The Legacy of Kafka in Contemporary Austrian Literature

Abstract

Filipp, Frank, ed. The Legacy of in Contemporary Literature. Riverside: Ariadne, 1997. $29.50 hardcover. Evaluating the legacy ofa great and extraordinarily influential writer is never an easy task. Such examinations tend to gravitate between the Scylla of positivistic influence study, where subsequent writers openly affirm and admit the impact a prominent literary precursor has had on their work, and the Charybdis of often broad, and hence vague, identification of intellectual or thematic constellations, which attempts to align the work of a later writer with the models of a significant forerunner. Of the nine essays collected in the present volume, only two successfully sail through these treacherous waters. The general problem is compounded in this instance by the sheer stature of as one of the most prominent, most influential of all modern German fiction writers: is there any author who does not share in some way, if only indirectly, in Kafka's legacy? Moreover, what defines Kafka's significance is the way in which his writing has tended to gather together, in concentrated form, many of the issues and dilemmas that have become the hallmarks of European modernism. Here one could go through a litany of terms and phrases, such as Freudian psychoanalysis, alienation, linguistic skepticism, existential angst, bureaucratization of civil life, etc. When contemporary writers articulate such omnipresent themes, are they always doing so in Kafka's name, as it were, or as his heir? Put differently: What criteria can be used to distinguish between the participation in a more generally shared cultural-intellectual problematic and the specific influence of a particular artist, especially one whose reach is as broad as Kafka's? If, as Frank Pilipp maintains in his preface, Austrian literature displays a more concentrated indebtedness to than do other national literatures (2), is it himself or the wider intellectual-historical tradition that explains this affinity? The major failing of the present volume is that it does not address this extremely complex problematic. Over half of the essays in this volume (five of nine) treat two authors who freely admitted Kafka's influence on their writing: Elias Canetti and Peter Handke. Kristie A. Foell points out differences between Kafka's fictional world and that portrayed in Canetti's Die Blendung in order to arrive at the uninspired conclusion that it was Kafka's person and his life, not his manner of writing, that fueled Canetti's imagination. Readers familiar with Canetti's reflections on Kafka's correspondence with Felice Bauer will not be surprised by this assertion. Richard H. Lawson seeks to explore parallels between Kafka's and Canetti's aphoristic writings. However, as becomes clear over the course of his deliberations, what he understands under the term aphorism is simply autobiographical self-expression. This explains why his examples of aphoristic utterances by are drawn solely from his diaries. Lawson completely ignores that both and Canetti were composers of aphoristic texts that reflect a specific literary genre, defined by its employment of rhetorical, structural, and figurative devises. Thus the special sympathetic relationship (34) he identifies between and Canetti is once again grounded in personal-biographical rather than in formal literary issues. Fully three essays address the impact of Kafka's work on Peter Handke. The outstanding contribution in this group, and one of the two outstanding pieces in this collection, is Thomas F Barry's Kafka and Handke: Poetics from Gregor to the Gregors. Barry is not satisfied with cataloging superficial connections between Kafka's and Handke's works; indeed, he expresses some skepticism about the significance of ties such as Handke's proclivity for giving his characters names that invoke those of Kafka's protagonists. Instead, he digs to the psychological level, citing their negative sense of their own body ego as Kafka's and Handke's most profound commonality. …