CHAPTER 4
Engaging the Stubborn
NARRATIVE SPEED AND READERLY JUDGMENTS IN
FRANZ KAFKA’S “DAS URTEIL”I
N THIS CHAPTER, I continue to explore issues of probability, though I shift
from a focus on generic frames to the phenomenon of an unfillable gap in
the plot dynamics of fiction, one that leaves rhetorical readers without any
adequate causal explanation for what happens. More specifically, I turn to look
at the rhetorical dynamics of what I call “the stubborn,” that is, textual recal-
citrance that does not yield to interpreters’ efforts to master it. The stubborn
is simultaneously part of textual dynamics and readerly dynamics: the author
shapes the textual phenomena to resist interpretation and the authorial audi-
ence integrates that resistance into the larger trajectory of its responses in
the progression. The stubborn is distinct from “the difficult,” textual phenom-
ena that initially appear recalcitrant but are designed to yield to interpreters’
efforts to comprehend them. (The difficult is the primary domain of literary
criticism.) The stubborn is also different from “the erroneous,” textual recal-
citrance that works against the author’s overall design.^1 (I will discuss a sig-
nificant subcategory of the erroneous in chapter 9, when I examine what I call
deficient narration.) Here I shall focus on Franz Kafka’s deployment of stub-
bornness at the climax of his powerful and strange short story “Das Urteil”
(1916), specifically Georg Bendemann’s acceptance of his father’s judgment- I first lay out these distinctions in chapter 10 of Narrative as Rhetoric. For related work
on textual recalcitrance, see the creative criticism in Wright. For related work on recalcitrance
that does not yield, see the exceptionally fine books by Weinstein and Abbott.
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