Bodies as Signs: Somacentric Signification and the Foundation of Meaning in Franz Kafka’s “Ein Hungerkünstler” and “In der Strafkolonie”

Abstract

This article offers a comparative reading of “Ein Hungerkünstler” and “In der Strafkolonie,” combining the topic of incomprehension and miscommunication with the motif of the body. It analyzes how meaning and signification are conceptualized within the two stories, how problems of misunderstanding are framed and possible solutions explored. In an attempt to overcome the limitations of speaking and writing, each story proposes a form of somacentric signification: the hunger artist turns his whole body into a sign, and the torture apparatus in the penal colony inscribes its sentence directly onto the delinquent’s skin. Using Charles Sanders Peirce’s triadic concept of the sign, Friedrich Nietzsche’s principle of the conventional nature of meaning, and Jacques Derrida’s critique of Western metaphysics, I analyze mechanisms and limitations of somacentric signification. Exploring the reasons for its ultimate failure leads me to consider the social foundation of meaning as depicted within the two stories, addressing the question under which circumstances understanding and communication are possible in the works of Franz Kafka.

Keywords:

• Franz Kafka
• “A Hunger Artist”
• “In the Penal Colony”
• body
• somacentric signification
• Friedrich Nietzsche
• Charles S. Peirce

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Olga Fedorenko without whose support this article would never have been published. Additional thanks go to my colleagues Jeong Hang-Kyun and Steffen Hannig for their insightful comments, and to Nicholas James for his thorough copyediting of a previous version. I started working on this topic in 2017 while staying in Weimar as a scholarship recipient of Klassik Stiftung Weimar.

Notes

1 Werner Hamacher explores the inevitability of failure and the impossibility of understanding based on Walter Benjamin’s reading of Kafka (280-323). Despite superficial similarities, this article differs from Hamacher’s study in approach, scope, and theoretical framework.

2 While “In der Strafkolonie” is commonly grouped with Kafka’s works on justice and punishment, numerous scholars have pointed out similarities to his later works on art and performance (Norris 430; Anderson 175; Corngold 77).

3 To keep the argument concise, two potentially relevant aspects are deliberately omitted: Franz Kafka’s preoccupation with his own body, especially in connection with his writing process (Anderson 184-88); and the often drawn parallel between his protagonists’ inability to make sense of their world and the analogue struggle of his readers with the interpretation of Kafka’s texts (Vogl 184-5). Concerning the topic “Kafka and the body” in general, see the works of Sell, Engelstein, and Shahar 456-462.

4 Gerhard Neumann proposes that the hunger artist tries to establish a so-called “absolute sign” which can only be validated by the complete disappearance of his body. While I agree with Neumann’s general premise, I see no need to postulate a self-negating “absolute sign.”

5 In accord with the conventions of Peirce scholarship, the “Collected Papers” are quoted not by page number, but by volume and paragraph number.

6 In the same paragraph, Peirce offers a concrete example for this distinction: “For instance, I point my finger to what I mean, but I can’t make my companion know what I mean, if he can’t see it, or if seeing it, it does not, to his mind, separate itself from the surrounding objects in the field of vision” (8.314). The parallel to the hunger artist’s situation is striking: he can display his emaciated body, figuratively pointing at it, but he cannot make his audience understand.

7 Oliver Jahraus makes a similar argument regarding the social legitimization of art, conceptualizing the protagonist’s failure and death as results of his misguided attempt to legitimize the art of fasting on a purely individual basis (435-6).

8 Andrea Bachner specifically “traces the obsession of post-structuralist theories of subjection with Franz Kafka’s story ‘In the Penal Colony’ by recontextualizing Kafka’s text in discourses on tattooing and body ornamentation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (21).

9 Notable dissenting opinions include Bernd Seiler (91) and Andrea Polaschegg (658-9) who both reject the notion of the officer as an unreliable narrator. Rebecca Schuman, by contrast, goes so far as to suggest that, since no example of the correctly functioning machine was provided in the text, the readers had no basis to judge “whether the machine’s malfunction was random, systematic, a normal case, a special case, or, in fact, a ‘malfunction’ at all” (157).

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Notes on contributors

Christian Baier

Christian Baier is Associate Professor in the Department of German Language and Literature at Seoul National University in South Korea. His research interests include the theory of fictionality and the concepts of autobiography and autofiction, as well as the works of Franz Kafka, Günter Grass, and Thomas Mann. His current research focuses on the concept of narrative, especially in its non-textual, discursive variations and their implications for the phenomenon of post-truth.