Time, Tense and Aspect in Kafka's "The Burrow" Author(s): J. M. Coetzee Source: MLN, Vol. 96, No.

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Time,Tense and Aspectin Kafka's "The Burrow"

J. M. Coetzee

Kafka's story"The Burrow" begins: "I have completed the construction myburrowand itseems to be successful."'The position of in time of the speaker, the creaturewhose lifehas been devoted to secure hideaway,seems to be clear: he the buildingof thisperfectly froma momentafterthe completionof the burspeaks (or writes) row but not so long afterit thatfinal judgment on itssuccess can be in Furtherinformation the nextfewpages help to situatethe given. nowof his utteranceas belongingto "the zenithof mylife" fictional on "growingold" (p. 326), "getting (p. 325), when he is nevertheless in years" (p. 327). The timeencompassed byhis act of storytelling, beginningat this is not, however, simplythe time that mightbe taken to moment, or utterthe thirty-five so pages of the text: although there are no breaks to markbreaks in the timeof narration,there typographical
1The ed. Nathan Glatzer (New York: Schocken, 1946), p. 325. Stories, Complete The translationis by Willa and Edwin Muir. Because the Muir translationis the standard one, I use it throughoutin this essay except at points where the Muirs, perhaps baffledby Kafka's unusual tensesequences, attemptto smoothout the time structure by silent emendation. All departures from the Muir translation are marked by footnotes.The German textused is thatedited byJ. M. S. Pasley in Der Der Heizer.In derStrafkolonie. Bau (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1966). Pasley'stext is based on a freshreading of Kafka's manuscriptand improveson the textgivenby V Max Brod in Franz Kafka,Gesammelte Schriften, (New York: Schocken, 1946). For a cautionaryword about Pasley'stext,however,see Heinrich Henel, "Das Ende von KafkasDer Bau", Germanisch-Romanische 22 Monatsschrift, (1972), 22-23.

MLN Vol. 96 Pp. 556-579 Press 0026-7910/81/0963-556 $01.00 ? 1981 by The Johns Hopkins University

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is at least one point (p. 343) where the narrationis interruptedby sleep. As for the time depicted by the narrative,all I shall say as a firstapproximation is that, aside from passing references to a time of apprenticeship(e.g., p. 357), it appears to cover life faroff in the burrow (which it depicts largelyas dominated by habit), to words of the include and pass beyond the momentat whichthe first textare uttered,and to continue as far as the momentat whichthe last words are uttered,a moment at which the time of narration and the time of the narrativeare identical. But the relationsbetweenthetime narration (the movingnowof of the narrator'sutterance) and the timeof thenarrative (referential time) turn out to be far more complex and indeed baffling,the more closelywe read the text.The first approximationto a reading the I give above glosses over the problemof fitting of time-relations a temporal continuum; patternof habitual life in the burrow into and attemptsto refinethe approximationbring us face to face in but the end withnot onlya narrative structure also a representation of time which cannot be compressed into a rational model. There are numerous passages in Kafka's fictionalworks and notebooks of thatreveal a preoccupationwiththe metaphysics time.It is above all in the stories"The Country Doctor" and "The Burrow", howfeel of ever,thatwe have representationsan idiosyncratic fortime.As we mightexpect, such storiesnecessarilybring Kafka into conflict of not only withthe time-conventions fictionalrealism (which rest but also withthe conception embedon a Newtonian metaphysics) ded in (and, in the Whorfianview,propagated by) the tense-system of his language. In thisessay I am concerned to explore the relationsbetweenthe of verb-system German (which, in the features I shall be comof is veryclose to the verb-system English),the narramentingon, of tive (and narratorial)structure "The Burrow", and the conceptionof timewe can postulateKafka held in 1923. In the first partof the essay I attemptlittlemore than to persuade the reader thatthe taskof layingout the eventsof the narrativein sequential temporal In order is riddled with difficulties. part II I discuss the work of and attempted two scholarswho have recognized these difficulties between two to overcome them. In part III I outline a distinction featuresof the verb,tense and aspect,thatare oftenconfused,and may aid us in our reading. suggesthow upholding the distinction And in part IV I attemptto explain the time-schemethat "The Burrow" represents,in both senses of this ambiguous phrase.

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I

There is nothing in the firstthree long paragraphs of the text to conflict with the time and tense conventions of retrospective firstperson narration. But with the fourth paragraph it begins to become more difficult to situate the now of the act of narration in time. Let us take up this paragraph in some detail. In the Castle Keep I assemble mystores. . . The place is so spacious that ... I can divide up my stores,walk about among them, play withthem ... That done, I can always... make mycalculationsand huntingplans for the future,taking into account the season of the year. There are to timeswhen I am so well provided for thatin my indifference food I never even touch the smaller fry that scuttle about the burrow ... (p. 328). The present here is an iterative, habitual present, with a cycle of seasons and even years.
fense ... Thereupon I mark off every third room ... as a reserve storeroom ... or I ignore certain passages altogether ... or I choose

... It sometimesseems riskyto make the Castle Keep the basis of de-

quite at random a veryfew rooms . .. Each of these new plans involves of course heavywork ... True, I can do [it]at myleisure ... But it is not so pleasant when, as sometimeshappens, you suddenly fancy,starting of up fromyour sleep, thatthe presentdistribution your storesis comhow tired or sleepy you may be; then I rush, then I fly,then I have no time for calculation; and although I was about to execute a perfectly exact plan, I now seize whatevermy teeth hit upon and new, perfectly
... (p. 329). pletely and totally wrong . . . and must be set right at once, no matter

drag or carry it away, sighing, groaning, stumbling. . . Until little by

sobers me, and I can ... returnto myrestingplace littlefullwakefulness

There is no question that this episode too is iterative, typical, recurrent, and that the now out of which the narrative is uttered is situated within these recurrences: episodes of panic are part of the life of the creature, they have occurred in the past, they are expected to recur. Then again thereare timeswhen the storingof all myfood in one place
seems the best plan of all ... and so ... I begin once more to haul all my stores back ... to the Castle Keep. For some time afterwards I find a certain comfort in having all the passages and rooms free . . . Then I

. usually enjoy periods of particulartranquility . . until at last I can no mehr and one night (eines restrainmyself(bisich es nicht ertrage) longer

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rushintotheCastleKeep,mightily myself Nachts) upon mystores, fling . and glutmyself. . (pp. 329-331). Here we see thatnarrativewithdifficulty sustainsthe illusionof an iterativepresent when the actions that recur are impulsive, unforeseen,and unforeseeable,when the speaker is at the mercyof forces he cannot control or predict. Thus the followingsentence strikesus as bizarre and perhaps ungrammatical: run about the streetsnaked. (1) Every month I impulsively Contrastit with: (2) Every month I run about the streetsnaked. The only way to domesticate(1) is to read it as a generalization about behavior over past months,culminatingin the present moment at whichthe sentence is uttered("Every monthfor the past x run about the streetsnaked"). It is most monthsI have impulsively bizarre when it is read as utteredwithinan iterativepresent ("My to habit is impulsively run about the streetsnaked everymonth"). The cause of conflictis of course that for a speaker to take up his stance withinan iterativepresent means, to the listenerwho, so to speak, unrolls the cycleof the iterativeon to a past-present-future continuum,thatthe speaker not onlymakes a generalizationabout his past behavior but also predictshis futurebehavior; and the act of predictionconflicts withthe notion of the impulsive. Kafka does not unequivocally provoke this contradictionin the passages I have quoted. Nevertheless,both when the burrowing creature startsout of his sleep and rushes and flies (eile, fliege) to into relocatehis provisions, and when "one night"he rushes (stiirze) the the Castle Keep to gluthimself, verbscarryconnotationsof the impulsive,the uncontrollable,the unpredictable,and thereforesit uneasily in a narratorialframeworkof iteratedtime. There are two alternativeways of explaining what is going on here. The less radical explanation is this: German, like English, iterativeaction. The lacks a specificmorphologicalformto signify non-iterative (punctual) sense of the verb is the semanticallyunsense. marked form,in contrastto the marked formof the iterative (This is perhaps no more than a consequence of the relativeinfresense.) Therefore unless a sequence of verbs quency of the iterative is systematically interspersed with iterative modifiers (sometimes, every day,...) or (in English) is given with an appropriate modal (will,usedto,. . .), the verbs tend to be read as unmarked, i.e. noniterative.In other words, it requires a continual pressure of emtime.Of course, the more to phasis in the writing maintainiterative

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thisemphasis has to be repeated, the clumsierit sounds. So rather than maintain the emphasis throughout, Kafka sometimes (for a event example, in the last two passages quoted) dramatizes typical fromthe iterative and so permitsthe reading to slip back fora cycle mode. while into the unmarked, non-iterative This rhetoricalexplanation thus interprets the problematic verb-sequencesin termsof the pragmaticsof "what works"forthe of reader, as manifestations the writer'sartfulness.There is no doubt that this explanation can be "made to work" for the sequences I quote and for others I mentionbelow. My reservations about explanation along these lines willbecome clearer later in this essay, when I argue that,ratherthan being an obstacle to understanding,the problematicsequences embody a conception of time thatis centralto Kafka's enterprise.For the momentlet me simply unlike beauty,being essentially observe that,"success" in writing, it requires some rhetoricalcoaxing and/orintimidademonstrable, tion from the critichimselfto establishany argument that a particular strategyin a text "works", that it is "successful writing", of at indeed that it is a "strategy writing" all. The second and more radical explanation is that the timeaberrant,thatitcan conceptionthatreignsin "The Burrow"is truly be domesticated only with a degree of rhetorical violence that amounts to traduction,and that it is betterunderstood as the reof whichdoes not draw a line betweeniterative flection a time-sense and non-iterative senses of the verb, or does not draw the line in the usual place. This is the explanation I will be exploring. However,beforedoing thatlet me indicatethe pervasivenessof difficult the tense-sequences.I quote in leapfrogfashionto highlight verbs. of after suchlapsesI makea practice reviewTo regainmycomposure with certain a leave and burrow, ... frequently it.... It is always my ing I ... this began myburrow Should I reconstruct partof myburrow? will remain the and on postponing decision, thelabyrinth probably keep ... cometo meare itis impregnable [The] nights which on suchdreams
as it is. ... SometimesI dream thatI have reconstructed it,... and now the sweetestI know ... So I must thread the tormenting complications beneath the mossycovering [of the entrance] . . . and now (nun) only a littlepush withmy head is needed and I am in the upper world. For a long time I do not dare to make that movement ... I then cautiously raise the trap door and slip outside . . . (pp. 331-333). solemnitythat I approach the exit again ... [for] it was there that I

I of this ... myself labyrinth whenever go out ... Butthen(dann)I find

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The time of utterance of the first paragraph here is clearly the same as at the beginning of the story: a present time after the completion of the burrow, a point from which the creature looks back to a cycle of habitual past behavior and forward to a future in which the burrow will probably not be rebuilt. But again, when he enters into closer description of his iterative excursions from the burrow, the now of narration shifts and becomes the moment (though what the status of that moment is we have yet to decide) at which he leaves the burrow. This becomes particularly clear in the paragraph that follows. ... I know .. . thatI do not have to hunt here (hier)forever,.. so I can pass my time here quite withoutcare ... or rather I could, and yet I ich es cannot (vielmehr, kinnte undkannes dochnicht).My burrowtakesup too much of my thoughts.I fled from the entrance fast enough, but bald bin soon I am back at it again (schnell ichvomEingangfortgelaufen, aberkomme zuriick). seek out a good hiding place and keep watchon ich I the entrance... At such timesit is as if I were not so much lookingat my house as at myself sleeping ... In all mytime I have never seen anyone the investigating actual door of my house . . . There have been happy periods in which I could almost assure myselfthat the enmityof the world toward me had ceased ... The burrow has probably protected me habe) or dared think (schiitzt) in more ways than I thought(gedacht the while ... inside it.2... Sometimes I have been seized with (bekam) childishdesire never to returnto the burrow again, but to ... pass my whichI am lifewatchingthe entrance.. . [But] whatdoes thisprotection amount to . . . ? looking at here from the outside (die ichhierbeobachte) . . . No, I do not watch over my own sleep, as I imagined; ratherit is I who sleep, while the destroyerwatches ... And I leave my post of observationand find I have had enough of this outside life.... But I have never (nicht)been able to discover ... an infallible method of descent. In consequence ... I have not yetsummoned the resolutionto in Eingang make my actual descent (ichbin ... nochnicht den wirklichen of and hinabgestiegen3), am throwninto despair at the necessity doing it freefromall mydoubts and ... rush to the door, soon.... I tear myself ... but I cannot.... The danger is by no means a fanciful one, but very real ... If [an enemy] were actually to arrive now ..., if [it] were actuallyto happen, so that at last ... I mightin my blind rage leap on him [and] ... destroyhim . . . but above all-that is the main thingwere [sic] at last back in my burrow once more, I would have it in my
2 The
3

Muir translation reads: "... while I was inside it." I followthe Brod texthere. The Pasley textis in error-cf. Henel, p. 23.

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to rest ...But

I but the itself rapture; first would... want heart greet labyrinth with to
nobody comes . . . (pp. 334-337).

The Muirs tryto follow The tense sequence is itselflabyrinthine. its twistingsand turnings,but there are unavoidable moments when theyhave to choose between progressiveand nonprogressive becomes "which I am looking at English forms(dieichhierbeobachte I look at here") and between perfectand here" ratherthan "which becomes "fled" rather than "have fled"). preterite(bin fortgelaufen committhe There is no way,in fact,of translating passage without of oneself from moment to moment to an interpretation its ting in particularof the situationin timeof the moment time-structure, at which the narrator speaks: are the events beheld from the perspectiveof the now of the firstsentence of the story-"I have [now] completed the constructionof my burrow"-which would make of the presenttense here a so-called historicalpresent,or has for the momentof narrationshifteddecisively, the timebeing, to a time out in the freshair where the burrowingcreaturewaitsindeunable to venturethe descent back into the earth? In fact cisively, in den wirklichenEingang hinabgestiegen,"says the creature. If the momentof utteranceof this sentence is the moment of utterance of the text,then the creatureis nowliterally trapped out in the open. This lengthyquotation should be enough to show that the detailed progressionof tense-sequencesindeed raises puzzling problems. Withoutquoting at quite such length,let me point to further passages in which the problem is unavoidable. The creatureis "now" outside his burrow."For the present... I frontedby thatentranceover there (dort)which now (etzt) literally locks and bars itselfagainst me" (pp. 339, 340). The deicticsemphaticallymark the momentof narrationas a momentoutside the
I approach the entrance [and] ... slowly am outside it, seeking some possibility of returning ..., conthis passage puts the question most starkly. "Ich bin . . . noch nicht

burrow. "And then ...

timeshifts withthenowof descend" (p. 341). The nowof narratorial narrated time: timeelapses in both the progress of the textand in the world outside the entranceto the burrow,and "now" entrance is achieved. The earlier irresolutionand incapacityto descend are overcome by sheer exhaustion. "Only in this state [of exhaustion] ... can I achieve mydescent" (p. 341). But the returnto the burrow rejuvenateshim. "It is as though at the momentwhen I set foot in
the burrow I had (hdtte)wakened from a long . . . sleep." He sets

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about transportingthe spoils of his hunting to his Castle Keep. When thistask is completed "a feelingof lassitude overcomes me" and he sleeps (pp. 342-3). Though there is no break in Kafka's manuscriptat this point,4 there is a gap in narrated time."I musthave slept for a long time" the (Ich habe wohlsehrlangegeschlafen), narrationcontinues.5This second part of the storyconcerns the mysteriouswhistlingnoise that the creaturehears in his burrow.Again the now of the narration seems to be cotemporal withthe now of the action; but again there are unsettlingpassages in which the now seems to reveal an iterative face.6On the other hand, the noise is unambiguouslydescribed as something"that I have never heard before" (was ichnie gehirthabe) (p. 347)-an iterativereturnof the noise seems to be ruled out. When the firstresearches into the origin of the noise fail, the creature revises his plans and speaks of a future of intention:"I intend now to alter my methods. I shall dig a ... trench in the directionof the noise" (p. 348). But thisnew plan bringsno solace, for "I do not believe in it" (p. 349). The reason for thismistrust of "reasonable" futureprojectionswould, in an iterative time,be that their failure has already been experienced. In the, so to speak, blinkered present of the text the cause of his own hopelessness remains obscure to the narrator. Even if we read the entiresecond part of the storyas linear and there are iterativecycleswithinit. non-iterative, I sucha "Sometimes fancy thatthe noisehas stopped...; sometimes faint one . .. one thinks thewhistling stopped that has whistling escapes I I forever. listen longer, jump up, ..." (p. 350). no If, on the other hand, we read this part as iterative,then the sequence I have quoted becomes part of the iterative present: neither German nor Englishwould appear to have a mechanismat the level of structure the verb phrase forindicatingiterative of cycleswithin cycles. "It may happen (kann ... geschehen) that I (man) make a new
4 See Henel, p. 7. 5 theyare presentin Though the Muirs translatethe next fewverbsas preterites, formin the German. 6 For example: "In such cases as the presentit is usuallythe technicalproblem [of trackingdown the noise] that attractsme" (p. 344); "often already I have fallen asleep at my work" (p. 348); (when he begins to shovel soil) "this time everything seems difficult" 350). (p.

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from discovery"(p. 351): thatthe noise is growinglouder. The shift ich to man is maintainedfor much of the rest of the paragraph, in with the new hypotheticalmode of the narrative. It conformity underseems impossible to square this mode with a non-iterative standing of the narrative unless one grants to the narrator the effectiveposition of a fictionalcreator, someone toyingwith seWhile quences whichmayor maynot be insertedintothe narrative. thispossibility cannot be dismissedabsolutely,there is nothingelse in the textto support the notion thatthe operations of writing are being so radically unmasked. On the other hand, if one understands the narrativeas iterative, then the hypothetical sequence fits in as one which may or may not occur in a given iteration. the As the creature moves about his burrow investigating noise, new ideas, new plans, new conclusions occur to him, all in turn abandoned as useless. Why does he not rememberthem fromprevious iterations,why does he entertain them again if they are why does he experience surges of hope and proved ineffective, The answer, at one level, is that he is in some sense condespair? demned theseiterations, to and thatpartof being condemned (as the of of Sisyphusmightteach) is thatthe torments hope are example of the sentence. What should interestus particularlyin an part investigationof tense and time, however, is that the inabilityto of learn frompast failureis a reflection the factthatthe iterations none of them being earlier in time than any other, are not ordered: no iterationencompasses a memoryof an earlier one. "Nothing ... approaching the present situationhas happened before; neverthelessthere was an incidentnot unlike it when the burrow was only beginning" (p. 355); and the creature digresses into a past-tenseaccount of an episode fromhis "apprenticeship". The temporal perspectivehas reverted unambiguouslyto that of the opening of the story:a nowin the timeof narrationwitha linear past behind it and a linear futurebefore it. The last pages of "The Burrow",afterthisepisode, are resigned, in valedictory tone. The creature retiresto his Castle Keep, to his storeof food, and awaits"the beast",dreaming of the peace of "the old days" (p. 358). Perhaps it is possible that the beast has never heard him, in which case there is hope. "But all remains unchanged" (p. 359). II The extraordinarytime structureof "The Burrow" has been commented on by numerous scholars. I should like to discuss two of the more perceptiveof these commentaries.

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In her 1968 essay, "Kafka's Eternal Present",and again in her book Transparent Minds (1978), Dorrit Cohn discusses peculiarities of timeand tense in Kafka.7Since her commentson "The Burrow" in the essay are absorbed into the book, I willquote only fromthe latter.Cohn writes:
. . . The animal-midway through the story-seems to "forget" the iterative natureof his account and begins to tellof... the appearance of the hissingsound. Up to thispoint the animal has described his habitual subterranean existence in durative-iterative present tense.... [After this point] the statictime of the firstpart of the story... becomes an evolvingtime,its durative tense a punctual tense ... The speaker who surveyedhis sovereignrealm in durative presenttense [is] transformed into a monologistwho simultaneouslyexperiences bewilderingevents and articulatesthem in a punctual present tense. ... This [temporal]structurecorresponds exactlyto Kafka's paradoxical conceptionof human time,whichis based on a denial of the distinction between repetitiousand singular events. For him, as he once affirmedaphoristically, "the decisive moment of human development is "The Burrow",by exploitingthe ambiguitiesof a discourse everlasting". cast in the presenttense, reflects this paradox in its language as well as its meaning. If the crucial eventsof life happen not once, but everlastingly,then the distinctionbetween durative and singulativemodes of discourse is effaced: the durative silence always already contains the hissing sound, and the destructionit brings lies not in a single future moment,but in a constantly repeated present (pp. 195-7).

The discussionof pp. 334-7 of "The Burrow" above should make it clear that Cohn's division of the storyinto a firstpart in which "tense" is durative-iterative a second part in which it is puncand for tual, is too neat: shiftsoccur too frequently her generalization to hold. Consequently, while she is right to characterize Kafka's as time-conception "paradoxical [and] . . . based on a denial of the distinction between repetitiousand singular events",she goes too far when she claims that this distinctionor opposition creates a structure any meaningfulsense. There is no clear correspondence in tenses and lifebefore between,on the one hand, durative-iterative "the decisive moment"(the startof the hissing),and, on the other, the arrivalof "the decisive moment"and singulativetenses. Where the amdirection is in identifying Cohn does point in a fruitful of present-tenseverb forms as the formal field whose biguities exploitation makes the higher-levelparadoxes of "The Burrow"
7 "Kafka's Eternal Present: Narrative Tense in 'Ein Landarzt' and Other FirstMinds (Princeton:Princeton Person Stories",PMLA, 83 (1968), 144-150; Transparent U.P., 1978).

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possible. But there is a certain flaccidityin the argument that between repetitiousand singular Kafka's "denial of the distinction events"is simply"reflected"in the language of the story.For "The between "durative and Burrow" does not "efface" the distinction The mostwe can say is thatat certainpointsin the text singulative". where we would expect the one formwe encounterthe other,and were indeed effaced,and durativeand vice versa. If the distinction the formswere used interchangeably, resultwould very singulative be nonsense. The problem is precisely that intuition probably (whichmay mislead) suggeststhatthere is systembehind the aberrant usage; and our critical task is one of probing intuitionby analysis.The conclusion I come to in thisessay happens to be quite close to Cohn's: the storyis indeed dominated by "a constantly repeated present."To reach thatconclusion,however,requires not of scrutiny the textbut a principledunderstandingof onlya tighter the use one may make of privilegedinsightssuch as the aphorism of Kafka's that Cohn quotes. In a study based on a more minute examination of tense sequences in "The Burrow" than Cohn's, Heinrich Henel arrivesat a similarcharacterization the temporal situationof Kafka's creaof ture: that it is "an endless condition".8Henel recognizes fromthe startthe particularhermeneuticproblems posed by a textin which so elementarya linguisticcategoryas tense, not easily reduced to other terms,becomes the object of the writer'splay: Whatkindof present is at occurs a givenpoint determined toneand by but whattone is appropriate and whatcontext perceived is context; the dependon howone understands present 5). (p. In Henel's reading, the storyfallsinto two main parts witha short linkingmiddle passage. In the firstpart the use of the present is indeterminate: in it Often soundsas ifa uniquemoment thehereand nowis intended, . is and yetthe dominant impression of the iterative . . Past definite in are events reported thepreterite, forthemost but non-recurring part and nowmeltintoan endlessly condition earlier expanding (pp. 5-6). In the second part themeaning thepresent of tensechanges.Pastis clearly distinguished and of frompresent, and the thoughts activities thebeastproceedin the order... The narrator keepsstepwith events now repretemporal
8 Henel, p. 6.

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and thepresent tensehe employs denotesat each pointof the sented, a later Whilethepresent thefirst of narration different, present. part with untranscended thepresent thesecondpartmoves fuses an of past, future. The effect is forward merges and intoan indefinite consistently in bothcases thesame: an eternal condition represented 6). is (p. Thus, like Cohn, Henel is concerned to smooth out, by an act of the generalization, difficulties presentedby the tense sequences. In his reading the time of the firsthalf of the storyis, by and large, the iterative, time of the second half is not. But, we can ask, is the mode of generalizingfromthe totality data the correctmode of of argument to employ here? Are we concerned to formulatelaws thatcover mostof the data-i.e., statistical generalizations-or laws thatexplain detailed variations,laws whose models would be rules of grammar?9My aim in this essay is to elucidate the temporal systemof the storyon the basis of usage which,despite its appearance of aberrance, I must startby assuming to have some kind of intentionalunity.For thisreason I do not find it enough to say, as Henel does, that the present tense in "The Burrow" "fillsno less than five distinctfunctions"(p. 4) without carryingthe analysis This classificatory further.10 step is only a stage in analysis,withno in itself. The more importantstage is the one at explanatorypower in whichthe question is answered: Is there a coherenttime-system which these five functionscan be said to participate? In other or words: Is therea temporalcoherence to the story, does the mind behind the storyshiftfromone temporal subsystemto another?
9 The cases I cite in footnote6 above are enough to indicate that Henel's conclusions are generalizationsratherthan laws,in the sense in which I use the terms.His are weakened bya habitof selectivequotation. For example, generalizations further he writesof a "whollynew, hithertonever before grasped resolution"at which the creaturearrives,"namlichvon dem Leben im Freien 'Abschied zu nehmen','niemals mehr zuriickzukommen',und der 'sinnlosen Freiheit' auf immer den Riicken zu kehren" (p. 6). The paradox Henel does not face here is that even this decisivesounding resolutionis given in a formwhollycompatible withan iterativetime,as fullerquotation reveals: "Und ich habe Lust, Abschied zu nehmen . . . und niemals mehr zuriickzukommen. . . GewiB, ein solcher EntschluBware eine vollige Narrnur durch allzu langes Leben in der sinnlosen Freiheit" (pp. heit, hervorgerufen 121-2 in Pasley; pp. 335-6 in the Muir translation).It is the content the phrases of Henel quotes thatleads him to thinkof the resolutionas makinga break in the cycle; thatin thisstoryeveryirruption but the paradox is precisely intothe cyclesof timeis so ambiguouslypresented in temporalform that it seems at least capable of being absorbed into the cycles. 10"As present proper, it describes an occurrence achieving itselfin the now; as historicpresent an earlier occurrence; as iterativepresent a present occurrence which has happened in the same way or a similarway fairlyoften; as progressive present likewise a present occurrence which extends into an indefinite,perhaps endlessfuture;and finally presentcan serveas a formof innermonologue"(p. 4). the

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III HithertoI have used the word "tense"ratherlooselyto designate I the element of verb inflectionthat marks time-relations. must between the two now refine the notion of tense by distinguishing withtemporal functions:tense and aselementsof verb inflection pect. The theoryof the verb on which I shall be basing my discussion of "The Burrow" is the descriptionfirst outlined by Gustave Guillaume in Tempset verbe(1929) and subsequentlydeveloped in his published lectures of 1948-9. A Guillaumean description of the (I English verb systemhas been given by W. H. Hirtle.11 am not aware of any comparable studyfor the German verb.) of In Guillaume's theory, is not possible to describe the system it tense and aspect in terms of a single model of time, namely the familiarunidirectional arrowof infinite timeof Newtonianphysics. The verb systeminstead rests upon two simultaneous and coma time, limitless plementaryways of conceivingtime: (a) as universe linear time along whose axis any event can be situated; and (b) as eventtime,the span of time that an event takes to achieve itself. eventtimecan be infinitesimal, the eventcan i.e., Though in theory be purely punctual with no intervalbetween beginning and end, this state is rarelyreached in the human world.12 Verbal aspectis a systemof representingevent time. Once this mental representationhas been achieved, in Guillaume's theory, of the systemof tenseserves to combine the representations event time and universe time. How does aspect representevent time?It conceives of the event as takingplace in two phases: a coming-to-be phase extendingover successive instants,followed by a resultphase during which no furtherdevelopment or actualizationof the event can take place. Depending upon at whatpointof the temporalcontinuumthe verb interceptsevent time, different aspectual resultsare achieved. In English,the primaryaspectual opposition is between (a) intercepting event time at some instant(which may be the final instant)of the coming-to-bephase, and (b) interceptingit during its after1 Gustave Guillaume, Tempset verbe(Paris: Champion, 1929); Leconsde linguisand the tique,I, ed. Roch Valin (Quebec: Laval, 1975); W. H. Hirtle, Time,Aspect Verb(Quebec: Laval, 1975). 12 For discussion of this point, see Bernard Comrie, Aspect(Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1976), pp. 42-3.

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math. The two aspects which resultare, respectively, immanent (a) and (b) transcendent. A diagram (figure 1) may elucidate these concepts.
Interception: immanent aspect Interception: transcendent

aspect

past

B Coming-to-be phase

E Result phase

non-past

Figure 1

Here the continuum extending infinitely from past to non-past representsuniversetime;and the sectionBE representseventtime, from beginning to end, with a coming-to-bephase and a result phase. Depending on whethereventtimeis interceptedduring the formeror the latterphase, we have verb formsof immanentaspect ("he is running","he runs", "he ran") or verb formsof transcendent aspect ("he has run"). (We see fromtheseexamples thataspect is independent of the past-presenttense distinction.) How are iterative verb forms-forms whose iterativemeaning is means-represented in such a scheme? signalled by non-syntactic Here the importantthingto recognize is that,though an iterative form may be thought of as shorthand for a succession of single events each with a beginning and an end (e.g., "he runs [every day]"), it does not interceptthe resultphase of any of these single events,and at most may or may not interceptonly the resultphase of theirtotality. Thus in figure2, where each Bi and Ei represent the beginningand end of a typicaliteratedevent i, the forms"he runs/ran [everyday]","he is/was running[everyday]", representan in the coming-to-be interception phase of eventi, while "he used to run [everyday]" representsan interceptionin the result phase of the totality the iteratedevents,i.e., afterEn. of
1. 1 B1 E1 past B Figure 2 2,a,1 2 B2 E2
. . . B

,./.-R.1

.i

n B.

En

non-past

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Therefore withoutloss of generalitywe can condense figure 2 to figure3, in whichthe iteratedeventsare representedwithoutindividual resultphases:
B1 B2 B3 m B Figure 3 *. Bi 1E. 1E B.l * B E.-E En E

past

non-past

There is one further point to recognize about iteration.Though in the diagrams thus far I have represented the event that is iterated as a single event (e.g. "I run"), in "The Burrow" it is more oftena sequence of eventsof some length (e.g. "I must thread the complicationsof this labyrinth.. . whenever I go out, tormenting and I am both exasperated and touched when, as sometimeshappens, I lose myself... But then I find myselfbeneath the mossy of covering... " [p. 333]). It is thewhole thissequence of sub-events out, threading, losing myself, being exasperated and (going .. touched, findingmyself, .) which is iteratedand which is represented in figure3 by the event (Bi,Ei). Now withinthe totaliteratedevent (Bi,Ei), morphologicalmeans of time-specification more impoverished than under normal are This is because what is under normal circumstances. (non-iterated) circumstances tense markerwitha secondary aspectual function a (e.g., the null morpheme 0 of run,which normallymarks the verb as present in tense and only marks iterativeaspect when syntactias callyreinforced, in "I run everyday"), is now charged primarily have to be with marking iterativeaspect, so that time-relations means. In the passage quoted above, the relaspecifiedby syntactic tive order of sub-eventsis represented (a) iconically,by the se("I quence of the signifiers lose myself... then I findmyself'),and relations ("I am ... exasperated ... (b) by the logic of syntactic when ... I lose myself'),ratherthan morphologically. This excursus on iterativity may help us to distinguishbetween of in "The Burrow" and the system tense and the structure time of in part,thatstructure realized, and thus to is aspect throughwhich, unravel, at least at a formallevel, some of the complexitiesof the narrative.For exemplarycloser analysisI have chosen the sequence half of the storybetweenthe emergence of the of pages in the first

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creature into the freshair (p. 333) and his descent back into the is burrow (p. 341), a passage in which the time-structure perhaps more bewilderingthan anywhereelse in the story. If we scrutinizethese pages closely,we find an alternationbetween two varietiesof temporal experience, and, going with each a variety, particularnarrative pointof view.The ground-bassof the is: (a) The iterative passage experience of emergingfromthe burrow, enduring the pleasures and terrorsof life above, not being able to re-enter the burrow, then finally re-entering it. The of iterativity the experience is signalled by so-called present-tense (in fact iterative-aspect)verb forms with associated adverbials of (sometimes, usually,etc.). In figure3 the time-segment thisexperience is (Bi,Ei) and the moment of narration from which it is described is outside any (Bi,Ei), i.e., beyond E. But thereare regular transitions into: (b) The timeof the iterationexperienced fromthe inside, witha past and an unknown futureof its own. In termsof figure3, it is as if the structureof (Bi,E) were identicalto that of (B,E), and thereforeas though the iterativenature of the experience became invisibleor were erased from knowledge. There are of two formaldevices above all thatachieve transitions thiskind: (i) whichhave the the occurrenceof overtpast and futureverb-forms, effect normalizingthe null morpheme 0 of the unmarked form of as a present tense ratherthan an iterative aspectmarker(as, forexample, in the context he ran ... he will run, he runs is read as a form); (ii) the emphatic use of deicticslike now,this, present-tense here,which,since theylocate the narrativerelativeto the time and place of itsnarration,serve to introducethenowof narrationinside (Bi,E,). The movementof these pages is thus a continual slide from an to outside view of the cycle safety-danger-safety an inside view in which danger is experienced from the inside and from which it seems impossibleto reattainsafety, followedby an abrupt and temoccurs returnto the saferoutside view.This back-and-forth porary not onlyat the level of the narrator'sexperience: it is also explicitly thematizedin the passage as a "problem". It is possible to minimize thisthematization and read it as simplya privatejoke of Kafka's, a on reflection the experience of writingoneself into a corner. wry But it is also possible to read it as a bringingto explicitnessof a fundamentalexperience of time with which the storycontinually wrestles at a formal level. Unable to summon the resolution to re-enterhis burrow,the creature says: "For the present ... I am

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of outside it seeking some possibility returning,and for that the would be very Einrichtungen) necessarytechnicaldevices (technischen desirable" (p. 339). Among the mostdesirable devices would be, of course, a passage fromthe dangers of (B,E) to the safetyof (Bi,EF) markerwould be such a (the switching power of the 0 tense/aspect device). Two pages later: "And then, too exhausted to be any longer capable of thought,... I ... slowlydescend ... Only in this
state . . . can I achieve my descent" (p. 341). As long as conscious-

ness has been in control, creaturehas been unable to achieve this the fromabove to below and has remained stuckin a conditransition tionthatis not onlyunendurable but logicallyimpossible:the iterative formshave already promised that ascent and descent form a the cycle,therefore creaturecannot remain stuckhalfway.Exhaustion and incapacityfor thoughtare the sole means that overcome the arguments (or rationalizations)of the conscious mind which keep him from his burrow; theyalso constitutethe absurd "technical device" that solves the problem of gettingstuck during the cycle.What can be read in the mode of realismas a piece of rather can ineptdeusexmachina psychologizing also be read in the mode of of as text-construction a flattening the distance between narrator and narrated,tillthe adventuresof the creatureseeking a way into his burrow become identicalwiththe adventuresof the signifying subject seeking to find a way to keep the narrative moving. As Henry Sussman writes:
The voice of the animal is ... also the voice of construction[of the

in constructs the of burrow, thetext], voiceof therhetorical employed thisparticular production. with the in of ... The readeris askedtobelieve theconcurrence thetext If at the to actions which animalclaims be performing themoment. for are no otherreasonthanbecausetheseactions mediated a written by
text subject to time in different ways than the unidirectionalthrustof on nevertheless, the basis of this fictivetemporal immediacy,to a now to whichis remarkably resistant revisionsto the past or projectionsinto the future.The animal thus becomes the agent of a temporalparadox, thatthe now, capable of feedingupon itself endlessly,is wider-reaching than both the past . . . and the future. . .13

confines is this itself, experience, presumption absurd.The narrative

13"The All-EmbracingMetaphor: Reflections Kafka's 'The Burrow',"Glyph, 1 on (1977), 104, 106.

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Sussman is right to characterize time in "The Burrow" as of paradoxical. But the ability thenow to feed upon itselfendlessly between a now of is not paradoxical at all as long as we distinguish narrativetime (which tracksthe process of feeding) and a now of narratedtime(thatwhichis fed upon). The paradox lies elsewhere: in the apparent identity-if we rely upon the signals given by verb-forms-of the texture of time in the narrated now of (BiE) and the momentof narration.It is thisparadox whichKafka brings into prominenceat the momentwhen, too "exhausted" to play any he longer withthe riddle itself, cuts throughthe knotand puts the creature back in the burrow.14 IV that It would be foolhardyto dismissout of hand the possibility "The Burrow" as we have it is incomplete, and that one of the thingsKafka mighthave done if he had completed it to his own satisfaction mighthave been to regularizeat least some of the more bizarre tense sequences, or to create gaps in the text ("chapterNeverthebreaks") to indicate lacunae in the time of narration.15 that less, one's procedure as a criticmust be to test the possibility
14 In the same part of his essay from which I quote, Sussman, however, gives a of characterization narrated time in the storythatignores the complexitiesof time and aspect I have triedto outline,in particularthe "dissolve" from(B,E) to (Bi,Ei) followed by reversion. Thus the followingargument of Sussman's, central to his reading of the story,is so much the weaker: In having recourse only to the here circumscribedby the constructionand the now in which the work of construction goes on, or at least is contemplated,the voice of the textabolishesthe "subject"whichis presumablyitssource and master. in Although the ruminationsof the animal are always in "self"-interest, the absence of any subject,the self becomes the self of language, whose existence,like the concept of the animal, defines the negation of the (human) self (pp. 104-5).

It is irrelevant the momentwhetherthe self is "the self of language" (Sussman's for thesis)or the self of narration(as I would prefer): all thatconcerns me here is that Sussman's argumentis not well founded. 15 In the of Max Brod, on the authority Dora to postscript his editionof the story, Dymant,writesthatKafka completed"The Burrow",and thatin the pages lostfrom the end the creature met his death in a fightwith his enemy. However, Heinz Politzerargues cogentlythat there is no good reason to depend on Dora Dymant's word and that the evidence points more stronglyto the conclusion that Kafka See Max Brod, himself destroyed the final pages, finding them unsatisfactory. V "Nachwort",in Kafka, Gesammelte Schriften, (New York: Schocken, 1946), p. 314; Heinz Politzer,Franz Kafka: Parable and Paradox (Ithaca: Cornell, 1962), p. 330; Henel, pp. 15-16. Kafka did not prepare the manuscriptfor publication.We may thereforesuppose thatit lacks a finalrevision.

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the textas itstandsis open to interpretation; only if no interpretation can be given should one fall back on the explanation that the textis in some sense at fault.What I shall be doing in thissectionof the essay, therefore,is to suggest how the repeatedly broken, interruptediterative presentcan be understood in the contextof the whole of the story. The state in which Kafka's creature lives is one of acute anxiety (one would call it irrationalanxietyif there were any reliable oppositionbetweenrationaland irrationalin his universe). His whole life is organized around the burrow,his defense against an attack which may come at any moment and withoutwarning. The key A notion here is without warning. warningis the sign of a transition from peace to its opposite. Strictly speaking, the art of reading a warningsis purely prospective,future-directed: sign recognized as retrospectively havingbeen a warningis no longer a warning,for it can no longer warn. In A warningis the sign of a transition. "The Burrow",however, time does not move through transitionphases. There is one momentand then thereis another moment;between them is simplya break. No amount of watchfulnesswill reveal how one moment becomes another; all we know is that the next moment happens. Zeno pointed out, before an arrow reaches its targetit Similarly, it to mustreach half-way itstarget;beforeit reaches half-way, must To reach a quarter of the way; and so forth. reach itstargetit must of of pass throughan infinity states;and to pass throughan infinity of statesmust take an infinity time. Zeno mighthave added: conceiving the flightof an arrow in this way as a succession of moments,we can never understand how it gets fromone moment to the next,we can never integrateits momentsinto a single flight. arriveat We knowthatthisparadox (whichhe did not necessarily via Zeno) preoccupied Kafka. In "The Great Wall of China" he describesthe messengerwho takes thousands of yearsand more to bring a message from the Emperor. In "The Next Village" a lifetimemay not be long enough for a journey to the next village. In "Advocates" flights stairsexpand beneath the searcher'sfeet. of The mystical correlate to the paradox is a time incommensurable with human time in which man's life occupies a mere instant,yet between two human moaeons of which can fitin the interstices ments.16
16 Cf. the notebook entryfor 11 December 1917, in which Kafka writesof the momentof expulsion fromParadise as a momenteternallyrepeated, yetas belonging to a time which "cannot exist in temporal relation" to human time.Gesammelte Werke: 1953),p. 94. aufdem Hochzeitsvorbereitungen Lande(New York: Fischer/Schocken,

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Time in "The Burrow" is discontinuousin a strictly formalizable sense. Any momentmay mark the break betweenbefore and after. "to Time is thus at everymomenta timeof crisis(fromGreek krino to divide"). Life consists in an attempt to anticipate a separate, danger which cannot be anticipated because it comes without withoutwarning. The experience of a time of crisis is transition, colored by anxiety.The task of building the burrow itselfrepresents a life devoted to trying stillanxiety,naturallywithoutsucto for withoutwarning "the enemy" is in the burrow. (Here I cess; is suggestthatit would be naive to thinkthatthe whistling a warnand that"the enemy" is some beast whom the reader does not ing get to see, ratheralong the lines thatDora Dymantsuggests;forby the end of the storythe architectof the burrow clearlyrecognizes thata break betweenbeforeand afterhas arrived,the clearestsign of thisbeing that the lead-up time that once looked innocentnow looks in retrospect like a timeof warning[p. 355]. This does not of course mean that there will only be a single foe, a single danger, a extensingle beforeand after:in theory"The Burrow" is infinitely sible.) We treat the past as real insofar as present existence has been conditionedor generated by it. The more indirectthe causal derivation of the present froma particularpast becomes, the weaker thatpast becomes, the more it sinkstowardsa dead past. But with Kafka it is preciselythe power of each moment to condition the next thatseems to be in question. Someone must have been telling lies about JosefK., but no backwardexplorationof timewillreveal the cause of the accusation against him. Gregor Samsa finds himinto a giant insect,whyand how he self one morningtransformed will never know. Between the before and the after there is not Verstage-by-stagedevelopment but a sudden transformation, metamorphosis.17 wandlung, to A common strategy the first-person of intelligence attempting understand the processesof timeis to takeup itsstancein a present when "I take up my moment (ideally the moment of tranquillity pen to write")whichstands forthe culminationof a certainpast, in thatled up to thismoment.Both parts order to retracethe history of Beckett'sMolloy,for example, take up this stance in an explicit
17I take the descriptionof the derivationalrelationshipof past to present from Roman Ingarden, Timeand Modes ofBeing, trans. Helen R. Michejda (Springfield: Max Thomas, 1964), p. 117. On the experience of the presentin Kafka, see further Bense, Die Theorie Kafkas (Koln/Berlin:Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1952), p. 62; Jorg der bei Beat Honegger,Das Phdnomen Angst FranzKafka (Berlin: Schmidt,1975), pp. 29-31.

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sentenceof "The Burrow"seems to promisea similar way.The first "I have completed the constructionof my burrow and it project: seems to be successful"(p. 325). But the project soon turnsout to be riddled with problems. Where are we to locate this privileged momentof success and security: before,after,or during the recital of eventsin and around the burrowthatoccupies pp. 325-343 and in terminates the state of sleep fromwhich the creature is awoken As the whistling? I have tried to show in section I of thisessay, by any putative temporal ordering of events at a detailed level becomes honeycombed with inconsistenciesand internal contradictions.There is no smoothcourse of narrativedevelopmentthatwill lead frombeginningsto the presentmomentof narration.Between then and now is always a break. It is fromthisvantage-pointthat the logic of iterativenarrative becomes clear. Failing to trace the present to roots in the past, Kafka'snarratorembarkson a seriesof projectsto wrap up the past as a round of habitwhichincludes the presentand, insomuchas it is repeated, projectsinto the future."I assemble mystores... I can divide up my stores,walk about among them,play with them ... That done, I can make mycalculationsand huntingplans ..." (p. 328): thisis typicalof the creature'sdiscourse.The crucial move, in Guillaume's terms,is away fromuniverse time toward event time, tense organization toward a away from linear past-present-future of time. cyclicaspectual organization This move-which I would call a ruse-is intended to capture the relation of past to present to future by trapping them all in an iterative pseudo-present.But as we have seen, the ruse continually fails. The pseudo-present of iterative/habitual aspect continually breaks down as the eventssignifiedwithin(Bi,E), the typicaltimeinto time, gap, persist in organizing themselvesinto successivity, into tense, and then in collapsing in the persistentrupture of the time-orderthat characterizes Kafka. There is no way of getting here fromthere. By talkingin termsof failed narrativeruses I may give the impression thatKafka is in some sense against,above, and superior to the narrator of "The Burrow", that if he does not know what a successful narrativestrategymight be he is at least aware of the This picturewould entirely of falsify futility the narrator'sstrategy. V That have in "The Burrow",rather,is a struggle-not we the story. of onlythe representation the strugglebut the struggleitself-with timeexperienced as continual crisis,and experienced at a pitchof

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anxietythat leads to attemptsto tame it withwhatevermeans lanconstructcalled "The Burrow" guage offers.The entire linguistic the stillingof this anxiety;the major metaphor for the represents linguisticconstructis the burrow itself,built by the labors of the forehead (p. 328). But thisparticularburrow,"The Burrow",could not have been built in a language that did not provide so easy a means of glidingfromtense to aspect as German (or English) does. it Thus, withoutdenyingthe totalimplicationof Kafka in the story, should be possible to recognize that the particularformthe story takes rests heavilyon a peculiarityof language. We can steer this of ourselvesto the extremism eitherthe course withoutcommitting determinethoughtor the structures Whorfianthesisthatlinguistic textis thatthe literary of line characteristic some Russian formalists in some sense predeterminedby its devices.18 I can spell out my position in a different way by isolating my Minds of disagreementfromDorrit Cohn, whose Transparent point contains the most carefullyworked out observationson the relations of time to narrativepoint of view in the story.Cohn recognizes the "illogical"nature of its temporalstructure;but thisstructure, she says, of to conception humantime, exactly Kafka'sparadoxical corresponds and between which based on thedenialof thedistinction is repetitious "the For events. him,as he once affirmed aphoristically, decisingular "The Burrow", is of sivemoment humandevelopment everlasting". by castin thepresent of theambiguities a discourse tense,reexploiting If flects paradoxin itslanguageas wellas itsmeaning. thecrucial this then of events lifehappen not once,but everlastingly, the distinction modes of discourseis effaced:the and singulative betweendurative the contains hissing silence durative sound,and thedealready always but future lies it struction brings notin a single moment, in a constantly (p. repeatedpresent 197). The aphorism Cohn quotes is both obscure and pregnant; but I am not sure that it lends itselfto quite the point Cohn is making here. It comes from the notebook of October, 1917, and occurs aftera parable whose gist we mightexpress as follows: We die at everymoment,but blindlydo not recognize our death and are spat
18 See, for example, Roman Jakobson: "It is the predominance of metonymy which underlies and actually predeterminesthe so-called 'realistic'trend." Roman Jakobsonand Morris Halle, Fundamentals Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1956), of (The Hague: Mouton, 1969), p. 195. p. 78. See also VictorErlich,RussianFormalism

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back into life. Kafka goes on: "From a certainpoint on, thereis no more turningback. This is the point to be reached." And then: moment of human development is "The decisive (entscheidende) Therefore those revolutionary (immerwdhrend). spiritual everlasting movements that declare everythingbefore themselves null are right,in that nothing has yet happened." The next aphorism is: "Human history the second between two steps of a traveller."19 is The passage as a whole thereforecontraststwo kinds of awarewhich we can call historicalawareness, imness of time. The first, to a past whichit sees as continuous withthe present. putes reality The second, which we can call eschatological,recognizes no such thereis only the present,whichis alwayspresent,sepacontinuity: rated from Ingarden's "dead past" by a moment of rupture, the is Hence the paradox thathistory over in "a entscheidende Augenblick. second" while the present moment is "everlasting". To say, as Cohn does, that"the crucial eventsof lifehappen not thereforemisses the point. There are no once, but everlastingly", "crucial events" as opposed to other events: there is only what is although the Similarly, happening now, and thisis alwayscrucial.20 of durative to singulativecannot reallybe efopposition linguistic faced withoutcausing a general collapse of language, the conceptual opposition between the two-an opposition which belongs to what I have loosely called the historicalsense of time-is brought
19 Hochzeitsvorbereitungen, 73-4. Quite aside from the literary-biographical pp. problem of relating the journal entryto a storywrittensome six years later, we edificesupon journal entriesthatmay should be waryof erectinglarge interpretive be no more than fleeting,partial insightsdeveloped in greater precision by the fiction.Cohn perhaps places too much reliance on this particular entry in her reading of "The Burrow". On the qualities of the thoughtin Kafka'sjournals, see Maurice Blanchot,"La Lecture de Kafka",inLa Partdufeu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), pp. 9-19. Blanchot writes:"TheJournal is full of remarksthat seem connected to theoreticalknowledge . . . But these thoughts... relapse into an equivocal mode that does not allow them to be understood either as the expression of a unique happening or as the explicationof a universaltruth"(p. 10). Blanchot's essay conKafka's thoughtfrom the particulardensityof stitutesa caveat against abstracting on. the experience it reflects 20 Cohn's in over Kafka's meditations, the paraphrase would fitmore comfortably same notebook,on the eternal returnof the expulsion fromParadise (Hochzeitsvorbereitungen, 94); that is to say, they describe a mythicpresent. I would suggest p. thatpart of the reason forCohn's failureto push her conclusionsfar parenthetically of enough maylie in her relianceon the treatment the presentin Harald Weinrich's Weinrichtreatsthe "historicpresent"as an "als ob" fora past timeand as a Tempus. component of a "Metaphorik der Tempora". It is, however, precisely the of metaphoricity the narrativepresentthatKafka is bringingintodoubt in thisstory. und Welt(Stuttgart: See Weinrich,Tempus: Kohlhammer, 1964), Besprochene erzihlte pp. 125-9; Cohn, "Kafka's Eternal Present",p. 149.

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into doubt by a linguisticpractice that steps perilouslyalong the brinkof contradiction, confusion,and nonsense. Thus by the end of the storythe silence does indeed, as Cohn says, "alwayscontain the hissing sound," and whateverthe noise signifiesis indeed already here "in a constantlyrepeated present" (which I would rathercall an everlastingpresent). But this does not go far enough. What is missingfrom Cohn's thatKafka gives to account is a recognitionof the radical treatment narrative time. For the everlastingpresent is nothingbut the momentof narrationitself.Now thatthe narratorhas failed timeand again to domesticate time using strategies of narrative (i.e., of strategies belonging to historicaltime), his structures sequence, each time at the "decisive moment" of cause and effect, collapsing intothe present,that of rupturewhen the past failsto run smoothly now that the constructof narrativetime has collapsed, there is is, now withinwhich his only the time of narrationleft,the shifting narrativetakes place, leaving behind it a wake (a text) of failure, of fantasy,sterile speculation: the ramifications a burrow whose thatcomes fromits fatalprecariousnessis signalledby the whistling of rupture. point(s)
of University Cape Town,SouthAfrica