Kafka's Other Prague: Writings from the Czechoslovak Republic by Anne Jamison (review)

Few authors have had as many claims made on their identity as Franz Kafka, a Bohemian-born, German-speaking Jew who spoke Czech fluently and became a citizen of the newly formed state of Czechoslovakia in the last few years of his life. In Kafka's Other Prague, Anne Jamison interrogates the binary logic that often plagues claims to Kafka's literary legacy on the basis of his "true" ethnic or national identity by tracing it back to the language politics of Kafka's contemporary Prague, where language served as a determiner "of identity, civic status, and even property lines and (in theory, at least) borders" (4). Against the backdrop of the shifting political landscape in the years between the end of World War I and Kafka's death in 1924, which saw the fall of the Habsburg Empire and the birth of the Czechoslovak nation, Jamison makes a compelling case for the importance of Kafka's increased engagement with Czech language and culture for his late fiction.

Each of Kafka's Other Prague's eight chapters combines historical research and literary readings in order to illuminate a particular aspect of Kafka's multilayered reflections on identity, language, and territory. The first two chapters, which serve as an introduction to Prague's language politics, show how many of the same questions that consumed Kafka in his "Czech period" were at the same time being passionately contested in the Czech press. The following six chapters take up the themes of language and architecture, social grammar, and gender as structure in Das Schloß (1926) before turning to the question of the function of sound, music, and language in the late animal stories. Drawing on newly available archival material unavailable to previous generations of scholars, Jamison's study works to correct a blind spot in Kafka studies, which has largely skirted the question of the impact of Kafka's Czech context on his fiction. Yet, by "focusing on the 'Czechoslovak Kafka,'" Jamison makes no attempt to claim him as a Czech writer (3). Rather, the book––to borrow a prominent image from Das Schloß, which takes a central place in Jamison's argument––endeavors to survey the ways in which Kafka's engagement with Czech language and culture led him to question the stability of national, ethnic, and gender distinctions that even he had once presumed to be settled.

Though Jamison acknowledges that Deleuze and Guattari's concept of "minor literature" has been more useful as a general paradigm for literary studies than it has for Kafka scholarship, she nevertheless endeavors to correct the misconceptions in Towards a Minor Literature (1986), chief among which is the tendency to treat Kafka's relationship to Czech as a "stable given" (30). The first chapter provides the clearest articulation of Jamison's central claim: against Deleuze and Guattari, Jamison argues for Kafka's increased attention to Czech as a literary language in his final years. She attributes this, on the one hand, to the shifting "balance of linguistic and political power" in "post-Hapsburg Prague," which made Czech the language of Kafka's professional life, and, on the other hand, to his relationship with the Czech writer Milena Jesenská, who translated a number of Kafka's stories and with whom he carried on a brief, but intensely personal correspondence (30). It was Jesenská, who inspired in Kafka a newfound appreciation for Czech as a literary language, which, in turn, fundamentally altered the way "he understood national and ethnic identity, gender and sex, and—paramount for Kafka—writing and language per se" (3).

The attempt to map the evolution of Kafka's relationship to Czech language and culture brings Jamison's study into close contact with the realm of material and print culture. Jamison prepares her readings of Kafka's late fiction by contextualizing them in discussions of Prague architecture and the ideologically diverse Czech newspapers and periodicals that constituted a...