I have always been struck by the incredible volume and variety of Kafka criticism and theory that is available. What I have found particularly frustrating is the ultimate inadequacy, however well-written, of such writing. There are seemingly as many different schools of thought and "interpretations" of Kafka as there are words in the English language. What I have come to realize is that this was always already Kafka's exact and inevitable intention. Kafka is theory; his texts explore the fluid and changing relationship between "sign" and "signified", between "concrete" and "figurative" language, between "reader" and "text." It is as impossible for us to stop interpreting Kafka as it is for us to stop interpreting language; just as we cannot look at a word on a page and not read it, we cannot read Kafka and not interpret it.
Harold Bloom has said that Kafka did everything possible to evade interpretation, which only means that what most demands interpretation in Kafka's writing is its deliberate evasion of interpretation. If we accept that Kafka deliberately tries to evade interpretation, to make finding the "right" meaning in his texts all but impossible, what we must next ask ourselves is "Why?" What Kafka was attempting to do every time he put pen to paper was to explode language and our relationship to it from within, to "concretely touch its limits." Kafka was particularly interested in the use of metaphor, as he felt that metaphor was the heart of all language. However, he despaired that metaphorical language could ever express what he was trying to express; he felt that the correct action for writing was a "raising up" rather than a "carrying over." For Kafka, metaphor was always already linked to the world of the mundane; it was not possible to reach a "higher" state through writing because metaphor allowed only a "carrying over" from one sphere of existence to another. No matter how creative the metaphor, writing can never go beyond itself.
