Apocalyptic Futures: Marked Bodies and the Violence of the Text in Kafka, Conrad, and Coetzee (review)

In Apocalyptic Futures: Marked Bodies and the Violence of the Text in Kafka, Conrad, and Coetzee, Russell Samolsky focuses on modern literary texts, Kafka’s “The Penal Colony,” Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, that fictionalize not “an open and utopian future” (1) but an apocalyptic one that “reflects the future back into the present” (7). The reception in the middle to late twentieth century of the works under scrutiny necessarily situates them in the context of more recent “hearts of darkness,” namely the Jewish Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, and the revelations of torture in apartheid South Africa and Abu Ghraib. Through a highly theorized juxtaposition of historical contexts, Samolsky offers a careful close reading of his primary texts because “their use of the apocalyptic figure of the marked or mutilated body” (9) highlights the body not as a blank screen awaiting textual inscription but as an always already inscribed text that both allows for and resists an “apocalyptic incorporation.” In reading these works as “proleptic of future catastrophe,” he thus reframes the relationship between literary reception and embodiment, bodily inscription and identity, past and present.

In chapter one, “Metaleptic Machines,” Samolsky intervenes in the pro/contra debate surrounding Kafka’s status as a prophet of things to come by showing how Kafka’s writing both performs and predicts its future context, thus linking the performative and the prophetic. Kafka, he argues, was “somehow coding in advance the future reception of his texts” (47). He then goes on to read the Kafkan text and its claims to a new kabbalah in terms of Harold Bloom’s Kabbalah and Criticism. In chapter two, “Apocalyptic Futures,” Samolsky turns to the long shadow cast by Conrad’s novella whose title, “heart of darkness,” appears again and again in various mass media references to later atrocities. Samolsky reviews the critical genealogy of Heart of Darkness as “prophetic of future cataclysm” (73) and offers a new reading of the performative aspect of the novella as apocalypse, how it can be said “to enact or embody its apocalyptic dimension” (75). Chapter three, “The Body in Ruins,” takes on Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), a book whose focus on the suspension of the law by the dying apartheid state is shown to be reborn anew in the infamous CIA black sites of the beginning of the twenty-first century.

The first two chapters of Apocalyptic Futures focus on the modernist text’s representation of mutilated/marked bodies as “floating or ungrounded” signs that “left the text open to a future overcoding” as “mediations on the relationship between an apocalyptic text and a future apocalyptic event” (126). By contrast, chapter three discusses how J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians is concerned with the ethical dilemma the author faces as his text’s representation of torture accrues spectacular power. Samolsky argues that, in juxtaposing historical time with a timeless present, Coetzee creates a historical allegory that makes “the future coterminous with the present” and shifts “future events and bodies into a continuous present” (133). Last but not least, in the coda, the author turns to Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus as a self-reflective meditation on the relationship between literary reception and the dead of the Holocaust. For Samolsky, while Kafka, Conrad, and Coetzee “wrestle with the ethical futurity of their works and how their texts might be taken as allegories of their struggle with their apocalyptic futures,” Spiegelman reveals “a writer’s taking ethical account of his own responsibility with regard to the encryption of the apocalyptic body into his own text” (178). Maus, Samolsky argues, is haunted by the marked bodies of the Holocaust itself rather than by the apocalypse to come, offering a “messianic counter-time” to apocalyptic incorporation.

Apocalyptic Futures is an important contribution to the study of the literature...