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The Myth of Power and the Self: Essays on Franz Kafka (review)
- Modernism/modernity
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 10, Number 3, September 2003
- pp. 587-589
- 10.1353/mod.2003.0056
- Review
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
Modernism/modernity 10.3 (2003) 587-589
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The Myth of Power and the Self. Essays on Franz Kafka. Walter H. Sokel. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002. Pp. 334. $39.95 (cloth).
In 1964 Walter Sokel published a masterful study of Franz Kafka entitled Franz Kafka—Tragik und Ironie, a book that has regrettably remained untranslated. And yet it has found readers on both sides of the Atlantic—readers who have marveled at this vast, original, synoptic enterprise that, for the first time, salvaged for criticism the full body of Kafka's work. Before Sokel, critics had found only relics on which to tag theorems: in 1953 Theodor Adorno pretended to read Kafka literally but produced only an anachronistic Marxist-Freudian fable of alienation; in 1957 Wilhelm Emrich found in Kafka a Heideggerian critique of our forgetfulness of Being. But Sokel, educated in Austria and America, and less ideology-maddened, read the [End Page 587] whole of Kafka for the first time with a flair for Central European depth-psychology and a New Critic's alertness to figurative language. The Kafka that has emerged for all readers since—the dutiful Jewish son of a brutal father and the aggressive martyr of a passion for writing, the good friend and tormented lover and the ascetic bent on world-denial—was delivered by the maieutic arts of Sokel, so that it can be fairly said that all subsequent writing on Kafka has been but a footnote to Tragik und Ironie. And now, almost forty years later, we have Sokel's critical triumph The Myth of Power and the Self, in which he has written an exemplary footnote to himself.
This is a gathering of dense, rich essays on Kafka spanning four decades, produced from a relation of affinity between critic and author that may be without parallel in recent criticism. Sokel reads Kafka with so assured an understanding and with such an acknowledged accommodatingness to alternative readings that it is almost impossible to speak of its errors. Or if there are such things, they can have only the same effect as his powerfully true statements: they disclose something significant about the relation between Kafka, his texts, and his readers.
The contents are appropriately varied: there are general essays, in fact remarkable for their detail, on Kafka's poetics and its constitutive tension between two views of poetic language. On the one hand, literature is truth; Kafka links truth to the outcome of an act of writing or to the integrity of the process on which it depends (72). On the other hand, poetic language deals in illusion; it cannot escape, as Kafka wrote, its "being dazzled by truth; the light on the flinching, grimacing face is true, and nothing else," though Sokel finds in this aphorism the attribution to writing of the power to "show the undoing of untruth" (93). No single utterance of Kafka about his art seems to have escaped the eye of this commentator. These essays throw a continual light on Sokel's more particular readings, where one is immediately struck by his decision to confront the most difficult texts (this is not generally the case among Kafka's critics). I find especially useful his reading of the story "Jackals and Arabs" in light of Nietzsche's master and slave moralities, with both terms relativized by the elusive position of the narrator (Sokel's fundamental passion for intellectual-historical thematic connections is tempered by his keen awareness of aspects of narration). And Sokel deals with those social-philosophical stories concerned with politics and government, like "An Old Manuscript" and "The Problem of Our Laws," noting how Kafka sees the benign and brutal aspects of authority as insidiously linked (319). These readings lead to powerful conclusions on the topic of Kafka's representation of power, which Sokel shows to be an affair of the cooperation of the subject in the view of himself that he has indeed been sinned against. Kafka is a great dramatist of power relations, which are again and again an affair of a sort...