No exit? Hegemony and hopelessness in Kafka, Beckett, and Handke.

Abstract

This dissertation combines a discussion of the concept of hegemony developed by Antonio Gramsci and Raymond Williams with readings of Kafka's Der Prozess (1925) and Das Schloss (1926), Beckett's trilogy Molloy (1951/1955), Malone Dies (1951/1956), and The Unnamable (1953/1958), and Handke's early novels Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter (1970) and Die Stunde der wahren Empfindung (1975), in order to let the concept and the novels illuminate each other, showing on the one hand that these novels are much more hopeful than the grotesque predicaments of their protagonists suggest, and observing on the other hand how the novels productively concretize the problems and possibilities outlined by Gramsci and Williams. The concept of hegemony sees power relations in society going far beyond physical force and conscious propaganda to pervade the entire social process, producing themselves as common sense and thus passing unnoticed. The seemingly absurd hopelessness of these novels results from the protagonists' becoming aware of the operation of hegemony: Kafka's K.s are subjected to the obscene pervasiveness and contradictoriness of the hegemony of the Law and the Castle, whose supposed purity and infallibility conceals a sordid sexuality and grotesque incompetence; Beckett's protagonists experience language not as a transparent medium of expression, but as invasively and inescapably structuring and limiting their experience; and Handke's Bloch and Keuschnig are tortured by the monumental boredom of the automatized habits of perception and action constituting hegemonic routine. The pervasiveness of hegemony means a corresponding ubiquity of sites of resistance. By their attention to detail, the novels reveal the contradictions and alternatives concealed by hegemonic common sense, and the revelation of these inevitable contradictions and exclusions demonstrates the inexhaustible potential for resistance to hegemony. In particular, the novels concretize Gramsci's and Williams' assertions of the fundamental role of language in producing hegemonic common sense, and although especially Beckett demonstrates the inescapability of language, we see the uncontrollable instability of this pillar on which hegemony rests. The dissertation concludes with a call for a social pursuit of local truths stable enough to forestall the anarchic meaninglessness looming in Beckett and Handke, but flexible enough to permit ongoing adjustment as their own contradictions and limitations become oppressive.