Kafka and the Universal ed. by Arthur Cools and Vivian Liska (review)

It is indisputable that, at least in the West, the term Kafkaesque is an accepted concept that conveys a quality that most everyone can recognize as a more or less “everyday occurrence” and certainly a possibility in our everyday lives. Once this word became part of our vernacular, it seems to me, the notion of Kafka’s universality was established. My first encounter with the idea that perhaps this “prophet of the 20th century”—as many saw, and still see, him—was indeed too singular to wear the mantle of universality was back in the 1980s; at that time feminist critics like Evelyn Beck pointed to Kafka’s “male-centered angle of vision” and ceased to find a connection to reality in his work, thus disqualifying him from the category of the universal.

The topic of this collection of essays by various scholars of literature and philosophy is what the editors designate as “the key paradox in the reception of Kafka during the twentieth century”—namely the singularity of Kafka that has been recognized as universal. This paradox seems to be more of a problem for philosophers than for those of us who are used to dealing with the ambiguities of literary interpretation (and even more specifically, Kafka interpretation), and this difference in method and tolerance manifests itself profoundly in the volume. The co-editors, both professors at the University of Antwerp, represent two different disciplines: Arthur Cools is a philosopher whose work deals with contemporary French philosophy and the questions of interplay between his discipline and literature, and Vivian Liska, who has written a number of important books and essays on Kafka, is a literary scholar with a strong philosophical underpinning. The chapters of this volume are, in large part, the results of papers presented at two different conferences, one held in Jerusalem in 2012, the latter in Antwerp (which bore the precise title “Kafka and the Paradox of the Universal”) in 2013.

The essays are divided into five sections, not separated by discipline; rather the point is to get an interdisciplinary perspective of the proposed paradox in each section. As is often the case with volumes that are collections of conference papers, there is a bit of randomness to the section headings—“The Ambiguity of the Singular,” “Before the Law,” “Animals,” “Modernism,” and “After Kafka”—but they are helpful in gaining an overall sense of the book’s organization. Readers will probably not want to digest this book from beginning to end but rather find the essays of most interest to them in any given section; that said, Stanley Corngold’s “The Singular Accident in a Universe of Risk: An Approach to Kafka and the Paradox of the Universal” is a good start to the problem as a whole. Selecting it as the volume’s opening essay is as auspicious as it is smart. Corngold nails the distinction between literary and philosophical approaches to a work—here, Kafka—and illustrates what he calls “the charm” of the former as opposed to what I will call the rigidity of the latter. Undaunted, however, he proceeds to a kind of philosophical reading of Kafka that is tempered by literary insights discovered by textual close reading. Corngold believes that Kafka’s very singular creations “command” to be interpreted, and his conclusion is that it is the “chorus” of readers doing so that provides the element of the universal.

The “chorus” of sixteen essays in this volume by the noted scholars Brendan Moran, Soren Rosendal, Arnaud Villani, Eli Schonfeld, Michal Ben-Naftali, Rodolphe Gasché, David Suchoff, Anna Glazova, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Lorraine Markotic, Galili Shahar, Shimon Sandbank, Kata Gellen, and Birgit R. Erdle, as well as a contribution by co-editor Cools, verifies Corngold’s assertion. Perhaps none defines the universal approach to Kafka’s singularity more clearly than Sandback’s “Reading Kafka: A Personal Story.” As one of the “chorus” dealing with the paradox of Kafka’s...