Franz Kafkas akustische Welten by Rüdiger Görner (review)

Franz Kafkas akustische Welten is a short, tightly organized guide to the role of sound in Kafka's oeuvre. Ever since sound studies have become established within the last decade, this particular angle seems ripe for analysis. However, scholars and biographers have long recognized Kafka's peculiar relationship to noise and music, and in recent years Görner's book has been joined by two others: Jürgen Daiber's Kaßca und der Lärm: Klanglandschaften der frühen Moderne (2015) and Kata Gellen's Kafka andNoise: The Discovery of Cinematic Sound in Literary Modernism (2019). It should be noted that all three books focus on the same texts, and for good reason. The sensitive animal figures in "Josefin die Sängerin," "Der Bau," and "Forschungen eines Hundes" are prominent features, as is the enticingly incomprehensible fragment "Das Schweigen der Sirenen" and the consequences of advances in technology during Kafka's lifetime like telephones and earplugs.

With its three parts Franz Kafkas akustische Welten is straightforwardly structured: after its extensive introduction entitled Befunde, the two major sections are called Bereiche and Beziehungen. Each subsection of parts two and three roughly corresponds to one text, the analysis of which usually takes no more than a few pages, and hence tends to be relatively superficial, particularly when it comes to the aforementioned texts with animals and technology. These texts would benefit greatly from a more radical and specific approach rather than summaries of sound's presence within a single text, with relatively little connection to others. By separating each story so cleanly and avoiding bigger questions about Kafka's relationships to sound, Görner's analysis overlooks many of the potentially fascinating cracks in the narrative facades on which Kafka thrives. In part three of Beziehungen, some subsections deal with texts by other writers, and while insightful, the strength of the connection between Kafka and the texts chosen varies wildly. It is hard to find a place for Joyce's Ulysses, written five years after "Das Schweigen der Sirenen," with vastly different circumstances and goals in mind (whatever they were), in a text that is ultimately about Kafka's particular usage of sound. However, it is easy to see how Kafka's decision to use intelligent dogs to interrogate human society could have been inspired by the Cervantes story "Dialogue of the Dogs" via E.T.A. Hoffmann's "Nachricht von den neuesten Schicksalen des Hundes Berganza," or why sirens in Rilkes poetry are worth comparing to his contemporary's parables. Yet Görner's choice of György Kurtág's large Kafka Fragmente cycle (1985-1987) as his only example for Kafka's texts attracting contemporary composers seems arbitrary. In his best moments Görner manages to situate Kafka in a literary tradition and a living, breathing world where writers share their peers' concerns, without jumping to conclusions about the uniqueness of Kafka, as so many scholars do.

Another helpful feature of this book is the way Görner clearly sets out four goals in his first part, Befunde, offering more insight into the reason why certain arguments are made and certain texts are featured. The goals combine relatively uncontroversial ideas (that sound plays a major role in Kafka's work and is related to Kafka's tendency for manipulating illusions) with bolder ones (that the idea of the "Kafkaesque" can be primarily understood as an auditory phenomenon). Of note is the idea of an "Acousticon," which is proposed as a unit for describing repetitive acoustic events (for instance, knocking on a door in Der Prozeß). Unfortunately these "acousticons" do not play a very large role in Görner's overall argument and as a result their usefulness for analysis has not been fully tested. The other aspects of Görner's theoretical approaches are set up and proven without much friction. Depictions of sound in a soundless medium like literature will by their nature have a...