Kafka and Cultural Zionism: Dates in Palestine, and: Kafka and Photography (review)

These two valuable but otherwise divergent studies of Kafka confirm the following interpretive rule of thumb: the longer Kafka looks at something the more problematic—or aporetic—that thing becomes. Perhaps just as we speak about the gaze of Orpheus, we should also speak about the gaze of Kafka. The difference would be this: whereas the poet-songster Orpheus loses his beloved wife Eurydice instantly and passionately as he turns to look at her before he is safely out of the underworld, Kafka’s gaze brings about a slower, more excoriating deterioration of its object.

And yet somehow, as Iris Bruce points out in her challenging and impressively researched study of Kafka’s relation to Zionism, Kafka is no defeatist. Take as a case in point his final diary entry, which Bruce cites at the beginning and the end of her book: “Every word . . . becomes a spear turned against the speaker. Most especially a remark like this. And so on ad infinitum. The only consolation would be: it happens whether you like or no. And what you like is of infinitesimally little help. More than consolation is: You too have weapons” (9). Kafka’s gaze is anything but passive; as Bruce notes, it produces metaphors—in this case, military metaphors—that take account of the “fundamental ambiguity of language, communication, and reception” (9).

The question, of course, is how to read these uncannily affirmative metaphors. Bruce follows Adorno in insisting upon the power of the literal in Kafka’s work. Kafka, so the argument goes, quite often plays with the literal meanings of common metaphors in his stories. Thus, in the case of The Metamorphosis, he draws inspiration from a vulgar trope in German equating a person with a verminous insect. When Gregor Samsa awakes one morning to find himself transformed into a monstrous bug, he literalizes or personifies a dead metaphor of German speech.

In a most patient and meticulous explication of Kafka’s cultural context, Bruce multiplies the examples of the Czech writer adapting contemporary metaphors to his own fictional ends. She shows very convincingly how Kafka builds a number of his animal stories around various anti-Semitic tropes. “Palestine is our land, and the Jews our dogs” was a common militant Arab slogan during the First World War, which Kafka then puts into the mouth of the Arab in “Jackals and Arabs”: “they are our dogs; finer dogs than any of yours” (187). “Investigations of a Dog” satirizes the “dog’s life” led by many Diaspora Jews. In a Zionist text, which Kafka owned, Jewish assimilation is described as “the systematic aping of foreign manners” (134). Kafka’s most explicitly Zionist text, “A Report to an Academy,” takes this issue to the level of the species by having its ape-protagonist Rotpeter literally “ape” other human beings. In so doing, the story sends up the myth of German Enlightenment as well as the curse of Jewish assimilation. Bruce argues that the final story Kafka wrote, “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk,” “develops out of this idiomatic expression, ‘pfeifen auf dem letzten Loch,’ to be on one’s last legs or to gasp, and that Kafka is playing with its literal and metaphorical meanings” (196). This story’s mouse narrator tells us at one point: “Although we are unmusical [an accusation leveled against the Jews by Richard Wagner] we have a tradition of singing.” But, to the extent that Josephine’s singing is really indistinguishable from the “piping” (pfeifen) of an ordinary mouse, our heroine (interestingly, the only one in Kafka) embodies a tradition in decline. This is what makes Kafka’s metaphors so uncanny: they are transient; they are never very far away from being dead metaphors.

Bruce succeeds in setting the record straight about the considerable amount of contemporary social reality that is present in Kafka’s...