13 - Kafka adapted to film

Summary

Die Bilder sind ja gut (The images are good of course)

Bertolt Brecht

Seasickness on terra firma

Kafka's earliest surviving short story, 'Description of a Struggle', contains a passage often quoted in discussions of the relationship between words and images in Kafka's writing:

I have experience, and I don't mean it as a joke when I say that it is a seasickness on terra firma. In essence you have forgotten the true names of things and now in haste pour arbitrary names over them. Quickly, quickly! But as soon as you run away from them you forget their names again. The poplar in the fields, which you have named the 'Tower of Babel' because you didn't know or didn't want to know that it was a poplar, sways namelessly again and you have to call it 'Noah, when he was drunk.'

I was rather surprised when he said, 'I am pleased that I did not understand what you said.'

Annoyed I replied hastily, 'The fact that you are pleased about it shows that you did understand it.' 'I did indeed show it, Sir, but you also spoke strangely.'

(BK: 89-90)

The narrator’s sense of outrage at the linguistic quirks of the community is, as one commentator has put it, dismay at the ‘confusion metaphor poses for nomination’, the way in which each image substituted for the ‘true names of things’ leads further away from the object itself to a proliferation of meaning. Certainly, the reference to the Tower of Babel implies that metaphorical substitution is an essentially arbitrary act.