Residual Revolution

The Quiet Politics of Vineland and One Battle After Another

When Thomas Pynchon published Vineland in 1990, the novel read as a post-Reagan elegy for the long twilight of the ’60s, populated by ex-radicals, countercultural communes, and a society that had learned to domesticate dissent. Thirty-five years later, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, his loose, fever-bright adaptation of Vineland, feels tuned to our late-digital moment: a vision of political disillusion refracted through cinematic spectacle.

One Battle After Another has been justly praised on many fronts: for its storytelling, plot construction, pacing, and blending of multiple tonal registers (political satire, action thriller, noir comedy), as well as for the profound humanity of the main characters, so vividly rendered that even the worst of them, the cruel and despicable Col. Lockjaw, elicits a fleeting sense of empathy by the end , which is not the case with the even more vile and obnoxious “Christmas adventurers”.

The cast, to be sure, delivers career-best performances, breathing life into every nuance. And visually, the film is indeed a feast, filled with arresting vistas and breathtaking sequences  – from the opening border-wall tableau to the final car chase, with the camera arcing and plunging like a surfer chasing a monstrous wave –, all crafted with artistry and bound together by Jonny Greenwood’s astonishing score, which functions not merely as accompaniment but as an interpretive force in its own right.

And yet, critical reservations have emerged, particularly regarding the film’s depiction of revolution and political action, and the ambiguity of its moral centre; reservations that open a window onto its dialogue with Vineland.

Pynchon’s novel is a sustained meditation on lost revolutionary potential and how remnants of that energy might still be tapped at a time of political exhaustion. Set in 1984, it continually flashes back to the ’60s counterculture, where spectral figures  ( the Thanatoids ) are haunted by the defeats of that era’s radical movements. By contrast, One Battle After Another has been criticized, particularly from a leftist perspective, for transforming political longing into spectacle, turning resistance into mere display. In this view, revolutionary desire becomes kink or stylistic flourish rather than collective orientation, obscuring the subtler, enduring political currents that Pynchon cultivates.

Such a binary  – the power of memory versus the seduction of spectacle  – misses the deeper continuity between the works. Vineland reflects a moment of disillusionment. Pynchon looks back at the ’60s through the lens of the Reagan era, defined by corporate dominance, militarization, and the emergence of the culture wars , features that today attain the paroxysm.

Though the Vietnam War was over, the psychic aftermath of both the war and the counterculture’s failure to sustain its radical ideals remained vivid. The novel is thus less an exercise in nostalgia than an inquiry into the collapse of a particular vision of freedom and revolution, exploring the gulf opened between promise and reality.

Pynchon portrays a generation suspended between the remnants of non-conformism and the entrenched conservative order that replaced it, a moment when resistance was simultaneously fragmented, repressed, and co-opted, caught in the constant tension between the desire for transformation and the crushing weight of power structures.

The connection between the two periods is tenuous but not entirely lost. Prairie Wheeler, the fourteen-year-old daughter of former radicals, embodies this fragile continuity. She may not inherit her mother Frenesi Gates’s revolutionary fervor, yet she still inhabits a world shaped by that earlier struggle.

Beneath its comic surface, Vineland exposes the legacy of COINTELPRO-style repression and the ways in which the state systematically dismantled and absorbed anti-establishment dissent. Though that utopian charge has waned, Pynchon suggests that traces persist, in memory, in scattered acts of resistance, and in the absurd resilience of figures like Zoyd Wheeler.

In Vineland, the middle names of Prairie’s parents  –  Frenesi Margaret Gates and Zoyd Herbert Wheeler  – function as covert historical signifiers that condense the ideological shift from the radical ’60s to the neoliberal ’80s. “Margaret” invokes Thatcher and the consolidation of market hegemony, while “Herbert” alludes to Marcuse, emblem of the countercultural Left. Frenesi personifies seduction and betrayal: a onetime radical turned state collaborator, moving from underground film collectives to work for the Nixonian political pornography machine. Zoyd, by contrast, now hapless, aging, and stuck in ritualized rebellion, represents a ghostly trace of that earlier intellectual ferment, now faded into nostalgia and farce. 

Their unlikely union, producing Prairie, allegorizes the fusion of these antagonistic legacies: the utopian impulse of the ’60s  –  the radical vision of a civilization of Eros  – absorbed and neutralized within the hyper-commodified, “post-ideological” landscape of the Reagan era. Through this pairing, Pynchon dramatizes the passage from the utopian and collectivist aspirations of the New Left to the besieged and managed subjectivity of late imperial America.

That’s where the deviations and overlapping between Pynchon’s novel and Anderson’s film come into play. As critic Rory Doherty notes in his review for Time magazine: 

“Apart from their contrasting structural approaches and character backstories, the biggest difference between text and film is setting. Vineland is overflowing with period detail, often ludicrous and sometimes satirically invented, rooted in the history of radicals being expunged by the Nixonian establishment, leading to the inevitable, reductive confines of Reagan’s ‘War on Drugs’ project. But the immediacy of One Battle After Another  – with its ICE-like detention camps, unlawful militias storming American streets, and elites who promote white supremacy in closed-door meetings  – was intended to embellish the spirit of Vineland rather than undermine it.”

Both novel and film imagine the wreckage of American radicalism, but they do so through different narrative devices and angles. In Pynchon’s novel, the People’s Republic of Rock and Roll (PR³) and the film collective 24fps form a paired allegory for the counterculture’s collapse into image and surveillance. In One Battle After Another, the militant faction French 75 re-stages that collapse in a more literal, violent key, turning the mediated irony of Pynchon’s world into a cinematic drama of insurgency and defeat. Taken together, they trace the passage from revolution as festival to revolution as ghost story.

In Vineland, PR³ is born from the irreverent utopian impulse of the ’60s: a college enclave that proclaims itself a sovereign micro-nation of peace, music, and weed. Pynchon renders it with the tone of a deadpan fable: the moment when political desire turns theatrical. Yet its very theatricality bears the imprint of its undoing. The members of the commune are already performing their freedom for the camera, which belongs to 24fps, the film collective that both documents and aestheticizes dissent. When Frenesi, 24fps’s camerawoman, begins filming for the authorities, the line between art and surveillance blurs. The revolution’s dream of visibility curdles into exposure. 

Allegorically, PR³ and 24fps represent the two faces of late-’60s radicalism: the yearning for liberated community and the fatal belief that liberation could be seen , that image was truth. Pynchon suggests that the counterculture’s tragedy lay not in repression alone but in its transformation into spectacle, its incorporation into the media economy it meant to overthrow.

One Battle After Another retools this parable into a more direct historical allegory. Its insurgent cell, French 75, condenses the real-world Weather Underground and similar militant groups that turned from protest to armed struggle. Where PR³ parodies the carnival republic, French 75 enacts the firing squad’s logic, yielding to the twin temptations of moral witness and elite voluntarism: the despairing revolt of a dissident petty-bourgeois group without a popular base.

The film compresses Pynchon’s layered temporality into a streamlined narrative of rise and ruin: bombings, betrayals, the erosion of ideals. Allegorically, French 75 stands for the afterimages of the ’60s, the moment when the spectacle of revolution sought to shatter itself through violence, only to become another genre of entertainment. The movie’s sleek cinematography and rhythmic editing make its very depiction of militancy complicit in the spectacle it critiques, accentuating that in both media ecologies, there is no exit from mediation.

Thus, PR³/24fps and French 75 form a dialectic. If Pynchon’s countercultural rebels are undone by representation, Anderson’s radicals implode in the immediacy of outrage. One is undone by the camera, the other by the gun. Between them unfolds the allegory of American idealism’s decay: the slow drift from communal euphoria to paranoia, from visibility to its weaponization.

By transforming PR³’s stoned republic into French 75’s guerrilla network, One Battle After Another trades Pynchon’s postmodern melancholy for tragic immediacy, yet both works end in the same space: the Reaganite (or Trumpist, it makes no difference) wasteland where rebellion survives only as image, an image that, in Anderson’s hands, intensifies rather than resolves that condition.

In that sense, PR³, 24fps, and French 75 are not different factions but sequential masks of the same fallen dream. Each names a stage in the long allegory of resistance: first the commune, then the camera, then the cell, each crushed, recorded, and replayed, until nostalgia is all that remains.

Yet there is another side to this story. Despite their differing emphases, both book and film are less concerned with simply recalling the past than with imagining how resistance, drawing on past experience, might persist in the present.

In Vineland, Pynchon’s focus on family (Prairie, Zoyd, Frenesi) and on the fragile solidarity of those left behind after the collapse of the counterculture points to the endurance of resistance through everyday care, loyalty, and kinship. If One Battle After Another carries this impulse forward, then what might appear to some viewers as spectacularization becomes instead a cinematic retranslation of that same political energy: a vision of how small solidarities, improvised alliances, and acts of attention persist within the hypermediated landscape of late neoliberalism. The parallel with Vineland might, in this sense, shed further light on this transformation.

Pynchon’s novel moves in the dreamlike, mnemonic, and fragmentary logic that defines his work: memory, transgression, failure, and the not-yet matter as much as the ostensible plot. Dreams and fantasies in Pynchon often operate as latent sites of political desire.

In Vineland, Prairie, the teenage girl yearning to reunite with her mother, stands in for the desire to maintain continuity with a radical past, a past foreclosed amid Reagan’s re-election campaign and by the then already omnipresent Tube (television), yet enduring virtually. Prairie inherits history and its defeats, though not in the same way as her parent’s generation. The crushed utopian energies of the ’60s persist, lingering in the present and waiting for another historical opening.

Watching archival footage of an earlier protest, she feels a belated surge of its lost intensity: 

“Even through the crude old color and distorted sound, Prairie could feel the liberation in the place that night, the faith that anything was possible, that nothing could stand in the way of such joyous certainty. She’d never seen anything like it before.” (Vineland, London: Minerva, 1990, p. 210)

Unlike in other Pynchon novels, where stronger revolutionary dynamics offer some measure of redemption  –  think the rocket counterforce in Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) or the anarchists of Against the Day (2006)  – Vineland presents a kind of smaller-scale survival. This has little to do with the survivalism of contemporary ideology; it concerns instead the endurance of a daughter, a broken family, a deferred dream. The novel’s ironic, “sitcom-like” closure signals the collapse of grand revolutionary energies, yet it also preserves the conditions for residual hope, as a not-yet-conscious desire.

Domesticity, seemingly apolitical, acquires a quiet political charge: everyday intimacy  – family, storytelling, solidarity  – carries its own utopian weight, a quiet refusal to surrender to surveillance and state power.

Back to Anderson’s film, reading it solely as a spectacle-driven flattening of utopian potential misses its attention to alternative forms of resistance: the ways family (however dysfunctional), lasting friendship, and the solidarity of margin-walkers operate as loci of present-day political possibility, echoing Vineland’s intimate counterforces.

In both works, “family” does not mean private retreat but a resistant social microstructure. In Vineland, Prairie’s search for her mother and the reconstitution of family becomes an allegory for rebuilding social memory and solidarity among the dispossessed. In One Battle After Another, family or communal ties among marginal figures resist incorporation into spectacle.

The margins, here, are not merely social but ontological , spaces of possibility where people can still act outside pre-scripted media narratives. This is Pynchon’s “counterforce” transposed into the visual register: not heroic revolution but distributed, everyday persistence.

Consider, for instance, Sensei Sergio’s  (Willa’s Latino karate teacher)  quiet kindness, resourcefulness, and composure, each put to work within the underground network protecting undocumented immigrants from fascist violence. Also, in the same sequence of this whole alternative organization of urban daily life  – one of the film’s highpoints –, the row-on-skateboard shot: youth in motion becomes a visual motif for marginality and improvisation, recalling the latent, restless energies of Pynchon’s world.

Skateboarding and urban or suburban youth culture resurge here as a figurative synthesis of life pulsating through camaraderie, rebellion, freedom, and the survival of alternative social spaces within rigidly structured, often oppressive environments. Like Prairie’s navigation of domestic and marginal spaces in Vineland, these fleeting moments of youthful mobility suggest the ongoing possibility of living otherwise, of asserting autonomy and solidarity under conditions that would otherwise constrain and surveil. In such gestures, Anderson’s new film finds its quiet politics: not the spectacle of sacrifice, but the slow labour of care. Not, therefore, a revolution televised, but one quietly sustained, in movement, memory, and ongoing attention.

Still, as Richard Brody recently noted in The New Yorker, whereas films such as Godard’s La Chinoise (1967) and Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970) sustained a documentary rapport with real activists and with the immediate experience of the political action they depict, One Battle After Another privileges instead the register of affective labor, resulting, according to the critic, in a film that is at once “brilliant and hollow”, “a vision of hopeful possibilities” yet “unmoored from realities”.

What may appear as vacuity, however, is less a failure of the film than the index of an objective impasse. The absence of direct “revolutionary labor” reflects the very logic of late neoliberalism, in which collective action, in the context of displaced industrialization and hyperproductivity, has been utterly fragmented, depleted, and aestheticized.

Ultimately, both Vineland and One Battle After Another converge in the imagination of a politics of the remainder, a politics of what persists when the grand narratives of emancipation seem exhausted. Pynchon had already intuited, amid the conservative backlash of the ’80s, that resistance would survive less as armed insurgency than as residual energy, dispersed through everyday gestures of care, memory, and solidarity. Anderson, in turn, translates this intuition into the visual regime of the twenty-first century, in which total mediation and spectacle have replaced direct experience. His wager is that pockets of meaning and community can still be cultivated within this regime: autonomous zones of affect and attention, where politics is relearned as a patient and shared practice.

Far from standing in opposition to collective organization, these zones may in fact be more closely in tune with forms of control of economic power devised by and for the working class, rooted in networks of material solidarity, mutual care, and the democratic reappropriation of urban space, and the available resources and means of production and survival.

What the film inherits from Vineland is not merely disillusionment, but the persistence of the possible in a time when we seem unable to see even a hand’s breadth ahead: a minimal utopia, that insists on germinating beneath the ruins of the spectacle.

[A previous version of this piece appeared in Portuguese on A Terra é Redonda]

Brussels, circa 2004

On the Intoxication of Youth and Fleeting Infinities

We sowed in youth a mustard seed,/ We cut an almond rod;/ We are now grown up to riper age:/ Are they withered in the sod?/ Are they blighted, failed and faded,/ Are they mouldered back to clay? (the Brontës)

A few luminous sequences in a film can cast a glow over the whole, transforming what might have left us indifferent into something distinct. In A Complete Unknown, within the shoebox dimensions of Dylan’s apartment – especially in those scenes circling the Cuban Missile Crisis – the dust and daylight conspire just so, sending me skidding down a wormhole to Brussels, around 2004, a time suspended in the aftermath of the great alter-globalization and anti-war protests, a moment that, in hindsight, rhymes more with 1962 than with anything that followed (specially after 2008, where everything started to go awry at an accelerated pace).

No television (no one seemed to take notice that it even existed), no internet (or barely: we checked our emails once or twice a week, at a call center, keeping online surfing to a minimum; it cost 50 cents per half-hour, money we’d rather spend on things that actually mattered), a phone, sure, portable in theory but mostly inert (with no cameras in hand, people seldom attempted to capture the living strand: pin-down a butterfly, and its wings forget the sky...).

Nobody seemed to really work. Money, when it appeared, vanished in an instant, funneled into booze & books. But somehow, that precarious edge of existence made everything shimmer. Reading like a beatnik, writing in a fever, making love to girls with names like forgotten poems, slipping in and out of second-hand bookstores where the yellowed pages carried the magical scent of new discoveries, the cinémathèque screening Tarkovsky, Fassbinder, or some New Wave deep cut, a jazz jam veering toward the sublime before collapsing into utter chaos, a friend’s apartment swelling nightly with bodies, bottles, and smoke, surrounded by a sea of possibility, moving beyond isolation through bright, bouncing synths, in the wild, surreal glam of moonage daydreams, the city itself, lights that never go out, unfolding in endless late-night conversations, each a whispered conspiracy against whatever dawn might bring...

Life had this lazy, unhurried rhythm, like it was stretching out, inhaling deep. We sprawled across the Grand Place like it was a secret we’d discovered, cheap beers sweating in our hands, the guilds catching the final rays of sunlight, shimmering in a way that felt like a half-remembered dream from some old Flemish painter, no panic about the passage of time, just this quiet, unspoken certainty that this moment, this exact moment, was infinite. 

Our Brussels was a polyphonic mestizo city where the notion of race held no dominion; a fleeting glimpse of a democratic oasis unsullied by commerce or greed (to borrow a phrase from Greil Marcus’ Invisible Republic), drawing wandering souls from across the globe: Angola, Argentina, Brazil, Cyprus, France, Germany, Ghana, Morocco, Martinique, Syria, Vietnam... In the many vernissages, encounters that felt like verses coming to life, fragments of poetry walking, speaking, unfolding in gestures, in glances that lingered just long enough to suggest entire unwritten stories. In the squats, their boots barely leaving the floor, pretty punkettes danced as if channeling some ancient, forgotten ritual. The music then – a collision of intensity, longing, rebellion, and transcendence – sounded like the emotional landscape of life-altering years, a soundtrack of raw desire, poetic defiance, dreamy evasion, pulling at something – an electric current – just beneath the surface of the night. And for a while, we believed – we knew – that we were perched at the edge of something vast, unnamed, vital. A threshold. A signal just beyond reach. Was the belief – that knowledge – the thing itself?

The countless difficult morning-afters, naturally, would perform their usual alchemy, softening the edges, thinning the thing out like smoke drifting on a breeze that never manages to touch the earth. But come nightfall, it would creep back, murmuring it hadn’t gone anywhere, one of those subterranean moods, lurking in the unseen places, waiting, unreadable, to be stumbled upon when the time was ripe, a time that never quite came, always just out of reach, like a horizon that keeps retreating the closer you get, until at last it simply flickered, wavered, and dissolved like a mirage. 

I’m not sure I’d go so far as to call Brussels back then, like Fitzgerald with his lost city, my lost city, but looking at it today – overcrowded with tourists, armed forces patrolling with machine guns, the homeless growing exponentially in number, gunfights almost weekly, violent flare-ups between rival soccer supporters on a regular basis, young minds too busy scrolling to imagine a life beyond the screen – it’s hard not to feel a stir, some quiet ache. I don’t mean to veer into deceptive nostalgia, the siren song of better days that never fully were, but damn, when everything’s unraveled into the gigantic quagmire we’re stuck in today, you start to think maybe looking back to times like that isn’t the worst instinct; if nothing else, that half-remembered dream of the possibility of another world – back then still in the air – may whisper of other paths, half-lit and long overgrown, yes, but never fully gone...

The Tailcoated Nobodies

A Close-Reading of Kafka’s ‘Ausflug ins Gebirge’

»Ich weiß nicht«, rief ich ohne Klang, »ich weiß ja nicht. Wenn niemand kommt, dann kommt eben niemand. Ich habe niemandem etwas Böses getan, niemand hat mir etwas Böses getan, niemand aber will mir helfen. Lauter niemand. Aber so ist es doch nicht. Nur daß mir niemand hilft –, sonst wäre lauter niemand hübsch. Ich würde ganz gern – warum denn nicht – einen Ausflug mit einer Gesellschaft von lauter Niemand machen. Natürlich ins Gebirge, wohin denn sonst? Wie sich diese Niemand aneinander drängen, diese vielen quer gestreckten und eingehängten Arme, diese vielen Füße, durch winzige Schritte getrennt! Versteht sich, daß alle in Frack sind. Wir gehen so lala, der Wind fährt durch die Lücken, die wir und unsere Gliedmaßen offen lassen. Die Hälse werden im Gebirge frei! Es ist ein Wunder, daß wir nicht singen.«

‘I don’t know’, I shouted quietly, ‘I really don’t know. If no one comes, then no one comes. I haven’t hurt anyone, no one has hurt me, but no one will help me. Really no one. But it’s not like that. The thing is, no one is helping me – otherwise, really no one wouldn’t be bad. I’d love to – and why not? – go on an excursion in the company of real nobodies. Naturally, to the mountains, where else? How these nobodies come together, these many arms stretched out and intertwined, these many feet, just a few steps apart! You can understand why they’re all wearing tails. We go on like this, light and loose, the wind blowing through the spaces that we and our limbs have left open. Our necks are free in the mountains! It’s a wonder we don’t sing.’

Probably written in the winter of 1909-1910, ‘Der Ausflug ins Gebirge’ is one of several short masterpieces Kafka composed throughout his life. A fragment of an unfinished novella (Description of a Struggle, a fantastic narrative seemingly inspired by Hofmannsthal’s Letter of Lord Chandos), it was later included in Kafka’s first published collection, Contemplation (1912). The short story we have chosen to translate and analyze distills, with Flaubertian rigor, the fin de siècle spirit that dominated Europe until the outbreak of the First World War: the pathos of nineteenth-century culture’s degeneration under the pressures of modernization, the growing inadequacy of traditional language and forms to capture a world in constant upheaval, and the restless anticipation – of a great crisis, the end of an era, a new beginning? – so characteristic of the period.

The text opens with uncertainty as the narrator’s fundamental disposition (‘I really don’t know’), an uncertainty that feels desperate or impotent (‘I screamed without making a sound’). This uncertainty quickly falters, giving way to indifference (‘If no one comes, then no one comes’). His subsequent reflection (‘I haven’t hurt anyone, no one has hurt me’) leads to a resigned conclusion, almost lamenting in tone (‘but no one will help me’). Though the circumstances surrounding him remain unknown, his isolation is unmistakable. There is a sense of reciprocity in causing no harm, yet none when it comes to receiving help. The fact that no one comes to his aid suggests that he may not occupy a privileged social position.

Still, uncertainty remains the dominant force, hinting at something left unsaid: ‘It’s not like that.’ What has been stated so far is, at best, only half the truth. This expectation of a shift is immediately thwarted by a return to complaint (‘It so happens that no one helps me’), which is then abruptly cut short – both visually and rhythmically – by a dash, splitting the narrative’s flow in two, as if marking a fracture in thought. Despite his regret that no one helps him, that he has no one to rely on, something about the phrase lauter Niemand (no one at all, simply no one) seems oddly appealing to him. Suddenly, this shift in perception gives rise to the daydream that follows: ‘I would love – and why not? – to go on an excursion in the company of real nobodies [lauter Niemand].’

After a sequence of negations (‘I don’t know’, ‘no sound’, ‘no one is coming’, ‘I haven’t hurt anyone’, ‘no one will help me’), the waking dream begins with a positive impulse – albeit one tempered by the conditional mood (‘I would love to’) and the unmistakable mark of pure potentiality (‘and why not?’). The attentive reader will notice that, in the original, Niemand is now capitalized; it is no longer a pronoun, as it had been up to this point, but a noun – something akin to a nobody. From here on, the narrator signals his anonymous, negative condition not with a tone of complaint but with a newly affirmative inflection.

The wordplay implicitly alludes to Ulysses’ trick to escape from Polyphemus in Book IX of the Odyssey. As Adorno and Horkheimer famously observe in Dialectic of Enlightenment: ‘Whoever, in order to save himself, calls himself Nobody and adopts assimilation to the state of nature as a means of dominating nature, becomes a victim of hubris.’ In the struggle to prevail against the nocturnal forces of myth, the line between courage and the conceit of emerging individuality is perilously thin. Still according to Adorno and Horkheimer, the instrumentalization of reason in the effort to preserve one’s identity paradoxically carries the risk of relapsing into depersonalization.

Incidentally, though with different meanings, the transformation of anonymity into a personalized condition – through the substantivization of the pronoun nobody – also appears in several of the young Brecht’s plays. In Drums in the Night, for instance, the undead soldier returning home, exhausted from the imperialist war, hides his identity to avoid joining his comrades in the ongoing German Revolution. In A Man is a Man, the fragmentation of the individual is depicted as a force – not in a heroic sense, but as a means of survival in capitalist society: dehumanization, the abstraction of the worker, becomes a prerequisite for entering the labor market. A similar theme emerges in the didactic plays, notably The Decision (often translated as The Measures Taken), where the point of view is collective and constantly shifting; the agitators are no longer distinct individuals but rather ‘blank sheets of paper on which the Revolution writes its instructions’. This motif also appears in Brecht’s Stories of Mr. Keuner, whom Benjamin described as a ‘Swabian Odysseus’. Notably, in the dialect of Brecht’s hometown, Augsburg, Keuner is pronounced similarly to keiner (‘none’), a synonym for niemand (‘nobody’). Without any trace of lofty idealism, says Benjamin, this modern Odysseus enters the cave of a new one-eyed monster: the class state.

In Kafka’s work, we find variations on this theme – for instance, in ‘A Report to an Academy’, where a chimpanzee recounts his escape from captivity. Rather than fleeing blindly in pursuit of some vague notion of freedom – a choice that would likely have led to a worse fate (perhaps life in a zoo or even death) – he instead seeks to suppress his animal nature by learning and imitating human behavior. This adaptation is not driven by any admiration for human existence but rather by sheer necessity: it is the only path available to him if he wishes to escape the confines of the circus cage alive.

In ‘Excursion to the Mountains’, the narrator’s identification as a true nobody is neither a survival strategy nor a regression to a state of pure indifferentiation. However, it may anticipate something akin to what we find decades later in African American modernist writers – particularly Ralph Ellison and LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka – where the ruse of invisibility, so to speak, takes on different meanings. In their work, invisibility is sometimes linked to the intoxicating sense of freedom that comes with deliberately renouncing the demand for recognition within the cultural and political framework of the white oppressor. At other times, it reflects the struggle to untangle the contradictions of being a Black intellectual in a racist society where culture itself is coded as a white domain. In any case, becoming nobody appears in these writers as a negation of the negation of their own roots – an overturning of the bad invisibility embraced by segments of the Black middle class as the price of entry into citizenship (or rather, sub-citizenship) within the white nation. In Baraka’s work, this negation of the negation foreshadows a form of class solidarity among those excluded from the white social order (on this, see chapter 7 of Ross Posnock’s Color & Culture).

Kafka’s use of nobody follows a slightly distinct trajectory. As we shall see, the word, initially a generic pronoun that negatively and indifferently subsumes everyone into an abstract universality, transforms at a certain point in the text into a specific noun – concretely designating something like a class of anonymous subjects.

In German, niemand has no plural form, yet the narrator makes it clear that this is not just one nobody but rather a collective of disqualified individuals (diese Niemand), a bunch of nobodies (another possible, though non-literal, translation of lauter Niemand). At this stage, dissatisfaction no longer leads to resignation, as it did earlier in the story; instead, it gives rise to the projection of an alternative collective existence. ‘An association of nothing but nobodies [eine Gesellschaft von lauter Niemand]’ now appears as a possible – or even desirable – alternative (‘and why not?’) to the mutilating isolation of bourgeois society, to the unsociable sociability (in Kant’s terms) that dominates a world of anonymous production and atomized individuals reduced to monads.

The break from monadic isolation is imagined as an escape to the mountains – but why naturally? As we know, Kafka excels at making the ordinary seem extraordinary and the offbeat appear mundane. Yet here, even in the conventional sense, mountains embody an exceptional temporality, seemingly outside the rhythms of bourgeois life. This meaning is reinforced by timeless myths across cultures – from Sisyphus to Farizade in The Thousand and One Nights, from Mount Olympus to the Himalayas – where mythology and the essence of the mountains are inseparable. In such stories, the act of climbing takes on a range of meanings: from divine punishment to the inevitable ordeal of a hero or heroine on the path to spiritual perfection. (One might recall, in passing, that in Camus’s famous reading, aside from symbolizing the absurdity of human existence, the Sisyphean effort towards the heights, in which one can detect a mockery of fatality by the condemned even in the knowledge of inevitable defeat, would not fail to contain a certain value in its propensity to fill a man’s heart with joy.) The Jewish tradition also reinforces this symbolism, as mountains are often sites of great revelation, where divine wisdom is bestowed or received: Abraham takes Isaac to be sacrificed on Mount Moriah; Moses receives the Torah on Mount Sinai; after the massacre of the Baal worshippers on Mount Carmel, Jehovah reveals himself to Elijah on Mount Horeb…

Beyond the traditional meanings associated with mountains – which Kafka was surely aware of – the exceptional nature of the scene is further emphasized, once again with an air of naturalness, by the fact that the nobodies are dressed to the nines (‘it is understandable that they are all wearing tails’). As if self-evident, the narrator invokes a marker of bourgeois distinction (the frock coat, typically worn for grand festivities such as weddings) and subverts its conventional use – after all, no one in their right mind wears a tuxedo on a mountain hike. Yet he preserves its deeper significance: extravagance, certainly, but one tied to the experience of communal luxury – borrowing the title words from Kristin Ross’s phenomenal study of the political imaginary of the Paris Commune.

Here, as in other parts of his work (recalling Adorno’s observations in Prisms), Kafka makes literature ‘out of the dregs of reality. He does not sketch an image of the society to come – like all great art, his work refrains from envisioning the future – but instead assembles the discarded fragments of the present, the waste left behind by the emerging new order as it renders the old obsolete.’

Stylistically, the text is not difficult to analyze, as it unfolds across three distinct levels, each corresponding to a different temporal plane. The main narration, enclosed within quotation marks, unfolds in the present tense (‘I know’, ‘comes’, ‘helps me’, ‘they come together’, ‘we follow’, ‘they become’), though it is itself divided into two temporal registers – that of the narrator’s cloistered daily life and that of his daydream. Meanwhile, outside the quotation marks, in the brief apostrophe at the very beginning of the story, the past tense (‘I shouted’) signals a distance from the narrated episode. The text’s dialectical structure suggests that the horizon of possibility opens precisely within the suffocating confines of isolation: the initial telegraphic, fragmented style gradually gives way, in the reverie that follows, to looser, more fluid sentences.

The dialectical mirroring in Kafka’s prose is striking: the fearless advance of the community of nobodies, faces turned into the wind, imaginatively supplants the total impotence of the isolated individual. The tuxedo – perhaps the true garment of the Ausnahmezustand of the dispossessed? – replaces the original nakedness, which in the first half of the narrative is rendered by the sheer absence of concrete referents. The rarefied, stifling atmosphere of the initial cocoon contrasts sharply with the richer, more empirical descriptions of the imagined life, which seems more tangible than the narrator’s real existence: the nobodies have arms, feet, necks, and, presumably, voices, as well as their formal attire. The ‘we’ of the dream replaces the fractured I-them dichotomy, without erasing the I altogether. The sense of shared freedom – moving ‘light and loose’, with ‘necks free’, and with ‘spaces left open’ despite walking together – stands in direct opposition to the suffocating confinement of daily life, the perpetual feeling of a rope around one’s neck. The solidarity of intertwined arms and synchronized steps in the open air of the mountain peaks critically contrasts with the isolated subject of the first part. And finally, the prospect of song – remembering that for Kafka, as Benjamin observed, singing often serves as a symbol of escape, a pledge of hope from the liminal world of helpers, the unskilled, and the undefined creatures like Odradek – opposes the stifled cry at the beginning. Silence prevails in both, but with entirely different meanings: at first, mute affliction and a muffled voice; at the end, one might imagine, the serene stillness of elevation, of being finally free from the strangling rope.

The self-denial imposed by the anonymous processes of labor is a negative experience, yet it also holds the potential for negating the bourgeois self that we all, to some extent, carry within us. The crucial distinction lies in whether one extracts something positive from this negative experience or simply embraces the negative as positive – a distinction that, broadly speaking, separates modernism from postmodernism. It is what distinguishes poetry of alienation from alienated poetry (drawing on the Lukácsian framework explored by the young Roberto Schwarz in A Sereia e o Desconfiado).

The subman of Kafka’s and Brecht’s narratives – the schizoid subject emptied of all the psychological richness associated with bourgeois interiority, with its burden of suffering and repression – is undoubtedly a promise of post-bourgeois existence. Yet, as Terry Eagleton observes in a 1985 article, this figure remains too close to the faceless employees of advanced capitalism to be embraced uncritically. Unlike postmodernism, however – and still following Eagleton – modernism did not fail to evoke, albeit in negative ways, a dense experience of time, one that was increasingly difficult to articulate in traditional ideological terms.

In other words, the best modernist works exposed the limits of traditional forms by introducing unprecedented landscapes and subjective nuances that these forms could not contain without distorting them. At the same time, modernists remained sufficiently aware of the very languages they were critiquing, allowing them to subject the new condition of the modern alienated subject to an implicitly critical treatment in turn.

Something of this can be seen in Kafka’s short story, where the movement of the interior monologue is discontinuous but not inarticulate. The utopian image, encapsulated in the dreamlike evocation of the misfits’ high-altitude excursion, is not to be confused with the imageless depiction of the confined-life hell suggested in the first part, marked by an incessant oscillation between helplessness and despair, disgust and indifference. Rather, it stands in diametric opposition to it.

At the same time, the quotation marks and apostrophe signal the narrator’s ability to narrate under conditions hostile to narration, allowing him to distance himself both from the suffocated present and from mere imaginary escape. Neither existing reality nor daydreaming has the final word, but rather the tension between the two, the mismatch, within the same individual, between the peaceful, adapted existence of a middle-class employee, drained by work and lamenting the time lost in making a living, and the imaginary life of the potential outcast, who dreams of breaking free from his conformist self but lacks the strength to do so alone. This is Kafka’s undramatic drama, situating him somewhere between Chekhov and Beckett: the awareness of damage, but no one to join forces with to put an end to the false life.

This does not distort the longing for a higher life – a longing that, for Kafka, found no better expression than the image of the galloping Indian: a life unburdened by separations and preordained identities. As he writes in one of his posthumously published aphorisms: 

»Die Freuden dieses Lebens sind nicht die seinen, sondern unsere Angst vor dem Aufsteigen in ein höheres Leben; die Qualen dieses Lebens sind nicht die seinen, sondern unsere Selbstqual wegen jener Angst.«  

In Michael Hofmann’s translation: ‘The joys of this life are not its joys, but our fear of climbing into a higher life; the torments of this life are not its torments, but our self-torment on account of this fear.’

[This article first appeared on Mundo das Formas, Jan. 2021]