Kafka’s Other Prague: Writing from the Czechoslovak Republic by Anne Jamison

Abstract

Reviewed by: Kafka’s Other Prague: Writing from the Czechoslovak Republic by Anne Jamison David Suchoff Anne Jamison. Kafka’s Other Prague: Writing from the Czechoslovak Republic. Northwestern UP, 2018. x + 222 pp. Anne Jamison’s Kafka’s Other Prague: Writing from the Czechoslovak Republic breaks new ground in the reading of Kafka as a translinguistic, postnational, and Jewish writer. Focusing on the period from Czech independence in 1918—the end of German’s linguistic domination of Prague—to Kafka’s death in 1924, the “other” of the book’s title opens up Kafka’s Czech linguistic, literary, and political connections more historically and textually than previous studies. Jamison expertly presents unknown—to non-Czech readers—linguistic, political, and literary texts that shaped Kafka’s late work. She does so without the least monolinguistic determinism, in order to launch acute new translinguistic readings of well-known Kafka works. “The primacy of language” in Kafka’s world, as she writes of his post-1918 situation, “brings the text closer to, rather than further away from, events and relations in the extra-textual biographical, and historical ‘real world’ of Kafka’s Czechoslovak Prague” (111). Kafka’s Other Prague offers a powerful revision of Delueze and Guattari’s capture of Kafka’s concept of small or minor literatures, using Czech writings and debates on language and identity from the period. Jamison sees the other not as seeking to inhabit the major but as a multiple historical perspective that opens up a different cultural space. Jamison shows how the sharp difference between spoken Czech, which Kafka used to enable him to keep his insurance job after 1918, and its standard form, which he had not mastered, opens up a translational perspective on the linguistic politics in his writings, creating critical effects in his thematics of gender and in his views of the minority voice. Rich readings of Czech context show how Kafka’s “assault against boundaries” (qtd. in Jamison 77), as his 1922 diary entry put it, took a multiplicity of forms. Jamison reads Kafka’s The Castle against an earlier 1921 diary entry that describes an assault that can take place “von unten” (78), or from below, or “von oben,” above, and hence as linguistically multiple against the social background. The ascendancy of Czech in 1918, for a German-speaking but Jewish Fremder, or foreigner, as The Castle describes K., could mean that a previously dominated Czech populace could be felt as an “assault . . . from below,” as well as an “assault from above,” given the newly sovereign linguistic order. The brilliance of Kafka’s Other Prague consists of such readings: its ability to take “a frame of reference far removed from the contingent, quotidian Prague” and then use material from Czech in the period to portray a “basic structure” (79) in Kafka, “in which [End Page 743] the terms and their interrelations are in flux” (79–80). Jamison uses Czech texts like Sergej Karcevskij’s later “The Asymmetric Dualism of the Linguistic Sign” or Jan Mukařovský’s ”On the Problem of Functions in Architecture” to make available the multiple meanings of architectural space and public sculpture as multiply inflected languages in Imperial German- and Czech-speaking, then-sovereign Prague, as in the case of the Jan Hus monument. Jamison shows how such imagery of nativity parallels scenes in The Castle that bring the question of foreignness as part of the native into focus, helping to establish Kafka’s practice of “establishing and deforming patterns” in his work (143). Jamison provides linguistic surveys and their debates as well as important analyses of Prague’s Czech Press, which published philological and avant-garde journals that Kafka was familiar with and the first translation of Kafka (by Milena Jensenská). For Jamison, Kafka’s method is enlarged by “cultural realities such as bilingualism, intermarriage, and translation” (10), which enabled him to use univocal icons in unique ways: in Kafka’s Other Prague, rather than serving as an image of unifying authority, the Castle’s tower becomes instead a symbol of formative linguistic differences. Jamison thus sees no “either-or logic of the nation state for Kafka” (6) and, for critics, no either-or choice between Kafka...