Kafka and Noise: The Discovery of Cinematic Sound in Literary Modernism by Kata Gellen (review)

With Kafka and Noise: The Discovery of Cinematic Sound in Literary Modernism, Kata Gellen makes an important contribution to modernist scholarship and the interdisciplinary field of sound studies through her analysis of noise in Kafka's oeuvre. The book participates in the recent turn in scholarship to define "modernist epistemologies"—that is, to examine "the ways in which modernist art and literature produce new modes of perception and knowledge" (199). Gellen aims to show how Kafka responds to two central crises of modernism—the crisis of narration and the crisis of knowledge—through the treatment of noise in his collected stories, notebooks, and letters. A central premise of this book is that noise is a "productive obstacle" in modernist literary narration in general and in Kafka's works in particular (3). Gellen's interpretations reveal that Kafka never settled on a single, unified approach to sound. Instead, she emphasizes that each one of Kafka's texts that deals with sound presents a different attempt to explore the productive tension between noise and writing (33). Noise puts a strain on many of the characters in Kafka's stories, and Gellen's book examines the literary significance of these disruptive, persistent, and enigmatic noises.

Kafka and Noise is noteworthy as the first sustained English-language study of sound in Kafka's collected works. Jürgen Daiber's Kafka und der Lärm: Klanglandschaften der frühen Moderne (2015) demonstrates a similar interest in sound in Kafka's writings; however, the book primarily focuses on Kafka's own frustrations with noise that disrupted his writing. Gellen adds to the scholarship on Kafka and sound through her innovative application of film theory and her focus not on Kafka's biographical writings, but on the literary significance of noise in his narration. Her approach yields fresh interpretations of Kafka's stories, including "Großer Lärm" (1912), "Die Verwandlung" (1915), "Das Schweigen der Sirenen" (1917), "Forschungen eines Hundes" (1922), "Der Bau" (1923), and "Josefine, die Sängerin oder das Volk der Mäuse" (1924). Although the use of film theory to analyze sound in Kafka's works is new, the study of the connection between Kafka and cinema has a long history, which Gellen traces back to Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno's debates about gesture in Kafka's writing in the 1930s. Inspired also by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's interpretation of noise in Kafka in their theory of a minor literature, Gellen picks up where these critics left off and offers sustained close readings of the problem of sound in Kafka's works.

Gellen's justification for her approach to analyze Kafka's literary works and silent film together in Kafka and Noise is persuasive. Concepts from film theory, such as acoustic close-up and acousmatic sound, provide the language necessary to analyze noise in literature, a silent medium. Gellen's application of these concepts offers new insights into Kafka's works that would not be possible with literary concepts and narrative theory alone. In addition, the interpretation of literary sound with film terminology illuminates what literature (and cinema) can do and what it cannot do, and thus this book makes a significant contribution to genre studies. There is another reason why concepts from film theory, rather than concepts in the field of sound studies, form the methodological underpinning of Kafka and Noise. According to Gellen, sound studies has "has, to a large extent, ignored literary sound" because literature is a medium that does not directly produce actual sounds (203). However, she argues that sound studies would have much to gain by focusing on literary sound as an object of analysis, and her book makes a strong case for that assertion.

In each of the book's four chapters, Gellen introduces concepts from film theory and applies them in her close readings of Kafka's letters and stories, which she interprets...