Abstract
In the attempt to explore the validity of the term ‘world literature’ for the 21st century we need to acknowledge two facts: Despite the continuing debates around the term, up until now ‘world literature’ has not been clearly defined as a concept or theory but remains an indeterminate and fluctuating term. It is, however, not just the performativity of the term’s meaning defined and used in different contexts in multiple, diverse and diverging ways that becomes the core of the definition. It is also the texts themselves, building an ever shifting and altering pool available to a global, likewise altering and never spatially comprehensive and inclusive audience, that cannot just be embraced as ‘world literature’ in the sense of an existing entity within itself. Instead, I argue, the term becomes meaningful when used to explore the dynamics of literature traveling the world, and its capacity to create new literary and social communities and vicinities, reaching beyond existing concepts of national, political, cultural, linguistic, and geographical location. In this chapter, I use Franz Kafka’s prose as a case study with which to explore the preconditions as well as the dynamics of a literature which was never intended to be received as world literature, but turned into world literature nonetheless. Kafka’s case is unique and representative at the same time. It offers a new understanding of world literature as a specific mode of writing through which a literary system is created that stands as a symbol for a real-life experience across systems. As is the case with Kafka’s literature, this symbolic system might operate even on a political level.
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- 1.
Mieke Bal: Travelling Concepts in the Humanities. A Rough Guide. Toronto 2002, p. 24.
- 2.
Theo D’haen/César Domínguez/Mats Rosendahl Thomsen: “Introduction”. In: Theo D’haen/César Domínguez/Mats Rosendahl Thomsen (eds.): World Literature. A Reader. London/New York 2012, pp. X–XII, XI.
- 3.
Franco Moretti: “Conjectures on World Literature”. In: New Left Review 1 (2005), pp. 54–68, 55.
- 4.
The latter is an aspect which will not be included in this investigation, as it would go beyond the actual intention of the study to fathom the phenomenon of ‘world literature’ from a sociological perspective. In fact, Kafka’s fiction provides an example where marketing strategies were not—or only to a minor extent—effective in terms of dissemination. The majority of his work was published only posthumously.
- 5.
Michaela Wolf: The Emergence of a Sociology of Translation. In: Michaela Wolf/Alexandra Fukari (eds.): Constructing a Sociology of Translation. Amsterdam/Philadelphia 2007, pp. 1–36, 1.
- 6.
See Ottmar Ette’s study ÜberLebenswissen. Die Aufgabe der Philologie. Berlin 2004.
- 7.
In his study What is World Literature? David Damrosch looks at the ways works change as they move from national to global contexts. Presenting world literature not as a canon of texts but as a mode of circulation and of reading, Damrosch argues that world literature is work that performs and gains in translation. When it is effectively presented, a work of world literature moves into an elliptical space created between the source and receiving cultures, shaped by both, but circumscribed by neither alone. Established classics and new fictional texts alike participate in this mode of circulation. Damrosch defines world literature in a cosmopolitan spirit as a “mode of circulation and reading” encompassing “all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin”. David Damrosch: What is World Literature? Princeton 2003, p. 5.
- 8.
Patrick O’Neill’s monograph Transforming Kafka: Translation Effects points out two key aspects of what the author calls the “multilingual Kafka phenomenon”, one involving bibliographical description, the other one involving comparative reading. In the introduction to his book, O’Neill states: “The extraordinary oeuvre of Franz Kafka has been translated an extraordinary number of times into an extraordinary number of languages. So much so, indeed, that no single reader, however impossibly gifted he or she might be linguistically, could ever hope to live long enough to read all the texts involved—all the original texts, that is to say, and all the renderings in the more than 40 languages involved to date.” Patrick O’ Neill: Transforming Kafka. Translation Effects. Toronto/Buffalo NY/London 2014, p. 3.
- 9.
Ibid., p. 4.
- 10.
As Thomas Anz has outlined in his biography, Kafka’s image as an enigmatic character and the myth created around his short life and allegedly shy personality often build the basis for researchers from different fields engaging with his work. See Thomas Anz: Franz Kafka. Leben und Werk. München 2009, p. 6. In this context see also Betiel Wasihun’s article: The Name “Kafka”. Evocation and Resistance in Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore. In: MLN 129/5 (2014), pp. 1199–1216.
- 11.
It is quite remarkable that neither Shakespeare nor Goethe for example have their works labelled in an internal context as typical Shakespeare-esque or Goethe-esque. While the adjectival phenomenon does apply to a number of modern authors (e.g. Joyce, Brecht, Proust, Dickens, Chandler, etc.) they are not used on a truly global scale and mainly apply to aesthetic forms rather than world visions. In Kafka’s case the label comments both on the presence of a singular vision or style in his work as well as on his influence—or at least the possibility to abstract ‘Kafka’ into such a vision. Interesting to note in this context is that neither Shakespeare nor Goethe had, historically speaking, followers.
- 12.
Franz Kafka: The Metamorphosis [Die Verwandlung 1915]. Transl. by Stanley Corngold. New York 1972, p. 2. The German original reads: “Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwandelt.” (Franz Kafka: Die Verwandlung. Leipzig 1915, p. 1).
- 13.
- 14.
Venkat Mani: Recoding World Literature. Libraries, Print Culture, and Germany’s Pact with Books. Fordham NY 2016, p. 106.
- 15.
Daniel Hartley : ‘Dead Letters’. Impersonality and the Mourning of World Literature in Ivan Vladislavić’s Double Negative. In: Rebekah Cumpsty/Rebecca Duncan (eds.): Interventions. International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. Special issue: “The Body Now: Somatic Vocabularies from the Millennial Global South” [forthcoming 2019], p. 3.
- 16.
Ibid, p. 9.
- 17.
See Anz, Kafka, p. 12 and Sander L. Gilman: Franz Kafka. London 2005, p. 46.
- 18.
Dieter Lamping in his study Kafka und die Folgen. Stuttgart 2017, p. 28 states: “Bei Kafka führt das Fremdmachen zu einer fundamentalen Verunsicherung auch des Lesers.”
- 19.
Mariano Siskind: Cosmopolitan Desires. Global Modernity and World Literature in Latin America. Chicago 2014, p. 20. For a discussion on the relationship between national and world literature see Dieter Lamping : Die Idee der Weltliteratur. Ein Konzept Goethes und seine Karriere. Stuttgart 2010, p. 63: “Weltliteratur ist immer auch Nationalliteratur—so wie Nationalliteratur immer auch Weltliteratur sein kann, wenn sie sich in Goethes Sinn am internationalen Austausch beteiligt.” Not so, however, in Kafka’s case.
- 20.
In his monograph Franz Kafka and Michel Foucault. Power, Resistance, and the Art of Self-Creation of 2014, Nicholas Dungey has convincingly demonstrated that Kafka’s short story In der Strafkolonie and the novel Der Proceß can be used as illustrative examples to exhibit Foucault’s central themes of disciplinary power and subjectivity (outlined in the light of his dystopian analysis of Enlightenment rationality, subjectivity, and politics). In the second part of the study, however, Dungey moves away from the texts to Kafka’s voluminous letters and diary entries, arguing that these operate as strategies of resistance against disciplinary norms and expectations dominant in Kafka’s own life. As is the case in other secondary sources too, such as for example Michael Löwy’s Franz Kafka. Subversive Dreamer [Rêveur insoumis 2004]. Transl. by Inez Hedges. Ann Arbor 2016, this scholar provides an interpretation of Kafka’s work based on the argument that writing for Kafka served as an artistic vehicle through which the author pursued a form of aesthetic self-creation which he called “literature as life”. As I am less interested in proving that for Kafka writing literature was a mode of resistance but rather want to explore the phenomenon of ‘resisting literature’ which, as I argue, is an intradiegetic device used to refer to the extradiegetic world, it will be necessary to take a different route.
- 21.
Roy Pascal speaks of “the impersonal narrator of the early tales The Judgment and The Metamorphosis” (Roy Pascal: Kafka’s Narrators. A Study of his Stories and Sketches. Cambridge MA 1982, pp. 21–33).
- 22.
Or as Michael Löwy has stated: “Kafka was far from being an ‘anarchist,’ but antiauthoritarianism—of a romantic and libertarian socialist quality—runs through his writings, in a growing universalization and increasingly abstract representations of power: from paternal and personal authority toward administrative and anonymous authority.” (Löwy, Subversive Dreamer, p. 29).
- 23.
Even the settings of St. Petersburg in Das Urteil, China in Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer, America in Amerika, or the Gold Coast in Ein Bericht für eine Akademie appear in these stories rather out of time and space and do not seem geographically traceable.
- 24.
Henri Lefebvre: Introduction to Modernity [Introduction à la modernité 1962]. Transl. by John Moore. London/New York 1995, p. 188.
- 25.
As discussed by Hannah Arendt: The Human Condition [1958]. 2nd ed. Chicago 1998; Jürgen Habermas: Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft [1962]. 9th ed. Frankfurt a. M. 2004 and Nancy Fraser: Rethinking the Public Sphere. A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy. In: Social Text 25/26 (1990), pp. 56–80.
- 26.
Hartmut Rosa: Resonanz. Eine Soziologie der Weltbeziehung. Frankfurt a. M. 2016, pp. 281–288 and 292.
- 27.
Hartmut Rosa: Weltbeziehungen im Zeitalter der Beschleunigung. Umrisse einer neuen Gesellschaftskritik. Frankfurt a. M. 2012.
- 28.
Franz Kafka: Die Erzählungen. 2nd ed. Frankfurt a. M. 2013, p. 17.
- 29.
Hartmut Rosa: Beschleunigung. Die Veränderung der Zeitstruktur in der Moderne. Frankfurt a. M. 2005, p. 60.
- 30.
Kafka, Erzählungen, p. 349.
- 31.
Anthony Giddens: Runaway World. How Globalisation is Reshaping Our Lives. 2nd ed. London 2002. Giddens uses the metaphor of a “runaway world” to illustrate how two consequences of globalization, the rise of a “risk consciousness” and “detraditionalisation”, undermine the ability of institutions such as the nation state, the family and religion, to provide individuals with a sense of security and stability. These institutions are no longer able to offer clearly defined norms and values that tell us how we should act in society. This situation has far-reaching consequences for how individuals experience daily life and for how they go about constructing their identities. “Revise Sociology. Anthony Giddens’ Runaway Society—A Summary” (2016), https://revisesociology.com/2016/08/21/anthony-giddens-runaway-world-summary/ (10.01.2019).
- 32.
Moishe Postone : Time, Labor, and Social Domination. A Reinterpretation of Marx ’s Critical Theory. Cambridge MA 1993, pp. 3–4.
- 33.
Immanuel Wallerstein: World-Systems Analysis. An Introduction. 2nd ed. Durham NC/London 2005.
- 34.
Warwick Research Collective (WReC): Combined and Uneven Development. Towards a New Theory of World-Literature. Liverpool 2015.
- 35.
These include theorists such as Marx and Engels , Max Weber, Michael Heinrich , Theodor Adorno , Alain Badiou , Moishe Postone , Cincia Arruzza , Fredric Jameson and more. See Daniel Hartley : Capital Personified: Impersonality in the Modern World-System, Basingstoke [forthcoming]. For a summary of these theories, see Daniel Hartley : Keeping it Real. Literary Impersonality under Neoliberalism. In: Sharae Deckard/Stephen Shapiro (eds.): World Literature, Neoliberalism and the Culture of Discontent. Basingstoke 2019, pp. 131–155.
- 36.
John Ellis: Kleist ‘Das Erdbeben in Chiliʼ. In: John Ellis: Narration in the German Novelle. Theory and Interpretation. New York 1974, pp. 46–76, 49.
- 37.
Wallerstein, World Systems Analysis, p. 390.
- 38.
Kafka, Erzählungen, p. 147.
- 39.
Niklas Luhmann: Einführung in die Systemtheorie. 5th ed. Heidelberg 2009.
- 40.
Kafka, Der Proceß, p. 20.
- 41.
Franz Kafka: Das Schloß in der Fassung der Handschrift [1926]. Frankfurt a. M. 1994, pp. 90–91.
- 42.
Hartley , Keeping it Real, p. 136.
- 43.
Rosa, Weltbeziehung, p. 707.
- 44.
Here a close reference to Samuel Beckett’s Act Without Words as well as more generally to texts by Camus unfolds.
- 45.
- 46.
Jennifer L. Geddes: Kafka’s Ethics of Interpretation. Between Tyranny and Despair. Chicago 2016, p. 7.
- 47.
Clearly expressed by Theodor Adorno in his essay “Aufzeichnungen zu Kafka”: “Jeder Satz spricht: deute mich, und keiner will es dulden.” (Theodor W. Adorno : Aufzeichnungen zu Kafka [1955]. In: Theodor W. Adorno : Prismen. Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft. Frankfurt a. M. 1997, pp. 254–283, 255).
- 48.
An excellent example of the broad range of different interdisciplinary approaches to Kafka’s oeuvre was offered within the framework of the 2017 lecture series at Duke Trinity College of Art and Science entitled “Whose Kafka. Multiplicity, Reception, and Interpretation”, in which a range of scholars gave public lectures, led seminars and organized a film series under the topic of “Kafka and the Kafkaesque”. See https://german.duke.edu/whose-kafka-multiplicity-reception-and-interpretation (11.01.2019).
- 49.
Evidence for this is provided by the project Kafka-Atlas launched by the Mitteleuropa Zentrum Dresden, which strives to provide “länderspezifische Informationen zu den jeweils herrschenden Kafka-Bildern/-Lektüren/-Rezeptionen und anderen Realien (z. B. Schulpflichtlektüren, veröffentlichte Übersetzungen, Ausgaben, Zensur etc.)”. https://www.kafka-atlas.org (10.01.2019).
- 50.
An argument could be made that Max Horkheimer’s and Theodor Adorno’s thesis of ‘the increasing totalitarianization of modern society’ is a precursor to ‘world systems theory’ (not quite in Wallerstein’s Marxist terms of “capitalist world economy” or “combined and uneven development” as articulated by the Warwick Research Collective, but in the sense of a phenomenological grasped ‘depersonalized world system’ as outlined in Kafka’s idiosyncratic texts. Theodor W. Adorno/Max Horkheimer : Dialektik der Aufklärung [1944]. Frankfurt a. M. 1981.
- 51.
See Axel Honneth: Pathologien der Vernunft. Geschichte und Gegenwart der Kritischen Theorie. Frankfurt a. M. 2007.
- 52.
Weber uses the metaphor of “stahlhartes Gehäuse” to illustrate the increased rationalization inherent in social life, particularly in Western capitalist societies. The ‘iron cage’ thus traps individuals in systems based purely on teleological efficiency, rational calculation and control. Weber also described the bureaucratization of social order as “die Polarnacht eisiger Finsternis und Härte” (Max Weber: Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus. Ed. and introd. by Dirk Kaiser. München 2013, p. 15).
- 53.
Adorno ’s comment on Kafka and Beckett in “Engagement” can be understood as a prefiguration and support of the ‘anti-world-systems’ and ‘resistance’ thesis outlined in this chapter: “Kafkas Prosa, Becketts Stücke oder der wahrhaft ungeheuerliche Roman ‘Der Namenlose’ üben eine Wirkung aus, der gegenüber die offiziell engagierten Dichtungen wie Kinderspiel sich ausnehmen; sie erregen die Angst, welche der Existentialismus nur beredet. Als Demontagen des Scheins sprengen sie die Kunst von innen her, welche das proklamierte Engagement von außen, und darum nur zum Schein, unterjocht. Ihr Unausweichliches nötigt zu jener Änderung der Verhaltensweise, welche die engagierten Werke bloß verlangen. Wen einmal Kafkas Räder überfuhren, dem ist der Friede mit der Welt ebenso verloren wie die Möglichkeit, bei dem Urteil sich zu bescheiden, der Weltlauf sei schlecht: das bestätigende Moment ist weggeätzt, das der resignierten Feststellung von der Übermacht des Bösen innewohnt.” (Theodor W. Adorno : Engagement. In: Theodor W. Adorno: Noten zur Literatur. Ed. by Rold Tiedemann. Frankfurt a. M. 1981, pp. 409–430, 426).
- 54.
Geddes, Ethics of Interpretation, p. 17.
- 55.
Richard K. Myers: The Problem of Authority. Franz Kafka and Nagi Mahfuz. In: Journal of Arabic Literature 17 (1986), pp. 82–96, 90.
- 56.
Interestingly enough, Adorno does not seem to fully grasp the political dimension of Kafka’s fictional take on the experience of modernity in his essay “Aufzeichnungen zu Kafka” when stating: “Die absolute Subjektivität ist zugleich subjektlos. Das Selbst lebt einzig in der Entäußerung; als sicherer Rest des Subjekts, der vorm Fremden sich verkapselt, wird er zum blinden Rest der Welt. Je mehr das Ich des Expressionismus auf sich selber zurückgeworfen wird, um so mehr ähnelt es der ausgeschlossenen Dingwelt sich an. Vermöge dieser Ähnlichkeit zwingt Kafka den Expressionismus, dessen Schimärisches er wie keiner seiner Freunde muß verspürt haben und dem er doch treu blieb, zu einer vertrackten Epik; die reine Subjektivität, als notwendig auf sich selber entfremdete und zum Ding gewordene, zu einer Gegenständlichkeit, der die eigene Entfremdung zum Ausdruck gerät. Die Grenze zwischen dem Menschlichen und der Dingwelt verwischt sich.” (Adorno , Aufzeichnungen, p. 275–276). Instead, Adorno clings to the formalistic, symbolic, and psychological dimension of Kafka’s prose and continues: “Dies Gesetz [der zeitfremden Wiederholung] nicht zuletzt verhält das Kafkasche Werk zur Geschichtslosigkeit. Keine durch Zeit als Einheit des inneren Sinns konstituierte Form ist ihm möglich; er vollstreckt einen Richtspruch über die große Epik, dessen Gewalt Lukács schon an so frühen Autoren wie Flaubert und Jacobsen beobachtet hat. Das Fragmentarische der drei großen Romane, die übrigens kaum mehr vom Begriff des Romans gedeckt werden, wird bedingt von ihrer inneren Form. Sie lassen sich nicht als zur Totalität gerundete Zeiterfahrung zu Ende bringen. Die Dialektik des Expressionismus resultiert bei Kafka in der Angleichung an Abenteuererzählungen aus aufgereihten Episoden.” (Ibid., p. 279). ‘Life as loose episodes strung together’, however, is just another metaphor for the subject’s experience of depersonalization and once again proves that along with our world systems and modes of living, literature is changing.
- 57.
Adorno , Aufzeichnungen, p. 263.
- 58.
Hartley , Dead Letters, p. 3.
- 59.
Dieter Lamping in this context speaks of a “kompositorische Geschlossenheit” linked to a “hermeneutische Offenheit”, which in fact increases the reader’s feeling of alienation. Lamping , Kafka und die Folgen, p. 47.
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Herrmann, E. (2019). Dialogue, Movement, and World Entanglement: Towards a Reconceptualization of World Literature. In: Lamping, D., Tihanov, G. (eds) Vergleichende Weltliteraturen / Comparative World Literatures. J.B. Metzler, Stuttgart. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-04925-4_5
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