Kafka's Other Prague: Writings from the Czechoslovak Republic

Abstract

In this readable and engaging book, Anne Jamison clears away some long-standing misapprehensions about Kafka's relation to the Czech language and provides much valuable information about its importance for him, particularly in the last six years of his life when he was a citizen of the First Czechoslovak Republic. Kafka spoke Czech fluently and read it easily. Since Jamison, who is familiar with Czech, tells us there is a wide difference (as in many other languages) between spoken and literary Czech, Kafka was less confident about writing it, and sometimes asked his Czech brother-in-law to help him in writing formal documents. A sign of his ability is that under the new Republic, when most of Kafka's German-speaking colleagues in the Workers' Accident Insurance Company were dismissed, Kafka was kept on. It may have helped, as Jamison surmises, that his surname sounded Czech and his forename could easily be given a Czech version as František.There is abundant evidence of Kafka's familiarity with Czech culture and literature, particularly after 1918. He read the fiction and letters of the classic Czech novelist Božena Nĕmcová and texts by young Czech writers published in the journal Kmen. Czech was also a “medium” language, in which he read translations of such Russian writers as Chekhov. And throughout 1920, he carried on a love-affair with Milena Jesenská, a gifted journalist, who translated his own fiction into Czech. His letters to her are full of Czech phrases.As Jamison makes clear, however, Kafka's relation to Czech does not fit the old binary model of comparative literature, in which a writer of one national language draws on the literature of another national language (as Baudelaire did with Poe, among many other examples). Czech was not in that sense a foreign language to Kafka. In some ways he felt it to be more emotionally intimate, and closer to the body, than German. He had easy access to both languages and simply used them for different purposes.Much confusion on this subject has been spread by the well-known book by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure (1975). Their model of a “minor literature” as a subversive construction within a major language may well have value in describing, for example, anti- colonial literature written in English by colonial subjects. But in claiming to derive it from the notes on “small literatures” that Kafka wrote in his diary on December 25, 1911, they “make the theoretically expedient but historically and linguistically outlandish move of substituting Kafka's views on Czech and Yiddish for his views on his own relationship to German literature” (p. 29; Jamison seems to mean “substituting […] with”). In supposing that Kafka aimed to write “minor literature” within German, Deleuze and Guattari rely on the even then outdated notion that Kafka spoke and wrote a special dialect called “Prague German.”Having politely but firmly demolished the claims by Deleuze and Guattari about Kafka, Jamison explores the Czech cultural context for Kafka's later works. She gives an excellent account of the various Czech journals to which Kafka refers (though I would have welcomed more detail about the contents of the philological journal Naše řeč [(“Our Language”)]. The left-wing periodical Kmen, in which Jesenská published her translations of Kafka's stories, was particularly important as giving Kafka access to texts of the Czech and international avant-garde.Jamison is perhaps most interesting on the correspondence between Kafka and Jesenská (of which Jesenská's letters are lost). She points out that “Jesenská brought the Czech language, women, writing and sexuality together” (p. 115). Not only was their intensive letter-writing sexually charged, but the proximity of Czech deepened the associations, present in Kafka's culture, between the Czech language and femininity. And because Kafka speaks of the music of Czech, Jamison is surely justified in tracing a connection with Kafka's last story, “Josefine, die Sängerin oder das Volk der Mäuse,” especially as Kafka often associates music with women. She is not quite right, however, in saying: “Almost the only women writers Kafka mentions with anything but horror were Czech” (p. 119); he writes with unbounded admiration about the Socialist autobiographer Lily Braun (letter to Minze Eisner, November/December 1920).Inevitably Das Schloss, which Kafka wrote early in 1922, receives considerable attention. Jamison interestingly relates K.'s profession as land-surveyor to the redrawing of territorial boundaries required after the First World War. Less persuasively, she considers Das Schloss “the most autobiographically allusive text of Kafka's maturity” (p. 133), most of the allusions being to Jesenská. The argument now becomes nebulous and speculative, with some reliance on alleged word-play, as when the name Klamm is supposed to come from Czech klam “deception” plus M for Milena; even more far-fetched conjectures follow. This procedure is at best genetic; it does not help with the interpretation of the text.Jamison is fully up to speed with Kafka research. She builds especially on two important studies, Scott Spector's Prague Territories (2000) and Marek Nekula's work on Kafka's languages, available in German as Franz Kafkas Sprachen (2003; Jamison cites the Czech original). Among more recent studies, she refers especially to Malte Kleinwort's examination of the Schloss manuscript (Franz Kafkas Spätstil, 2013) and Michelle Woods's Kafka Translated (2014). Her handling of German materials is not quite assured: there are a few small errors in German quotations; Leib (body) does not normally mean “womb” (p. 141); and she misdescribes Grillparzer's play about the founder of Prague, Libussa, as a novel (p. 35).Disagreements aside, this is a substantial and original contribution to knowledge, which belongs among the best recent work on Kafka and his cultural context.