Abstract
A continuation of the analysis of Kurzprosa, and its uncannily plastic architecture, its inherent mobility, and other formal properties. A staged encounter between Kafka’s ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ and Roland Barthes’ ‘Le Plastique’ by way of an exploration of how the properties of the Kurzprosa are foundational to Literary Plasticity, as they are both exterior and interior, impersonal and personal, malleable and permanent.
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Notes
- 1.
Definitions of the short-short story, flash fiction, prose poem, microfiction, and various other short prose forms have often occurred in conjunction with those of the Kurzprosa, but none has ever really served well, or thoroughly enough to effect the introduction of Kurzprosa as such into the Anglophone literary critical landscape. Kurzprosa, or Kurzgeschichte, often defined elsewhere as a High Modern genre par excellence, has been around (in German) in a codified way since the mid-1800s. In this way, the Kurzprosa has a sister sub-genre in the prose poem (again, a literary sub-genre often associated with High Modernism, either in the lyric digressions of Mallarmé or in the ludic audacity of Stein), but the short-short story, microfiction, and flash fiction, ‘postmodern’ inventions in genre (even if there are pre-existent precedents), postdate Kurzprosa by quite some way. Middleton is also a translator of Walser, Nietzsche, Goethe, and, perhaps most notably in this context of Elias Canetti’s book on Kafka (Kafka’s Other Trial), writes of these differences in his Preface to Crypto-Topographia (London: Entharmion, 2002): 7–8. Additionally, Marc Botha makes a strong case for the long, transnational history of the ‘short short’ story in his essay ‘Thinking Through Microfiction’ (in The Cambridge Companion to the English Short Story).
- 2.
Middleton, Cryptotopographia: 7–8.
- 3.
Writing about small prose forms and Kafka, it is hard to avoid the long shadow of the diary entry made infamous through misappropriation by Deleuze and Guattari, where Kafka outlines his ‘Schema zur Charakteristik kleiner Literaturen’. See Kafka, Tagebüchen 1910–23, Ed. Max Brod (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1973), particularly the entry of 25–27 December 1911. For a digest of the Literary-Theoretical debate, see Lowell Edwards, ‘Kafka on Minor Literature’, German Studies Review 33.2 (May 2010): 351–374.
- 4.
Christopher Middleton, Putaxanadu (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1977): 70.
- 5.
Christopher Middleton, ‘Introduction to an Unpublished Anthology of Short Prose’ (1992) in Jackdaw Diving: Selected Essays on Poetry and Translation (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1998): 177–86.
- 6.
Botha, ‘Microfiction’: 202.
- 7.
Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings 2.1. Ed. Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknapp P., 1999): 134.
- 8.
Middleton, Putaxanadu (Manchester: Carcanet, 1977): 70.
- 9.
See Roland Barthes, Le Plastique, in ‘Comparison’ section below.
- 10.
As far as sentiment goes, this may as well be Middleton writing, but in fact is Jeffrey L. Meikle, on plastic rather than the Kurzprosa, in American Plastic: A Cultural History (New York: Rutgers University Press, 1997): ‘It is hard to do justice to plastic because it serves so many functions, assumes so many guises, satisfies so many desires, and so quickly recedes into relative invisibility’ (xiv).
- 11.
The list continues, traversing generic boundaries and national borders. André Jolles’s Einfache Formen (1968) surveys many foundational short, or simple forms in German Prose Literature, and although Jolles’s forms are part of a greater project to map Ur-forms of literature, it is also true that many of their Ur- or essential attributes may be traced in the basic Stimmung of Kurzprosa.
- 12.
Middleton, Putaxanadu: 70.
- 13.
See Kenneth A. Lockridge, On The Sources of Patriarchal Rage: The Commonplace Books of William Byrd and Thomas Jefferson and the Gendering of Power (New York: New York University Press, 1992): ‘the genre originates in the classical notion that one should memorise topoi […] Early in the sixteenth Century, Erasmus revived this tradition […and] the modern commonplace book […] became a common instrument of self-fashioning’ (1).
- 14.
Alexandra Harris elaborates on the phenomenological difference between the Norse-indebted window, ‘signifying what came in rather than the ability to see out’, as opposed to the Anglo-Saxon eagduru (or ‘eye-hole’), the latter of which we can extend to the Germanic-indebted loophole, as denoting a concern with seeing out, added to which is a defense against anything which may be incoming. See Weatherland (London: Thames & Hudson, 2016): 34. Extending to the present the loophole also allows us (figuratively) a ‘way out’ of any doctrinal or legal document or argument: a ‘way out’ of any consistent or monolithic point of view.
- 15.
Edgar Allen Poe, 1842 review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice Told Tales. In Poe: Essays and Reviews Ed. Gary Richard Thompson (Library of America, 1984): 572.
- 16.
Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, and Interesting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012): 1.
- 17.
Kafka: pour une littérature mineure (Paris: Les éditions de minuit, 1975): 7. Note particularly the domestic aspect of Kafka’s idea of a kleine Literaturen: that it sits naturally as Tagbüchfüren (communitarian diary-making) rather than as Geschichtesschreiben (abstracted history-making). See Franz Kafka, ‘Schema zur Charakteristik kleiner Literaturen’ (1911) rather than Deleuze and Guattari. ‘Kleine Erzählungen’ was the original subtitle given to Ein Landarzt, in which, of course, ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ first appeared. Further regarding Deleuze and Guattari, I refer mainly to Kafka: pour une littérature mineure, but also to the relevant sections of Mille plateux (Paris: Les éditions de minuit, 1980).
- 18.
Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: 13.
- 19.
Ollivier Dyens, Metal and Flesh: The Evolution of Man: Technology Takes Over. Trans. Evan J. Bibbee and Ollivier Dyens (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2011): 56–57.
- 20.
Malabou, Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: 1.
- 21.
Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do With Our Brain? Trans. Sebastian Rand (Fordham University Press, 2008): 71–2.
- 22.
Malabou, Ontology of the Accident: 14.
- 23.
See in particular in this collection Dirk Göttsche, ‘“Geschichten, die keine sind”: Minimalisierung und Funktionalisierung des Erzählens in der Kleine Prosa um 1900’, Kafka und die kleine Prosa der Moderne (Würzburg, 2010): 17–33.
- 24.
Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: 39–40.
- 25.
Dyens, Metal and Flesh: 56.
- 26.
Barthes, ‘Le Plastique’: 171. ‘[Plastic] is less a thing than the trace of a movement’.
- 27.
Ghosh, ‘Plastic Literature’: 282.
- 28.
See Malabou and the ‘third’, ‘archaic’ plastic possibility provided by thinking with the figure of the salamander: ‘when a salamander or lizard’s tail grows back we do indeed have an instance of healing without a scar. The member reconstitutes itself without the amputation leaving any trace […] it is without a pharmakon and without an intruder’. In Catherine Malabou Changing Difference: The Question of the Feminine in Philosophy. Tr. Carolyn Shread (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011): 81–2.
- 29.
Kafka, trans. Muir and Muir, ‘The Cares of a Family Man’.
- 30.
Susan Frienkel’s story in this respect is particularly demonstrative: deciding to try to go a day without plastic, on waking, she immediately encounters difficulty: the toilet seat; her toothbrush. Thus, she is forced to change her vow, and, instead of attempting to not touch plastic, she writes down each object she touches over the course of the day which is comprised in full or in part of plastic, and ‘within forty-five minutes I had filled an entire page’. See Susan Frienkel, Plastic: A Toxic Love Story (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2011): 1–4. Link this, then, to Jane Bennet’s writing on ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ – that ‘Kafka’s Odradek is one of many barely detectable shapes that inhabit the Earth with us. These shapes largely exceed, underwhelm, or otherwise elide our notice […a] strange tenacity’. In Grain Vapor Ray v.2 (Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2015): 16–17.
- 31.
Barthes, ‘La réponse de Kafka’ (1960) Essais Critiques (Paris: Seuil, 1971): 138–9. Trans. Leo Hamalian, ‘Kafka’s Answer’.
- 32.
Mark Miodownik, Stuff Matters: The Strange Stories of the Marvellous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2013): 126.
- 33.
Barthes ‘Le Plastique’: 171. ‘Plastic is […] in essence, the stuff of alchemy’.
- 34.
See Chapter 1, part 1 ‘Plastic’s Long Reach: Plastic/Literature’, in particular pages 6–8.
- 35.
Meikle: 1.
- 36.
Catherine Malabou, Changing Difference. Trans. Carolyn Shread (London: Polity, 2011): 121. Edwin Muir op. cit.
- 37.
See in particular chapter 11 ‘Synthesis’ of Mark Miodownik’s Stuff Matters: The Strange Stories of the Marvellous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2013): 242.
- 38.
Malabou, Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: 2.
- 39.
Meikle: 1.
- 40.
Barthes, ‘La réponse de Kafka’: 138. At a remove, as Barthes is writing a review of Marthe Robert’s study of Kafka in France-Observateur.
- 41.
The British Plastics Federation provides an interesting short timeline, in its Plastipedia, here: www.bpf.co.uk/plastipedia/plastics_history/default.aspx
- 42.
See Sparke, Penny (ed). The Plastics Age: Modernity to Post-Modernity (London, Victoria and Albert Museum: 1996).
- 43.
Barthes writes, in the final paragraph, of the modulation of plastic from pure use value to the realm of play, or pleasure (albeit a pleasure which is situated firmly within the ‘useful’ activity of making works in plastic): ‘Le plastique est tout entier englouti dans son usage: à la limite, on inventera des objets pour le plaisir d’en user.’
- 44.
Miodownik, Stuff Matters: 242.
- 45.
Vatter, The Republic of the Living: 53.
- 46.
Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature: xvi, 40.
- 47.
Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself: 61.
- 48.
Roland Barthes, Mythologies. Tr. Annette Lavers (New York: FSG, 2001): 143.
- 49.
Franco Moretti, ‘The End of the Beginning’, New Left Review 41 (2006).
- 50.
Michael Hoffmann on Kafka’s prose, quoted in Michelle Woods, Kafka Translated: How Translators have Shaped our Reading of Kafka (London: Bloomsbury, 2013): 2?
- 51.
It is interesting to note again that the work’s difficulty, and critical concerns with its variable articulations of being, extends to the textual history of ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ itself: Richard Gray et al. note how not only is it difficult to put an exact date on the work’s composition, but that also no manuscript versions of the work exist. A Franz Kafka Encyclopedia (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2004): 254. In the initial content lists drafted for Ein Landarzt in Kafka’s Blue Octavo Notebooks, ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ does not appear, but the work does is listed in a prospective table of contents sent by Kafka’s to Kurt Wolff in August 1917.
- 52.
Dirk Göttsche ‘“Geschichten, die keine sind”: Minimalisierung und Funktionalisierung des Erzählens in der Kleinen Prosa um 1900’ in Kafka and Short Modernist Prose ed. Manfred Engel and Richie Robertson (Würzburg: Köningshausen and Neumann: 2010): 18.
- 53.
Barthes: 244.
- 54.
Barthes.
- 55.
The difficulty of even placing, let alone translating, the tone of Kafka’s work is neatly summarized by Michelle Woods in Kafka Translated, 94–6. Here, she is at first writing about translators’ and interpreters’ difficulties with The Castle, but this later expands to encompass the majority of Kafka’s prose works, what Mark Harman has diagnosed as Kafka’s ‘eerie’ or ‘surreal’ High German (qtd. in Woods, 96), and the problem in Kafka’s writing of the shifts in register, ‘even within sentences’ between the ‘officious’ to the ‘colloquial’ (Woods, 96).
- 56.
Middleton, Crypto-topographia: 7.
- 57.
Hofmann (translator’s introduction to Amerika).
- 58.
Woods, Kafka Translated: 96.
- 59.
I take this quotation from Jonathan Culler, writing on lyric poetry as the ‘creation of an apparently phenomenal world through the figure of voice’. ‘Changes in the Study of Lyric’: 50.
- 60.
Ghosh, ‘Plastic Literature’: 289.
- 61.
The final paragraph of Die Sorge des Hausvaters begins with such questioning ‘Vergeblich frage ich mich, was mit ihm geschehen wird. Kann er denn sterben?’ [Hofmann: ‘In vain I ask myself, what will happen to him. Can he die?’ p.212; the Muirs are no less melodramatic: ‘I ask myself, to no purpose, what is likely to happen to him? Can he possibly die?’]. The final paragraph of ‘Le Plastique’ gestures towards the speculative future of a ‘plastic world’ (‘le monde entier peut être plastifié, et la vie elle-même’ [‘the whole world can be plasticized, and even life itself’]) which would render, post facto the argument of the Kurzprosa defunct.
- 62.
Michelle Woods’s Kafka Translated: How Translators Have Shaped Our Reading of Kafka addresses precisely this interesting aspect of the proliferation of the literary work; Kafka’s works are perhaps best suited to this approach not only because of their size, and genre-bending tendencies, but also to what Adorno has called their ‘general proviso of indeterminateness’ (qtd. in Woods: 2).
- 63.
A further subtlety in Kafka’s Kurzprosa’s travels is enfolded here, inasmuch as Borges’s collection itself underwent a titular, generic, metamorphosis between its 1957 and 1969 editions. The change from the Manual de zoología fantástica to El libro de los seres imaginarios brings with it a generic shift from a guidebook (identificatory; nonfictional) to a book (descriptive, more general, and possibly nonfictional or fictional), and a shift in subject matter from animal life in particular to species and their habitats more generally, and a contextual movement from the fantastic to the imaginary. The English translation responds to the title of the second edition, as does the French and (in part) the German; the re-titling of Kafka’s Kurzprosa does, however, remain consistent throughout.
- 64.
Katrin Klingan et al. Textures of The Anthropocene: Grain Vapor Ray v.2: Vapor (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2015) (see pp. 13 onwards in particular).
- 65.
Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: 13.
- 66.
Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Introduction’, The Book of Imaginary Beings. Rev. and Trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni (with Borges) (London: Vintage, 2002): 14. (El libro de los seres imaginarios (Buenos Aires): 1967).
- 67.
The translation of the Kurzprosa printed in Klingan et. al runs to three paragraphs only.
- 68.
Deleuze and Guattari describe the work as an ‘admirable, three-page text’. Kafka: 40.
- 69.
Jorge Luis Borges (ed.) and Maria Guerrero (tr.), Einhorn Sphinx und Salamander: Das Buch der Imaginären Wesen (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1982).
- 70.
There are ‘repercussions’ on the actor of ‘all actions and movements’, physical and cognitive. Difficult practice habits lead to the creation of a ‘virtuosic habitus’ which can, however, be destabilized by agents foreign to that practice. Even so, ‘research in the fields of learning theory, neuro-motorics, neuro-rhetoric and neuro-aesthetics consolidate and vary didactic intuitions that originate in […] artistries’. Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life: 320–1.
- 71.
Modern Care as Sorge ‘sans phrase’, or the courage to persist in the face of the inappreciable, we can trace, with either Peter Sloterdijk or Hans Blumenberg, to the 1920s, and Heidegger’s lifework linking Being (Dasein/Wesen) to Care (Sorge), which does provide a further connection to the modern work of plastic. See in particular Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life Trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity, 2013): 29; ‘Heidegger declared care [Sorge] to be the essence of Dasein’: Hans Blumenberg, Care Crosses the River Trans. Paul Fleming (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2010): 153.
- 72.
Heather H. Yeung, ‘Our Plastic Brain’, in Memory in the Twenty First Century, ed. Sebastian Groes. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016): 276–279.
- 73.
See See Malabou, Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing.
- 74.
See Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life, and notes 70 and 71, above.
- 75.
See Daneille Wilde, ‘Embodying Neuroplastic Change’ Proc. CHI 2013: Ext. Abstr. on Human Factors in Computing Systems (New York: ACM Press, 2013): 2267–2276. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2468356.2468749
- 76.
See David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano, ‘Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind’ Science 342.6156 (2013): 377–380. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1239918. Before this, Maryanne Wolff’s popular Proust and the Squid (Cambridge: Icon, 2008) advances an interesting argument not only about the synthetic nature of literature, but the synthetic nature of the reading act itself, thence moving on to investigate the ways in which the brain forms new neural networks to facilitate and support reading. Plasticity, it seems, is foundational not only to literary form, but also to the writerly and readerly acts.
- 77.
See Adam Zeman, F. Milton, A. Smith, and R. Rylance, ‘By Heart: An fMRI Study of Brain Activation by Poetry and Prose’ Journal of Consciousness Studies 20:9–10 (2013): 132–158.
- 78.
See Gregory S. Berns, Kristina Blaine, Michael J. Prietula, and Brandon E. Pye, ‘Short- and Long-Term Effects of a Novel on Connectivity in the Brain’ Brain Connectivity 3.6 (2013): 590–600. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1089/brain.2013.0166
- 79.
‘Natürlich stellt man an ihn keine schwierigen Fragen, sondern behandelt ihn […] wie ein Kind’.
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Yeung, H.H. (2020). Kurzprosa as Plastic Art. In: On Literary Plasticity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44158-6_3
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