Abstract This article applies insights from picture theory (W. J. T. Mitchell) and the psychology of perception (Ernst Gombrich) in order to examine Franz Kafka’s and Samuel Beckett’s use of multistable pictures in The Trial and Watt. It argues that these pictures—the portrait of a judge and the picture of a circle and displaced center—are significant not as objects of hermeneutical interpretation, but rather as sites where the conditions of spectatorship and perception become visible. As Kafka’s and Beckett’s protagonists “read” these pictures, they experience perceptual inversions and aspect shifts comparable with those involved in classic multistable images such as the duck–rabbit and the Necker cube. The multistability of their readings thwarts the desire for allegorical interpretations and dramatizes, instead, the act of viewing the picture. Scenes of reading pictures thus allow Kafka and Beckett to explore literary spaces that are given shape as an iterative search for orientation. Contextualizing Kafka and Beckett in relation to empirical and Gestalt psychology and to their interests in reversible figures, the article shows how each writer complicates the representation of aspect switches. In Kafka, multiple readings of a picture appear to be simultaneously possible, resulting in an accumulation of aspects that overdetermine the picture. In Beckett, the binary inversion of figure and ground gives way to a series of possible interpretations that display aspect shifts in overdrive. By representing the problem of reading pictures in the medium of literature, Kafka and Beckett offer insights to the literary dimensions of the pictorial turn in modernism studies.

中文翻译：

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图片方向：卡夫卡和贝克特的多稳态空间

摘要本文运用图像理论（WJT Mitchell）和感知心理学（恩斯特·冈伯里奇）的见解，以检验弗朗兹·卡夫卡和塞缪尔·贝克特在《审判与瓦特》中对多稳态图像的使用。它认为，这些图片（法官的画像以及圆和移位的中心的画像）的意义不大，不能作为解释学的解释对象，而可以作为观看和观察条件可见的场所。当卡夫卡（Kafka）和贝克特（Beckett）的主人公“阅读”这些图片时，他们会遇到与经典的多稳态图像（如鸭子-兔子和内克立方体）中涉及的感知反转和相变。他们阅读的多重稳定性阻止了寓言解释的欲望，反而戏剧化了观看图片的行为。因此，阅读图片的场景使卡夫卡（Kafka）和贝克特（Beckett）可以探索具有一定形状的文学空间，从而反复寻找方向。本文将卡夫卡和贝克特与经验心理学和格式塔心理学以及他们对可逆数字的兴趣相关联，将每位作者如何使纵横转换的表示复杂化。在Kafka中，可能同时读取多个图片，导致积累了过多确定图片的方面。在贝克特（Beckett）中，数字和地面的二进制求反被一系列可能的解释所取代，这些解释显示了超速行驶中的外观变化。卡夫卡和贝克特通过代表文学作品阅读图片的问题，对现代主义研究中绘画转向的文学层面提供了见识。