MAX BENSE
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hardly cares how sound the product is he inspects--or how "true" its
producer. His job is not to refute a "truth" but to destroy him who
tells it.
(Holding Converse with the Philosophers)
CRITICISM
Taking as our point of vantage the new, "fundamental" ontology,
it makes no sense to speak of imitation,
mimesis.
Words no longer serve
as vehicles of statements or as their copies. Rather, they aim to show
forth clearly what the thought or thing, of its very nature, intends. . . .
This change in our whole thinking can be traced in modern fiction. We
no longer expect narrative to
reflect
things or events, much less to reflect
on them. Its job now is to make the intentions inherent in words and
metaphors as explicit as possible-to exfoliate them-and in so doing
assist the self-exegesis of existence.
(Kafka's Theory)
While in Poe's stories we can still discern an adequate object of
prose, such an object is either not found in Kafka or found in constant
retreat. But in proportion as the object withdraws, the reader feels
drawn into the orbit of that prose, challenged, and made perspicuous
to himself.
As
regards the instrumental character of prose, this represents
a drastic inversion of the usual procedure; so drastic that the weII-known
content or meaning inversion of the
fable
appears mild by compari–
son....
Interruption
furnishes the mechanism which releases the tech–
nological inversion of Kafka's prose. But while in Poe such disturbances
of the normal world of prose are always eliminated in the end, by means
of a causal analysis little short of fanatic-restoration of order being one
of the classical rules of story-telling-the situation is quite different in
Kafka. Here the disturbance is aIIowed to persist, unfounded and un–
explained, as though it were a part of reality itself. And, oddly enough,
reality does not lose but gains in the process: it acquires a new con–
tinuity whose character I have described elsewhere, in discussing the
"continuity of the maze."
(The Metaphysics of Literature)
In the magnificent disciplines of today the object-such as it used
to be and, to an extent, still is-has been made to undergo ambiguous
abbreviations, which demand to be taken seriously. Yet this situation is
not altogether new. Weare acting out, once more, the old game of
generalization; and what we call our 'world'-that world of cities,
