Kafka's Copycats: Imitation, Fabulism, and Late Modernism

Abstract

It’s often noted that Franz Kafka’s influence on 20th-century world literature is immense and that his two most touted novels, The Trial and The Castle, helped late modernists and their postmodernist successors articulate theological and epistemological skepticism, anxieties about bureaucratic tyranny, and Jewish trauma in the wake of the Holocaust. Yet Kafka’s creative and critical reception in Anglo-American culture has been largely misunderstood, especially during the period of his initial impact, circa 1933-1955. This project focuses on the large-scale integration of Kafka’s fables—his short stories about animals, hybrids, and assemblages—into Anglophone writing during the late modernist period. The dominant narratives about his reception render invisible the powerful effect of these supposedly minor texts on British and American literature. I argue that the fable genre, which has been construed as fallow for the greater part of the 20th century, was reanimated and disseminated largely due to Kafka’s work. A counterintuitive network of transatlantic writers are the media through which this dissemination took place: the Scots Willa and Edwin Muir, the first translators of Kafka’s novels and stories into English, whose own poems and prose narratives do surprising things with the Kafkan fable; leftwing radicals such as W.H. Auden and Christopher Caudwell, who opened up their Marxisms to zoological discourses via Kafka; surrealists like Leonora Carrington, Anna Kavan, and William Sansom, who were excited by Kafka’s explorations of hybridity and corporeal collage; American poets and practitioners of multiple genres, such as Delmore Schwartz, John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, and Sylvia Plath, who, to greater and lesser extents, crafted fables whose nonhumans register psychological (and psychoanalytic) frictions between various individuals and communities; and the Jewish-American fiction writers Paul Goodman, Isaac Rosenfeld, and Saul Bellow, all of whom found Kafka’s dogs to be powerful figurations of the “insider-outsider.” In an energetic quest for a new language, at the crossroads and impasses of Marxism and psychoanalysis, in a quicksand of competing geopolitical and philosophical forces, late modernists turned to Kafka as a model for a new kind of cosmopolitan and deracinated writing, helping them remap their relationship to the dominant modernisms of their time. It is striking that the writers in this study frequently wrote direct imitations of Kafka’s work. Yet the vast majority of these rewritings have been deemed too minor to warrant critical investigation or have remained in the vaults and boxes of library archives. Oftentimes writers were hesitant or embarrassed to publish work that was patently fantastic or foregrounded the subjectivities of animals or other nonhuman beings. The boom in Anglophone writing inspired by Kafka’s fables hasn’t been registered by the Kafka industry for other reasons as well, such as the longstanding view that imitation (unlike adaptation and appropriation) is a spurious rather than a transformative cultural practice. By reconsidering and recovering these imitative texts, we encounter short stories, plays, libretti, and poems that closely replicate the particularities of Kafka’s formal and thematic tics while taking them in new directions that respond to the exigencies of a period of intense planetary, phylogenetic, and cultural crisis. Kafka opened up an avenue of temporary or permanent escape from the elaborate stylistics and epic projects of high modernism.