An axe for the rising sea: Kafka’s Anthropocene afterlives

Abstract

This article analyses the influence of Franz Kafka on contemporary writers who engage with the climate emergency, focusing in particular on the Australian writer Richard Flanagan and the Polish author Olga Tokarczuk. This transnational corpus is warranted not only by the scale of the crisis, but also by Kafka’s status as a writer whose work refuses to sit neatly within the borders of a nation or ‘Nationalsprache’. The article details both writers’ direct allusions to Kafka, and — under the rubrics of ‘bounds’, ‘scales’ and ‘parables’ — identifies aesthetic techniques they adopt and adapt from his work. These include a disruption of the inside and outside of texts, the rendering of complexity in pithy or parabolic form, and a concern with the mechanisms of denial. The extent of this engagement with Kafka, I argue, suggests that his literary models are uniquely useful in the struggle to give form to the ‘Anthropocene’.