On Literary Plasticity: Readings with Kafka in Ecology, Voice, and Object-Life by Heather H. Yeung

Abstract

Reviewed by: On Literary Plasticity: Readings with Kafka in Ecology, Voice, and Object-Life by Heather H. Yeung Paul Sutherland Sherban On Literary Plasticity: Readings with Kafka in Ecology, Voice, and Object-Life. By Heather H. Yeung. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2020. vii+111 pp. $59.99. ISBN 978-3-030-44157-9. 'Plastic has bad press.' So begins Heather H. Yeung's book. In her introductory chapter, she emphasizes plastic's political image by referencing National Geographic articles that portray plastic as the new 'bedrock' of our planet, replacing floating icebergs with drifting plastic bags (p. 1). Despite these opening remarks, On Literary Plasticity is not an anti-plastic treatise. Rather, the book questions humanity's 'addiction to plastic'. It takes Kafka's story Die Sorge des Hausvaters as its focal point and elucidates the titular concept via a close reading. Yeung maintains that critics must consider plastic in its various guises: plastic history, neuroplasticity, linguistic plasticity, and (her own contribution here) literary plasticity (p. 3). Far from a condemnation of plastic, this book dwells with Kafka's Kurzprosa to elucidate the plastic processes of reading and encourage a deeper understanding of 'the hold that plastic exerts on us' (p. 4). In Chapter 2, Yeung highlights the word and figure of 'Odradek' in Kafka's story, its plastic implications, and propounds an ethical imperative from the text. Critics mostly disagree on how to categorize Odradek, thus leading Yeung to conclude that it evades taxonomy (p. 42). However, as the story progresses, Odradek becomes more familiar, moves from neuter to masculine pronouns, and receives a voice. Yeung argues that this development reflects the human disposition to value familiarity and fear alterity (p. 43). The image of Odradek mutates like plastic and, like plastic's many polymers, Odradek contains various synthetic units (p. 48). Yeung thus draws Kafka's ethical injunction from the text, namely that we must not take literary creation for granted, and we must allow a story 'to simultaneously take us over and resist comprehension' (p. 44). In Chapter 3, Yeung considers Roland Barthes's Le Plastique in tandem with Kafka's story because both texts share critical qualities in common with plastic; [End Page 312] they are 'ultimately unnatural' and mobile (pp. 58–59). Yeung illustrates their unnatural aspects by showing that each of the texts evades genre; they elude categorization into short story, aphorism, prose poem, or scientific observation (p. 63). Hedging genre, both present unnatural morphology (p. 60). Additionally, owing to their small size, they share the quality of mobility with plastic; they can easily travel in a pocket or purse, and one might quickly replicate or recite them just as one might recycle plastic (p. 66). On Literary Plasticity offers a particularly valuable contribution to Kafka scholarship in its fourth chapter, wherein Yeung diverges from the most familiar reading of the final paragraph of Die Sorge des Hausvaters. Noting that Slavoj Žižek, Judith Butler, Walter Benjamin, and 'Theodor Adorno all assume the narrator to be the eponymous Hausvater, Yeung focuses instead on the plasticity of points of view (p. 88). 'Thus, she shifts the 'work and literary power' of the text from the figure of the father onto the text's 'formal machinations' (p. 89) and argues that it would be mistaken to assume that the narrative voice of the opening paragraph coincides directly with that of the Hausvater. Instead, Yeung contends that the narrative voice is 'disembodied', and in so doing offers a novel interpretation (p. 89). Although the final chapter presents a satisfying shift from Kafka's early twentieth century to plastic's twenty-first century, I had hoped to find a more explicit illumination of the political implications of Yeung's engaging assertion. If we rely extensively on plastic objects and plastic modes of thought in the Anthropocene age, precisely how might we perceive oceanic plastic anew after Yeung's reading of Kafka? Yeung implies that we ought to embrace literary plasticity and neuroplasticity in our approach to the ecological threat of plastic objects, yet the political claim remains implicit (p. 99). An explicit visualization of how this perception of plastic might transmute the environmental gaze on...