is formed from con +
ops (wealth, as in opulent) and means abundance or plentyi.e., a collection (con-) of wealth or resourcesbut also implies the authority to use this
abundance: power. As a result, this is an exchange of more than just words.
Narcissuss rhetorical invocation of death returns, later, in the form of his
literal death. At the same time, a shift in meaning of the word copia also represents an exchange of the power implicit in that word. In relinquishing power
over herself, Echo reciprocally gains power over Narcissus.
Upon his first encounter with Echo, Narcissus is alternae deceptus imagine vocis (deceived by the [likeness of an] answering voice [3.385]). This
likeness (imago) anticipates, and hence is later echoed by, the imagine
formae (form/beauty [3.415]) which seizes Narcissuss gaze in the reflecting
pool. So transfixed is he by his own image that in his immobility he comes to
resemble a marble statue (marmore signum [3.419]). Whilst Echo has become pure voice (vox manet [3.399]), Narcissus has become pure form. The
metonymical displacement whereby each comes to embody their dominant
characteristic also reduces the character to that characteristic exclusively.
The figure below roughly describes the trajectory which Narcissuss voice
and form follow in order to return as simulacra (echoes/reflections):

Narcissus is twice deceived by an imago, mistaking what is in fact his own reflection for another person: first the imago vocis returned to him by Echo, and
second the imago formae which he sees in the water. In both cases, the object of
Narcissuss desire is his own imago: he is both subject and object. The short
circuit which this diagram describes is avoided only so long as Narcissus fails
to recognize himself as the subject of a signifierand indeed the signum
into which he is transformed means both statue and, more simply, sign or
signifier. But as the diagram also makes clear, the path his voice takes on its
way to returning as an imago is longer than that of his bodily form, because it

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must pass through Echo. And certainly it would be a mistake to discount

Echos influence altogether. As we have seen, Echo is able to assert a degree of
subjectivity even through the limited means available to her. The difference
which Echo stands for is thus not only the different meanings inherent in
every word, but also the fundamental difference between the self and the
other expressed through the economy of desire and recognition, which, at
base, the above diagram also describes. When Narcissus rejects Echo she loses
the object of her desire which leads to her demise, whereas Narcissus can go on
in the illusion that his desire is really directed at another, so long as the identity
of that other remains ambiguous. When Narcissus finally grasps that he is in
love with his own image, the moment of recognition, expressed through the
grammatically precarious (Spivak 24) iste ego sum, enacts the loss of self
inherent in the doubling of the self. The verb linking subject and predicate
saves the subject, in that it takes the first-person singular (sum, not est),
but the equivalence of case hides an equivalence of agency: instead of I am
he, it could just as easily say He is I. But it does not, and the forced grammatical separation of subject and predicate bespeaks the fatal division of the self
which Narcissuss entrance into linguistic self-consciousness precipitates.
Faced with this dilemma, Narcissus wishes he could abandon his body altogether: o utinam a nostro secedere corpore possem! (3.467). That is to say, he
wishes to preserve the copy whilst eliminating the original. Quod cupio
mecum est he says, inopem me copia fecit (What I desire, I have; the very
abundance of my riches beggars me [3.466]). His possession of that which he
desires renders his desire objectless. Copia (Con-ops) has made him inops:
without wealth (and hence powerless). The loss of power over the object is
equal to the loss of power over ones self. Only by eliminating the self can one
hope to gain power over the objectEchos fate is mirrored in Narcissuss
own.
Copia also forms the etymological root of the word copy. It would therefore be possible (albeit slightly anachronistic) to re-assess Narcissuss profession of poverty and impotence as though these were not caused by the
over-abundance of beauty in Narcissus himself, but rather by the very copy of
himself which holds him transfixed like a statue by the lakeside. Even as
Narcissus is the source of the reflection, so the reflection is the source of his
distress. Furthermore, it cannot be overlooked that Narcissus speaks of nostro [] corpore when referring to his body. To be sure, in classical Latin it is
quite common to refer to oneself in the first-person plural, but, in a text as obsessed with doubling as this one is, what may otherwise be a mere convention
takes on a special significance. Thus, even as they betoken an act of subjugation, Echos last words to Narcissussit tibi copia nostrialso redouble the
initial nostri and transform the grammatical plural into a semantic one.
Both iste ego sum and inopem me copia fecit explicitly point to a singular
speaker (sum, me), as distinct from the puer unic[us] (peerless youth

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[3.454]) in the water, whereas nostro [] corpore again uses the plural form
as if to show that the two share a body. Votum in amante novum, vellem,
quod amamus, abesset! (3.468)a strange wish, Narcissus says: would that
that which we love were absent (translation modified); only an absent love
object can sustain the lover. Yet he is powerless in the face of his copia in the
lake, and so must die in order that the one he loves might live on.
In psychoanalytic terms, this strange wish is known as aphanisis, a term
delineating the absolute threat to the subjects desire, the threatened erasure
or disappearance through which the subjects desire must pass if it is to be
sustained (Lukacher 74). Aphanisis, which Lacan describes as the fading of
the subject, is a constitutive moment in the formation of the subject within
language: when the subject appears somewhere as meaning he is manifested
elsewhere as fading, as disappearance. There is, then, one might say, a matter
of life and death between the unary signifier and the subject, qua binary
signifier, cause of his disappearance (Lacan 218). This is Narcissuss predicament precisely: his likeness (imago) is that which transforms him into a
binary signifier, which in turn causes his disappearance qua unary subject. He
cannot exist in both states at once. The uneasy equivalence manifest in iste
ego sum (I am he) merely underscores this tension.
***
A similarly precarious relationship between the subject and language, in
particular rhetorical language, may be found in the works of Franz Kafka,
whose well-known declaration, Der Roman bin ich, meine Geschichten sind
ich (Briefe 15), hinges on a grammatical conceit identical to Narcissuss trope
of self-recognition, except that in this instance the verb is conjugated twice,
thus doubly yoking the subject and predicate together even as they exchange
positions between the first and second clause.
Der manifeste ParallelismusRoman : ich / Geschichten : ichist gleichzeitig
ein latenter Chiasmus, in dem das Ich und die Literatur (Roman, Geschichten) jeweils in umgekehrter Position stehen. Das Ich ist Schaltstelle nach beiden Seiten:
Es wird Literatur und die Literatur wird Ich. (Ngele 12)

Here the fading of the subject results in a correlative fade-in of the object-signifier. One must be dominant, i.e., it must have copia (power) over the
other, even when it is itself a mere copy of that other. The only way out of this
vicious circle, as we saw in Narcissuss case, is to devise a way for the two singular egos to merge into a dual nos: hic, qui diligitur, vellem diuturnior esset; /
nunc duo concordes anima moriemur in una (I would that he that is loved
might live longer; but as it is, we two shall die together in one breath
[3.47172]). Moriemur: death will unite the lovers, and thus finally reconcile
the subjects divided halves.

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Whereas for Narcissus this division ultimately proves insurmountable and

self-destructive, for Kafka it instead becomes the site of a productive tension
where an unresolved, floating ambiguity may be maintained for as long as
possible, even to the point of sustaining it indefinitely. The latenter Chiasmus Ngele identifies in this passage is the product of a radical and deliberate
undecidability: Das Ich ist Schaltstelle nach beiden Seiten and hence can be
both and neither at the same time. This tension is at work even in Kafkas
earliest writings, as I will show in the following close reading of Der Ausflug
ins Gebirge, the fifth text in Kafkas Betrachtung. The text first appears in a
minimally different form as part of the second version of Beschreibung eines
Kampfes, and I will examine its genealogy later in this essay. The piece is short
enough to quote in full:
Der Ausflug ins Gebirge
Ich wei nicht, rief ich ohne Klang, ich wei ja nicht. Wenn niemand kommt,
dann kommt eben niemand. Ich habe niemandem etwas Bses getan, niemand
hat mir etwas Bses getan, niemand aber will mir helfen. Lauter niemand. Aber
so ist es doch nicht. Nur da mir niemand hilft, sonst wre lauter niemand
hbsch. Ich wrde ganz gernwarum denn nichteinen Ausflug mit einer Gesellschaft von lauter Niemand machen. Natrlich ins Gebirge, wohin denn
sonst? Wie sich diese Niemand aneinander drngen, diese vielen quer gestreckten und eingehngten Arme, diese vielen Fe, durch winzige Schritte getrennt!
Versteht sich, da alle in Frack sind. Wir gehen so lala, der Wind fhrt durch die
Lcken, die wir und unsere Gliedmaen offen lassen. Die Hlse werden im Gebirge frei! Es ist ein Wunder, da wir nicht singen. (Drucke 20)

In what can be described as the classic reading of this text, Hans-Thies

Lehmann views the Ruf ohne Klang as a reference to writingKlanglose
Sprache ist aber die Schrift (216)and hence the company of nobodies as
eine kaum verhllte [!] Allegorie der Buchstaben, taking the mention of
everyone being dressed in Frack as an oblique reference to Frakturschrift,4
before concluding that Diese Erfahrung einer Krperlichkeit der Buchstaben
ist eines der wichtigen Motive des Selbstbezugs in Kafkas Texten (217).5
Detlev Kremer offers a consonant reading to Lehmanns when he asserts that
Dieses Ich ruft ohne Klang, das heit, es schreibt eine wrtliche Rede nieder
(64). Having previously demonstrated how in two other texts by Kafka (Der
Kbelreiter and Prometheus) mountains come to embody writing, Kremer
quite plausibly reads the destination of the Ausflug as a further indication that
this silent shout is in fact a performance of the act of writing. My goal here is
not to dispute this reading of the text, which on the whole is both cogent and
provocative, but rather to insist that the manifest presence of the written
word must be seen in relation to the explicit absence or negation of the voice.6
Furthermore, I would like to suggest that the very structure of the text as the

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record of an utterance which effectively never took place reveals something

fundamental about the essence of identity and desire as it relates to Kafkas
poetics of the self. In this way, Narcissuss strange wish to eliminate the self
in order to preserve the object of its desire may be read as analogous to the wish
expressed here in the Ausflug ins Gebirge.
The first thing one notices about the text is the overabundance of negations and absences and the constant repetition of words and phrases. Elisabeth Strowick notes,
Die fortwhrenden Wiederholungen vorwiegend in der ersten Hlfte des Textes
[] lassen sich insbesondere im Rahmen eines Ausflugs ins Gebirge als Echo vernehmen. Diese dem Ruf inhrente Echostruktur ist bemerkenswert gerade angesichts eines Rufes ohne Klang, der doch kaum Nachklnge produzieren drfte.
(573)

Yet I would like to suggest that these intra-textual echoes also reproduce ad infinitum the primary echo which is the text itselfan echo, more importantly,
of something which was supposedly never truly uttered in the first place.
Thus, I furthermore propose that the Ruf ohne Klang be read in relation to the
Schrei ohne Antwort which inaugurates Unglcklichsein. On the one hand,
these two utterances are diametrically opposed, since the one seems to be full
of sound while in the other it is utterly lacking. And yet at the same time they
are strangely analogous in terms of the echoes they produce, despite the fact
that each in its own way seems to preclude the possibility of any response at
all. Finally, read in conjunction with the Ausflug ins Gebirge, which, as we
shall see, is intensely engaged in the production of something out of nothing,
the narrators wish den Schrei zu hren, dem nichts antwortet und dem auch
nichts die Kraft des Schreiens nimmt might be reinterpreted asinadvertentlyeliciting a response from a nichts which, moreover, has the capacity
to strip the cry of its power.
The first sentence of Der Ausflug ins Gebirge sets the tone for the interplay between affirmation and negation that characterizes the text as a whole:
Ich wei nicht, rief ich ohne Klang, ich wei ja nicht [...]. First of all, a Ruf
ohne Klang is effectively no Ruf at all; yet a silent shout is not the same as
pure silence, and hence a peculiarly intense form of absence which is almost a
presence. The content of the shoutthat is to say the entire text besides rief
ich ohne Klangis enclosed in quotation marks, establishing a dual level of
narration. As this is a direct quotation, its ich speaks in the present tense, and
thus constitutes a phantom presence within the text, while the ich ohne Klang
outside the quotation marks speaks in the past tense. One of the central tensions of the text is thus established at this fundamental narrative level. A
shout never uttered is here reproduced in writing and is thus lent a voice, as it
were. In this instance the antecedent was silent, which means that this textual echo in fact constitutes the first utterance of these words.
Rhetorically, the trope of lending a voice to something or someone with no

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voice of their own is known as prosopopoeiathe fiction of the apostrophe to

an absent, deceased or voiceless entity, which posits the possibility of the latters reply and confers upon it the power of speech (de Man 926).7 Under ordinary circumstances the lender and the borrower would be two distinct figures, but here the ich outside the quotation marks is allowing the ich ohne Klang
to speak by quoting it, that is to say himself. The juxtaposition of two ichs is
refigured in the phonetic similarity between nicht and ich. Since the German
pronoun ich is contained in the negation nicht, writes Silvia Beier, this first
sentence manages, on the material level of language, to repeat the word ich
five times (55). Not only does nicht contain the pronoun ich, it also echoes
it.8 In other words, the quoted ich, is quite literally the product of a negation:
the silent subject fades through aphanisis into language, just as Echo wasted
away until only her voice was left, and the remaining voice is lent back to the
gap, an echo which pares the nicht down to its central three letters and creatingex nihilo, as it werethe speaking subject. This process is dramatized
even within the text itself as the subject gradually joins the ranks of nobodies
and thus becomes a lauter Niemand himself. As other critics have noted, lauter in German means not only solely or nothing but, but can also be construed as the modified adjective laut, meaning loud (Beier 5657; Strowick
57374; Lehmann 217). The transition from one to the other is marked orthographically: Lauter niemand becomes lauter Niemand. At the same time,
this transition mirrors that of the subject himself, as a loud Nobody is
diametrically opposed to the silent Somebody of the ich ohne Klang. At the
beginning of the passage, the [n]ich[t] also stands in opposition to the niemand
as yet uncapitalized.
A disembodied voice and a devocalized body: vox and formaEcho and
Narcissus. Where in Ovid their relationship was binary, in Kafka it really remains unary: the two ichs are actually the same ich twice over. When that
initial split proves insufficientor rather, insurmountablefurther divisions
ensue until a profusion of (almost) singing nobodies subsumes the singular ich
into the illusion (or perhaps the imago) of a plurality. Copia nostri here receives a
final inflection. From the initial meaning of my abundance and the implied
power over me, via a copy of me to a copy of us, we now arrive at an
abundance of (copies of) us.
Initially the relationship between ich and niemand is binary and antagonistic: Ich habe niemandem etwas Bses getan, niemand hat mir etwas Bses
getan. As we know, in Kafka, etwas Bses can have the most profound impact precisely when it has not been done: Jemand mute Josef K. verleumdet
haben, denn ohne da er etwas Bses getan htte, wurde er eines Morgens
verhaftet. The famous opening sentence of Der Proce suggests that Josef K.s
arrest must be due to some third party, yet even as this slanderous jemand fails
to present himself, it becomes increasingly likely that in fact nobody has done
such a thing. Hence the act of committing etwas Bses was never performed

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by either party and indeed it is precisely this fact which has brought about the
state of affairs in which Josef K. now finds himself.
The issue with nobody seems to be that he wont lend a hand: niemand
aber will mir helfen. Lauter niemand. Aber so ist es doch nicht.9 Here the
negations again creep into the text, but what precisely is being negated?
Seemingly it must be the reference to etwas Bses, since the unhelpfulness
of niemand is promptly reaffirmed. But what is it with which the speaker
requires help? The answer must lie in the subjunctive which follows: Ich
wrde ganz gernwarum denn nicht?einen Ausflug mit einer Gesellschaft
von lauter Niemand machen. Even this statement is negated, but only to say
why not?; and sure enough this negation also has a positive outcome, as the
description of this Ausflugwhich now seems to be happening after allis
written (spoken?) in the indicative.10 Nor is this shift in mood purely grammatical. Once out in the fresh air with his company of nobodies, a certain
lightness of step and of spirit overcomes the text: Wir gehen so lala. The ich
has now joined the ranks of the lauter Niemand. The subsumption of the ich
into the non-entitative wir does not equal a regression into the primal lack of
the nicht, however, as this is a manifest, capitalized Niemand, endowed with
a voice and limbs (Gliedmaen), which is to say articulate. In losing itself in
this group, the ich may achieve a sort of unity previously unavailable to it. It
couldnt do it on its own; it needed nobodys help. But why go into the mountains? Wohin denn sonst? Echo, Ovid tells us, stripped of her body, now
inhabits lonely mountain passes, where none shall see her but all may hear
her, for voice, and voice alone, still lives in her (sonus est, qui vivit in illa
[3.401]). Sound (sonus/Klang) is precisely what the narrator is lacking; sound
lives in the mountains, so lets go there!
The ich and the nobodies almost attain their goal, but not quite. The phrase
Wir gehen so lala represents the apex of this Ausflug, for it is in that onomatopoeic disyllable that the words on the page almost succeed in freeing themselves of the shackles of signification and becoming pure sound.11 The possibility is latent in the very phrase lauter niemanda pure nobody tending to
produce (pure) sound. This invites a radically different reading: The trajectory of Ausflug ins Gebirge is not from single letters to sentences and sense, but
from the single letter to language that is no longer language but music (Beier
59). Die Hlse werden im Gebirge frei! the text exclaims, referring not only
to lauthals as Lehmann suggests (217) but to Notenhals, i.e., the stems of
notes in musical notation. Regardless, however, of whether letters or notes are
meant (and there is no reason why it couldnt be both), the freedom alluded to
here is clearly the liberation from the page in the form of a spoken (or sung)
utterance, i.e., through the human voice.
In this context, a comment of Malcolm Pasleys is worth mentioning:
[Kafkas] Handschriften haben fast den Charakter einer Partitur. Er hat gleichsam
horchend geschrieben und seine Geschichten bekanntlich nach deren Wirkung

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beim mndlichen Vortrag beurteilt. Diese Probe des Vorlesens mussten sie bestehen. Der Leser wird gut daran tun, schreibt Richard Thieberger mit Bezug auf
Kafka, der Sprache mglichst wieder den Klang zu verleihen, in dem sie konzipiert worden ist, und sich nie mit dem traurigen Surrogat des stillen Lesens zufriedenzugeben. (390)

The reader must here play Echo to Kafkas Narcissus, as it were, using her
voice to re-animate his words using the same Klang in which they were
conceived. Thus the second movement within the text becomes apparent:
there is no Klang in the text at all, but while the initial Ruf was completely
silent, it nevertheless left a trace which could be read and recast as sound. As a
diagram, this relationship might look like this:
Unlike Narcissus in the earlier diagram, in this one Kafka is out of the loop.

Kafka

Text

Leser

Klang
The most obvious reason for this is that the two diagrams are not strictly complementary, since one describes only the intra-diegetic relationships of the
characters and the other incorporates a meta-textual level including the
author and the reader. On the other hand, the two texts are not structurally comparable either. The point, therefore, is that in each case a second figure
(Echo; the reader) is required in order for a metamorphosis to take place. In
Kafkas text, this second figure is missing, and although lala implies singing,
it remains a mute signifier, just as it remains ein Wunder, da wir nicht
singen at the end of the text.
Beyond the resonances which singing/not singing come to assume in
Kafkas later textsmost notably Das Schweigen der Sirenen and Josefine,
die Sngerin oder das Volk der Musespecifically in relation to the establishment of a community, this image of the narrators integration into a company of (almost) singing nobodies more immediately echoes the first text in
Betrachtung, Kinder auf der Landstrae, in which the narrator describes a
game he and his companions play, until finally they hold hands and run
through the landscape singing as an evening train passes in the distance:
Wir liefen enger beisammen, manche reichten einander die Hnde []. Einer von
uns begann einen Gassenhauer zu singen, aber wir alle wollten singen. Wir sangen viel rascher als der Zug fuhr, wir schaukelten die Arme, weil die Stimme nicht
gengte, wir kamen mit unseren Stimmen in ein Gedrnge, in dem uns wohl
war. (Drucke 1213)

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This, as in the Ausflug, is one of those rare instances in which Kafka says
we. Outwardly, this company is similar to the procession of lauter Niemand
(Wie sich diese Niemand aneinander drngen, diese vielen quer gestreckten
und eingehngten Arme), but it is only through the voice that a community
can emerge. Moreover, the children are borne on the windbei den Sprngen
hob uns in den Hften der Wind (12)whereas the wind passes straight
through the gaps in the company of nobodies, exposing the insubstantiality of
this imagined community. Within the structure of Betrachtung, then, Der
Ausflug ins Gebirge represents a sort of echo of this earlier text, even as it
stages a desire to become caught up in the sort of community that was once
possible. The text thus also serves as a way-point on the trajectory from
Kinder auf der Landstrae at the beginning of the collection to Unglcklichsein at the end. What in Der Ausflug ins Gebirge still seems to provoke
playful flights of fancy has, by the beginning of the final text, become
unertrglich, and when the unhappy narrator is visited by a specter of his
childhood self, his solitude and alienation are complete. If the central concern
of Der Ausflug ins Gebirge may be characterized as transforming the arrival
of nobody (Wenn niemand kommt) into the arrival of somebody, the
moral of Unglcklichsein, as it were, might be: (Auch) wenn jemand
kommt, dann kommt eben niemand.
The final nicht of the Ausflug thus does not have the same affirmative
quality as its predecessors, for at the end they are still not singing. The final
quotation mark closes off the discourse and takes us back to the silent realm of
the ich ohne Klang, even as the blankness of the bottom half of the page gapes
ominously below the small body of text. This was inevitable. The reader
already knows that this speech is being reported to her by another (even if that
other is the same), and so if the text had dissolved into pure sound, it would
not have come into existence in the first place. It is only through its reproduction in writing that the speech act assumes solid form and becomes intelligible
and/or communicable.
***
Both Kinder auf der Landstrae and Der Ausflug ins Gebirge originally
formed part of the second or B version of Beschreibung eines Kampfes, which
Kafka worked on between November 1909 and August 1911, the same period
during which he also wrote Unglcklichsein (see NS1, App. 5256; Drucke
App. 7374). The titular struggle is (or seems to be) one between the narrator and his double. Over the course of the text, other characters are introduced,
but they ultimately reveal themselves to be permutations of the original binary opposition. At the beginning of the second section, the narrator has
jumped on the shoulders of his companion/adversary and is riding him up a
steep hill: Die Landstrae, auf der ich ritt, war steinig und stieg bedeutend,

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aber gerade das gefiel mir und ich lie sie noch steiniger und steiler werden
(NS1 73, 140). The use of the word bedeutend harbors a deliberate ambiguity when seen in the context of the vast unfertige Gegend in which this episode takes place. The narrators ability to mold this unfinished landscape
around him as he sees fit is clearly presented as having to do with the construction of meaning. The playful coupling of rising (die Landstrae [] stieg)
and falling (das gefiel mir) serves only to emphasize the primacy of language. This is a textual landscape.
In the B version this is where the narrator utters his Ruf ohne Klang,
whereas in the earlier version he simply grumbles something about verliebtes
Gerede before abandoning his companion and descending into a valley (of
which he is likewise the architect). Alone in the valley, the narrator of the B
version falls asleep:
Ich schlief und fuhr mit meinem ganzen Wesen in den ersten Traum hinein. Ich
warf mich in ihm so in Angst und Schmerz herum, da er es nicht ertrug, mich
aber auch nicht wecken durfte, denn ich schlief doch nur, weil die Welt um mich zuende war. (NS1 145, emphasis added)

He then escapes from this dream and returns to the Drfer meiner Heimat,
which leads to the second dream which would become known as Kinder
auf der Landstrae. There is no equivalent to this passage in the A version of
the text, but the narrators restless sleep does have a precursor in a longish passage which Kafka crossed out in the original manuscript and which is reproduced in the appendix of the critical edition. Here the narrators sleep is
traumlos [] aber doch nicht ohne eine fortwhrende leise Strung. Die
ganze Nacht durch hrte ich jemanden neben mir reden (NS1, App. 158). The
narrator cannot make out what the voice is saying except for a few individual
phrases, but rather perceives mostly the Art ihrer Betonung.
What returns here in ghostly guise is not only the other. It is quite literally a
part of the narrator s self. For the words that the narrator hears uttered by the
mysterious voice are his own, which he had used when trying to entertain the
acquaintance by narrating to him a scene from his life. Now the disembodied
voice literally echoes the narrator, quoting bits of his attempted narration [].
In a ghastly and ironic reversal, the self s former appeal to the other comes back
as an appeal to the self, which the self does not acknowledge as its own.
(Sokel 175)

Even in the earliest version of the text, words once uttered come back as
echoes to haunt the speaker. As we trace the development of this trope from
the earliest beginnings to the version in Betrachtung, we notice a distinct reduction and distillation. The sleep troubled by an outside voice is replaced by a
sleep which will not allow itself to be troubled precisely because there is nothing outside it (weil die Welt um mich zuende war). The figure of the double
vanishes and becomes instead the figure of the self re-doubled. Thus the self s

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re-echoing of its own words back to itself in fact constitutes their first utterance. The unfertige Gegend (73, 140) in which the initial Ruf takes place is
gradually brought to completion until it is consumed by that Ruf and enclosed
in quotation marks, whereupon the surrounding narrative fades away entirely, leaving only the solitary ich recounting the Ruf. Beyond it there is nothing; everything else must be spoken by him.
***
One of the few references to the real world in Beschreibung eines Kampfes
is the Laurenziberg in Prague. In a diary entry dated 15 February 1920 Kafka
again makes reference to this landmark, singling it out as the point of departure for his artistic trajectory. It is worth quoting at length, for it neatly sums
up a number of the key elements I have sought to emphasize through my
examination of Der Ausflug ins Gebirge:
Es handelt sich um folgendes: Ich sa einmal vor vielen Jahren, gewi traurig
genug, auf der Lehne des Laurenziberges. Ich prfte die Wnsche, die ich fr das
Leben hatte. Als wichtigster oder als reizvollster ergab sich der Wunsch, eine
Ansicht des Lebens zu gewinnen (unddas war allerdings notwendig verbundenschriftlich die andern von ihr berzeugen zu knnen) in der das Leben
zwar sein natrliches schweres Fallen und Steigen bewahre aber gleichzeitig mit
nicht minderer Deutlichkeit als ein Nichts, als ein Traum, als ein Schweben erkannt werde. Vielleicht ein schner Wunsch, wenn ich ihn richtig gewnscht
htte. Etwa als Wunsch einen Tisch mit peinlich ordentlicher Handwerksmigkeit zusammenzuhmmern und dabei gleichzeitig nichts zu tun undzwar nicht
so da man sagen knne: ihm ist das Hmmern ein Nichts sondern ihm ist das
Hmmern ein wirkliches Hmmern und gleichzeitig auch ein Nichts, wodurch
ja das Hmmern noch khner, noch entschlossener, noch wirklicher und wenn
Du willst noch irrsinniger geworden wre. Aber er konnte gar nicht so wnschen, denn sein Wunsch war kein Wunsch, er war nur eine Verteidigung, eine
Verbrgerlichung des Nichts, ein Hauch von Munterkeit, den er dem Nichts geben wollte, in das er zwar damals kaum die ersten bewuten Schritte tat, das er
aber schon als sein Element fhlte. (Tagebcher 85455)

This text forms part of what are collectively known as the Er aphorisms. In
view of this fact, it is surprising to see that the passage nevertheless begins in
the first person: Ich sa einmal. By the end, however, this ich has become a
third-person er. This transition is seemingly effected through the reactions of
the man to the ichs hammering. Seemingly: in actual fact the transition happens because there is no such reaction, for the original wish was not a wish at
all. Lifes natrliches schweres Fallen und Steigen cannot help but remind us
of the steep slope from Beschreibung eines Kampfes, which, as we saw, was not
natural at all, but rather the creation of the narrators ego. The other half of
the wish, namely that life should appear as ein Nichts, ein Traum, ein
Schweben, is far more clearly manifested in the texts under discussion. The

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purpose of the wish, however, was to maintain the uneasy ambiguity of

representation, and most importantly of all, to be able to communicate and
convince die anderen of this ambiguity in writing. That is to say, Kafkas
Wunsch is equal and opposite to Narcissuss strange wish: equal in that it
acknowledges an irreconcilable disparity, opposite in that instead of seeking
to resolve it, it is to be maintained and made comprehensible to others. The
hovering (Schweben) Kafka describes is precisely the precarious hovering between entity and non-entity which precedes (or arguably is contained in)
aphanisis.
Eine Verbrgerlichung des Nichts is a fitting description of the embodiment of Niemand that appeared in Der Ausflug ins Gebirge. The crushing
solitude of the subject is alleviated by transforming it into a company (eine
Gesellschaft) of nobodies in white tie, ambling and (almost) singing in the
great outdoors. Ein Hauch von Munterkeit can thus refer both to the animating breath of the literary demiurge as well as to the touch of gaiety which
comes over the happy wanderers on their excursion. This breath (Hauch) may
also aptly refer to an echo, which in repeating a sound that has vanished (or
faded) into nothingness (Nichts), re-animates and in a sense preserves it.
Thus the Ruf ohne Klangmanifestly a non-entity from its inceptionis preserved, as we have seen, through self-repetition. In order for it to be brought
fully to life, however, a second actor is required, one that cannot be provided,
or produced, by the ich itself.
When still couched in its larger narrative framework, the Ruf ohne Klang
contained an apostrophe to a second person: ich wrde ganz gerne, (was
sagen Sie dazu?) einen Ausflug mit einer Gesellschaft von lauter niemand
machen (NS1 141). In Betrachtung, this question has been eliminated and replaced by a phatic warum denn nichtsans question mark. There isnt anybody around to hear it, anyway; there is only nobody. It is this solipsistic
gesture which renders the wish invalid, at least, that is, if we choose to take the
later Kafka at his word. Changing the ich ohne Klang into an er would not
solve anything, even if it might bring us one step closer to the story of Echo
(ich) and Narcissus (er). Just as Narcissus resists Echos advances, so too must
the ich of Kafkas Ausflug be solitary and self-absorbed.
But Narcissuss fate does in fact have an external source: in Ovids version
of the myth, Narcissus is cursed by the goddess Nemesis to be denied that
which he most desires. This curse is a response to the righteous prayer
(precibus [] iustis [3.406]) of one of many nymphs and young men who like
Echo have also been spurned by the youth. Clearly, Ovid was forced to introduce these other jilted lovers here since Echo cannot have uttered the prayer
herself without someone having done so before her. But, in effect, this prayer
is an echo of sorts, since Narcissuss infatuation with his own image is prefigured in his rejection of Echo: her desire for Narcissus was for him the same as
his desire for himselfit was his own voice he was drawn to, or rather the like-

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ness of his voice (imago vocis), just as it was the likeness of his beauty (imago
formae) which held him in thrall by the lake. Fundamentally, then, the prayer,
or wish, which seals Narcissuss fate is a response to something never uttered,
or uttered silentlyohne Klang. As such this prayer is the copy that ultimately
gives Echo power over Narcissus.
In this we may have found the real reason why Kafkas third-person alterego gar nicht so wnschen [konnte]. Behind the desire to establish and
maintain the hovering ambiguity between reality and nothingness there is a
prior, unutterable wish for the object of that desire to remain unattainable. We
see this even in the way Kafka chooses to refer to the desiring subject as he,
taking the original wish and returning it to another in the form of its non-fulfillment. In so doing the ich may hope to defer the non-fulfillment of its own
wish by making it appear as if the one it discounts had belonged to someone
else originally. It is the illusion of primary speechof the non-equivalence of
ego and imagowhich finally collapses the wished-for ambiguity.
Notes
1

Thus, as Walter Sokel observes, one of the dominant characteristics of Kafkas

writing is the way in which he presents the triumph of narcissistic self-fulfillment
only to show it as illusory (175).
2 The narrators solitude and isolation is further underscored by a subordinate
clause that Kafka subsequently crossed out. The sentence originally read: [] im
Grund des Spiegels, der nur mich und nichts weiter zeigte, [] (Drucke, App. 75).
3 On the figure of the double in Kafkas early works, including Unglcklichsein,
see Rolleston.
4 This reading is echoed by Mark Anderson, who adds that the use of elegant clothing in the early texts also has a self-referential function for Kafkas attempt to forge his
own ornamental literary identity, to merge with his writing (35).
5 Lehmann is careful to specify that his is not intended to be eine durchgefhrte
Lektre des Textes but rather merely die Exposition eines fr Kafkas Schreiben
entscheidenden Motivs, but this does not prevent him from pointing out, in a characteristically parallactic gesture, eine Reihe von Wortspielen und Anspielungen, which
one could pursue if one were so inclined. One such allusion is the play on No-one as a
proper name in the Odyssey, a parallel which Elisabeth Strowick has explored in
greater detail.
6 On the significance of the voice and silence in Kafkas works, see especially Kittler
and Menke, as well as Arlette Camions essay on Die Stimme in Kafkas Erzhlungen,
in which she explores the implications of Maurice Blanchots characterization of
Kafkas narrative voice as voiceless (aphone). This, Camion argues, assumes particular significance in Kafkas short prose: Gerade wegen ihrer Krze ist aber die Erzhlung
Beobachtungsfeld fr den Leser, Versuchsfeld fr den Schriftsteller: dort erfhrt eine
criture sich selbst, dort nimmt eine Stimme sich selber wahr, und erstarrt im Echo ihrer
selbst (55).

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7 Bettine Menke, following de Man, reads prosopopoeia as eine Figur aller Figuration und aller Bedeutung (15), exemplified in the texts she analyzes by the reproduction (Wiedergabe) of the voice through the echo, whose salient characteristic is its
production of difference through repetition (312).
8 Another resonance of this ich ohne Klang, which succeeds in producing signification through absence and negation, might be the Hebrew letter aleph (!), which has
no sound of its own but rather denotes den laryngalen Stimmeinsatz [], der einem
Vokal am Wortanfang vorausgeht as Gershom Scholem explains. He continues: Das
Aleph stellt also gleichsam das Element dar, aus dem jeder artikulierte Laut stammt,
und in der Tat haben die Kabbalisten den Konsonanten Aleph stets als die geistige Wurzel aller anderen Buchstaben aufgefat, der in seiner Wesenheit das ganze Alphabet
und damit alle Elemente menschlicher Rede auffat. Das Aleph zu hren ist eigentlich
so gut wie nichts, es stellt den bergang zu aller vernehmbaren Sprache dar (qtd. in
Kremer 133; see also Heller-Roazen 1925). In rabbinic Judaism, the letter aleph occupies a privileged position as the first letter of the alphabet also because it is the first letter of the word anokhi (*,1!) meaning I and hence the letter which stands at the
beginning of the first Commandment (I am the Lord your God). The aleph, therefore, is in essence nothing, and yet it is the inaudible herald of all human language, an
Ich which may be heard only in writing.
9 Kafka will take up this motif again several years later in his hunter Gracchus fragments, one of which begins: Niemand wird lesen, was ich hier schreibe; niemand wird
kommen, mir zu helfen; [] Das wei ich und schreibe also nicht um Hilfe
herbeizurufen (NS1 311).
10 See Lehmann: Nach dieser Exposition der Elemente Negation und Konjunktiv,
die Grundzge von Kafkas Texten beschreiben, bleibt ein winziger Rest indikativisch
formulierter Vorstellung (216).
11 Strowick highlights an additional overtone in this phrase, adding that Wenn es
heit: Wir gehen so lala, lt sich darin ein Echo der Wendung Es geht so lala
vernehmen, die Kafkas Text krperlich-literal in Szene setzt (573). The jubilant tone
which otherwise pervades the text at this point is thus tempered or even partially negated by association.

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