Kafka's Travels: Exoticism, Colonialism, and the Traffic of Writing (review)

John Zilcosky has written a thought-provoking book on Kafka's travels that interprets Kafka's major writings from the perspective of fin-de-siècle travel, popular culture, adventure literature, and the culture of exoticism. It takes guts to tackle such a prominent writer in a first book. One really needs to come up with a unique perspective and face established Kafka scholarship. Zilcosky does so with great bravura. He employs a unique methodological combination of close readings and what I would term a cultural studies approach (although one that is cognizant of historical and philological details and indebted to psychoanalytic criticism). By drawing on materials such as travel diaries, train schedules, tour guides, adventure books, photos, illustrations, and the like, Zilcosky successfully establishes that Kafka was an avid traveler, if only textually. In fact, it turns out that as a boy—though also later—Kafka enthusiastically read popular utopian travel stories, in particular the dime-story adventure series "Schaffstein's Little Green Books." In real life, to be sure, Kafka adhered to his desk in Prague, especially after his literary and creative breakthrough with "The Judgment" in 1912. Zilcosky persuasively argues that Kafka was not only familiar with travel literature, but that he was an enthusiastic reader of utopian colonial travel stories throughout his life, and thus displayed the common turn-of-the-century fascination with travel and exotic places. Zilcosky claims that Kafka described his characters in terms of a symbolism of exotic travel. He did so in order to show that—as opposed to the tradition of travel literature—they would not be able to arrive at home but rather, like Karl Rossmann in Der Verschollene, disappear after discovering their exotic selves. Kafka's characters are thus travelers rendered exotic. They search for the foreign, but they end up discovering it within themselves (and thus don't need to travel anymore).

While Kafka's travelers seek material and sexual pleasures, these pleasures are purportedly unknown to their author. Zilcosky instead presents a man "who has found, in traveling, the pleasures that eluded him in the confines of Prague" (3). Zilcosky's Kafka is a writer who does not arrive anywhere, but a traveler who does arrive (though in Paris, Berlin, or Vienna rather than in utopia). The new and emerging travel culture, and culture of tourism, had a profound influence on Kafka. Zilcosky's thesis is that Kafka's creative channels were "unclogged" by his reading of an early series of travel writings (a project that he and Max Brod engaged in), and that after his breakthrough with the story "The Judgment" in 1912, he no longer needed to travel himself and write about it. In 1911 Kafka and Max Brod "toured decidedly prosaic central and western Europe: Germany, Switzerland, Northern Italy, and Paris. It was here that they began an autobiographical travel novel that . . . attempted to transcend fin de siècle exoticism by turning it inward—toward the structure of home and self" (23). Kafka's traveling writing style instead emerged from the period after 1912 and is based on his repression of the desire for physical travel. Zilcosky's main thesis is presented in the following claim: "I maintain that Kafka's telltale 'traveling' style emerges out of his typically fin de siecle interest in travel culture and technology and, moreover, that travel materializes as a repressed theme in Kafka's works at the precise moment when Kafka ends his actual travels" (14). Zilcosky develops this thesis through chapters on the early travel novel Richard and Samuel, the "America" novel, The Trial, the "Penal Colony," The Castle, the letters to Milena, and the "Hunter Gracchus."

A good example of Zilcosky's way of reading can be found at the beginning of his chapter on Karl Rossman in the "America" novel. Zilcosky identifies the main theme of the book as the disappearance of the traveling self, and introduces contextual evidence for this...