Kafka's Travels: Exoticism, Colonialism, and the Traffic of Writing by John Zilcosky (review)

Abstract

MLR, 100.3, 2005 873 Sylvain Guarda's slim volume comprises four almost self-contained studies on the four works named in his title. What the texts have in common, according to the author, is their reputation as minor works and their consequent neglect in literary criticism. His stated purpose is to rectify this assessment by drawing attention to hitherto unrecognized layers of meaning, and even to uncover 'das Eigentliche' (p. 48) in his chosen texts. However, he does so in a muddled and incoherent way that leaves his reader confused as to the actual points he is trying to make. A common denominator of his approach to the four texts,even though that is never clearly stated, seems to be a theological one, which lets them appear as variations on the theme of 'heidnische Machtgier und christliche Opferpassion' (p. 104). In his discussion of Unterm Birnbaum (to take just one example of a text still widely present on school and university curricula), Guarda casts Abel Hradscheck as a serial killer,citing solely his personality as a 'blutriinstiger Sanguiniker' (p. 54) as evidence for this assessment. He completely fails even to acknowledge the character of the story as thematizing transgression and displacement, the questions of home and belonging and identity (Abel hails from Bohemia, is brought up in Berlin, has plans to emigrate to America, marries a Catholic woman, etc), or the dimension of social mobility (their bourgeois pretensions, as manifest in the Hradschecks' design on a 'Polisander-Fortepiano'). He overlooks the relevance of Ellemklipp as a portrayal of Prussia just before the onset of the rapid modernization that Fontane witnessed in his own time, and thus as a distant mirror for contemporary concerns. These shortcomings illustrate the limitation of approaches without any overriding (let alone theoretical) angle (other than the wish to demonstrate that there is more to the texts than meets the eye) or a clearly focused socio-historical interest. The chance of a re-evaluation of Fontane's 'Nebenwerke' has thus been lost. Finally, one last observation. In her footnotes, Nottinger unnecessarily cites series titles and series editors while elsewhere using the outdated abbreviation 'a.a.O.'. But this is only a minor quibble. Guarda, however, mistakes the series title 'Wege der Forschung' for the book's main title and cites periodicals as mainstream as Literatur ftirLeser with editor, place, and publisher, while elsewhere confusing the printer of the Text + Kritik special volume on Theodor Fontane with its publisher. Many similar errors could be listed. Factual mistakes also abound in his study: Abel Hradscheck is not of Polish but of Bohemian extraction; his wife never converted to Catholicism but from Catholicism to Lutheranism (p. 51); the Heidereiter (in Ellemklipp) is in the employment of the local countess and would not have worn a 'Preu8ische[s] Jagerkostiim' (p. 44); and his two wives are surely not 'beide Witwen' (p. 42) when one of them died before her husband. Formulations like 'Auf diese Aspekte wird im folgenden [. . .] zu sprechen sein' (p. 37) and expressions like 'Selbstintrospektion' (p. 91) and many more such violations against grammar and register undermine a reader's best intentions to concentrate on the substance of a scholarly work. Is it too much to ask for a stricter adherence to scholarly conventions and for some more scrutiny from copy-editors, supervisors, research assistants, friends,and colleagues? indeed from everybody who is roped in to proof-read books before they are submitted to publishers? National University of Ireland, Maynooth Florian Krobb Kafka's Travels: Exoticism, Colonialism, and the TrafficofWriting. By John Zilcosky. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2003. xvi+ 289 pp. ?40. ISBN 0-312-23281-0. This is very nearly a first-rate book and is certainly a very good one, which will take its place among the scholarly writing on Kafka in English. John Zilcosky builds 874 Reviews in particular on the work of Mark Anderson, to whose book he alludes in his own title. The extent of Kafka's interest in travel, as uncovered and explained here, is astounding, and that this is the firstmonograph on the subject perhaps even more so. If some of the evidence is apparently not central to an...