Kafkas bewegte Körper. Die Tagebücher und Briefe als Laboratorien von Bewegung (review)

Kafka’s letters have been read as stories of communication and failed communication, and in their transmission they have been imagined as traveling bodies, moving freely with the advance of the postal system, as if to compensate for Kafka’s unwillingness to send a less literary part of himself. Elisabeth Lack’s notion of letters as laboratories of movement intersects this pivotal question in Kafka scholarship—what is in a letter?— exploring a new connection between writing and bodies, and the corporeal capacity to communicate meaning qua metaphor. Studying Kafka’s sketches and descriptions of bodies in motion in his diaries and letters, Lack argues for “literary possibilities and processes of motion capturing” (14).

Walter Benjamin’s characterization of Kafka’s literature as one of paradoxes permeates Lack’s analysis. She locates the nexus between the body and its potential to express meaning in language on the levels of symbol, gesture, and metaphor. On the symbolic level, bodies function as symptom carriers of inner developments, but that to which they refer remains unidentifiable. Likewise, a decipherable reference system is impeded on the level of gesture, as ambivalent bodily movements obscure communication. A position that positively denies the possibility of identifiable significance seems to imply that Kafka’s bodies resist metaphorical readings. But Lack argues that on the level of metaphor, the primary interest of her work, bodies in Kafka must be understood as “rhetorical operations in the context of a search for the expressive body” (28). Kafka’s metaphors serve as bridges between the body and all that it can represent.

Lack’s book is most interesting where it explores the extent to which Kafka’s body metaphors engage the discourses of modernity. In contrast to Sarasin and Tanner (Physiologie und industrielle Gesellschaft, Frankfurt / Main 1998), who deem bodies to be culturally contingent products, Lack maintains that for Kafka, as agents of presentation, they are not. While sketches and descriptions of traveling, deformed bodies reflect the ruling discourses of their time, this mode of representation cannot be extrapolated from them.

An interesting conclusion arises from Lack’s analysis: Kafka’s keen interest in the body may well be a source of the distinct metaphorical feel of his language in fiction. His broad metaphorical vocabulary, then, moves against the grain of the language crisis at the turn of the century. The literary presentability of Kafka’s bodies counters the short-comings of language in communicating bodily experience.

Lack convincingly establishes the need to examine Kafka’s interest in the potential of the body as an expressive medium, using as her examples his letters and diaries where, unlike in the stories and novels, body metaphors and the motif of the expressive body carry no additional dimensions of meaning. Lack’s arguments are supported by textual analyses of some of the most famous passages in Kafka’s letters and diaries. This makes her book a pleasant read, as the reader will be familiar with the context in which Kafka made the cited claims and thus better be able to understand Lack’s theoretical concerns. Her methodological backdrop is Benjamin; and she extensively cites some of the most respected names in recent Kafka scholarship, such as Kittler, Neumann, and Pasley. Lack discovers that the diaries and letters document the successes and failures of the body metaphors and motion sketches, and suggests this as a further avenue of exploration.

Lack’s book innovatively explores the patterns of Kafka’s thought. It is a valuable resource to students and scholars, and an original contribution to a rich body of Kafka scholarship pertaining to corporeality and to the relationship between his letters and fiction. Stressing the expressive dimension of the body, Lack shows how the imposition of rhetorical devices—metaphor and comparison—releases the body’s potential to make manifest otherwise obstructed meanings. Her work confirms that in Kafka, the body—like the act of writing—maintains the closest tie to language.