Interpreting literature is highly subjective – this is part of its attraction. Thinking about possible meanings will eventually always tell you something about yourself, or indeed, about the general beliefs, experiences and convictions of other interpreters. The scope and range of potential for interpretation varies from text to text, of course, and some texts which look very straightforward and ‘obvious’ might mean very different things to different readers, or even different things to the same reader at different times in their life. Kafka is an author with a very high ratio of interpretations per pages of text and there are a huge number of secondary texts written on
Kafka’s work. His writing seems to invite interpretation and has been described as enigmatic, dreamlike and allegorical. Often, the narrator describes events which on the surface seem ordinary. Descriptions of seemingly normal life are then turned into stories of the unnatural and
Kafka’s characters experience anxiety, suffering unfounded accusations, despair and often death. Explanations are often withheld so that the reader is forced to think about his or her own understanding of what happens in Kafka’s fiction.
A reason why so many readers have been able to identify with Kafka’s texts may be because his fictional world represents typical relationships, like family relations. Also, there is his use of first person narration. Kafka’s language is not complex, and it has been remarked that he uses
‘normal’ language and a matter-of-fact style to describe unbelievable and often quite surreal scenes. The adjective ‘kafkaesque’ (or kafkaesk , in German) is explained on Wikipedia:
The adjective refers to anything suggestive of Kafka, especially his nightmarish type of narration, in which characters lack a clear course of action, the ability to see beyond immediate events, and the possibility of escape. The term's meaning has transcended the literary realm to apply to real-life occurrences and situations that are incomprehensibly complex, bizarre, or illogical.
What happens in Der Schlag ans Hoftor ?
Here is what I think - your description may well have picked up on other things!
The narrator and his sister are on their way home. Apparently, the sister has knocked on a manor house gate. However, whether she did or not is not clear, she may have just shaken her fist at it. The narrator is not sure, which doesn’t seem surprising as this act would be seen as quite insignificant in the normal scheme of things. Soon after, the villagers appear and look at the pair, first in a friendly way, then more anxiously. Brother and sister are informed that they will be accused and prosecuted for knocking on the door. At this point, the narrator is still very calm and confident. He knows that there is no proof that his sister did what she is accused of.
The villagers warn him that he will be held responsible too. Next there is a description of the manor and the yard, from a distance as it seems. The scene is compared with watching smoke from afar, waiting for the flames to come into view. Men on horses appear, kicking up a lot of dust. They are described as carrying lances as they ride into the yard. They soon turn and ride out of the yard again, coming towards the narrator and the village. The narrator manages to persuade his sister to go home by convincing her that she ought to get changed to be more presentable. He seems to have accepted all responsibility. After this, the riders, or rather two in particular, address the narrator from their horses, asking about the sister. After hearing that she is not around, they seem to lose interest in her and focus their attention on the brother. The judge and his assistant called Aßmann – who is the only character with a name in this story –
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lead the narrator to a farmer’s cottage and, once the narrator has stepped over the threshold, he is pitied by the judge. The cottage room is then described as being more like a torture chamber than a domestic living room: it is tiled, there is an iron ring hanging from one of the walls and the bed reminds the narrator of an operating table. The end of the text reveals that the whole story has been narrated from inside this room, as a kind of report of what happened and in the clear knowledge that any thought of escape and freedom is unrealistic. The narrator will remain imprisoned there and worse may happen to him yet.
Central Themes
The text can be seen as a kind of report, like one would give in court when asked to justify one’s actions. In that sense, it is analytical, as it describes the action from a particular point in time, looking back at events in the light of a specific accusation, problem, or question. With this in mind, every sentence gains in significance. Every statement is there to either explain the current mystifying situation of the narrator or to justify his actions. Occurrences, which in normal life are unimportant and without much consequence, like the possibly frivolous knocking on the door, become grounds for imprisonment and possible torture. The notion of shifting perspectives is one of Kafka’s main themes. The sentence describing the villagers’ reaction illustrates this change very well: their behaviour mutates from open friendliness to fright to shock within a single sentence, at the end of which they are described as standing hunched with foreboding. This sentence may describe an actual change in the villagers, but it may also describe the gradual change in the narrator’s understanding or evaluation of the situation. As we have no other source of information, we have to rely on what the narrator tells us. However, his narration may be unreliable.
There are other themes, of course. Brother and sister are described as ‘on their way home’, as
‘strangers’ and different from the villagers. They have entered a world which is not theirs and may have violated rules in ignorance. City and countryside have different rules and laws, it seems. The theme of brother and sister on their way home is perhaps reminiscent of fairy tales, like Hänsel and Gretel, where the siblings are abandoned by grown-ups. Childish fears, that one can be punished for things without understanding the reasons, can be seen as a major theme in Kafka’s writing. Everything is potentially punishable. Even if knocking on the gate was not permitted, and even if it had happened, the narrator is still clearly innocent of it. He seems to be found guilty by association, as the brother of the alleged perpetrator. He will be punished for an action which he did not commit and which, in any case, seems harmless and inconsequential. This paints a pessimistic picture of life: not knowing the rules, we are all bound to commit serious offences and are answerable to an unknown power which will punish us.
Central metaphors
A metaphor usually picks up on a feature of a person, an object, a situation or a feeling and replaces the description of this feature with the description of another object or situation. This new thing has features which tell us about the original object in interesting ways. The similarities between the two can be conventional, like comparing intense emotions to the heat of a flame. In describing something abstract like feelings we often use something more concrete like an object to describe it. Language is so full of this we don’t even notice it anymore. We talk about a
‘warm’ person or a ‘cold-blooded’ act even though a person’s blood is nearly always about 37 degrees.
Freud argued that in our dreams we often make use of such metaphors. Being on a road, for example, unsure of where we are going, might hint at some insecurity about life’s aims for the dreamer. Kafka uses conventional metaphors, like roads, doors, gates and thresholds often to create a dreamlike atmosphere in his stories. In Der Schlag ans Hoftor , we can find all these metaphors. The ‘road home’ can be interpreted as life, doors and gates may symbolise
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opportunities, and a threshold is conventionally used to describe a borderline, a limit or demarcation line of new territory. Conventional language uses expressions like:
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the journey of life
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to go home (= to die)
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to move on
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to be on the right track these expressions exploit the idea that life is like a road.
Similarly, we use the idea that opportunities are like windows or doors, when we say things like:
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a window of opportunity
• this opportunity opened up
• to open doors for somebody.
The concept of the threshold as marking a limit or an end and/or a new beginning is used in expressions like:
• pain threshold
• at the threshold of the 19 th century
• we are on the threshold of a great discovery.
Even though the metaphors used by Kafka seem to be conventional and operate as linguistic clichés and readers will be aware of their conventional meaning, they do not help to explain the situation the narrator is in. Instead, they create an atmosphere of foreboding and fear precisely because they seem to describe such archetypical and significant situations like ‘life’,
‘opportunities’ and ‘end/new beginning’. The metaphors can be understood to signal big themes.
Other metaphors like the smoke in the distance or the dust kicked up by the horses describe the narrator’s interpretation of life. Combined with the expression ‘etwas ins Reine bringen’, meaning to put something right, used by the narrator, smoke and dust can be seen as obscuring one’s vision. The narrator literally can’t see clearly and can only guess at what is behind the smoke. Life for him is no longer ‘rein’, or pure, but unclear.
A further example lies in the description of the ‘Bauernstube’. In German, this word evokes associations of a cosy room in a farmer’s cottage. This chamber however turns very quickly into a prison and possibly even a torture chamber as soon as the narrator has stepped over the threshold. This refers to similar transformations throughout the story. An innocent knock at a door turns into a crime, friendly farmers turn into panic-stricken creatures. A rider turns into a judge and an innocent man turns into a prisoner.
Adaptation
Adapting the story could include, using different perspectives to tell what happened (what did the sister, the villagers or the judge think?), describing a courtroom scene in which the narrator explains and justifies his actions, inventing a ‘happy ending’ in which the sister returns and rescues the brother, for example.
Reactions to Kafka’s texts
Just as you will have compiled a number of different views on this story, there is a range of critical interpretations of Kafka’s work by literature scholars, influenced by belief systems such
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as religion (Christianity and Judaism), philosophy (Existentialism, Marxism), political systems
(Anarchism) and psychology (especially Freud’s and Jung’s theories). For a quick introduction see here: http://www.spiritus-temporis.com/franz-kafka/critical-interpretation.html
or the entry in an encyclopedia: Type ‘Kafka encyclopedia’ into google book search: http://books.google.com/
From there you can navigate to page 137.
In this review of new translations of Kafka you will also find some useful ideas: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/feb/17/featuresreviews.guardianreview12
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