Kafka's Travels: Exoticism, Colonialism, and the Traffic of Writing (review)

John Zilcosky's highly readable book reveals the enduring symbolic importance of travel in Kafka's oeuvre, where travel materializes as a repressed theme in Kafka's works at the precise moment when Kafka ends his actual travels. Complicating the cliché of Kafka as writer of stasis, Zilcosky refreshes our understanding of many of the most important and most studied works. He also succeeds where many literary and cultural studies scholars alike fall short, shifting expertly between close textual readings and the larger social, political, and historical contexts out of which Kafka's peculiar vision emerges.

Each chapter in Kafka's Travels is based around a grouping of texts, from the early experimental travel novel Richard and Samuel to the better-known America (The Man Who Disappeared) and stories 'The Hunter Gracchus' and 'In the Penal Colony,' all lending themselves to a reading focused on travel as both theme and trope. But Zilcosky also treats famous texts rarely if ever examined through this optic: 'The Metamorphosis,' The Trial, The Castle, the Letters to Milena. Zilcosky shifts expertly among literary, (auto-)biographical, socio-cultural, and historical evidence, constructing a complex, compelling interpretation of Kafka as traveller turned writer turned second-order traveller, increasingly constrained in his movements, ever striving for more freedom to explore the exotic topography of his writerly imagination.

Zilcosky bases his innovative analysis in overlooked sources, such as Schaffstein's immensely popular 'Little Green Book' adventure-travel series. In 1916 Kafka writes of The Sugar Baron, a dime-store colonial adventure novel: '[it] affects me so deeply that I feel it is about myself, or as if it were the book of rules for my life.' This 'book of rules' proves to be a set of guidelines by which Kafka finds it increasingly difficult to live. Instead, his writing becomes a form of 'non-traveling travel,' an 'immobile voyage' only 'threatened' by real travel. In other words, Zilcosky argues, Kafka's famous Reiseangst (fear of travel) is in psychoanalytic terms symptomatic of the fear of the end of life's journey. Kafka's life, restricted to an ever-narrower compass, is (in his famous formulation) like the eternal torments of dying, while writing, Zilcosky reminds us, is 'modernity's chief figure of deferral.' Zilcosky applies Freudian tropes to show how the twists and turns of travel yield in Kafka to the 'traffic' of writing: 'travel, Kafka hopes, might fully be transposed into signs' the 'translation' of travel into writing; of literal travel into a polyvalent Verkehr: the 'intercourse' of travel, traffic, exchange, commerce, business, social relations, sex.

Exoticism, the modern self's alienation and otherness, the connection between location and identity, the peculiar nostalgia for and fetishization of the foreign (the longing for a 'second home' in an alien land: Heimweh nach der Fremde). In his attention to discourse, Zilcosky illuminates afresh all aspects of a waning nineteenth-century colonialism, inverted in the Kafkan 'exotic within the Heimat.' Linking the genesis of Kafka's texts to the socio-political context of fin-de-siècle Europe, Zilcosky helps forestall Kafka's exile in a formalist wasteland. At the same time Kafka's Travels largely avoids the danger of mimeticism: a return to reading Kafka as a 'realist' writer is the privileging of content over form in postcolonial critical discourse. For, if a poststructuralist approach possesses one virtue, it is its foregrounding of the irreducible primacy of the letter or 'law' of the Kafkan text; Kafka's writing surpasses even as it exemplifies the modern. Extending Zilcosky's description of 'In the Penal Colony': everything Kafka ever wrote is 'highly self-reflexive and hermetic, concerned with its own rhetorical structures.' Avoiding the trap of presenting the Kafkan text as an adequate reflection of the still-colonial world, Zilcosky demonstrates rather the refraction of specific aspects of the world in the representation of an author's attempts to locate his authentic self somewhere outside that world.

Kafka scholarship does not need to be carried...