Kafka, Angry Poet

396 Pages·2015·18.631 MB·English

by  Pascale Casanova, Chris Turner

Kafka, Angry Poet
PASCALE CASANOVA
Translated by Chris Turner
LONDON NEW YORK CALCUTTA
Pascale Casanova
Kajka, Atigry Poet
1 RANSLVrtl) BV CHRIS Tl.RXER
Hranz was one of the mosi ¡nnucmial
writers of the twentieth century. Flis writing
contributed greatly to existentialism, and the
term ‘Katkaesque’ is now synonymous with the
literature of the surreal, the complex and the
illogical. His works sustained themes of vio­
lence, family conflict, bizarre and all-powerful
bureaucracies, and fantastical transformations.
However, I’ascale Casanova looks past the cus­
tomary analyses of Kafka’s work and dives deep
into his mind, examining his motives rather
than the results. She bravely asks, 'What if Kafka
were the most radical of social critics? What if
he had actually attempted to pull the wool over
our eyes with narratives that are, in fact, subtly
deceptive?’
According to Casanova, Kafka began with
an awareness of the tragic fate of the German-
speaking Jews of early rwentieth-century Prague
and was subsequently led to reflect on other
forms of power, such as male dominance and
colonial oppression. Through her detailed
research, Casanova shows us a combative Kafka
who was at once ethnologist and investigator,
unstintingly denouncing all forms of domina­
tion with the kind of tireless rage that was his
hallmark, and sheds light on the deep-seated
reasons for Kafka’s anger.

For D., because.
CONTENTS
viii
Acknowledgements
Introduction I
Preamble 18
CHAPTER 1 1 Prague 23
Prague, Austrian City 24
The Transformations of the Jewish Group 33
Eastern Fascinations 47
The Literary Space 59
CHAPTER 2 1 Kafka's Politics 99
Genesis of a Political Habitus 100
The Discovery of Yj<i<Jishkcil 120
An Eastemized Westerner 141
CHAPTtR Î 1 The Tools of Criticism 177
Kafka in the Literary World 180
The Letter of June 1921 190
Unreliable Narrators and
Ambiguous Narratives 206
A ‘Popular* Literature 224
CHAPTiR 4 1 Forms of Symbolic Domination 283
Assimilation as Domination 284
Encryptions 294
The Trial, or Humiliation 305
The *22 Christian Negro Youths in Uganda’ 333
Conclusion 365
Bibliography 368
Acknowledgements
I would liie to thank Dominique Eddé. Xavier Galmiche. Éric Hazan.
Hugues Jallon. UuKnt Jeanpiene. Orole Matheron. Jean-Pierre Morel.
Xavier Person, Franck Poupeau and Gerald Stieg for generously reading
this îext and for aD their suggestions which in a sense ‘gave me permission’
to strike out on the paths of Kafka criticism and also enabled me to avoid
many pitfells. If there are errors. the>‘ are, of course, my o\mi. I also thank
Sarah liioux-Salgas ftw opening the doors of the library of the Musée du
Quai Branly to me, together with Bonard Hoepffiier, Alban Lefranc and
Denise Virieui.
introduction
And as in that game in which the Japanese amuse themselves by
filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it littie pieces
of paper until then indistinct, which, the moment they are
immersed in it, stretch and shape themselves, colour and differ­
entiate, become flowers, houses, human figures, firm and recog­
nizable, so now aU the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's
park, and the w'ater-lihes on the Vivonne, and the good people of
the village and their little dw’ellings and the church and all of
Combray and its surroundings, all of this which is assuming form
and substance, emerged, town and gardens alike, from my cup
of tea.
Marcel Proust. The Way by Swann's
Franz Kafka is a cult figure the world over. He is read, commented
upon and quoted in every language. Tfie Trial and The Castle are
among the most widely distributed, widely admired novels in the
world.* And for more than 60 years we have seen a kind of fetishiza-
tion of his writings: readers identif>^ passionately with the WTiter of
the diary; the tiniest quotation, wrenched out of context and set up
as the standard of a wisdom which is m>'sterious but all the more
‘profound’ for that, is positively venerated.^ The cult of Kafka is
encouraged by the critics, who find in him the most perfect embod­
iment of literature with a capital L obsairity, secrecy, singularit)’
and apparent artistic autonomy. For a ver>’ long time now, Kafka
himself has not been described in the ordinal)’ terms of biography.
Most notably. Max Brod, in a portrait of the author tliat has been
highly mfluential because it claimed the status of first-hand testi-
niony, made him out to be a saint and a sage, a paragon of goodness
and patience, w^hose kindness and equanimit)' were matched only
hy his calm, aloof indulgence.* ‘The category of sacredness (and not
really that of literature) is the only right one within which Kafka s
Pascale Casanova 1 2
life and woA can be viewed - U is on Ais belief in Kafka's to^ess
*i5dom that many of the psychological or sociological pomaite
are constructed, which forget his polemical violence his harsh
assessments of many of his contemporaries, his irony, his laughter
and his aesthetic loathings-in short, the peremptory character of
his likes and dislikes, which sits uncomfortably with his supposed
saindiness.
Kafka has also been turned into a prophet When rediscovered
after the Second World War, he was initially lauded for having
tallegedl)') foretold the horrors of Nazism (despite his death in 1924).
Acc^uiring on the way one of the most ancient, archaic roles assigned
to the poet, that of vatcs or soothsayer, he thus attained a virtually
divinatory status, to the point where he became a kind of almost pre­
ternatural genius predicting honor. This reading, which rides
rou^hod over all historical reality, chooses to overlook the real
conditions of the writing of the texts and presupposes a meaning
inferred from what happened ajier, while showing no interest in
what was happening during, the writing of the texts, was for a very
kmg time one of the main obstacles to a proper historidzation of
Kafka’s texts. Since he was supposed to ha\*e predicted the future,
there was no longer any need to concern oneself with his history.
Kafka was. as it were, twice submerged: once by the outbreak of
war. in w’hich the material, physical and political world of the Jews
of Prague was put to the sword; and a second time by the appUcation
of an interpretive grid that arose out of categories of thinking pro­
duced afier the war w'hich prevent us firom understanding what w'as
going on h^on it occuned.
4, 1 ^■riters most commented upon in the
L 1 7 .^ *eir dual u n iv^ and enigmatic character,
the DTo^ T “ ™®™ous battlefield. In parallel with
has made it possible (and still does) for
Introduction | 5
each intellectual ‘corporation’ to appropriate the texts and to propose,
without any historical sanction, an interpretation dictated solely by
the logic of the debates internal to each interpreter’s field of origin,
be it philosophical, literary, metaphysical, ps>choanalytic, religious
or sociological. In the course of criticizing the ‘deep’ interpretations
of Kafka in circulation, Haimah Arendt slips in a remark to the
effect that interpretations of his work tell us more about the reader
than the author.^ Marthe Robert, summing up the critical reception
of Kafka in France, was able to write, for example, in 1984:
Since Kafka retained no trace of his origins and nothing of
any earthly affiliations whatever, he quite naturally came to
be granted a sort of right of extraterritorialit>; thanks to
which his person and his work—in exchange, admittedly,
for their real existence—^were assigned a perfection and a
purity that can only belong to abstract thii^. This right of
extraterritoriality was, ultimately, a celestial pri\ilege: coming
from nowhere and belonging to everyone Kafka quite natu­
rally seemed to have fallen from the Heavens—even to those
writers least inclined to take Heaven as a reference.®
His is one of the rare global bodies of literary- work that still
gives rise, even today, to such uninterrupted interpretative passion.
Each year, after a massi\’e trawl through the endless bibliography of
Kafka commentar>', exhausted researchers propose new h>'potheses
which, most often, contradict one another. Each year, Kafka fever
produces at least one irmovative book which states a new truth about
the Prague writer and for a time redefines the t)’pe of legitimate
research that will be discussed within the little \wrld of interpreters
about the enigma he represents. This batdefield is itself, of course,
an international arena. The battles are fought out mainly in three
languages; English, German and French. This is why the tiniest piece
of writing on Kafka excludes naivety or, in otlier words, the illusion
of solitude. To venture to interpret Kafka—that is to say, to propose a
new interpretation—presupposes a familiarity (albeit in some cases
only partial) with the compact international field of Kafka
tion and the \’arious different options a\’ailable within that
pjsMie casa"'”'" I 4
„f ,he «ventieth century: of Michael LQwy (2004)
'“"'rts Kafka's closeness to the anarchists and the libertarian
Tcíiata of Bohemia: oflris Bruce (.007) who studies Pra^e
nomsm and its spedficitíes: and of Bemd Neumann (2007) who,
subscribing to the methods of New Historiasm, concludes that
Kafka had assimilationist convictions.» The coUecüve work edited
by Bettina von Jagow and Oliver [ahraus, the Kajka Handbuch,
updates Hartmut Binder’s project of 1979 and sums up all the
historical, biographical. theoreHcal and other advances.« This inter­
national discussion ‘opens the way, so to speak, for a historical
re-examination of Kafka’s writings.
It is at this point in the debate that I too shaU attempt to intrude
into this game and. despite the objections just raised and the obsta­
cles just described, propose my own hypothesis for deciphering
Kafka’s texts. I should note that I confine myself to decoding a num­
ber of fictional texts (though 1 claim no explanatory monopoly on
these), taking the gamble that, even with such an exceptional case,
it was possible—nay, necessary—to start out from as great a distance
as possible (from the political and literary field of Prague) to get
back to the extreme singularity of the narrative fictions themselves.
Even today, biography remains one of the only forms of history
permitted in literary studies.'* It is conceived as the narration of a
psychological singularity, reduced most often merely to the events
of sentimental, family or sexual life. And that psychology is imme-
diately applied to the texts, the aim being to find in the work the
psychological characteristics that have been identified in the life. At
is ^int, the literary work is regarded as the obvious product of a
pecu lar inner life which is supposedly narrated, expressed or poured
immediately trans­
oms a n t a discon.
•. ¿ "...I.
•k.... m U i« „.,,,,„11
since the advent of nsvrh i confession or, better,
P ychoanalysis. as a receptacle for unconscious