Sketchy! Kafka’s Drawings in Medias Res

This essay traces the ways in which Kafka's drawings position themselves adamantly in the middle of things: temporally both through the foregrounding of their own becoming and through dynamic evocations of motion, as well as interpersonally through networks of performance and observation. The article juxtaposes images with texts such as "Wunsch, Indianer zu werden," "Der Kübelreiter," and sections of letters that describe the process of drawing to argue for a generative rather than privative sense of incomplete becoming that functions differently in the two media. It also explores how meanings arise and vary through relation and perspective. The images reflect self-referentially on the visual medium through depicted acts of observation, and also offer a visual commentary on textuality through expressive portraits of Kafka's own relatives reading. The drawings' sketchiness—their dynamic refusal of closure—enables a theory of humor in Kafka's work as arising from the way the viewer is "drawn into" the images. The recognition of one's own implication in this prolific openness of bodies and in the always-undercut drive to find meanings reveals the viewer as a co-inhabiter of an absurd and yet vibrant world in flux.