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"Up in the Gallery" (German: "Auf der Galerie") is a short piece of fiction written by Franz Kafka. It was created between November 1916 and February 1917 and published in the collection ''A Country Doctor (collection), Ein Landarzt'' (''A Country Doctor'') in 1919.Richard T. Gray, "Auf der Gallerie", ''A Franz Kafka Encyclopedia''; Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2005; pp
21
€“22. The story offers two versions of a scene in which a young man watches a circus ringmaster and a woman on horseback.
Broadly speaking, the story invokes the topsy-turvy relationship between “Being, Sein” and “Schein” (being and appearance), a mainstay of 19th-century German idealism, that Kafka likes to complicate throughout his writing. Both sentences of narration contain elements which suggest a dream state or hallucination.Hans Osterwalder,
Dreamscapes: Harold Pinter's ''The Room'' and Franz Kafka's 'Auf der Galerie'
; ''Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik'' 52(1), 2004; pp. 57–60. Although grammatically the first sentence is presented as counterfactual and the second sentence presented are factual, both describe scenarios mediated by the fallible perception of the Galeriebesucher. The 'truth' of the second version may lie only in the fact that this version reflects the Galeriebesucher's limited conscious responses to the scenario. A common interpretation of the story posits that the first sentence describes a more truthful version of reality, evoking a noble and appropriate reaction from the young man. The young man of sentence two cries involuntarily from sadness because his body perceives the cruelty implicit in the situation.Theisen, "Kafka's Circus Turns" (2005), p. 175. “Can power, exploitation, and inhuman discipline—expressed in images of circus training—be masked so completely that their perception fades into one dim, inarticulate expression of sorrow within the communal feeling of “bliss,” into an expression that ultameimately marks nothing but a textual void (Vogl 109)? The assumption that the spectator's tears are tears of sorrow, and thus an affective reaction to the hypothetical reality described in paragraph one, relies on an interpretation that takes as reality what Kafka presents in the subjunctive, and takes as lie or illusion what Kafka offers in the indicative.” Galeriebesucher1 might represent the true but suppressed feelings of Galeriebesucher2. A fatalist reading would emphasize the actual helplessness of Galeriebesucher2 as a reflection of Kafka's perceived impotence and perhaps emblematic of the futility of the human condition. Peter Heller lists the “gallery” story as an example of Kafka's (failed) “experimentation with the positive". The Direktor is often understood a coalescence of social evil: perhaps an agent of the system of class oppression, or perhaps a domineering patriarchal father. The Kunstreiterin is generally seen as exploited: for her physical labor and for her value as a sexual commodity within a patriarchy, patriarchal system. The two male characters over how the Kunstreiterin is to be perceived, but her agency is limited in either case, as a victim of the cruel master (who resembles a pimp) or as a damsel in distress to be rescued by another man.Boa, “a resistant reading” (1991), pp. 492–493. Freudian readers would immediately perceive a classic Oedipus complex, Oedipal situation, in which the younger man experiences shame and frustration when an older, more powerful man (with a whip) obstructs his access to the beautiful woman. A twist on this reading proposes to explore the changes in power dynamics between the male ringmaster and the female performer. According to common interpretations, the story poses the question of how a person's vantage point may affect their ethical choices. The power to intervene, available in the story only to Galeriebesucher1 who sees the circus in a sort of blurry long exposure photography, long exposure, comes to those who can pierce the veil of ideology and understand social processes on a deeper level. Bianca Theisen prefers to focus on the inherent ambiguity of performance, identifying the reader with the ''Galeriebesucher'' and arguing: “The ambivalence of the text's final gesture offers no clear exegesis to the incongruities and contrasts set up by the two paragraphs and reproduces the circular relationship between negation and affirmation that organizes and reorganizes a miserable reality as mere fiction and an illusionary mirage as reality.” Theisen observes: “Weeping is not univocal; tears can also indicate joy.” Ultimately, she argues, the spectator's tears indicate only his uncontrollable body. Elizabeth Boa contests the 'heroic' aspects of the subjunctive world in sentence one. First, even this scenario envisions only ''possible'' action by the Galeriebesucher. Given the structural ambiguity of observation and interpretation, might every witness to atrocity behave just as passively at the weeping spectator in the story?Boa, “a resistant reading” (1991), p. 491. “Perhaps the occasional reader has rushed out from reading a fiction to shout 'Stop!' But can fiction offer knowledge even of what it is that has to be stopped? Does the fictional circus refer to anything? The man perhaps weeps because he recognizes that he is not seeing through the surface to underlying truth, but is himself caught up in a fiction. And even if fiction is ''das zweite Gesicht'', revealing truth behind appearances (as several critics assume of the first paragraph), will it make any difference? To see through the surface makes the man weep rather than act. Either way, it is better, perhaps, to remain a consumer of pretty fictions, like the circus in the second paragraph, rather than the horror-tales as in the first.” The uncertainty alone is enough to make one weep. Boa denies that Kafka has fully pierced the ideological veil, writing: “The text purports to show how certain social interactions work: given this set of attitudes and self-understanding, that effect may result; but the attitudes and self-understanding have an unstable, experimental quality, like the young man's masculinity.” What the story ''really'' shows, Boa argues, is “art-production as the obsessive circlings of sado-masochistic masculinity and of a divided self”—manifested as layers of textual ambiguity organized around the figure of an unknowable woman.
via ProQuest
3 July 2013. *Hawes, J. M. “Blind Resistance? A reply to Elizabeth Boa's 'Resistant Reading of Kafka's ''Auf der Galerie”. ''Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fur Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte'' 69(2), June 1995. Accesse
via ProQuest
3 July 2013. * Ritter, Naomi. ''Art As Spectacle: Images of the Entertainer Since Romanticism''. University of Missouri Press, 1989. * Spahr, Blake Lee. “'Auf der Galerie': A Stylistic Analysis”. ''German Quarterly'' 33(3), May 1960; pp. 211–215. Accesse
via JStor
3 July 2013. * Theisen, Bianca.
Kafka's Circus Turns: 'Auf der Galerie' and 'Erstes Leid
". ''Companion to the Works of Franz Kafka'', ed. James Rolleston. Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2006.
"Up in the Gallery" (German: "Auf der Galerie") is a short piece of fiction written by Franz Kafka. It was created between November 1916 and February 1917 and published in the collection ''A Country Doctor (collection), Ein Landarzt'' (''A Country Doctor'') in 1919.Richard T. Gray, "Auf der Gallerie", ''A Franz Kafka Encyclopedia''; Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2005; pp21
€“22. The story offers two versions of a scene in which a young man watches a circus ringmaster and a woman on horseback.
Text
Story
The story features three human characters: * The ''Kunstreiterin'', a woman performer riding a horse (''Pferd'') in circles around an arena; * The ''Direktor'', a Ringmaster (circus), circus ringmaster who supervises the woman's progress; and * The ''Galeriebesucher'', a spectator at the circus who watches from the gallery. The story has two paragraphs. The first paragraph describes a possible (subjective) reality, in which the Galeriebesucher witnesses the Kunstreiterin (and her Pferd) suffering because the cruel Direktor forces them to perform. The Galeriebesucher rushes into the arena to intervene. The second paragraph describes "how things are" (objective): the Direktor seems protective of the Kunstreiterin and orchestrates her performance only reluctantly, while the Galeriebesucher absorbs the scenario—and unconsciously weeps.Exegesis
The first scenario is mechanical and out of focus; the sound of the orchestra blends with the noise of the ventilators and the audience's applauding hands are “really steamhammers”. In the second scenario, details are precise, sequential, and dramatic. The Galeriebesucher identifies heavily with the situation he witnesses, such that these details seem to encompass his worldview (and govern his action). In the first sentence, he seems empowered to change the situation; in the second, he seems helpless.Boa, “a resistant reading” (1991), pp. 487–488. “The first looks like a sequence of cause and possible effect. By the end of the paragraph the narratee is confidently in control of the story, or of a tentative sketch towards a story, just as the young man deiciseively acts to control events in the circus.” The noise of the story and the tempo of the writing coincide to emphasize this moment of intervention at the end of the first sentence.
Broadly speaking, the story invokes the topsy-turvy relationship between “Being, Sein” and “Schein” (being and appearance), a mainstay of 19th-century German idealism, that Kafka likes to complicate throughout his writing. Both sentences of narration contain elements which suggest a dream state or hallucination.Hans Osterwalder,Dreamscapes: Harold Pinter's ''The Room'' and Franz Kafka's 'Auf der Galerie'
; ''Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik'' 52(1), 2004; pp. 57–60. Although grammatically the first sentence is presented as counterfactual and the second sentence presented are factual, both describe scenarios mediated by the fallible perception of the Galeriebesucher. The 'truth' of the second version may lie only in the fact that this version reflects the Galeriebesucher's limited conscious responses to the scenario. A common interpretation of the story posits that the first sentence describes a more truthful version of reality, evoking a noble and appropriate reaction from the young man. The young man of sentence two cries involuntarily from sadness because his body perceives the cruelty implicit in the situation.Theisen, "Kafka's Circus Turns" (2005), p. 175. “Can power, exploitation, and inhuman discipline—expressed in images of circus training—be masked so completely that their perception fades into one dim, inarticulate expression of sorrow within the communal feeling of “bliss,” into an expression that ultameimately marks nothing but a textual void (Vogl 109)? The assumption that the spectator's tears are tears of sorrow, and thus an affective reaction to the hypothetical reality described in paragraph one, relies on an interpretation that takes as reality what Kafka presents in the subjunctive, and takes as lie or illusion what Kafka offers in the indicative.” Galeriebesucher1 might represent the true but suppressed feelings of Galeriebesucher2. A fatalist reading would emphasize the actual helplessness of Galeriebesucher2 as a reflection of Kafka's perceived impotence and perhaps emblematic of the futility of the human condition. Peter Heller lists the “gallery” story as an example of Kafka's (failed) “experimentation with the positive". The Direktor is often understood a coalescence of social evil: perhaps an agent of the system of class oppression, or perhaps a domineering patriarchal father. The Kunstreiterin is generally seen as exploited: for her physical labor and for her value as a sexual commodity within a patriarchy, patriarchal system. The two male characters over how the Kunstreiterin is to be perceived, but her agency is limited in either case, as a victim of the cruel master (who resembles a pimp) or as a damsel in distress to be rescued by another man.Boa, “a resistant reading” (1991), pp. 492–493. Freudian readers would immediately perceive a classic Oedipus complex, Oedipal situation, in which the younger man experiences shame and frustration when an older, more powerful man (with a whip) obstructs his access to the beautiful woman. A twist on this reading proposes to explore the changes in power dynamics between the male ringmaster and the female performer. According to common interpretations, the story poses the question of how a person's vantage point may affect their ethical choices. The power to intervene, available in the story only to Galeriebesucher1 who sees the circus in a sort of blurry long exposure photography, long exposure, comes to those who can pierce the veil of ideology and understand social processes on a deeper level. Bianca Theisen prefers to focus on the inherent ambiguity of performance, identifying the reader with the ''Galeriebesucher'' and arguing: “The ambivalence of the text's final gesture offers no clear exegesis to the incongruities and contrasts set up by the two paragraphs and reproduces the circular relationship between negation and affirmation that organizes and reorganizes a miserable reality as mere fiction and an illusionary mirage as reality.” Theisen observes: “Weeping is not univocal; tears can also indicate joy.” Ultimately, she argues, the spectator's tears indicate only his uncontrollable body. Elizabeth Boa contests the 'heroic' aspects of the subjunctive world in sentence one. First, even this scenario envisions only ''possible'' action by the Galeriebesucher. Given the structural ambiguity of observation and interpretation, might every witness to atrocity behave just as passively at the weeping spectator in the story?Boa, “a resistant reading” (1991), p. 491. “Perhaps the occasional reader has rushed out from reading a fiction to shout 'Stop!' But can fiction offer knowledge even of what it is that has to be stopped? Does the fictional circus refer to anything? The man perhaps weeps because he recognizes that he is not seeing through the surface to underlying truth, but is himself caught up in a fiction. And even if fiction is ''das zweite Gesicht'', revealing truth behind appearances (as several critics assume of the first paragraph), will it make any difference? To see through the surface makes the man weep rather than act. Either way, it is better, perhaps, to remain a consumer of pretty fictions, like the circus in the second paragraph, rather than the horror-tales as in the first.” The uncertainty alone is enough to make one weep. Boa denies that Kafka has fully pierced the ideological veil, writing: “The text purports to show how certain social interactions work: given this set of attitudes and self-understanding, that effect may result; but the attitudes and self-understanding have an unstable, experimental quality, like the young man's masculinity.” What the story ''really'' shows, Boa argues, is “art-production as the obsessive circlings of sado-masochistic masculinity and of a divided self”—manifested as layers of textual ambiguity organized around the figure of an unknowable woman.
Context
Franz Kafka Franz Kafka works, wrote “Up in the Gallery” while living with his sister Ottla Kafka. He soon after rented his own apartment and moved out. Kafka not only attended circuses but also read periodicals about them. The circus motif figures prominently in his writing. “Der Galerie” might refer not just to the seating for an audience, but to the cheap seats high up: the bleachers. Segregation by class of a circus audience would have been noticeable and significant to Kafka. The captive equestrienne of “Up in the Gallery” has been compared to Kafka's self-starving “A Hunger Artist, hunger artist”.Ritter, ''Art As Spectacle'' (1989), p. 85. Kafka may have considered these performers, beleaguered unto sickness by the demands of their audience, as representative of artists in general.Theisen, "Kafka's Circus Turns" (2005), p. 172See also
* Ringmaster (horse show) * Feminist film theory * Feminism and the Oedipus complex * HermeneuticsReferences
Sources
* Boa, Elizabeth. “Kafka's 'Auf der Gallerie': a resistant reading.” ''Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fur Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte'' 65(3), September 1991. Accessevia ProQuest
3 July 2013. *Hawes, J. M. “Blind Resistance? A reply to Elizabeth Boa's 'Resistant Reading of Kafka's ''Auf der Galerie”. ''Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fur Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte'' 69(2), June 1995. Accesse
via ProQuest
3 July 2013. * Ritter, Naomi. ''Art As Spectacle: Images of the Entertainer Since Romanticism''. University of Missouri Press, 1989. * Spahr, Blake Lee. “'Auf der Galerie': A Stylistic Analysis”. ''German Quarterly'' 33(3), May 1960; pp. 211–215. Accesse
via JStor
3 July 2013. * Theisen, Bianca.
Kafka's Circus Turns: 'Auf der Galerie' and 'Erstes Leid
". ''Companion to the Works of Franz Kafka'', ed. James Rolleston. Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2006.
External links
* {{Kafka Short stories by Franz Kafka 1919 short stories