From Kafka to Sebald: Modernism and Narrative Form by Sabine Wilke (review)

A variety of scholarly approaches enriches the anthology From Kafka to Sebald: Modernism and Narrative Form. This collection of articles, written by well-known scholars, contributes to a literary analysis of historical practices without neglecting the aesthetic aspects. It illuminates various genres and demonstrates how narratives reflect societal practices symbolically and directly and how community norms are constituted and unconsciously internalized. For this purpose, historical, comparative, and deconstructive dimensions are scrutinized. A good third of the anthology focuses on Kafka and his influence on other writers. However, essays on Sebald, Hofmannsthal, Yvan Goll, Schnitzler, Freud, Christa Wolf, and Robert Menasse are included as well to exemplify the development of modernism after Kafka. The grand seigneur of Kafka research, Walter Sokel, contributes reminiscences of his own life to the autobiographical genre. Editor Sabine Wilke intents the volume to serve as an advancement of narrative forms in modernist fiction, which is seen “as a location of an aesthetic and formal struggle with the main issue of the period” (2). The four parts of the book are “Kafka’s Slippages,” “Kafka Effects,” “Narrative Theory,” “and “Autobiography.”

The first part starts with Stanley Corngold’s “Ritardando in Das Schloß,” in which the author pursues the dimensions of uncertainty in the novel. One of them concerns real-life phenomena that the protagonist confronts but which turn out to be merely “Schein.” This realization stifles his action. Traditional safety and knowledge of the “real” world is lost, as K. finds himself caught in an inscrutable network of power. In a close reading Corngold marks elements that entail delay of action, and he concludes that due to the ambiguity in this world, K. simply does not know what he really wants. The next contribution in the first part is Imke Meyer’s outstanding essay on Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist.” She succeeds in a virtually impossible task: to add a highly plausible new analysis of the story that has been interpreted so many times before. She is able to link the story to a historical process in Austria, and I agree with her that the hunger artist’s existence demarcates the contested space in which bourgeois subjectivity is constituted. Meyer shows that the individual caught in the net of bourgeois society must consume himself in the very process of constitution.

The second section starts with Jens Rieckmann’s “Hofmannsthal after 1918: The Present as Exile.” Here, “Kafka effects” are traced in Hofmannsthal’s personal and professional crisis after the loss of monarchy at the end of World War I. Rieckmann focuses heavily on Walter Kappacher’s novel Der Fliegenpalast (2009), which retells ten days of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s vacation in Bad Fusch during the summer of 1924, when the writer was fifty years old. Kappacher’s novel is closely based on Hofmannsthal’s letters, diaries, and other firsthand material. Rieckmann picks out the relevant parts pointing to the existential problems caused by Hofmannsthal’s private life as a married family man and by his professional struggles as a writer. Specifically, Rieckmann’s examination shows how a contemporary writer, Kappacher, uses biographical material from the Weimar Republic to constitute a modern novel. The second contribution to this section, “Yvan Goll’s Die Eurokokke: A Reading through Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk” by Rolf J. Goebel is bound to revive further interest in Yvan Goll’s neglected but fascinating and visionary urban novel Eurokokke (1927). Goebel argues that while Benjamin’s text could be called a philosophical reading of urban modernity, Goll fleshes out Benjamin’s most significant themes in fictional metaphors and narrative plot scenarios. Goebel emphasizes, though, that Goll was not directly influenced by Benjamin, instead arguing that both transformed a historical process into literature.

The third section in the volume, on narrative theory, begins with Gail Finney’s chapter “Else Meets Dora: Narratology as a Tool for Illuminating Literary Trauma.” She confronts one of Freud’s scientific texts on psychoanalysis (“Fragment of an Analysis of a Case...