From Kafka to Sebald

Modernism and Narrative Form

Sabine Wilke, Sabine Wilke

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441109361
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: German Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume is a response to a renewed interest in narrative form in contemporary literary studies, taking up the question of literary narratives and their encounters with modernism and postmodernism within the German-language milieu. Original essays written by scholars of German and Comparative Literature approach the issue of narrative form anew, analyzing the ways in which modernist and postmodernist German-language narratives frame and/or deconstruct historical narratives. Beginning with the German-language modernist author par excellence, Franz Kafka, the volume's essays explore the unique perspective on historical change offered by literature. The authors (Kafka, Kappacher, Goll, Bernhard, Menasse, and Wolf, among others) and works interpreted in the essays included here span the period from before World War I to the post-Holocaust, post-Wall present. Individual essays focus on modernism, postmodernism, narrative theory, and autobiography.

1. Introduction: Kafka, Modernism, and Beyond

Sabine Wilke

The question of narrative form is crucial to the meaning of cultural artifacts. Unless we carefully analyze the position from which a tale is told and how that perspective evolves in complex ways, we have but a hazy grip on how the narrative unfolds, whose point of view we fully or partially share, which perspectives on the narrated events are presented as truths, and how trustworthy the narrator really is, if at all. Scholars who work on narrative theory and analysis concern themselves with this issue: Wayne Booth in his attempt to understand the rhetoric of irony, Robert Scholes who coined the phrase of the “fabulator” to designate modernist writers of fiction who shy away from direct representation of the surface of reality, Hayden White in his many studies on the narrative discourse of historical reality, to name just a few milestones in the history of narrative among many others.¹ From Kafka to Sebald: Modernism and Narrative Form explores how this larger discussion of narrative form relates to German literary modernism. It also brings German scholarship on narrative into this discussion in the wake of the important work by Franz Karl Stanzel and Käthe Hamburger in the seventies.² Dorrit Cohn’s research on narrative tense and narrative modes for presenting consciousness in fiction built the necessary bridge between narrative theory and German literary modernism and it is by no means an accident that the focus of her analyses is the work of Franz Kafka.³

In terms of historical coverage, From Kafka to Sebald ties together original scholarship on one of the most important German-language writers from the beginning of the twentieth century, Franz Kafka, with scholarship on his contemporaries and on postwar German-language fiction leading up to W. G. Sebald, Christa Wolf, Robert Menasse and others in an attempt to reflect on the specific trajectory German-language fiction has taken over the last century. The aim is not to be comprehensive and map all the possible avenues writers have traveled in expressing narrative modes of consciousness, but to highlight some crucial and recurring themes and formal problems that have preoccupied German-language modernism and continue to preoccupy self-conscious fiction to this day. Patricia Waugh, in her work on metafiction, characterizes the concerns and characteristics of self-conscious fiction as “a celebration of the power of the creative imagination together with an uncertainty about the validity of its representations; an extreme self-consciousness about language, literary form and the act of writing fictions; a pervasive insecurity about the relationship of fiction to reality; a parodic, playful, excessive or deceptively naïve style of writing.”⁴ In the German context, self-conscious fiction often relates to the narration of trauma. Dominick LaCapra has reminded us that “there is an important sense in which the after effects—the hauntingly possessive ghosts—of traumatic events are not fully owned by anyone and, in various ways, affect everyone” and that, as a historian, he prefers to “distinguish between victims of traumatizing events and commentators (or those born later).”⁵ Cathy Caruth’s work on the double wound of trauma locates trauma not “in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature—the way it was precisely not known in the first instance—returns to haunt the survivor later on.”⁶ The notion of writing trauma is crucial to an understanding of postwar German-language fiction in the wake of the Holocaust and will be addressed in several of the essays in this volume.

While there are many individual books and articles written specifically on Franz Kafka and his fiction, this collection of essays brings Kafka’s work into conversation not only with his contemporaries, fellow Hapsburg intellectuals such as Sigmund Freud, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler and other writers and artists of the period such as Yvan Goll, but also with contemporary authors that position themselves vis-à-vis the legacy left by Kafka’s writings and in particular his articulations of narrative consciousness. The emphasis in From Kafka to Sebald is on the advancement of narrative form in German-language modernist fiction, not understood as a universal structure, but as the location of an aesthetic and formal struggle with the main issues of the period, with alienation, urban existence, deception, disjointed life experiences, the collapse of the belief in the possibility of an objective articulation of meaning, the role of language, the fictionality of modes of documentation and the presentation of historical material, the fictionality of life and the performance of cultures, and other issues that emphasize the cultural construction of life experiences in modernism. The book approaches the question of narrative via a set of important questions including gender, performance, trauma theory, exile, autobiography and memory in an attempt to establish relevance to ongoing debates. Narrative form in German-language modernist fiction is analyzed from a variety of perspectives that have comparative, deconstructive and historical dimensions. The relevance of the topic of modernism and narrative form rests on the idea that most twentieth-century modernist avant-gardes defined themselves through the critique of narrative as the quintessential form of modern identity and as a category in both aesthetic practice and theory. Narrative theory has experienced a major revival in the course of the last decade, transforming the heritage of structuralist literary narratology into a truly interdisciplinary, transmedial study of narrative practice. The papers collected in this volume investigate how these narrative practices in German-language fiction shape our perception of reality through these lenses.

The essays in this book are dedicated to Richard T. Gray, who turned sixty in July 2012. From Kafka to Sebald is a tribute to the work of this scholar of German literature who has devoted much of his intellectual and critical life to the interpretation of the works of Franz Kafka and, more recently, W. G. Sebald and other contemporary authors of fiction. The essays collected in this volume engage in a conversation with the topics that form the center of Gray’s intellectual life as a teacher, mentor and scholar. Gray wrote a dissertation on Kafka’s aphorisms under the direction of Walter H. Sokel at the University of Virginia. The work was later published as volume 91 in the “Studien zur deutschen Literatur” with Niemeyer, under the title Constructive Destruction: Kafka’s Aphorism: Literary Tradition and Literary Transformation. It constituted the first systematic attempt at articulating Kafka’s contribution to this genre.⁷ Constructive Destruction charts the significance of the aphoristic form to the overall development of Kafka’s fiction, leading up to the insight that Kafka’s turn to aphoristic expression resolves dissatisfaction with his previous narrative practices and helps him evolve his parabolic style. Lessing’s play Emilia Galotti, Schiller’s Die Räuber, Heine’s Ideen: Das Buch Le Grand, Büchner’s Woyzeck, Hofmannsthal’s “Reitergeschichte” and Kafka’s “Das Urteil” constitute the Stations of the Divided Subject in Richard Gray’s second book, which deals with questions of literary form in the context of displacement and subjugation of the political subconscious. In Stations of the Divided Subject Gray shows how aesthetic innovation in German bourgeois literature was shaped by the simultaneous accommodation with and rebellion against bourgeois reason on the part of the literary intelligentsia. Returning to Kafka, Richard Gray, together with Ruth Gross, Rolf Goebel and Clayton Koelb, composed the entries in A Franz Kafka Encyclopedia, an extremely useful and practical tool for students of Kafka’s works at all levels.

After a critical study of the “science” of physiognomics⁸ and a study of the relationship between aesthetics and economic thought,⁹ Gray’s scholarly interests returned to the subject of narrative in the example of W. G. Sebald and autobiographic fiction. In his work on W. G. Sebald, Gray explores questions of memory and narrative, relations of exiles to the idea of “homeland” and “adoptive nation”, the relationship between image and text, trauma, memorial, and the possibilities of post-Holocaust literature, narratives of physical and imaginative travel, and questions of the relationship between architecture, image and narrative structure, always keeping Sebald’s literary precursors in mind. In a contribution to a collection of essays on literature in the century of totalitarianism, Gray discusses the idea of exile as displacement using the example of one of Sebald’s figures, Dr Henry Selwyn.¹⁰ A narratological examination of Die Ringe des Saturn, Gray’s essay begins with “the observation that this text exhibits a structure of laminated layers reminiscent of an omnipresent narrative consciousness in negotiating the transitions between themes, episodes, historical events and inter-textual allusions that constitute the text’s compositional makeup.”¹¹ These points of transition become Sebald’s segues that function as points of cohesion in an otherwise disjointed text. The impression of continuity that this strategy evokes, however, depends on the narrator’s art of transition; he makes them look as if they are not merely staged when in fact they are the product of conscious intervention on the part of Sebald’s narrator whose “narrative consciousness is characterized above all by its capacity to choreograph subtle transitions and cross-references among disparate elements”, thus making him into the quintessential bricoleur.¹²

This volume addresses narratological questions in a variety of formats. The first section on “Kafka’s Slippages” includes two essays that deal with the logic of ministerial action and narrating allegory. In his essay on “Ritardando in Das Schloß”, Stanley Corngold analyzes the narrative logic of Kafka’s novel and shows the complexity faced by any project that tries to map a unified narrative field theory. Corngold sees very little progression in the episodic structure of the work. Particles of Kafka’s earlier work are redistributed throughout the novel among various characters and contribute to the failure of assuming a totalizing view of Kafka’s narrative that always slips away from itself. In a similar vein, Imke Meyer takes a critical look at “Kafka’s ‘A Hunger Artist’ as Allegory of Bourgeois Subject Construction”. The outlines of her allegorical reading capture for a moment, in the face of allegory’s insistence that the “breach between sign and referent” cannot be healed, the shifting outlines of one of the text’s possible meanings. Meyer contends that Kafka shows us a subject that must consume itself in the very process of its constitution.

The second section deals with “Kafka Effects”. In his essay on “Hofmannsthal after 1918: The Present as Exile”, Jens Rieckmann discusses exile in the context of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s understanding of the loss of the k.u.k (“kaiserlich und königlich”—imperial and regal) monarchy and his alienated existence in the Austrian Republic. Rieckmann reads Hofmannsthal’s artistic crisis as a mode of exile compared to the creative output of his youth. In “Yvan Goll’s Die Eurokokke: A Reading Through Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk”, Rolf Goebel shows that although neither work influenced the composition of the other, Benjamin’s monumental compilation of citations and reflections on Paris as the capital of European modernity in the age of high capitalism can serve as an interpretive framework for a new reading of Goll’s rather neglected novel. The comparison of Benjamin’s and Goll’s texts helps elucidate the complex range of intellectual responses to the cultural crisis of interwar Europe.

The...

Table of contents

• Cover
• New Directions in German Studies Vol. 5
• New Directions in German Studies
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Kafka, Modernism, and Beyond
• I Kafka’s Slippages
• II Kafka Effects
• III Narrative Theory
• IV Autobiography
• Index