Metamorphosis in Modern German Literature: Transforming Bodies, Identities, and Affects by Tara Beaney (review)

Tara Beaney's book can be read as a metamorphic process. In four chapters concentrating on E.T.A. Hoffmann, Franz Kafka, Marie Luise Kaschnitz, Jenny Erpenbeck, and Yoko Tawada, Beaney shows how the concept of metamorphosis changes during 200 years of German culture. The organization of the chapters, as the author details in the end, follow the lifecycle of a silkworm, an animal whose images accompany each of the chapters' beginnings. After the introduction in which she briefly sketches the central questions for the book project and develops a definition of metamorphosis as "extreme change of form" (2), Beaney centers in her first chapter on Der goldene Topf (1815) and Der Sandmann (1816) by E.T.A. Hoffmann, but also draws upon Die Serapionsbrüder (1819–1821), Nachricht von einem gebildeten jungen Mann (1814–1815), and Nachricht von den neuesten Schicksalen des Hundes Berganza (1814) to develop an understanding of metamorphosis as subjective and firmly grounded in perception, and "the affective modulation of perception" (29). While metamorphosis in the romantic texts seems to be a focal point of highly ambivalent affects to investigate self-realization on the one hand, and the fear to lose one's own autonomy on the other (167), it also has to be read with regard to the literary process as well as a reception of the text itself: by interweaving metamorphic occurrences, instable or insecure perceptions, and charged affects, Hoffmann's texts question the events taking place as either "madness, as allegory, or as real" (31).

While Hoffmann's texts in this sense clearly fall into the category of the fantastic, as Tzvetan Todorov has developed it in his seminal Introduction à la littérature fantastique (1970), Kafka's texts never question the reality of their world. Metamorphosis morphs in the second chapter into a literary investigation of what it means to be and become animal. Focusing mainly on Die Verwandlung (1912) and Bericht für eine Akademie (1917), Beaney argues that Kafka investigates radical differences through the literary employment of metamorphosis in an act of mimetic imaginations and identifications. Interestingly, metamorphosis conceptualized as becoming animal or vice versa as becoming human, is closely tied to a confined space in Kafka, essentially closing out the outer world. The exploration of radical difference hence takes on the form of an investigation of the "inner perspectives" (64) of the protagonists. Here in this doubly confined space of room, and inner perspectives, the metamorphosis plays out, and simultaneously questions the well-known binary logic that puts human/mind/rationality/language on the one side, and animal/body/drives/nonlanguage on the other side of the equation. Chapter 3 then investigates in close readings Marie Luise Kaschnitz's Das dicke Kind (1951) and Jenny Erpenbeck's Geschichte vom alten Kind (1999). As different as both texts are, the transformation of young girls into grown-up women (in Kaschnitz's text the narrator discovers that the child who visits her is her alter ego; in Erpenbeck's text a seemingly fourteen-year-old girl emerges as a thirty-year-old woman after she loses weight due to an illness) has to be read, as Beaney points out, as a "final revelation of identity" (110). Moreover, in a discursive and psychoanalytical approach, these bodily transformations can signify twentieth-century German history, and the denial of psychosexual as well as sociocultural predicaments that leave their traces on female bodies. In the last chapter focusing on Yoko Tawada's Opium für Ovid: Ein Kopfkissenbuch von 22 Frauen (2000), stable or fixed identities are fundamentally questioned through a concept of metamorphosis that is constantly transforming and in flux. As such, Beaney claims, the chapter "represents the metamorphic stage of the book as a whole" (169), and the subject of the book––metamorphosis––is hence rendered instable and ephemeral itself.

The composition of Metamorphosis in Modern German Literature shows conclusively how the human subject and humanity are questioned through...