The Eye and the Hand in Kafka’s Drawings

In the years leading up to the recent centennial of Franz Kafka’s death, perhaps the most significant revelation to emerge about the paragon of twentieth-century literature is that he had a strong interest in drawing. Over one hundred pages of drawings by Kafka, most of them previously unknown, were made public in 2021 by the National Library of Israel in an online repository, and they have opened the door to new consideration of the place of visual production in Kafka’s life and work. An extensive illustrated catalog with reproductions of all of Kafka’s known renderings, Franz Kafka: The Drawings, was published later that same year by Andreas Kilcher, and both the images and the book have inspired extensive commentary and reflection.[1] This includes two recent editions published on the centennial: a special issue on the drawings of The Germanic Review edited by Carsten Strathausen, and Through the Eyes of Franz Kafka: Between Image and Language, the monograph edited by Marie Rakušanová and myself, which focuses on Kafka’s connection to the art and visual culture of his home city of Prague, and how it is reflected in his writing and the drawings now at the National Library.[2]

The discovery of these new drawings, as Kilcher writes in his catalog, presents an opportunity to reconsider the conventional understanding of Kafka “as a storyteller to the exclusion of all else,” and to appraise more closely his relationship to visuality.[3] This topic has been previously studied mainly in relation to photography and cinema, and mostly from the perspective of Kafka as a spectator and consumer, not an active participant in the act of visual representation itself. [4] Earlier scholarship on previously identified drawings by Kafka was limited and often treated them as if they were mere pictorial extensions of the thematic content of his literary fiction.[5] Kilcher argues against this, and he posits that drawing for Kafka held a more important role, as an alternative medium that Kafka deployed in moments where writing proved out of reach or inadequate to expressing what he wished to convey. As Kilcher explains it, Kafka turns to drawing “at the point where writing has reached its limits” (Kilcher, “Drawing and Writing,” 260). Judith Butler, who contributes to the catalog, makes this same assertion.[6] It has been repeated so widely in reviews and responses to the book that it has been accepted as a commonplace.

The idea is premised on a passage in the first section of Kafka’s diaries, from 1909, where Kafka laments a period of “five months of my life in which nothing I wrote could satisfy me,” and produces several small ink drawings on a preceding and subsequent page.[7] Yet it is difficult to interpret from this that for Kafka, drawing was doing work that writing was incapable to perform, in large part because the chronology does not bear this out. By the time he wrote this passage in his diaries, Kafka was in fact hardly drawing anymore. As Kilcher himself explains, Kafka produced the majority of his drawings during his time as a student at Prague University and when beginning his work as a law clerk, in the period of approximately 1901 through 1907, and this is substantiated by primary sources.[8] As John Zilcosky explains in The Germanic Review, what is indeed notable for Kafka is “not the enduring presence of drawing but its sudden disappearance,” and that it drops off at precisely the point in Kafka’s life when he begins to devote himself in earnest to writing and publishing.[9] In contrast to the proposition that for Kafka, “the failure of writing is compensated for by the image,” as Kilcher claims, drawing is according to Zilcosky the thing that Kafka must “surrender” to clear the way for literature: it remains present in his writing only “as an absence, as the thing that he must, as a pure writer, deny himself” (Kilcher, “Drawing and Writing,” 261; Zilcosky, “End of Drawing,” 165, 167).

The relationship between drawing and writing for Kafka was indeed rather different than how Kilcher characterizes it, and I am also not convinced that when Kafka stops drawing, his writing withdraws as sharply from his renderings as Zilcosky suggests. In the present essay, I give closer consideration to Kafka’s drawing practice and propose that there is a more substantial point of connection between his drawings and writings—and that it is rooted in the distinctive way that Kafka accords visual attention to his subjects across both media. This is powerfully evident in the drawings themselves, which through the choices that Kafka makes as he moves his hand across the page, register the highly particular way that Kafka’s eye operates. Kafka’s pictures evidence a distinctive mode of intensive and overfocused visual attention that he cultivates in his drawing practice, and which leads him to concentrate exceptionally closely and selectively on specific features of the mostly human subjects that he renders, and to truncate or efface other aspects of their form and appearance. This anticipates how Kafka represents his subjects in both his private and literary writings, where instead of describing individuals in comprehensive detail, Kafka frequently offers a highly concentrated accounting of a narrow aspect of their appearance on which his description rests.[10] The resonant plane of connection between Kafka’s drawings and his writings is a mode of seeing and visual attention that the drawings themselves determinedly manifest, and that emerges in the drawings first, before it surfaces in Kafka’s written texts.

Writing on the tenth anniversary of Kafka’s death in 1934, Walter Benjamin famously argued that Kafka in his writing narrows his attention to human gesture, which Benjamin calls “the decisive thing, the center of the event” in Kafka’s fiction.[11] Indeed there is great focus given in both Kafka’s writings and his drawings to bodily gestures and comportment. As scholars and commentators including Kilcher and Butler have noted, many of Kafka’s drawings converge on figures that adopt conspicuous physical motions and poses. They walk, stride, move their hands, and angle their heads in abundance, and Kafka often reduces his representation of them to these bodily gestures, frequently using flowing, curvilinear lines that both amplify the movements of the figures and call attention to the motions of Kafka’s own hand as he draws. Yet gesture is not an end in itself in the drawings, and it is also not a fulcrum for a narrative “event,” since Kafka’s pictures present conspicuous narrative qualities only in a small number of instances. Rather, Kafka’s absorption with gesture is a function and product of the particular mode of overfocused visual attention that is characteristic of the drawings overall, and gesture is above all Kafka’s focus in those circumstances where he observes or imagines figures viewed from a spatial distance, where their gestures are their most evident quality or the only one that remains available to sight. Gesture is also not the only attribute to which Kafka directs concentrated visual attention. When he portrays figures from closer up, he directs the same level of intensive focus to the morphology of the body, to particular features of anatomy, and to the clothing and dress of his subjects.

Independent of the aspect of the subject on which Kafka focuses, and whether he is producing an observational drawing from life or rendering figures from memory or imagination, which he does frequently, Kafka operates similarly. He bears down on a specific constituent element within the larger whole and transposes it into a tapered and concentrated pictorial representation, and this paves the way for parallel strategies that Kafka employs in his writing. To take this proposition seriously means to reject the notion posed by some critics when the new drawings were made public in 2021, that “any attempt to know Kafka more intimately on the strength of his drawings is likely doomed to disappointment,” or as another suggested, that they are merely “distracted doodles” that lack intention or an underlying artistic attitude.[12] It requires us to allow that Kafka’s drawings were part of a larger endeavor of reconciling with visual attention that spanned both his pictorial and literary efforts, and to open up to the possibility that Kafka the writer learned from Kafka the artist, and adapted some of the essential operations of his writing from his drawing practice.

Ways of Drawing

The drawings now in the collection of the National Library of Israel were found in a bank vault in Zurich belonging to the family of Max Brod’s secretary Ilse Esther Hoffe, in a protracted court case that concluded when Israel’s Supreme Court in 2016 ruled that Hoffe’s descendants transfer the drawings, along with other materials from Brod’s estate, to the library. The case has been extensively chronicled, most notably by Benjamin Balint.[13] Brod bequeathed the drawings to Hoffe, initially in a gift letter in 1947, and they came from his own possession.[14] He stated that he received and gathered them from Kafka during the years they spent together as university students in Prague, and that Kafka at the time drew frequently but had little impulse to preserve his pictures. Brod stated that he retrieved some of them from “the wastebasket” and managed to collect just a portion. “What I did not save was lost,” he wrote.[15] After Kafka’s death, Brod over the years published a limited selection of the drawings in the biographical writings and editions of Kafka’s texts he prepared, starting with his biography, published in Prague in 1937.[16] He later sold two drawings to the Albertina in Vienna, while the drawings in Kafka’s dairies ended up at the Bodleian Library when the diaries were deposited there, and there are also several drawings in Kafka’s correspondence, today housed at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach and other institutions.[17] Yet Brod for the most part did not make the drawings widely available.[18] Hoffe and her descendants were even more reticent to allow access to them, and the majority were not known until the National Library of Israel presented them online.

The drawings from Brod’s former estate carrylittle additional documentation. Neither Kafka nor Brod kept records of them, and they do not often contain written inscriptions, with the exception of several pictures that contain short annotations in Kafka’s hand: “Martha reading,” “mob,” “haughtiness of wealth,” and “supplicant and distinguished patron,” written in the manner of titling.[19] Beyond this, the only other substantive contextual information we have about the drawings concerns the time period of their creation. Brod’s dating of them to his and Kafka’s university years is corroborated by several sources, including a letter that Kafka wrote to Felice Bauer in February 1913 in which he locates his drawing practice in an already distant past. “[O]ne of these days I’ll send you a few of my old drawings, to give you something to laugh at. These drawings gave me greater satisfaction in those days—it’s years ago—than anything else.”[20] This is the same letter in which Kafka writes about having earlier in his life taken private drawing lessons: “I was once a great draftsman, you know, but then I started to take academic drawing lessons with a bad woman painter and ruined my talent” (Kafka to Bauer, Letters to Felice, 189). Kafka also studied drawing in primary school, but apart from this and the private instruction he received, whatever else he learned, he taught himself and developed on his own.[21] The early dating of the drawings is also supported by the published recollections of Friedrich Feigl, a painter and graphic artist with whom Kafka was close. Feigl recalled that he first saw Kafka’s drawings around 1907, when Brod showed them to him and his artist friends in the Prague group called the “Eight” and asked that they include Kafka in an exhibition they were planning, which they ultimately did not.[22] A much smaller number of Kafka’s drawings date to later, such as those that accompany the 1909 passage in his diaries; several drawings that Kafka integrated into his correspondence; and a few others that show Kafka engaging with early cubism and rendering heads and faces with sharply angled, sometimes overlapping planes, an unusual technique in relation to his other works, and one that is difficult to trace to anywhere else except cubism, widely popularized in Prague between 1910 and 1914. Kafka’s engagement with the modern art of his time was significant.[23]

Even with the more than hundred pages of newly discovered drawings, it remains a small corpus, and a body of work this compact does not lend itself to easy analysis. At the same time, the drawings themselves are hardly mute. The more closely one considers them, the more they reveal about Kafka’s artistic process and the directions to which he impelled his drawing practice. They encompass considerable variety as well as a number of unifying characteristics, starting off with the fact that Kafka, across all his drawings, had a strong preference for working with small, portable materials. These lent themselves easily to observational drawing from life and to the type of extemporaneous drawing that could be produced with a few spare minutes of time, without the need for a more stable arrangement of materials and working surfaces. The drawings are all monochrome, and most of them are in pencil, an implement easily carried around, while a smaller number are in ink. Nearly all are rendered on paper of a format small enough that it could have easily fit into a coat pocket. Kafka often produced his drawings on sheets of ruled notebook and ledger pages that at some point, either then or subsequently, were removed from their original binding and stitching, their vertical dimensions between six and seven inches. He also worked on unruled, sometimes watermarked writing paper, often cut down into smaller pieces or folded in half in the manner of a booklet, as well as on cut pieces of packing paper. A smaller number of drawings in the National Library of Israel collection, fewer than a dozen, appear on the reverse or over the top of other documents: an envelope, a visiting card, printed reproductions of author photographs, and typed and annotated lecture notes from Kafka’s university studies. Beyond this, there is a somewhat larger, bound octavo notebook with black covers and unruled paper, approximately eight inches in height. It contains over forty pages of drawings, mostly in India ink, and a smaller number in pencil, the sheets still in their original configuration, although full of excisions made by Brod, who cut out some of the images to reproduce them.[24]

In all cases, Kafka devotes careful attention to the placement and composition of each drawing relative to the format of the page, and there are few if any extrinsic features to distract from the image.[25] When Kafka sets his hand to the page, the drawings are not afterthoughts, or “doodles” on the margins of written manuscripts, but his main and absolute fixation. The aforementioned variety that abounds in the drawings does not so much concern Kafka’s assortment of varied paper substrates, which is considerable, but rather, how he shifts between different methods of working and modes of representation when he draws. Examining the drawings, we see him moving freely and easily from naturalistic to more abbreviated, reductive depictions; from modeling and shading to line and contour; and from curved to more geometric forms. Kafka is so adept at deploying these different ways of drawing that in some cases, he shifts between these modalities on the same sheet of paper, or in the case of the bound black notebook with ink drawings, on adjacent or successive pages. To a large extent, the way he chooses to approach each drawing is motivated by the nature and identity of the subject he portrays, his physical proximity to it, and the observable attributes that most attract his attention.

Working in pencil, Kafka draws his mother and, with the aid of a mirror, himself (Fig. 1).[26] The faces are coarsely rendered but carefully observed, with enough care for the identity and specificity of the individuals that their features are clear. Kafka’s mother wears reading glasses and tilts her head, while below her on the same page Kafka’s own face stares directly outward. Kafka uses both line and shading to establish facial features but leaves much of his mother’s head undeveloped—choosing instead to focus on the nose, mouth, and glasses, the tilt of her head, and her overall posture, which he conveys through an abbreviated rendering of the shoulders and upper arms. When it comes to his self-portrait, he shows the entirety of the face and more clearly defines its edges, his hand applying more pressure to the pencil when he reaches the chin, which he renders as chiseled and sharp, and goes over several times, darkening its edges. Another pencil portrait, more finely executed and cut down from a larger sheet of paper, shows an acquaintance whose identity is today difficult to establish (Fig. 2). The young man, who appears to be in his late teens or early twenties, is close enough to Kafka personally that he is comfortable subjecting himself to the scrutiny of having his portrait rendered. The beginnings of an even more carefully rendered pencil portrait, another young man observed from close up (Fig. 3), appear on the back of a commercially printed photolithograph portrait of the Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio.[27]

Family and friends can be counted on to sit still for the several minutes it takes Kafka to develop the drawing, and it is also as if the intimacy of familial and fraternal relationships compels in him an additional sense of duty to get the representation right, which the more naturalistic conventions he adopts in his portraits allow him to do. Kafka later devotes a lengthy entry in his diaries to chronicling a visit in December 1911 with Brod to the studio of their artist friend Willi Nowak, another member of the Eight, who was working at the time on a painting and lithograph of Brod. In the matter of portraiture and a picture of his closest friend, as the diary entry reveals, Kafka clearly understood the merits of an artistic representation that was true to life and also flattering, with “noble, composed features.”[28] His own portrait drawings reflect this.

In other drawings, indeed the majority of them, Kafka searches for subjects in public settings beyond the circle of family and intimates. In his essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” Charles Baudelaire celebrates the modern artist who trades the sequestration of the home and studio for the street—who “moves into the crowd as though into an enormous reservoir of electricity,” animated by the human dimension of their urban surroundings.[29] This is how it is with Kafka. Like many artists and writers who, from the second half of the nineteenth century onward, sought out subjects from urban life, Kafka engages in regular observation of his home city and its inhabitants, taking daily walks out of doors and frequenting coffeehouses, bars, and theaters, which provides him with ample opportunity to observe and draw the individuals around him.[30]

“[T]he people watcher,” the biographer Reiner Stach calls him.[31] Populated environments attract Kafka, and people are indeed the main subject of his drawings: men and women, young and old, occasionally accompanied by a dog, horse, or carriage. In public settings, rendering a naturalistic likeness is not Kafka’s objective. He does not know personally the people he encounters, and he does not have the physical proximity to draw them from up close or for an extended period of time. Moreover, in public spaces, the figures do not stand still. Their bodies are constantly in motion, so he must work much more quickly and selectively than in his portrait drawings. Instead of rendering the whole of the figure, head, or face, and representing it with a consistent level of detail, he trains his eye on some partial aspect of the person’s appearance and develops the drawing with this as the center of attention. The object of Kafka’s focus varies from one drawing to the next. Sometimes it is a minute detail, such as a discrete part of the body or clothing, and at other times it is gesture and comportment. This mode of overfocused looking and its distillation through drawing is at once a practical accommodation to rendering subjects in urban public space and the product of Kafka’s desire to concentrate, rather than disperse visual attention.

The Overfocused Eye

In pointed shoes and in a knee-length dress and coat, a young woman walks along the street and Kafka makes a quick pencil drawing of her (Fig. 4) on the back of another photolithographic author portrait.[32] He roughs in the forms with wandering, faint marks of the pencil and reduces the woman’s body and limbs to an almost ephemeral presence. Her coat, with two prominent buttons, is worn open over her dress. Her arms are drawn with just a few lines, her left elbow far out of its natural position, and there is no articulation to the hands. Kafka focuses much more attentively on the face, the features of which he represents with firm, darker marks of the pencil: chin, mouth, nose, eyes, eyebrows. The woman’s pointed shoes receive this same darkened and more insistent treatment. For the hair, a churning nest of lines takes shape as two dark masses on either side of the face. The woman’s hat is reduced to a brim, a single curved line with a band of coiled fringe above.

No surroundings or space are depicted around the figure, and in only a few of his pictures does Kafka ever include these externalities of the physical environment. The rare outlier is a drawing on a page spread from one of the small, ruled notebooks that Kafka used frequently, where he draws a middle-aged man in a distinctive hat with two peaks, wearing a wide triangular collar, set against the background of a gothic tower reminiscent of the late medieval architecture of Prague (Fig. 5). A roadway extends behind the man into the distance, and Kafka renders much smaller figures at the base of the tower, using cursory outlines to represent their bodies and poses. All attention focuses on the oversized man in the foreground and his head and face, the elements that Kafka most thoroughly develops. The way that Kafka crops the man’s torso is unusual, cutting him off just below his chest and leaving no indication of his lower body, as if it were of no significance, and across the rest of the page spread we see figures and forms entirely unconnected to this street scene. It is difficult to name another artist of the early twentieth century who in this genre of urban representation consolidates his vision to such a high degree.[33] This is the distinctive characteristic of Kafka’s drawings, and it stems from the nature of his seeing: he trains his eye on his subject and on a specific aspect of their body, dress, or comportment, and as if he were placing it under magnification, he overfocuses on it to such a degree that he amplifies its prominence, often to the point of exaggeration, while everything else is minimized or eliminated.

In nearly all other cases except for this latter drawing, Kafka’s figures stand on their own, without a background, hovering over the white of the page. Kilcher refers to Kafka’s figures as “free-floating, lacking any surrounding,” and Butler writes evocatively of how they are “sketched without gravity, without ground” (Kilcher, “Kafka’s Drawing and Writing,” 253; Butler, “What Ground?” 281). On the reverse of Kafka’s portrait of himself and his mother are more images of street life (Fig. 6), and here, the figures are characteristically free of any surroundings. Kafka arranges them in two horizontal rows: a man marches forward holding a newspaper or book; another appears to be running; another gesticulates, waving his arms; and a woman with her arms pressed to her sides stares ahead. Kafka’s representation of the figures is pared down to line and contour, with no shading to convey volume, depth, or mass. Kafka moves his pencil so quickly that he hardly lifts his hand from the page, and the lines that constitute each figure are in some places almost continuous. He directs his attention almost entirely to their postures and gestures, emphasizing these qualities with overstated elongations and extensions of limbs, and feet curled and pointed to suggest the motion of approaching and pushing away from the ground, although no street or surface is depicted.[34] These two sides of the same folded sheet of paper, front and back, make plain the way that Kafka shifts his mode of working and adapts it to his subjects and circumstances. The way he draws his gestural figures is the exact opposite of the more developed, conventional portraits of himself and his mother on the other side of the sheet.

Perhaps this tendency to selectively overfocus on specific features of his subjects explains Kafka’s attraction to caricature, which he follows in the press and through his artist friends.[35] In several drawings, Kafka adapts the genre’s practice of devoting heightened attention to a single part of the body and exaggerating it for humorous effect. A pencil drawing that he makes of D’Annunzio’s head (Fig. 7), rendered directly over the poet’s portrait photograph, stretches his facial features, enlarging his nostrils and extending his bearded chin into a bulbous appendage. In another drawing (Fig. 8), irregularly cut down from a larger sheet of paper, Kafka depicts the head of a woman or girl with a bow in her hair, whose features he plumps and ages, and next to her a man in the uniform of a server, his face more angular and his ears comically stretched to appear as large as his bowtie. There are several such drawings by Kafka that exaggerate features for comedy. A few of these even depict figures engaging with one another in actions that Kafka depicts with narrative intent, yet they are the exception, and in the vast majority of drawings, even those that depict multiple figures on the same page, Kafka’s figures are not shown to be interacting and usually do not even register one another’s presence. [36]

Benjamin in his 1934 essay writes of the “distorted” individuals in Kafka’s fiction, their shape and appearance “far away from the continent of man,” and the effect that Benjamin and subsequent generations of critics and scholars have discerned in Kafka’s writings stems from how Kafka apportions his vision (Benjamin, “Franz Kafka,” 811, 802). Through Kafka’s overemphasized concentration on certain parts of the body, shape and scale are altered beyond the forms of nature, and select elements take on an outsized importance. This is a characteristic of nearly all of Kafka’s drawings, and it is a quality that is also abundantly present in his writings, including his diaries, where he records his daily experiences and encounters in short passages of text that reveal a similarly overfocused approach to visual observation. There, Kafka not only describes with intensive focus particular attributes of individuals that he observes in public, but also the act of looking itself, how he directs his eyes, even the duration for which he holds his gaze on the object of his attention. In an entry from September 1911, Kafka describes walking along Prague’s busiest commercial square and boulevard and in the royal gardens of the Belvedere:

Yesterday on Wenzelplatz encountered 2 girls, kept my eyes too long on one of them, while it was the other who, as became apparent too late, was wearing a wide brown pleated coat as soft as household attire and a little open in front, had a delicate neck and delicate nose. Her hair was in an already forgotten way beautiful.—Old man with loosely hanging pants on the Belvedere. He whistles; when I look at him, he stops; if I look away, he begins again; finally he whistles even when I look at him.—The beautiful large button beautifully attached at the bottom of the sleeve of a girl’s dress. The dress worn beautifully too floating over American boots. How rarely I achieve something beautiful and this unnoticed button and its unknowing dressmaker achieve it. (Kafka, Diaries, 20–21)

With the exception of location, we learn little about the physical space and environment in which these encounters take place, and even in Kafka’s descriptions of the individuals, his eye settles on just a few select attributes of their appearance. Kafka declares the hair of the girl on the Wenzelplatz (Václavské náměstí) to be “beautiful,” but the details of its appearance are “already forgotten” to him when he is writing, for it is her “delicate neck and delicate nose” on which he focuses. The other girl whom he describes appears absent a physical body; it is her clothing, specifically her “American boots” and the “large button” on her sleeve that are the objects of Kafka’s attention, the latter “unnoticed” by all except him. Carolin Duttlinger, in her essay for the book Kafka: Making of an Icon, also published in the recent centennial year of Kafka’s death, characterizes Kafka as “an acute but rather wayward and sometimes rebellious observer, whose gaze tended to stray away from the ‘main event,’” and who is “often captivated by random details and particularly by the behavior and appearance of the people around him.”[37] Frequently, as is the case with this diary entry, the features that Kafka isolates are minor or incidental, not the ones that were of normative interest to most writers and artists of his time or that we would expect to read about or see. What holds his attention is indeed often something as plain as a button, how clothing rests on the figure, or a slight turn of the body.

While on a visit with Brod to Prague’s Lucerna theater, for example, Kafka focuses not on the action on the stage, but on the appearance and clothing of a woman in the audience who he describes as “[t]he merry fat woman in the box. The wild one with the rough nose, the ash-dusted face, the shoulders that pushed themselves out of her incidentally not low-cut dress, the back that was jerked this way and that” (Kafka, Diaries, 220). Elsewhere in the diaries, Kafka is “[s]itting with acquaintances outdoors at a coffeehouse table” and reports on the bodily movements of a married couple: “[A] woman at the next table who has just arrived, breathes heavily under large breasts and with a heated shiny brownish face sits down. She leans her head back, a heavy down becomes visible, she turns her eyes upward, almost in the way she might sometimes look at her husband, who is now reading an illustrated paper next to her” (19). At a nudist sanatorium in Saxony, in a formerly redacted passage of the diaries restored by Ross Benjamin in his recent new English translation, the object of Kafka’s attention narrows more closely to limbs and skin. He directs his eyes toward “2 beautiful Swedish boys with long legs, which are so formed and taut that one could really only run one’s tongue along them.”[38] Kafka’s focus can be unrelenting, and he frequently narrows his gaze with such intensity that it borders on the invasive. When he is out in public, as his diary entry from the Wenzelplatz and Belvedere attests, he observes so intently, and for such long durations, that others catch him in the act of looking. Kafka seems unbothered by this; indeed, in some cases the confrontation impels him to hold his eyes on the person longer. The whistling man at the Belvedere finally resigns himself to the fact that Kafka will not avert his eyes and, after pausing his whistling, resumes again.

There are countless examples of such heightened visual attention and scrutiny in Kafka’s fiction writings, from his earliest published stories to his later literary works. In his first publication, in the inaugural issue of the illustrated Munich literary journal Hyperion in early 1908, a series of eight numbered vignettes, each hardly a paragraph or two long, several of the stories feature accounts of individuals closely observed.[39] In the sixth of them, which Kafka later titled “Der Fahrgast” (“The Passenger,” often titled “On the Tram” in English editions) when he published it in his first book, Betrachtung (1912), he presents the reader with a male narrator who is riding a tram and intently observing other passengers. The narrator’s attention focuses on a woman preparing to step off the tram as it nears its stop. He stands close to her and takes stock of minute aspects of her appearance, from how she holds her hand to brace herself against the tram to her clothing, hair, and head. He studies her with such proximity and focus that he can discern the smallest of details, which Kafka narrates in the first person: “a collar of white fine-meshed lace,” and hair that falls in “stray little tendrils on the right temple. Her small ear is close-set, but since I am near her I can see the whole ridge of the whorl of her right ear and the shadow at the root of it.”[40]

Gesture and Distance

The protagonists in Kafka’s early fiction indeed sometimes stand exceedingly close to the objects of their gaze and are therefore able to scrutinize even the smallest aspects of their appearance. In other cases, when Kafka or his literary subjects stand at a greater distance from the individuals they observe, there is less possibility to discern the buttons on their sleeves, the lace of their collar, or the particular shape of a nose, ear, or leg—the “delicate” and “beautiful” smaller elements of the whole. When there is physical distance between them, Kafka by and large focuses his descriptions of individuals on their gesture, posture, and comportment. In his diaries, the woman whom Kafka watches taking her seat at the coffeehouse “leans her head” and “turns her eyes upward”; at the Lucerna, the woman in the audience has shoulders that have “pushed themselves out” of her clothing (Kafka, Diaries, 220, 19). These are things that can be seen from further away, when smaller details are less visible to the eye.

The focus on gesture is for Kafka often a function of proximity, or more accurately the lack thereof, and pictorial and textual representation in his works approximates how we observe forms and figures in real life, in dimensional space, the particularities of their appearance becoming clearer the closer we stand, and less clear at a distance, where what is left for us to see is reduced to overall form and gesture. “Wedding Preparations in the Country,” the beginnings of the novel that Kafka started to write in 1907 but did not finish, centers on the character of Eduard Raban, a resident of the city who is preparing for a journey by train to meet his fiancée, who lives in the countryside. Kafka presents Raban, uneasy with anticipation of the trip, preoccupied with the act of observing others. In the opening section of the text, Raban prepares to exit his home and approaches its open doorway. He stands there facing the street. It is crowded with people and carriages, and Raban shifts his eyes from one figure to the next, concentrating most of all on their physical movements. “On the pavement straight in front of him there were many people walking in various rhythms.” [41] Two men are in conversation: “The one held his hands palm-upward, raising and lowering them in regular motion, as though he were balancing a load. . . . And hurrying past was a young man with a thin walking stick, his left hand, as though paralyzed, flat on his chest” (Kafka, “Wedding Preparations,” 52). As two carriages pass one another, Raban studies the motions of the horses that pull them. “The animals tugged at the shafts, the carriage bowled along, swaying as it gathered speed, until the swerve around the carriage ahead was completed and the horses moved apart again, only their narrow quiet heads inclined toward each other” (Kafka, “Wedding Preparations,” 52–53).

Nearly all of the language concentrates on the physical comportment of bodies, the disposition and movement of hands, limbs, and heads. In his diaries, in an entry from 1912, Kafka describes himself, similarly to Raban, standing in the doorway of his family’s home in Prague on a day in winter. The apartment building that Kafka lived in at the time with his parents and sisters stood at the corner of Niklasstrasse (Mikulášská třída), a major boulevard recently constructed during the demolition and rebuilding of Prague’s Jewish quarter, and the embankment of the Vltava River. It was a heavily populated intersection, and looking out from the doorway, Kafka directs his gaze toward the crowd of people he observes:

Girls in light clothes with hats as distinctly colored as postage stamps walked on the arm of young people and a melody, suppressed in their throats, revealed itself in the dancing step of their legs. Families kept together well and even if at some point they were scattered in a long row there were arms stretched slightly backward, waving hands, shouts of pet names to link the lost ones. Solitary men sought to close themselves off even more by putting their hands in their pockets. (Kafka, Diaries, 198)

Kafka’s account of his own placement with respect to this scene and his focus on the bodily gestures of the individuals he observes closely parallels that of his protagonist Raban. What both texts present could also be a corollary to any number of Kafka’s drawing of figures, their bodies and limbs animating the page as they walk, stride, run, and wave their hands, like the drawing of figures in two rows on the back of Kafka’s portrait of himself and his mother, a gathering of people that appears to be similarly observed or imagined from a more distant vantage point. Gesture also abounds in the India ink drawings in Kafka’s bound black notebook of drawings. Across its many pages, there are over one hundred individual figures, and they occupy a wide array of poses and configurations (Fig. 9–10).[42] Kafka renders them mostly as outlines, tracing the edges of their form, their bodies either left blank or filled in with black. Some of the lines are straighter and more geometric, while others are more curved, and in almost every case there is hardly anything more than a dot and a slash for the eyes, nose, and mouth, for Kafka devotes much less attention to the faces than to the way the figures move. Their legs and arms are constantly in motion. These are their most definitive and characteristic features, and the ones that Kafka extends to elongated, exaggerated proportions.

On another page spread of the notebook (Fig. 11), Kafka shifts from ink to working in pencil. On the right-hand page he draws two fencers. The sport was popular in Prague, and well into the early twentieth century university fraternities often settled their affairs with duels; the motif also appears in Kafka’s fiction.[43] The left figure faces forward and shifts his weight to his front leg, holding his foil in a lunge, and the other, to the right, is shown in profile and adopts the defensive position of a parry, as if under attack, his head pulled so far back that it could not trail any further behind the body. On the facing left-hand page are figures engaged in other activities. They stand and walk, one of them holds a flag or banner, and a seated man rests his slumped body over a desk. As in so many of his drawings, Kafka distills the ordinarily complex and abundant particularities of the human body into the simplest of lines and shapes—stretched, elongated, amplified, and reduced in ways that subordinate form to movement and make the gesture the center of attention, indeed the only thing the viewer of the drawing can reliably distinguish.

In the same page spread, at the lower right edge of the left-hand page, are six smaller, nearly identical clustered forms composed of three pencil marks each: a circle perched atop a vertical line, with a prominent diagonal line oriented to the right (Fig. 12). These are Kafka’s fencers from the facing right-hand page, now reduced to the smallest possible scale and pared down to the absolute minimum of visual information: head, torso, and sword arm with foil. In these six small pencil renderings, Kafka pushes against the outer edges of pictorial representation, but his intent is not to abandon it. What reads at first glance as a flight into abstraction, an absence of seeing and an absent body, or a dematerialization and dissolution of form into ornamental patterns, is instead the product of Kafka’s intensely focused visual attention.[44] The main element to which Kafka directs his attention—the defining movements of a fencer in motion—is the feature he draws and the sole focus of his representation. The body is distilled into the linear essence of a gesture on which he concentrates so intently that he excludes all else, until these are the only marks that remain.

Zilcosky, in reference to Kafka’s fiction, considers the relatively limited visual details that Kafka provides in his literary texts and comes to the conclusion that “[b]y not supplying images and continually tempting us with the insistence that there is ‘nothing to be seen, ‘Kafka creates an uncanny visual dissonance. We find ourselves holding many images of the same thing in our minds at once” (Zilcosky, “End of Drawing,” 169). The spareness of the more gestural of Kafka’s drawings, with their lack of individuated specificity or detail and their economy of lines, accomplishes something comparable—allowing, even demanding of the viewer that they imagine from Kafka’s few simple marks of pencil and ink a more ample and complete corporeal presence. Kafka as a writer adapts this strategy in large part from drawing, and not incidentally, he comes to his drawing practice and his distinctive way of observing and drawing his subjects at a time in the first decade of the twentieth century when many artists were experimenting with precisely how much a discrete pictorial mark or element—disassociated from more traditional techniques and conventions of pictorial representation—can ultimately communicate and express. This had been one of the key preoccupations of artistic modernism since impressionism, and Kafka in his drawings confronts the question directly, and comes up with an answer: quite a lot, if the viewer comes to the act of observation with interest and concentration. In the same way as in the countless visual encounters that constitute our daily lived experience, where a small element or motion of a person’s body can transmit an extraordinary amount of information, a few lines and marks can encompass a world.