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Kafka's Travels: Exoticism, Colonialism, and the Traffic of Writing
In 1916, Kafka writes of The Sugar Baron , a dime-store colonial adventure novel, '[it] affects me so deeply that I feel it is about myself, or as if it were the book of rules for my life.' John Zilcosky reveals that this perhaps surprising statement - made by the Prague-bound poet of modern isolation - is part of a network of remarks that exemplify Kafka's ongoing preoccupation with popular travel writing, exoticism, and colonial fantasy. Taking this biographical peculiarity as a starting point, Kafka's Travels elegantly re-reads Kafka's major works ( Amerika , The Trial , The Castle ) through the lens of fin-de siecle travel culture. Making use of previously unexplored literary and cultural materials - travel diaries, train schedules, tour guides, adventure novels - Zilcosky argues that Kafka's uniquely modern metaphorics of alienation emerges out of the author's complex encounter with the utopian travel discourses of his day.
306 pages, Hardcover
First published November 23, 2002
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October 23, 2012
For a densely-referenced work of scholarship that combines theoretical ingenuity with the techniques of close-reading, this is a gripping read.
The bold title sets the tone. For Kafka - apart from a few trips in Europe in his twenties - did not travel widely at all, and indeed spent much of his life in Prague. But as this study convincingly argues, travel was very important to his work, in several different ways.
Zilcosky argues that the diaries he kept during his youthful journeys in Switzerland, Paris, and Italy between 1909 and 1912 played a crucial role in his development as a writer, allowing him to refine the descriptive and narrative techniques that characterize his mature work. Travelling with his friend Max Brod, they planned to transform their individual diaries into a jointly-authored travelogue that exoticised Europe. And although only one chapter of Richard and Samuel ever appeared, this theme of defamiliarisation was to become an enduring one.
In contrast to the travel books Kafka enjoyed - from the journals of Flaubert and Goethe to the popular adventure stories of the Little Green Books - his protagonists never overcome their feeling of confusion and alienation by reaching a place of safety and contentment. or a commanding view that reassures them they are in control. Even where their movements are highly circumscribed - within a single town, for example - their mobility is carefully tracked by the narrator. But while the nostalgic yearning for a journey's end, somewhere they can feel at home, accompanies their peregrinations, such satisfactions always elude them.
Zilcosky pays particular attention to the Little Green Books, which made a big impression on Kafka, especially The Sugar Baron by Oskar Weber. In his letters and diaries, Kafka admits to enjoying fantasies of a colonial life (in the jungle, on a plantation) and they leave their mark not just on those stories with a colonial setting (such as 'In the Penal Colony') but elsewhere (in making the hero of The Castle a land-surveyor, for example, or introducing the giant insect in Metamorphosis). But the narratives he composes mark a distance from these fantasies, encouraging the reader to reflect on and analyse them.
This distancing is achieved partly by Kafka's adjectivally-sparse style and his often generic settings, which Zilcosky compares with the baroque detail found in Weber. The transformation of sadistic imperial fantasies into masochistic ones, where the protagonist finds some pleasure and gratification in exchanging places with the 'native', also disrupts expectations.
I especially enjoyed the chapter on his correspondence with Milena Jesenská. Zilcosky examines the various tactics whereby Kafka tries to postpone actual meetings between them, preferring the vicarious travel afforded by the mail train and the telegraph rather than the evident disappointment he felt in physical encounters. His deteriorating health must have been a factor here, although it is also a classic study in the dynamics of flirting.
Kafka finally moved to Berlin, where he lived with Dora Diamant. Dora remembered him coming across a girl in a park who had lost her doll. Touched, Kafka reassured her by saying that the doll had gone travelling. He knows this because she has sent him a letter, which he promised to bring her the following day. And thus begins a series of daily missives in which tales of adventure in foreign lands enthral the girl and distract her from her loss, which Kafka must continue until he can plausibly marry off the doll and gently reconcile his reader to not seeing her again.
Zilcosky doesn't say so, but I wonder if we might treat this as a fable that captures the relationship that many travel writers have - or think they have - with their readers.
The bold title sets the tone. For Kafka - apart from a few trips in Europe in his twenties - did not travel widely at all, and indeed spent much of his life in Prague. But as this study convincingly argues, travel was very important to his work, in several different ways.
Zilcosky argues that the diaries he kept during his youthful journeys in Switzerland, Paris, and Italy between 1909 and 1912 played a crucial role in his development as a writer, allowing him to refine the descriptive and narrative techniques that characterize his mature work. Travelling with his friend Max Brod, they planned to transform their individual diaries into a jointly-authored travelogue that exoticised Europe. And although only one chapter of Richard and Samuel ever appeared, this theme of defamiliarisation was to become an enduring one.
In contrast to the travel books Kafka enjoyed - from the journals of Flaubert and Goethe to the popular adventure stories of the Little Green Books - his protagonists never overcome their feeling of confusion and alienation by reaching a place of safety and contentment. or a commanding view that reassures them they are in control. Even where their movements are highly circumscribed - within a single town, for example - their mobility is carefully tracked by the narrator. But while the nostalgic yearning for a journey's end, somewhere they can feel at home, accompanies their peregrinations, such satisfactions always elude them.
Zilcosky pays particular attention to the Little Green Books, which made a big impression on Kafka, especially The Sugar Baron by Oskar Weber. In his letters and diaries, Kafka admits to enjoying fantasies of a colonial life (in the jungle, on a plantation) and they leave their mark not just on those stories with a colonial setting (such as 'In the Penal Colony') but elsewhere (in making the hero of The Castle a land-surveyor, for example, or introducing the giant insect in Metamorphosis). But the narratives he composes mark a distance from these fantasies, encouraging the reader to reflect on and analyse them.
This distancing is achieved partly by Kafka's adjectivally-sparse style and his often generic settings, which Zilcosky compares with the baroque detail found in Weber. The transformation of sadistic imperial fantasies into masochistic ones, where the protagonist finds some pleasure and gratification in exchanging places with the 'native', also disrupts expectations.
I especially enjoyed the chapter on his correspondence with Milena Jesenská. Zilcosky examines the various tactics whereby Kafka tries to postpone actual meetings between them, preferring the vicarious travel afforded by the mail train and the telegraph rather than the evident disappointment he felt in physical encounters. His deteriorating health must have been a factor here, although it is also a classic study in the dynamics of flirting.
Kafka finally moved to Berlin, where he lived with Dora Diamant. Dora remembered him coming across a girl in a park who had lost her doll. Touched, Kafka reassured her by saying that the doll had gone travelling. He knows this because she has sent him a letter, which he promised to bring her the following day. And thus begins a series of daily missives in which tales of adventure in foreign lands enthral the girl and distract her from her loss, which Kafka must continue until he can plausibly marry off the doll and gently reconcile his reader to not seeing her again.
Zilcosky doesn't say so, but I wonder if we might treat this as a fable that captures the relationship that many travel writers have - or think they have - with their readers.
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