Reading Gestures: Body Schema Disorder and Schizophrenia in

Kafka’s Modernist Prose

Sonja Boos

Modernism/modernity, Volume 26, Number 4, November 2019, pp. 829-848

(Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.2019.0060

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/744792

Access provided at 6 Jan 2020 02:28 GMT from UZH Hauptbibliothek / Zentralbibliothek Zürich
Reading Gestures:
Body Schema Disorder and
Schizophrenia in Kafka’s Modernist
Prose

Sonja Boos

modernism / modernity
volume twenty six,

number four,

pp 829–848. © 2019
Kafka could understand things only in the form of a
johns hopkins
gestus, and this gestus which he did not understand con-
stitutes the cloudy part of the parables. Kafka’s writings university press

emanate from it.

—Walter Benjamin1

Gestures
Sonja Boos is Associ-
Many prose narratives by Franz Kafka animate and illuminate ate Professor of Ger-
psychopathological models of the subject. This can sometimes man at the University
conceal their equally consistent preoccupation with very physical, of Oregon. She is the
corporeal processes. Bodies communicate crucial information author of Speaking the
Unspeakable in Postwar
in Kafka, particularly when they slip over the line from human
Germany: Toward a
to insect or animal corporeality. A master at rendering bodily
Public Discourse on the
movements, Kafka often depicted human and animal figures, Holocaust (Cornell
complete or in parts, as well as the actions and gestures they University Press, 2015)
perform—or fail to perform. In Kafka’s diaries, literary sketches and various articles on
of distorted bodies do similar representational work as his draw- German literature, film,
ings: both convey a fragmented sense of self through physical and critical theory. She
is currently complet-
gesture.2 Likewise, his prose works draw much of their liveliness
ing a second book
from slapstick humor that is based on dysfunctional bodies.3
manuscript, Poetics of
Who can resist smiling at Gregor Samsa’s first clumsy attempt the Brain. The Emergence
at lifting his vermin body out of bed: “he lunged forward with of Neuroscience and the
all his force, without caring, he had picked the wrong direction German Novel.
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

830 and slammed himself violently against the lower bedpost.”4 And who has not, like the
character himself, “laugh[ed] loudly” at Karl Rossmann’s “unsuccessful attempt to
swing himself onto” the stoker’s bed?5
Kafka’s prose gives literary substance to the emergent knowledge about postural,
tactile, kinesthetic, and vestibular dysfunctions explored by neuroscientists of his era.
This scientific knowledge is present in works ranging from Kafka’s early fragment
“Description of a Struggle” to a few representative stories (“The Metamorphosis,”
“Researches of a Dog,” “A Report to an Academy,” “Josefine, The Singer or the Mouse
People,” “A Starving-Artist”), to the novels The Man Who Disappeared and The Trial.6
The present article will not attribute clinical conditions to Kafka’s literary characters or
engage the actual plight of non-neurotypical individuals. Neither does it suggest that
the author’s artistic use of medical symptoms means he experienced them himself.7
The goal is rather to show that the somatic manifestations in Kafka’s fictional charac-
ters can be plausibly explained through the lens of several neuroscientific discoveries
of his time. Such an undertaking does not run counter to Walter Benjamin’s seminal
insight, cited in the epigraph of this article, that the gestures and bodily movements
in Kafka’s prose are ultimately illegible and unidentifiable even for the author himself.
It is indeed tempting to read the meaning of Kafka’s opaque gestures, as when Karl
Rossmann, the protagonist of The Man Who Disappeared, “lower[s] his face before
the stoker and slap[s] his trouser-seams as a sign that all hope was gone” (Man, 16).
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari thus interpret the bent head as an “index of submis-
sion, the gesture of one who is judged.”8 Yet the succeeding gesture is not as readily
legible. A Duden entry defines the act of laying one’s hands on the trouser seam (die
Hände an die Hosennaht legen) as a part of a military drill or salute involving the
precise positioning of the middle finger parallel to the outseam of the trouser leg.9
But clearly this interpretation is at odds with the decidedly nonmilitary context of the
gesture (the chapter is set on a passenger steamship in the harbor of New York City),
and the suggestion that it signifies Karl’s hopelessness—as if a single, elusive gesture
could contain the full essence of Karl’s involuntary immigration to “America” and his
failed attempt to escape a scandal resulting from his seduction by a maid.
How, then, to interpret Kafka’s gestures, given that they oftentimes subvert con-
ventional modes of representation and refuse symbolic meaning? The following read-
ing will emphasize their neuroscientific dimension in order to open a new pathway
to understanding Kafka’s bodies as bodies that can be mapped and made predictable
through their failing sensory-motor processes, even if the latter are inflected by the
symptoms of schizophrenia, which was then, and remains today, a poorly understood
diagnosis, partly because of a lack of biological markers.10 Thus, the article aims to
explore Kafka’s troubled bodies as the site of an interplay between Kafka’s modernist
poetics and early twentieth-century neuroscientific research into both schizophrenia—a
term first introduced by Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler during a 1908 lecture—and
body schema disorder, a neuropathological condition (also first described in 1908) that
involves difficulties in identifying body parts or their relative relations to one another.
What unites both conditions in Kafka’s writings is that they oftentimes fail to register on
 BOOS / reading gestures
the subject, and even if they register, they do so without offering etiological certainty 831
about the subject’s psychopathological tendencies and neurological abnormalities.
This finds its historical correspondence in the difficulties experienced by the scientific
community at the turn of the century in understanding visible sensory-motor deficien-
cies and the underlying mental illness. Both were understood in negative terms, as an
absence of insight into one’s body and a sweeping lack of mental self-awareness. What
is more, the symptoms were considered irreducibly opaque, as they presented differ-
ently in different characters, resulting in an epistemological challenge: this was a form
of psychopathology that was unknowable, unnarratable, and as a result representative
of the modern experience of contingency.
And yet, Kafka’s writings present a way of narrating the unknowable experience of
schizophrenia by effectively extending the established modernist paradigms of alien-
ation, contingency, and loss. In Kafka’s writings, schizophrenia manifests as a direct,
visual and somatosensory experience that mirrors the works’ episodic and fragmentary
structures. In other words, schizophrenia is not just abstractly conveyed through the
works’ literary, textual devices, but physically performed by the neurologically affected
bodies of its fictional characters, who make the condition visible and indeed narratable
in the form of an embodied, corporeal experience.
Any discussion of medical notions of the past must proceed with caution, as these
scientific categories are historically contingent and thus malleable and provisional.
Schizophrenia was often falsely associated with “split personality,” which is due to a
misunderstanding that goes back to an inaccurate interpretation of Bleuler’s term.
Schizophrenia does mean “split mind,” but the name refers to a “splitting” of the
patient’s mind (i.e., experience) from reality, a rift between irreconcilable thoughts or
impulses and the ordinary demands of ordinary life. Bleuler thus defined schizophrenia
as a “fragmentation of the thinking process and of behavioral response.”11 As Bleuler
elaborates: “The patients speak completely disconnectedly, often in half-broken sen-
tences. They are quite restless and constantly busy doing something, but their activi-
ties lack purpose and are not carried through to the end, even such simple actions as
leaving a room. We see merely fragments of their behavior, as we do of their thinking”
(Dementia Praecox, 224).
Given that the traumatic dimension of their experience often relates to their paranoid
traits and suspiciousness, it is not a stretch to compare figures like Josef K. or Gregor
Samsa to “people” with paranoid personality disorders who, as Bleuler noted, often
resembled cases of schizophrenia.12 This is not to claim that Josef K. or Gregor “have”
schizophrenia, but to argue that these texts nevertheless engage with the othering that
these fictional characters’ physical manifestations produce. It argues that the apparent
disorganization of certain psychic functions in Kafka’s characters is structurally related
to a form of latent schizophrenia that is triggered by personal experiences and trauma.
This line of reasoning is supported by Bleuler’s association with Sigmund Freud and
his acknowledging the possibility of psychogenic or reactive triggers for schizophrenia
(as opposed to underlying biological processes), which the eminent German psychia-
trist Emil Kraepelin did not allow. As far as Kafka’s knowledge of Bleuler’s writings is
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

832 concerned, it has long been established that Kafka was conversant in psychoanalytic
concepts.13 Given his familiarity with Freud’s writings, it seems likely that he would
have come across the works of Bleuler, who was an early proponent of Freud’s theories
and a prominent member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.14
The medical category of body schema disorder has likewise undergone a number of
historical transformations.15 Marginalized in the fields of neuroscience and psychiatry,
body schema disorder has not been codified as a psychiatric condition and thus never
attained the validity of a diagnosis listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders, or DSM.16 The condition was first diagnosed by the Czech neurologist
Arnold Pick who was professor of neuropsychiatry and head of the psychiatric clinic
at the German-language campus of Charles University in Prague. Kafka was enrolled
there as a law student between 1901 and 1906, yet it is unlikely that Kafka attended
Pick’s lectures, since as a student he was captivated by literary studies and art history,
and his interest in the holistic health movement only ignited later, during his stay at
Jungborn in 1912.17 When Pick first identified body schema disorder in 1908, Kafka
had already accepted employment with the Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute for
the Kingdom of Bohemia. As a matter of fact, it is there that Kafka had his first actual
encounters with psychiatric patients. As John Zilcosky notes, Kafka was tasked with
raising funds for a hospital for the treatment of nervous disease in 1916, and wrote vivid
descriptions of soldiers suffering from war neurosis whose care had been delegated
to Kafka’s institute.18
The present article submits that a poetic interaction between Pick’s and Bleuler’s neu-
roscientific discoveries and Kafka’s prose is strongly suggested irrespective of whether
these researchers had any immediate impact on Kafka or whether Kafka was even
aware of their work. As a study of the relation between poetic and scientific depictions
of psychopathological conditions or, in a more general sense, between literature and
knowledge, it explores the emergence of a new object of knowledge as it is facilitated
and shaped by a given set of representational or narrative modes and aesthetic forms
of expression. This line of thinking bears close parallels to Jacques Rancière’s notion
of a “poetics of knowledge” and his “study of the set of literary procedures by which a
discourse escapes literature, gives itself the status of a science, and signifies this status.”19
If science has literary or poetic qualities, literature is not to be considered a “secondary”
response to science, as a realm that merely popularizes or critiques the latter. Instead,
literature must be understood as a discourse that is constitutive of knowledge itself.
Thus, the larger issue implicit in the early twentieth-century convergence between
neuroscientific research and Kafka’s prose is the question of whether or not literary
texts can play a substantive role in predicting and answering the questions that are
being posed in the sciences.
It bears mentioning that Kafka’s “blood-relative” Heinrich von Kleist anticipated
a significant neuroscientific discovery in his 1810 essay “The Puppet Theatre,” which
problematizes self-awareness, self-reflection, and its consequence, the loss of kinetic
grace in humans.20 In a philosophical dialogue with the narrator, “Herr C” thus analyzes
the postural functioning of a marionette:
 BOOS / reading gestures
Every movement, he said, had a centre of gravity; it sufficed if this, inside the figure, were 833
controlled; the limbs, which were nothing but pendula, followed without further interfer-
ence, mechanically, of their own accord. He added that this movement was a very simple
one; that whenever the centre of gravity was moved in a straight line the limbs described
a curve; and that often, if shaken by accident, the whole thing was brought into a kind of
rhythmical activity similar to dancing. (Kleist, “Puppet,” 411–12, emphasis in original)

C’s description captures the complex interplay between bodily processes and mental
faculties that would come to define the functioning of the “inertial sensor,” a sensory
organ to be discovered a decade later, in 1820, by Czech physiologist Jan Evangelista
Purkinje.21 Purkinje’s notion of an inertial sensor was an important step towards the
protracted discovery of the vestibular system in the course of the next century. Today,
the vestibular system is considered a key contributor to our balance system and our
sense of spatial orientation as it complements the body schema by giving input about
movement, posture, and equilibrioception. Herr C’s mechanical-philosophical explana-
tion of a common, albeit obscure “center of gravity,” which provides information about
the movement and configuration of pendula-like limbs in relation to a pivot point (the
head), identifies key characteristics of a vestibular organ, such as the one described by
Purkinje in his work on the inertial sensor.

Body Schema Disorder

The century separating Kleist’s critical approach to the Enlightenment ideals of

German classicism and romanticism and Kafka’s radical modernism manifests as a shift
from knowledge—albeit of a secret, unattainable system—to a preoccupation with
this very system’s comic dysfunctionality. In Kleist’s marionettes, the vestibular system
functions unobtrusively under normal circumstances, even if the marionettes’ graceful
postures are of course not attainable by any human being. By contrast, in Kafka’s literary
characters, the body schema is invaded by a pathological, schizophrenic component,
illustrating that ego regressions are often accompanied by body schema alterations.
It is significant, then, that the medical literature of Kafka’s time had yet to make the
connection between two neuropathological conditions that manifested differently—as
a sensory-motor deficiency and a mental disorder, respectively—yet were ostensibly
related.22 By contrast, Kafka’s writings show some knowledge of the fact that patients
with schizophrenia often exhibit drastic catatonic symptoms that may either have the
same biological origin as body schema dysfunction or be mediated by it (Mishara, “Body,
Self,” 130). Moreover, the importance of Kafka’s prose for the medical field and for
neuroscientific knowledge more broadly conceived lies in the fact that they reveal and
foreground the significant role of anosognosia for the etiology of both schizophrenia
and body schema disorder. The former neurological condition was first described by
Gabriel Anton in 1893 and by Pick in 1898, and subsequently termed anosognosia
by Joseph Babinski in 1914, referring specifically to a case of lacking awareness of
hemiplegia (paralysis on one vertical half of the body).23 Derived from the Greek α =
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

834 without, νόσος = disease, γνώσις = knowledge, anosognosia denotes a lack of insight
into or denial of one’s illness. It was originally considered a subcategory of body schema
disorder, after Henry Head and Gordon Holmes proposed that damage to the body
schema was responsible for the loss of awareness of a body part.24 Since its inception,
the term anosognosia has, however, broadened in scope. Today it is considered a com-
mon symptom of both schizophrenia and body schema disorder.25
As a particularly multifaceted neurological disease, anosognosia not only connects
schizophrenia and body schema disorder but also figures, in Kafka’s writings, as the
defining condition of the modernist experience of alienation, fragmentation, and loss
of self. The importance of Kafka’s modernist prose thus extends beyond its capacity
to “provide data about the structure of the human self,” which Aaron L. Mishara has
acknowledged (“Kafka, Paranoic,” 3). Beyond that, it is a valuable source of specific
medical knowledge about the neuropathological confluence of schizophrenia with the
lesser-known body schema disorder, as well as their shared symptomatology. Occupying
a unique place in the canon of high modernism, Kafka’s modernist prose is formally
innovative but not aestheticist, as it affects and is affected by the extratextual world
of society, politics, and, crucially, science.26 Kafka’s work captures and foregrounds
the insurmountable tension between desire and nihilism, which is (barely) mediated
by a form of psychopathological denial. This denial epitomizes, but also exceeds, the
skepticism and epistemic uncertainty that is characteristic of literary modernism and
its underlying logic of psychological defense mechanisms. In Kafka’s prose a differ-
ent, “anosognostic” kind of denial operates constantly and invariably, undermining
the reader’s quest for meaning, while at the same time thwarting the protagonists’
trajectories as they deny and minimize the actuality of their problems.27 There is a
strong suggestion that Karl Rossman is indeed a hopeless case who will never “make
it” in America, that K. is “guilty” of the undisclosed charges he is accused of, and that
Gregor Samsa is letting his family down his family down by staying home from work. The
truth, I argue, is constantly betrayed in their bodily actions and somatic malfunctions.
Pick defined body schema disorder as “disturbed orientation on one’s own body”
(Störung der Orientierung am eigenen Körper).28 Hence, the condition becomes notice-
able only when the body schema is absent or compromised. When Karl “free[s] himself
and [runs] diagonally across the room, even brushing against the officer’s chair,” he
lacks—knowingly lacks—a degree of corporeal awareness as he negotiates the space
(Kafka, Man, 12, emphasis added). Just as with his botched attempt to jump into the
Stoker’s bed, we might ascribe this clumsy move to Karl’s general awkwardness, itself
a sign of his existential disorientation. Yet an ironic twist emerges from Karl’s assertion
that “in this room one knew where one was,” uttered for the purpose of finding self-
reassurance about his body in space (11, emphasis added). There is a subtle disconnect
between Karl’s looking out the office window, which allows him to acknowledge that
they have arrived in New York Harbor, and his inability to situate and know the location
of his physical body therein. His disorientation exceeds the confusion of a passenger
who gets lost on a large steamship, or a greenhorn immigrant wandering the streets of
Manhattan. Despite his knowing where he is in a broader, geographical sense, Karl is
 BOOS / reading gestures
unable to adequately gather and process enough sensory information about his body 835
and its orientation within the concrete space it occupies to move safely around or climb
into a piece of furniture.
Karl lacks something more local and more specialized than geographical knowl-
edge: a neurological function known as the proprioceptive sense. Proprioception is the
unconscious registration of our own body’s limb position, which enables us to control
our movement in pursuit of behavioral goals.29 It is based on what British psychiatrists
Head and Holmes described in 1911 as “our power to appreciate the position of a
limb, or to estimate the weight of an object . . . based upon impulses which, even at
the periphery, exist apart from those of touch and pressure called into simultaneous
being by the same external stimulus” (“Sensory,” 108).30 Lacking an integrated neural
representation of his body (the “body schema”) and the space around it (“peripersonal
space”), Karl “was in general slow in his movements, for although he had long legs,
they were too heavy” (Kafka, Man, 10). This makes it difficult for him to effectively
pilot his body to avoid and manipulate objects, acts involving various automatic (but
not reflexive) sensory processes that serve to gather internal information about the
relative positions of neighboring body parts so as to key them into the environment.
While the body schema involves the body as a whole, body schema disturbance typi-
cally involves only one or a few body parts. Pick’s first patient frequently complained
about having lost her nose, which she would desperately search for everywhere until
finally claiming her examiner’s nose as her own possession (Studien, 14). As a subper-
sonal, preconscious function, the body schema renders the experience of oneself as one
that is both bodily and paradoxically anonymous. Patients may feel that their bodies
are no longer their own or that they no longer exist through their bodies as if they had
lost all inner connectedness to it. Karl’s misplaced suitcase can be read as a figure of
his fragmented and alienated body: “He wanted to inspect his suitcase and make an
inventory of his things, for he could remember them only vaguely and the most valu-
able items were sure to be lost” (Kafka, Man, 67). Another example is Gregor Samsa
who closes “his eyes so as not to have to see his squirming legs,” while pondering that
he “would have needed hands and arms to lift himself up, but instead . . . had only his
numerous little legs, which were in every different kind of perpetual motion and which,
besides, he could not control” (Metamorphosis, 3, 6). Of course, the irony of “The
Metamorphosis” is that within the reality of the story Gregor’s body schema is neatly
intact. With just a slight adjustment of mental, rather than motor response (essentially,
he just needs to decide to “get the upper part of his body out of bed first”), Gregor
“warily turn[s] his head toward the edge of the bed, [which] work[s] easily” (7). Then,
to Gregor’s surprise and “in spite of its width and weight, the mass of his body finally
followed, slowly, the movement of his head” (7). In the following pages, we come to
witness Gregor’s swift transformation into an agile and active creature that navigates
its room with almost blissful virtuosity: “He especially liked hanging from the ceiling;
it was completely different from lying on the floor; one could breathe more freely; a
faint swinging sensation went through the body; and in the almost absent-mindedness
which Gregor felt up there, it could happen to his own surprise that he let go and
plopped onto the floor” (30).
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

836 But even as Gregor has completely adapted to an insect’s proprioceptive system,
he continues to express surprise and even resistance to inhabiting the body of a giant
bug: “Was he an animal that music could move him so?” he asks toward the end of
the story (46). This and multiple other statements contradict the famous opening of
“The Metamorphosis,” with its “meticulous Pseudo-realist description” of Gregor’s
transformation: “When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams,
he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin” (3).31 The reader is
asked to accept the story’s fantastic premise even if it is undermined throughout the
remainder of the story as Gregor struggles to maintain a human sense of self. In that
way, Gregor’s innocuous remarks (“unfortunately it seemed that he had no real teeth”)
can be read as evidence of a self-denial that runs “deeper” than even the psychological
undertones previously identified by numerous commentators (13).32 The indetermi-
nacy of Gregor’s metamorphosis, which is not discursively treated in the story, is what
makes the text significant for Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of “becoming-animal”
in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. They describe a movement in which the subject
is folded into an unstable, nomadic, and anomalous mode of existence. It is a move-
ment from body to flesh, where the body is a figure of unity and identity, while the
flesh is marked by disarticulation and disfigurement. And yet “becoming-animal” offers
a form of freedom, as “there is no longer man or animal, since each deterritorializes
the other, in a conjunction of flux, in a continuum of reversible intensities” (Deleuze
and Guattari, Kafka, 22). Ultimately, it is never decided whether Gregor becomes an
insect or stays human. Given the deliberate “ontological fuzziness” of Kafka’s animal
figures, the present article reads them allegorically and anthropocentrically—with a
focus on bodies, not species.33

Animals

From a neuropathological point of view, the discrepancy between the reader’s

and Gregor’s perspectives allows for two explanations. The first is that Gregor suffers
from anosognosia, a deficit of bodily self-awareness that can manifest in the form of
asomatognosia, defined as the unawareness of possessing an extremity. In “A Report
to an Academy,” there is much ambiguity with regard to the actual existence of Rot-
peter’s tail. At first, it seems naturally integrated into his body schema, as Rotpeter
instinctively knows that a gap in his crate is “not by a long shot big enough to stick
even [his] tail through” (Kafka, Selected, 79). Yet after this initial comment, Rotpeter
never again so much as mentions the rear end of his animal body. The omission of the
tail, symbolized by a much-treasured scar “below the hip,” has prompted speculations
about a possible Oedipal castration (78).34 But it also serves as the narrative sign of
Rotpeter’s alleged “becoming-human.” Tails are a basic differentiating feature between
apes and monkeys, as they can be a hindrance to walking upright. Hence the implied
amputation of Rotpeter’s tail points toward a phylogenetic transformation—he finds
himself evolving into a humanoid being. As a result, his sense of self is disintegrating
or, more exactly, his body schema ceases to cohere. Rotpeter increasingly resembles
 BOOS / reading gestures
Karl Rossmann, another asomatognostic subject who is clueless about the presence of 837
his tail/genitals “between his legs” (Kafka, Man, 23).35
Anosognosia can also present as anosodiaphoria, the misrecognition of a severe
disease. This condition, whereby patients treat their illness as a mere trifle, is exempli-
fied by Gregor’s unflinching conviction that “today’s fantasy would gradually fade away”
(Kafka, Metamorphosis, 6). Patients with anosognosia act as if there is nothing wrong
with them, and when confronted with their condition, make excuses and rationalize
their impairment away. This kind of misrecognition is exemplified by Gregor’s other-
wise irrational conclusion that “for the time being he would have to lie low and, by
being patient and showing his family every possible consideration, help them bear the
inconvenience which he simply had to cause them in his present condition” (22). As
Babinski rightly suggested, anosognosia is often linked to patients with damage to the
right cerebral hemisphere. It arises because the impairment is not communicated to the
brain’s major language center, which is situated in the left. Note that Gregor expresses
surprise that his body fails to function like it used to, thereby indicating that the left
hemisphere of his brain is ignorant of the damage. As it no longer receives the kind of
information that would be consistent with its views, the left hemisphere continues to
adhere to its now outdated body schema and rationalizes impairment away. And so,
Gregor confabulates a schizophrenic text, insisting that he still inhabits a human body.
The other way I suggest to read this condition through the lens of early twentieth-
century neuropathology is to focus on Gregor’s self-experience (Selbsterfahrung) of
his body. I am partial to the view that Gregor’s body schema is intact when (or very
soon after) we encounter him on that first morning. The problem is not that he can-
not get out of bed; after all, his explorations very quickly reach acrobatic heights. The
problem is rather that he is unable to “form a clear picture” of his body and imagine
himself from the outside as one object among others, and by extension as himself (7).
The story’s concern with Gregor’s inability to construe a psychic spatial image of himself
correlates with the scientific discovery of the “body image,” a neuroscientific concept
first defined by Austrian Psychoanalyst Paul Schilder in 1934. Already since the early
1920s, Schilder had thought about ways to extend the concept of body schema to our
subjective mental knowledge of it, so as to capture both the somatic and the mental
aspects of our self-experience. Defined as the “picture of our own body, which we
form in our mind,” Schilder conceived of the body image as a counter-concept to body
schema, as it concerns not how we sense our body, but how we construe it as a mental
representation of what we think we look like.36 In other words, the distinction between
body image and body schema is that between our mental, psychological perception of
our own body as we believe it might be experienced by others and our unconscious,
physiological performance of it, in turn based on our internal access to it through bodily
sensations. Loosely based on the imago-concept borrowed from psychoanalytic theory,
Schilder’s term is informed by Freud’s theory of psychosexual development, as it takes
our capacity to “convert” libidinal energy into body parts as the basis of the development
of a body image. Gregor’s denial of his insect appearance and his efforts to hide who
he has become seem interpersonally motivated, and thus point toward a disturbance
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

838 of his body image: his self-scrutiny is aggravated as his family catches sight of him, and
it results in an increased preoccupation with imagined defects such as his “many legs,
pitifully thin” (Kafka, Metamorphosis, 3). Yet the function of Gregor’s legs is quickly
restored and the sensory-motor processes elicited by his body schema remain active.
One might argue that as an animal, Gregor naturally lacks a psychology with desires
and intentions, and that an insect would hardly have the world-centered frame of ref-
erence that accompanies a body image.37 Like other animal figures in Kafka’s prose,
Gregor has the kinetic (motor) ability to touch, sing, eat, run, hide, and climb, but lacks
any conscious awareness of how he does it, or how he gets there. Yet it is precisely this
quality that aligns him with Kafka’s human figures, who, ironically, also rely on intuitive
guessing and instinctual behaviors rather than deliberate action. In Kafka, both animals
and humans lack a hermeneutic horizon, a reliable, conscious frame of reference and
sense of self. The final words, “like a dog,” spoken by Josef K. in the moment of his
execution to convey the human experience of death, betray the isolation of body and
mind, self and other, that is also intrinsic to Kafka’s schizophrenic animals (Trial, 231).
If the animals’ body image disorder (and schizophrenic lack of self-awareness) is
more pronounced, it is not because they are animals, but because they (mis)construe
themselves as humans. The narrator of “Josefine, the Mouse Singer” performs an an-
thropomorphizing reading of a much-admired fellow mouse that paradoxically others
her as a mouse. Providing a long-winded and contradictory account of the relationship
between the artist and her audience, the narrator explains that whenever Josefine must
sing to the mouse people, she assumes a particular stance, “[extending] her neck . . .
as high as it would go” and tilting “her little head . . . back . . . eyes turned toward the
heights” (Kafka, Selected, 97, 99). His depiction evokes the paradoxical dual nature of
Josefine as an ordinary mouse and an accomplished (human) singer. Is her movement
the reflex action of a mouse on the lookout for predators or the posture of a vocal artist
attempting to sing beyond her vocal break? Misconstruing Josefine’s posture as a sign
of leadership, the narrator also lauds her attempts to give solace and provide a sense of
community: “Whenever we get bad news [she] cranes her neck and strives to oversee
her flock like the shepherd before the storm” (99). This humancentric perspective
fails to recognize that Josefine’s posture is quite plausible for a small mammal seeking
to warn her flock of impending danger. It also misapprehends Josefine’s “squeaking”
as extraordinary vocal artistry, if in reality it merely represents the ultrasonic vocaliza-
tions of mouse communication (95).38 The narrator’s anthropocentric misinterpretation
of Josefine’s bodily gestures is exacerbated by the intricate narrative layering of the
story, which results in a highly self-reflexive text that casts all matters of song, speech,
and action as a social performance of sorts. This only serves to underscore the lack of
self-reflexivity in the narrator, who casts his fellow mice as thinking and behaving like
humans in some ways, but ultimately describes them as strange and as other.39
In a similar manner, the story “Researches of a Dog” draws much of its humor from
the discrepancies between an animal’s and a human’s self-perception. Told from the
perspective of a dog who presents his inquiries into the practices of his culture, the
story concerns the nature and limits of knowledge. The voice of the first-person narra-
 BOOS / reading gestures
tor is marked by the slightly pompous and self-righteous attitude of a human scientist. 839
This dog is driven by his “peculiarities, which are as plain as day” and a “disquiet . . .
tear[ing him] out of the circle of his kind” (Kafka, Selected, 132–33). Despite his al-
leged scholarly objectivity, the narrator is clueless as to a dog’s natural interaction with
human creatures. Unable to assume an external attitude to his bodily self, he is capable
of performing an “honest jump,” but lacks any awareness of how such a jump would
be perceived by his human master, whom he is unable to actually see:

Anyone who has remained even slightly open-minded about science—and there are, of
course, very few of them, for the circles that science draws are becoming ever wider—will
readily recognize, even when he does not attempt special observations, that the main part
of our food found lying on the ground in such instance comes down from above; indeed,
we catch most of it, each according to his dexterity and greed, even before it touches the
ground . . . I had greater success with another, admittedly slightly eccentric, experiment
that caused something of a sensation. Reasoning from the usual method of snatching
food from the air, I resolved not to let the food fall down, of course, but also not to catch
it. To this end, whenever food came, I jumped up a little, but I made sure the jump fell
short; but the food generally fell to the ground, dull and indifferent, and I threw myself
on it furiously, furious not only with hunger but also with disappointment. But in isolated
cases something else did occur, something actually wonderful; the food did not fall but
followed me through the air; the food pursued the hungry. (143, 150–52)

The passage echoes the 1878 discovery by German physiologist Hermann Munk of
Seelenblindheit, a unique kind of psychic blindness that left a dog with a partially
extirpated brain unable to recognize familiar objects or individuals (like his master),
while his ability to see objects (i.e., to behave appropriately toward them by avoiding
collision with or successfully snatching them from the air, etc.) remained preserved.40
One recent study even suggests that Munk’s psychic blindness might be considered an
early example of anosognosia in nonprimates, two decades before Babinski provided a
name for the phenomenon (Prigatano, Study, 7). There is a comical parallel between
the dog’s literal inability to see humans and his figurative inability to see himself from
an external (human) perspective. This rift between the experience of the self as sub-
ject (based on privileged inner access to the body) and the self as object, as a body for
others, opens up a rift between the narrator and his interlocutors, be they his fellow
dogs or his human readers. The narrator of “Researches of a Dog” is pure body schema
and untainted inner experience, as he lacks a body image or visual representation of
himself. In their discussion of “becoming-animal” and its central tenet of selflessness,
Deleuze and Guattari note that “the expressions of the solitary researcher tend toward
the assemblage (agencement) of a collective enunciation of the canine species even
if this collectivity is no longer or not yet given” (Kafka, 18). Hence the story’s conflict
does not arise from the impossibility that an animal who is disconnected from the “col-
lective assemblages of enunciation” should tell his own story (18). Rather, it unfolds
through a series of implausibilities that result from his narrating his own body, of which
he however has next to no knowledge. The dog lacks a self image and a sense of how
he is perceived (and fed) by others, as when he is amazed that “the food pursued the
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

840 hungry,” if in reality it is him who follows the lure in his master’s hand (Kafka, Selected,
133). The story tropes on the paradox that the dog cannot visualize his own body, even
if the latter is patterned to perform for others and express itself.
The discrepancy between our knowledge and understanding of the dog’s predicament
and the limited information available to the dog himself is both funny and pathetic.
But the denial of knowledge to an unsuspecting animal also produces an uncomfort-
able effect on the reader that is comparable to the praecox feeling, a notion coined
by H. C. Rümke to describe the unease experienced upon meeting a schizophrenic
patient.41 Psychiatrists may thus find it hard to empathize with a schizophrenic patient
because he or she lacks attunement with the external world. The reader of Kafka’s
story may likewise perceive the dog as a profoundly alienated and alienating character
who is unable to transcend his own perspective and mediate his experience of self in a
coherent first-person voice. Instead, the dog perpetuates his fractured sense of self in
a narrative where the telling and experiencing of his own story are dissociated. Note
the similarity with Rotpeter, who describes his inner experience of “glumly sobbing,
painfully searching for fleas, wearily licking a coconut, knocking my skull against the
wall of the crate, sticking out my tongue whenever someone came near me” (Kafka,
Selected, 79). If it is difficult for the reader to empathize with him, it is not because he
is an ape but because of the discrepancy between his “human words” and “apish feel-
ings” (79). The problem with Rotpeter’s report is that it is based on the false premise of
a harmonious interplay between his body image (how he perceives and communicates
his body) and his body schema (how he experiences his body), which the story itself
debunks through Rotpeter’s oddly disjointed perspective. Ultimately, the questions of
whether the ape merely denies the actual physical signs of his apishness and of whether
his motor output is really altered through his lifestyle changes, are never resolved, just
as it remains uncertain whether such changes in his body schema and image would
support Rotpeter’s claim to have transformed into a human.

Humans

Contrary to Kafka’s animals, the human protagonists are often out of sync with their
bodies. As they fall asleep in the wrong places, reject food, or disavow sensual pleasures,
they nevertheless tend to be very conscious of their bodies’ visual representation. In
Kafka’s short story “A Starving-Artist,” the theatrical effect and visible impact of a
starvation act, carried out by the eponymous protagonist, increases as the size of his
body proportionately shrinks. Experiencing the decline in appreciation of his craft, the
starving-artist is preoccupied with how he is perceived from the outside, even though he
knows that it is impossible to communicate the intricacies of his bodily sensations, such
as the experience of how food tastes or, more specifically, how it does not taste to him:
“Try to relate the art of starving to someone! Those who have no feel for it can never be
made to understand” (93). While he is addicted to his audience, his performance is an
antispectacle both in the sense that he is best when he is not watched (“he succeeded
effortlessly [when] no one counted the days”) and in the sense that his starvation is
 BOOS / reading gestures
a natural result of his lack of appetite. Given that the starving-artist “could not find 841
the food [he] liked,” his act of self-deprivation is hardly an artistic achievement (95).
Contrary to the starving-artist, whose audience is tragically waning, other protago-
nists in Kafka’s works are framed and defined as the scrutable objects of an implicit
surveillance apparatus. In the opening paragraph of The Trial, Josef K. is thus strangely
unconcerned by the presence of a peering neighbor: “Someone must have slandered
Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested. His
landlady, Frau Grubach, had a cook who brought him breakfast each day around eight,
but this time she didn’t appear. That had never happened before. K. waited a bit longer,
watching from his pillow the old woman who lived across the way, who was peering at
him with a curiosity quite unusual for her” (Kafka, Trial, 3). A more expected reaction
would have been to worry about his breakfast and to escape the inquisitive gaze of his
neighbor. But K. doesn’t seem affected by the material conditions of his captivity, such
as the fact that one apple “was his entire breakfast” and that “there was nowhere to
sit in the entire room” or that he “would have to wear a much worse [nightshirt] now”
and that the second guard’s belly “kept bumping against him” (5, 6, 10). He seems to
perform his life at the expense of experiencing it from within, viewing himself (and his
physical body) almost exclusively through a prism of external views held by others (often
anonymous strangers). So while Josef K. is hungry enough to eventually ring for his
landlady’s cook, he subsequently suppresses his hunger to focus on what he perceives
of as more urgent matters, namely the appearance he presents to his intruders: “he
was already lifting a coat from the chair and holding it up for a moment in both hands,
as if submitting it to the judgment of the guards” (11). His body matters to K. almost
exclusively as an exterior appearance perceived by others.
The representation of K.’s self as unembodied or “uncoupled” from his own physi-
cal nature stands in tension with the novel’s concern with the body’s readability within
a physiognomic, semiotic framework. K. is obsessed by the question of whether he is
valued by others, and it is clear that the answer to this question (and with it the outcome
of his trial) hinges on a set of superficial traits that are linked to his physical appearance
and bodily movements. As far as his legal predicament is concerned, K. is very active
in the sense that he moves around a lot within the courts to seek out influential people,
but not in the sense that he reflects on his past actions. In that way, his trial can itself
be taken as a metaphor for the system of perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs he brings
to his own body as if from the outside. Like the prisoner in the controlled space of the
panopticon, K. has internalized the gaze of the other: the “someone” who “must have
slandered” him may well be a projection refracting his own views back to him through
a number of mirror image doubles. Accordingly, the first chapter stages an exchange
of glances between K. and two of his alter egos, a character named Willem, who is
reading a book (arguably a mise an abyme of Kafka’s The Trial), and another character
named Franz (possibly Franz Kafka himself).42 From the first pages of The Trial, the
text establishes K. as a composite character who is made up of external views and who
is disconnected from his own body.
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

842 Kafka’s prose indicates that a disturbed interplay between body schema and body
image is often an indication of schizophrenia. His approach to figural narration, a high-
modernist narrative mode developed and refined by Kafka during his breakthrough
period, neatly conveys the sense of schizophrenic alienation and fragmentation that
is at the heart of K.’s self-perception.43 Eliminating the omniscient, auctorial narra-
tor, Kafka embeds the narrator in the story but refuses him the authority and identity
of a first-person narrator. While the narrator’s perspective is so closely connected to
that of the protagonist that the former becomes invisible, the reader doesn’t actually
grasp much of either’s feelings or thoughts. What we learn is given to us in enigmatic
gestures and equivocal dialogue, seldom through direct access or concrete facts. As a
result, the inner life of the third-person narrator/protagonist remains alien to us, just
as the other characters (to whose thoughts and feelings we are not privy) remain a
puzzle (Sokel, Myth, 117).
The incomplete, fragmented perspective of The Trial’s figural third-person narrator
corresponds to the conjectural and individuated perspective of its protagonist, who,
for lack of the autobiographical information necessary to develop a proper self-image
and identity, is also unable to respond to the demands of the external world. As Bloom
notes, K. “cannot realize his own self: it is internally exiled.”44 It is but a small step from
the novel’s insightful depiction of K.’s incoherent response to his arrest to what Bleuler
defined as a broader fragmentation of the schizophrenic’s thinking process. K.’s rather
frantic and purposeless pursuit of his trial is a marker of schizophrenia understood as the
exiling of all meaning, from the novel and from one exemplary individual. At the end of
the Trial, the fragmentation of K.’s behavioral response finally begins to bleed into his
proprioceptive awareness, again anticipating the discovery of a correlation between body
schema disorder and schizophrenia in the field of neurology. Thus, upon their arrival
at the quarry, K.’s executioners experience great difficulty in propping him up: “The
men sat K. down on the ground, propped him up against the stone, and laid his head
down on it. In spite of all their efforts, and in spite of the cooperation K. gave them,
his posture was still quite forced and implausible” (Kafka, Trial, 230). Lacking a clear
internal representation of his body posture—a body schema—K. is unable to actively
integrate his posture and position in the environment. He slumps like a marionette
with severed strings: “One of the men asked the other to let him work on positioning
K. on his own for a while but that didn’t improve things either. Finally, they left K. in
a position that wasn’t even the best of those they had already tried” (230).
The schizophrenic tendency toward fragmentation that is so pronounced in The
Trial’s protagonist is replicated within the text by the distinctly fragmentary nature
of its architectural structures where each part—a passageway, a court building, or a
country road—functions as a disjointed fragment that is superimposed upon a laby-
rinthine whole.45 Like K., who is scattered and loses interest quickly, the surviving
unfinished manuscript of The Trial seems itself unable to keep track of its internal
spatial arrangement. When Max Brod prepared the novel for publication after Kafka’s
death, he arranged the disordered manuscript into what he believed to be the most
cohesive sequence of chapters.46 But it is also true for Kafka’s work as a whole, which
 BOOS / reading gestures
does not offer a reliable sense of unity, yet is bound together, as Deleuze and Guattari 843
write, by a rhizomatic quality: “This work is a rhizome, a burrow. The Castle has many
entrances whose rules of usage and whose locations aren’t very well known. The hotel
in Amerika has innumerable main doors and side doors that innumerable guards watch
over; it even has entrances and exits without doors” (Kafka, 3, emphasis in original). As
a commentary on interpretation, the notion of the literary work as rhizome suggests
that readers have to choose their own openings and passages through the oeuvre und
thus engage in an experimental exercise that will change depending on which entrance
is chosen. But if we consider the text as a body, and Deleuze and Guattari’s description
of Kafka’s oeuvre as another way to conceptualize the link between schizophrenia and
body schema disorder in it, another reading suggests itself. This article submits that just
as patients with schizophrenia and body schema disorder have a specific impairment
in the ability to actively represent and maintain contextual information about their
ego and body, respectively, the reader of Kafka’s oeuvre may feel unable to determine
the internal spatial arrangement of its textual fragments, architectural structures, and
urban territories. In that sense, the quote suggests that Kafka’s prose epitomizes and at
the same time overcomes the illegibility of the modernist, schizophrenic text in which
individual parts stand in a dysfunctional relation to the whole, precisely by closing the
door to the reader.
This tendency toward fragmentation applies not only to inanimate structures in
Kafka’s works, and sometimes the manuscripts themselves, but also to human body
parts and their gestural movements. As suggested before, Kafka often presents spe-
cific gestures and poses that remain illegible because they are isolated and estranged
from context and dialogue. Noting the “obsessive attention to details of gestures” in
Kafka’s early dramatic fragments, Martin Puchner has convincingly argued that “in
none of these excessive details can we hope to find additional information about mo-
tivation, character, or stage action. [They undermine] the traditional function of the
stage direction.”47 If Kafka pays analytical attention to the performing body (and, it
bears mentioning, he kept an inventory of such gestures in his diary), he does so not to
supplement verbal explanation but to complicate it. For these gestures often subvert
the very meaning they purport to establish. To quote Puchner once again: “Kafka does
not seek to translate gestures back into language but contends himself with registering
their effects and also their limits” (“Antitheatrical,” 186–87). While this assertion is
correct, the present article interprets Kafka’s play with gestures less as a commentary
on the modernist trope of “language without meaning” than as an articulation, a precise
representation, as it were, of bodily alienation that is rooted in body schema disorder
and closely connected to schizophrenia (191). Gestures in Kafka aren’t representative
of a fin-de-siècle nostalgia for authentic meaning, as if the latter could be recovered by
way of bodily expression, nor are they merely an “irreducible residual phenomenon . . .
of language as such,” as Werner Hamacher argues.48 Instead, the gestures are closer to
what Isolde Schiffermüller describes in reference to Clemens-Carl Härle’s reading of
Kafka as “the trace of a language that was written with the body” (Gesten, 38). Their
opaqueness signifies neither regression nor closure, but an opening up toward a new
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

844 kind of language, one that begins to assert itself and was increasingly recognized in the
medical profession and among neuroscientists in the last two decades of the nineteenth
century. Reading the physical and psychopathological meaning of gestures in Kafka’s
work shifts our focus from the discipline of epistemology and the tradition of language
skepticism to the domains of neuroscience and psychopathology.

Schizophrenia

When, in the first chapter of The Trial, K. makes “a gesture as if he were tearing
himself loose from the two men, who were, however, standing some distance from
him,” his absurd, comical action must be understood as the expression of a unique
neuropathological condition that embodies and reflects broader aspects of modernity
(Kafka, Trial, 5). After all, such farcically disconnected gestures are not restricted to
the protagonist. In a similar vein, the inspector “had pressed his hand firmly down on
the table and seemed to be comparing the length of his fingers . . . while the two guards
were sitting on a chest draped with an embroidered coverlet, rubbing their knees. The
three young men had placed their hands on their hips and were gazing around aim-
lessly” (16). No character seems safe from the deficiencies of spatial orientation and
kinesthetic-proprioceptive integrity that mark the onset of body schema disorder. In
Kafka’s writings, gestures are mobilized to such great effect that they illustrate complex
perceptive-motor-cognitive deficits that would otherwise evade our attention, and at
the same time uncover the neuropathological basis of the epistemological crisis of
modernity. In other words, psychopathological distortions expose the gap between our
perception and conception of reality and that of the (schizophrenic) other, revealing a
view of reality as not just subjective or intersubjective, but as psychotic and delusional.
Depicting schizophrenia by way of gestures and hence in the most literal and, as it
were, visual terms, Kafka’s prose gravitates around scientific issues (without attempting
to actually tackle them, of course). Kafka’s writings are prototypical modernist narra-
tives in that they thwart interpretation and undermine our tendency to make automatic
assumptions about the mental states and behaviors of others. As narratives that all too
often simply do not add up, they bear a resemblance to schizophrenic associations,
which likewise manifest a sense of acute self-reflexivity and self-referentiality. And
to the degree that they defy comprehension and classification, they are analogous to
schizophrenia, a disease that is inaccessible and strange even to psychiatrists. Indeed,
schizophrenia is often considered as psychiatry’s quintessential “other,” a limit case of
human existence. Karl Jaspers thus defined it as “a gulf which defies description.”49
As such, schizophrenia has its equivalent in modernism, which is often proclaimed as
being elusive, opaque, and incomprehensible. Given the perplexing variety of possible
schizophrenic and schizoid symptoms, schizophrenia corroborates the modernist logic
by which meaningful experience is resisted and the reader is left without the requisite
hermeneutic clues.
Kafka’s earliest preserved piece, the short story “Description of a Struggle” (writ-
ten between 1903–7), is a prime example of a virtually impenetrable modernist text
 BOOS / reading gestures
that straddles the borders between dream and reality—and between a set of obscure 845
characters who meet under bizarre circumstances, travel invented landscapes, and
pray in a strangely violent manner. For Louis A. Sass, the work presents “the most
vivid evocation of the schizophrenic experience not only in Kafka but in all of Western
literature,” as it “contains nearly every feature of modernism, including derealization,
dehumanization (disappearance of active self), giddy perspectivism or relativism,
and detachment” (Madness, 318). Sass’s description of the piece accurately captures
its stratified narrative structure and the somewhat off-putting progression through a
series of unstable (projected) narratorial points of view resulting in the doubtful, re-
fracted consciousness that came to epitomize modernism’s frail subjectivity. To Sass,
the complex narrative form compels the reader to undergo “something closely akin to
the experience” of the figural narrators, as reading this text is a struggle itself (321).
As he concludes: “‘Description of a Struggle’ seems almost to give us the experience
of schizophrenia itself: it is an extremely raw and direct, at times almost unbearable
presentation of . . . central schizoid themes” (318). But if schizophrenia is in fact
the disease of the “other”—too heterogeneous to be pinned down and too alien and
restricted for an outsider to grasp—then any suggestion of a narrative providing us
access to such a schizophrenic experience through the simple act of reading is bound
to be a contradiction. There is, in Sass’s account, a certain slippage between the text’s
(thematic or formal) representation of schizophrenia and the reader’s immersion into an
experience or state that this representation supposedly evokes. Of course, the alterna-
tive argument—that modernism and schizophrenia’s kinship is based on precisely their
refusal of logic, expressing a more resigned attitude according to which neither one can
be penetrated intellectually or emphatically—truncates any effort at arriving at a more
nuanced understanding of either paradigm and thus leads to an interpretive cul-de-sac.
This brings us back to the importance of an interdisciplinary, science-oriented explo-
ration of the links between bodily gestures and schizophrenia in Kafka’s prose, as they
promise to elucidate core questions about the modernist narrative. It is not just that
associations by schizophrenics—which, according to Bleuler, “normal individuals will
regard as incorrect, bizarre, and utterly unpredictable”—find their echo in modernist
texts, with their habitual tendency to stage the epistemological impossibility of telling
a coherent or truthful story (Dementia Praecox, 9). Beyond mirroring this tendency,
Kafka’s prose actively engages the ways in which bodily actions, poses, and gestures
are readable as signs of specific neurological deficits—body schema and body image
disorder—thereby offering a new formulation of the complex meanings of a schizo-
phrenic text. Kafka’s writings foreshadow the primacy of the body, which represents,
in the words of Ian McGilchrist, “the necessary context for all human experience.”50
As outward physical manifestations of neurological damage, gestures in Kafka belie
the claim that schizophrenia is incommensurable and as such representative of the
modernist experience. Instead they shift our focus to the concrete manifestations of
a very real aspect of modernity: the way in which the body becomes the playing field
upon which medical science and the humanities will increasingly pursue their interests.
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

846 Notes
1. Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death,” in Walter Benjamin:
Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1999), 795–818, 808.
2. See Jan Ehrenwald, Anatomy of Genius: Split Brains and Global Minds (New York: Human
Sciences Press, 1984), 156.
3. As a corrective to Theodor W. Adorno’s reading of Kafka’s Chaplinesque humor, Isolde Schif-
fermüller notes that Kafka’s concrete, real-life connection with the cinema and its culture of height-
ened gestural expressivity predates the silent movie era and the films of Charlie Chaplin (Isolde
Schiffermüller, Franz Kafkas Gesten: Studien zur Entstellung der menschlichen Sprache [Tübingen:
Francke, 2011], 31–32).
4. Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis, trans. and ed. Stanley Corngold (New York: Bantam, 1972), 7.
5. Franz Kafka, The Man Who Disappeared (America), trans. Ritchie Robertson (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2012), 6.
6. Franz Kafka, Description of a Struggle, trans. Tania and James Stern (New York: Schocken Books,
1958); Franz Kafka, Selected Stories, trans. and ed. Stanley Corngold (New York: Norton, 2007), 93;
Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Breon Mitchell (New York: Schocken Books, 1998).
7. According to Louis A. Sass, manifold diary entries and letters testify to Kafka’s schizoid ten-
dencies, defined by his feelings of vulnerability and anguish expressed therein and epitomized by his
alienated relationship toward his own literary production: the one thing to ground him in life was
also the very thing that further inflamed his sense of inferiority and foreignness. See Louis A. Sass,
Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). The triangulation among schizophrenia, modernism, and Kafka
extends into the author’s afterlife through the popular and critical reception of his writings. In the
1950s, Félix Guattari helped cure a young Jewish patient who suffered from pathological identifica-
tion with Kafka by encouraging him to write stories himself (Félix Guattari, Jean Daive program on
France Culture, August 24, 2003, Institut national de l’audiovisuel, Paris, quoted in François Dosse,
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives, trans. Deborah Glassman [New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 2007], 247). And in a more recent article, Aaron L. Michara, a psychiatrist and
psychologist venturing into the “historical period of [literary] modernism,” defined Kafka’s nocturnal
writing spells as “hypnagogic hallucinations” that could elucidate the underlying cognitive and neural
causes of “paranoid delusions of schizophrenia” (Aaron L. Mishara, “Kafka, Paranoic Doubles and
the Brain: Hypnagogic vs. Hyper-reflexive Models of Disrupted Self in Neuropsychiatric Disorders
and Anomalous Conscious States,” Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine 5 [2010]: 13).
8. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 61.
9. Duden, February 2018, “Hosennaht, die, n.”
10. Joel Paris, The Intelligent Clinician’s Guide to the DSM-5 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2015), 98.
11. Eugen Bleuler, Dementia Praecox or The Group of Schizophrenia, trans. Joseph Zinkin (New
York: International Universities Press, 1950), 350.
12. “In paranoia the mechanism of the construction of the delusions is identical with that of
schizophrenia; thus it may be possible that paranoia is an entirely chronic schizophrenia which is so
mild that it could just about lead to delusional ideas” (Bleuler, Dementia Praecox, 281).
13. Hartmut Binder, Motiv und Gestaltung bei Franz Kafka (Bonn: Bouvier, 1966).
14. See Walter H. Sokel, The Myth of Power and the Self: Essays on Franz Kafka (Detroit, MI:
Wayne State University Press, 2002), 153.
15. For an overview and critique of previous attempts to conceptualize “body schema,” see Klaus
Poeck and Bernt Orgass, “The Concept of the Body Schema: A Critical Review and Some Experimental
Results,” Cortex 7 (1971): 254–77.
16. Contrary to schizophrenia, body schema disorder cannot be cured through therapy, although
perception of the body schema can be improved through extensive repetition of tasks.
 BOOS / reading gestures
17. See Reiner Stach, Kafka: The Decisive Years, trans. Shelley Frisch (Princeton, NJ: Princeton 847
University Press, 2005), 86–90.
18. John Zilcosky, “Kafka’s Poetics of Indeterminacy: On Trauma, Hysteria, and Simulation at the
Fin de Siècle,” Monatshefte 113 (2011): 344–59, 346.
19. Jacques Rancière, The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge, trans. Hassan Melehy
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 8. On the notion of “poetics of knowledge” see
also Joseph Vogl, Poetologien des Wissens um 1800 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1999), 7–16.
20. Heinrich von Kleist, “The Puppet Theatre,” in Selected Writings, trans, and ed. David Con-
stantine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 411–16. The term “blood relative” appears in a
letter to Felice Bauer on September 2, 1913 (Franz Kafka, Briefe. 1913–1914, ed. Hans-Gerd Koch
[Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999], 275).
21. Jay M. Goldberg, Victor J. Wilson, and Kathleen E. Cullen, et al., “Historical Transforma-
tion,” ancillary online material for The Vestibular System: A Sixth Sense (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2011), oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195167085.001.0001/
acprof-9780195167085/.
22. For a review of works describing distorted body experiences observed in schizophrenic pa-
tients (including works by Bleuler and Schilder), see Seymour Fisher, Body Experience in Fantasy
and Behavior (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970), 545. The author, however, reports to
have “encountered considerable difficulty in his attempts to delineate empirically the nature of body
schema distortions which occur in those who are seriously maladjusted” (Fisher, Body, 545). See also
Mishara, who notes that “patients with schizophrenia often complain about losing a sense of their
bodies as material object, including the ability to attribute a sense of ownership to their thoughts and
bodies” (Aaron L. Mishara, “Body Self and Its Narrative Representation in Schizophrenia,” in Body
Image and Body Schema: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Body, ed. Helena De Preester and
Veroniek Knockaert [Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, 2005], 127–52, 130).
23. Joseph Babinski, “Contribution à l’étude des troubles mentaux dans l’hémiplégie organique
cérébrale (anosognosie)” (“Contribution to the Study of Mental Disorders in Organic Cerebral
Hemiplegia [Anosognosia]”), Revue Neurologique 37 (1914): 845–48, quoted in Classic Cases in
Neuropsychology, ed. Chris Code, Claus-W. Wallesch, Yves Joanette, and André Roch Lecours, vol.
2, Brain Damage, Behaviour, and Cognition (New York, Psychology Press, 2001), 177.
24. Henry Head and Gordon Holmes, “Sensory Disturbances from Cerebral Lesions,” Brain 34
(1911): 102–254.
25. See George P. Prigatano, The Study of Anosognosia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
26. On Kafka’s status vis-à-vis high modernism, see, most recently, Joshua Kavaloski, High Mod-
ernism: Aestheticism and Performativity in Literature of the 1920s (Rochester, NY: Camden House,
2014), 109.
27. As Sokel argues, Kafka’s allegorical prose “insists on a search for meaning, but . . . frustrates
all attempts to deliver it. Craving for meaning and eternal denial of it is the statement allegory makes
about the world” (Myth, 106).
28. Arnold Pick, Studien zur Hirnpathologie und Psychologie (Berlin: S. Karger, 1908), 1.
29. Shaun Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 2005), 6.
30. The term “body schema” was established by Head and Holmes in 1911 to signify the mental
concept formed by the individual of their own body.
31. Stanley Corngold, “Explanatory Notes to the Text,” in Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis,
57–102, 63.
32. See Walter H. Sokel, “Beyond Self-Assertion: A Life of Reading Kafka,” in A Companion to
the Works of Franz Kafka, ed. James Rolleston (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2002), 33–60, 41.
33. Anniken Greve, “The Human Body and the Human Being in ‘Die Verwandlung,’” in Franz
Kafka: Narration, Rhetoric, and Reading, ed. Jakob Lothe, Beatrice Sandberg, and Ronald Speirs
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011), 40–57, 44.
34. Joseph Vogl, Ort der Gewalt: Kafkas literarische Ethik (Zürich: Diaphanes, 2010), 127.
35. An explicit mention of the genitals would have been a breach of decorum in Kafka’s time. Given,
however, that the scene is more than just evocative of rape, the contrast between Karl’s ignorance
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848 and the detailed description of the intercourse makes it possible to interpret his reaction as part of
his aberrant self-perception.
36. Paul Schilder, “Localization of Body Image,” Proceedings of the Association for Research in
Nervous and Mental Disease 13, no. 5 (1934): 466–84, 466; and Paul Schilder, The Image and Appear-
ance of the Human Body: Studies in Constructive Energies of the Psyche (London: K. Paul, 1935),
11. Pointing to the historical confusion of the terms body image and body schema, Shaun Gallagher
traces both terms back to the work of Schilder, who used them interchangeably (Gallagher, How, 19).
37. On the question of animal consciousness and self-awareness, see Donald R. Griffin, Animal
Minds: Beyond Cognition to Consciousness (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
38. See on this Kári Driscoll, “An Unheard, Inhuman Language: Narrative Voice and the Ques-
tion of the Animal in Kafka’s ‘Josephine, the Singer or the Mouse Folk,’” Humanities 6, no. 2 (2017).
39. Andrea Baer, “Performative Emotion in Kafka and Freud,” in Kafka’s Creatures: Animals,
Hybrids, and Other Fantastic Beings, ed. Marc Lucht and Donna Yarri (New York: Lexington Books,
2010), 137–56, 139.
40. Hermann Munk, Über die Funktionen der Großhirnrinde (Berlin: August Hirschwald, 1890), 22.
41. Henricus Cornelius Rümke, “The Nuclear Symptom of Schizophrenia and the Praecox Feel-
ing” [1941], trans. J. Neeleman, History of Psychiatry 1 (1990): 331–41.
42. See Stanley Corngold, “Medial Allusions at the Outset of ‘Der Prozeß’ or, res in media,” in A
Companion to the Work of Franz Kafka, 149–70, 154.
43. Franz Karl Stanzel, A Theory of Narrative, trans. Charlotte Goedsche (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1984), 186.
44. Harold Bloom, Introduction to Franz Kafka, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House
Publishers, 2005), 1–3, 1.
45. See Carrie L. Asman, “The Language of Defamiliarization: Benjamin’s Kafka,” in Approaches
to Teaching Kafka’s Short Fiction, ed. Richard T. Gray (New York: Modern Language Association of
America, 1995), 76–83.
46. See Max Brod’s postscript to Franz Kafka, The Trial (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), 334.
See also Carolin Duttlinger, The Cambridge Introduction to Franz Kafka (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2013), 123.
47. Martin Puchner, “Kafka’s Antitheatrical Gestures,” The Germanic Review 78, no. 3 (2003):
177–93, 179.
48. Werner Hamacher, “Die Geste im Namen. Benjamin und Kafka,” in Entferntes Verstehen.
Studien zur Philosophie und Literatur von Kant bis Celan (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998), 280–323, 319.
49. Karl Jaspers, General Psychopathology, trans. J. Hoenig and Marian W. Hamilton (Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 449. Bleuler notes that the symptoms of schizophrenia “exist
in varying degrees and shadings on the entire scale from pathological to normal” (Dementia Praecox,
13). In view of their “fluctuating character . . . it is not to be expected that we shall be able to dem-
onstrate each and every symptom”; further, “The emergence of an idea without any connection with
a previous train of thought, or without any external stimulus, is . . . so foreign to normal psychology
that one is obliged to look even in the patient’s seemingly most far-fetched ideas” (22).
50. Ian McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the
Western World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 118, emphasis in original.