Change of Scene: Surveying the Ruins 353Letting the cat out of the bag: Kafka, Beckett, Hölderlin... to think dangerously; to spur on thought, to shrink from nothing in
the experience of the matter, not to be intimidated by any convention of
received thought.^125
Although Adorno was now fully occupied with his academic duties,
both in the university and in the institute, he was very much concerned
to maintain his flow of publications on literary and cultural topics, so as
to give the German reading public a first impression of this Frankfurt
homme de lettres. ‘The cat can’t leave off catching mice and the critic
can’t stop writing’ – a self-ironizing sentiment he often repeated when
talking about his intellectual obsessions. Between 1952 and 1953 he
had written a bulky treatise on Kafka, which he at once placed in the
cultural magazine Die neue Rundschau and republished a short while
later in Prisms, a collection of essays.
Kafka’s stories and novels had fascinated Adorno since the mid-1920s.
His discussions and correspondence with Benjamin often focused on
The Country Doctor, In the Penal Colony, The Trial and The Castle, and
during the 1930s Benjamin had published his own notes on Kafka in
two essays entitled Potemkin and The Little Hunchback.^126 Having read
these notes in December 1934, Adorno wrote to Benjamin expressing,
not for the first time, his complete ‘agreement in philosophical funda-
mentals’. This referred to both Benjamin’s idea of Kafka’s ‘inverse
theology’ and ‘the category of ambiguous and alienated thinghood’. He
also emphasizes the idea that ‘it is only to a life that is perverted in
thingly form that an escape from the overall context of nature is prom-
ised.’ Adorno’s lengthy letter of December 1934 contains in essence the
programme of his own Kafka interpretation, which in his own words
‘would have to begin with the relationship between prehistory and
modernity’.^127 This programme now lay twenty years in the past, but
even so Adorno now tried to put it into practice in his ‘Notes on Kafka’,
undoubtedly a work of central importance in his oeuvre and one he
dedicated to Gretel. The extent to which he was disturbed by his early
encounter with Kafka can be gauged from his suggestion that there
can be no distanced, contemplative view of the Prague writer. Instead,
‘the narrative will shoot towards him like a locomotive in a three-
dimensional film.’^128
At the very start of his 1953 essay, Adorno refers to Benjamin and in
particular his definition of Kafka’s prose as ‘parable. It expresses itself
not through expression but by its repudiation, by breaking off.... Each
sentence says “interpret me”, and none will permit it. Each compels the
reaction, “that’s the way it is”, and with it the question, “where have
I seen that before”?’^129 So it is all the more important not to approach
Kafka’s seemingly philosophical or metaphysical novels with ready-made
interpretative tools, but instead to start from the literal meaning of the