The Cambridge Introduction to Franz Kafka by Carolin Duttlinger (review)

It is genuinely refreshing to read a book on Kafka without an agenda or all-encompassing thesis about how to interpret Kafka and what our earlier readings were missing—even if such books also have their time and place. Carolin Duttlinger, the author of The Cambridge Introduction to Franz Kafka, offers an overview of Kafka’s works that both situates them in their historical, cultural, and biographical contexts and provides penetrating close readings of the novels and a substantial number of shorter works. The central aim of the book appears to be to identify overarching themes and problems in Kafka’s oeuvre and to explore possibilities for interpreting them. The book will be a valuable resource to any student of Kafka seeking to understand the world out of which Kafka emerges and to find a way into his major works.

It is remarkable how much pertinent information Duttlinger packs into the first two sections of the book, “Life” and “Contexts,” especially considering that they total only sixteen pages. The biographical section touches on the major events and experiences in Kafka’s life that are thought to have influenced his writing: his family relationships, his romantic attachments, his friendship with Max Brod and other Prague intellectuals, his education as a jurist, his work in accident insurance, and his struggle with illness. The section on contexts highlights areas that have come to play a bigger role in Kafka scholarship in the last twenty years (multilingual and multicultural Prague, urban modernity) as well as ones established long ago (psychoanalysis, Judaism). Additionally, Duttlinger connects Kafka to related developments in modernist aesthetics such as expressionism and new media, especially film and photography.

By far the longest section of the book is the one entitled “Works,” which proceeds chronologically from Kafka’s first published writings to the last stories, with the longest sections devoted to the three novels. As noted, Duttlinger gives compact, accessible, and nontendentious readings that cover a lot of methodological ground. For instance, her reading of The Metamorphosis discusses such issues as narrative perspective and tone, translation, eroticism, familial estrangement and struggle, capitalist mass modernity, and music and sound; along the way, she makes meaningful reference to expressionism, horror film, and Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of “becoming-animal.” These remarks will provide at least a useful summary and at most a variety of interpretive possibilities to anyone who has read this story—which, it is fair to assume, most of Duttlinger’s readers will have. Other particularly strong sections include the ones on The Man Who Disappeared (formerly known as Amerika), The Castle, and the collection of stories The Hunger Artist.

The final short chapter, “Scholarship and Adaptation,” gives a quick overview of some of the debates around the editing and publication of Kafka’s works, a hypercompact history of Kafka criticism (the progression from allegorical to text-immanent, psychoanalytic, deconstructionist, and cultural-historical readings), and a brief presentation of three famous film adaptations (Welles’s 1962 The Trial, Straub and Huillet’s 1984 Class Relations, based on The Man Who Disappeared, and Haneke’s 1997 The Castle).

There are recurrent motifs in Duttlinger’s study, which function as useful signposts as the reader makes his or her way through the dense presentation of Kafka’s writings: the new media landscape of modernity (considering Duttlinger has published a book on Kafka and photography, this focus is not surprising), the problem of intergenerational struggle as a feature of expressionism, and the various ways to understand the meaning and function of Kafka’s animals. One further motif that Duttlinger treats with particular care is the problem of freedom versus the more circumscribed possibility of finding “ways out,” a topic that Kafka addresses specifically in such stories as “Report to an Academy” and which critics have attended to as well. This attentiveness seems apt, given that Duttlinger’s own methodology could be described as an attempt to offer “ways in” to Kafka’s works: not complete or...