Kafka for the Twenty-First Century (review)

Essays based on Roland Reuß’s, Walter Sokel’s, Ritchie Robertson’s, and John Zilcosky’s keynote presentations from the “Kafka at 125” Conference held in April 2009 constitute this impressive anthology’s core component. Their pieces, together with the other ten contributions and the co-editors’ excellent introduction, not only offer fresh, international perspectives on more than a century of Kafka’s impact on modern literature and recent revelations about his biography, original manuscripts, and the context of his literary production. They also affirm the author’s continued significance in the present millennium’s altered historical context, underscoring Ruth Gross’s optimistic assessment that “Franz Kafka is alive and well in the twenty-first century” (vii).

Roland Reuß’s exegesis of manuscript facsimiles from Kafka’s octavo notebooks calls into question decades of scholarship that took the published versions of Kafka’s wording for granted with respect to the three novel fragments and the many other writings that remained unpublished in his lifetime. Designating these manuscripts as “draft on the way to becoming text” (25), Reuß delves into important nuances of Kafka’s switch from pen and ink to the more tenuous medium of pencil in the octavos, and his experimentation with such “material parameters” as page layout and line length. Through careful scrutiny of Kafka’s autobiographical writing and such fiction as The Castle, Mark Harman exposes the fundamental skepticism about language that underlies Kafka’s construction of metaphors that reflect on the “inherent deceitfulness of figurative language” (57). Walter Sokel opens with a succinct definition of Nietzsche’s concept of the Dionysian that enables one to view Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis positively, as an overcoming of Gregor’s ego and individuation, and to find significant Nietzschean analogies in “The Judgment” and “Josephine, the Singer, or the Mouse People.” Uta Denger presents another perspective on “The Judgment” in her treatment of the story’s father-son conflict as an allegory of conflict between the realist and aestheticist approaches to literature, and relates the work to Gustave Flaubert’s application of the poetic to the prosaic. Expanding upon Judith Butler’s concept of gender melancholy, Katja Garloff explores in considerable depth the erotic dimension of “A Report for an Academy” and relates the notion of “racial melancholy” to Kafka’s subversive treatment of dominant discourses on Jewish assimilation. Jacob Burnett’s provocative reading of Kafka’s The Castle introduces, among other things, Nietzsche on the death of God and Douglas Hofstader’s concept of the “strange loop,” to explain the protagonist K.’s futile striving to access the castle as the result of K.’s premodern insistence that the castle functions as a “transcendental signifier” in a modern world lacking a “grounding center.”

Drawing upon Kafka’s office writings, Doreen Densky finds an intriguing affinity between the proxy roles played by Kafka’s literary figures such as The Trial’s Josef K. and the author’s own proxy function as senior legal secretary at the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague. Ritchie Robertson deftly uses the concept of the “total institution” from Erving Goffmann’s 1961 sociological study Asylums to elucidate Kafka’s “extraordinary insight into mechanisms of power, authority and violence” (137). Not surprisingly, Robertson’s prime example for such a total institution is The Trial. But in locating the origin of oppression in the family, he also touches on some of Kafka’s major stories. Rolf Goebel’s examination of Kafka’s references to real and imaginary recording machines and telecommunications devices in the light of Paul Virilio’s theory of space, speed, and telecommunication demonstrates how Kafka’s writing anticipated “the age of television and virtual reality” (153). Peter Beicken’s scrutiny of the visual element in Kafka’s early short prose and passages from Amerika: The Missing Person and The Trial presents a persuasive case for the “cinematic quality” of Kafka’s fiction, which...