Abstract
The first attempt at the physiognomy of a particular text is realized on the chapter "In the Cathedral" from Franz Kafka's The Trial (1925). To avoid traditional interpretation of famous "Kafkaesque themes," I focused on a detailed examination of the narrative scene, e.g. the space of the cathedral which I propose as a visual mode shaping the writing of Kafka's text.
This mode is represented by the architecture of the Gothic cathedral, the principles of which were formulated by art historian Wilhelm Worringer in relation to his notion of "the Gothic will to form," and which are embodied in the figure of ornament. The space of the cathedral (interpreted as an "invention of writing," not a real construction), a place of "an exalted hysteria" where a "senseless rage of expression" flows, as Worringer puts it, created by gothic lines resigning from representation, inspires an approach to literary speech not from the point of view of its message, but its motion and physiognomy.
This staged encounter of literary speech and Gothic space, two phenomena which mutually produce each other, allows for experimentation and a possibility to avoid classical interpretation focusing on the historical context or the author's work. Instead, it opens a way to concentrate on the anonymous "movement of writing," which runs through the text, and on the understanding of its visuality and its resonance with space.
A dynamic and complex current flowing without any given intention, a chaotic tangle of lines, a missing center, vertigo, pathos, expression prevailing over meaning - such are the principles of both Worringer's Gothic and Kafka's writing.