Abstract

The space of the threshold is the tumultuous zone where a construct meets its own limits, where the vocabulary of an inside realm clashes with that of an outside world. The zone of the threshold serves both as a delineation of limits and as a point of potential contact and transfer. ;In Kafka's story Der Bau, the burrow which should protect its builder, proves to be a greater threat than the outside wilderness. The more perfected a protecting construct becomes, the more vulnerable is the realm of the threshold and the more dangerous the definition of wilderness. The escalating constructs of criticism, built underneath Kafka's literary texts as shelters for rational understanding, take part in this dream of the perfect structure. Why try to house Kafka in an intricate network of critical concepts if his stories criticize the suffocating nature of such systems of understanding. Kafka is not a puzzle of which we hold the missing pieces, we are the cut-up puzzle and Kafka tells us how the scissors work. ;Cees Nooteboom is a contemporary Dutch author whose last novels exemplify a writer who has transformed the zone of the threshold from a scene of battle into his own imaginative playground. In the early poetry, the artist's flight into an interior world takes the form of a struggle against metaphor, that trope of transfer between an interior and exterior reality. In the later work, especially the novels of metafiction, Nooteboom's imagination is at ease in that creative zone where two voices compete and coexist. ;In the field of amphibian thought, Herder is a key figure. His early attack on extremist philosophies and their dry conceptual language culminates in his critique of Kant. Inspecting Kant's building of pure reason, Herder focuses on the realm of the threshold, between quarry and building, between live metaphors and dead concepts. Herder's own metaphorical language creates the bridge that straddles the abyss traced by abstract, dualist thought. ;Due to its hybrid nature, amphibian thought cannot be captured within the conventional categories of philosophy, literature or criticism. Threshold thinking does not create schools, for one cannot extract the essence out of amphibian thought, without killing the beauty and the beast