Translating Technologies: Dickens, Kafka and the Gothic

Abstract

Recalling his first attempts to write a novel in a diary entry from the year 1917, Franz Kafka describes Der Verschollene/America in terms of his ‘intention as I now see it to write a Dickens novel, but enhanced by the brighter lights I would have taken from these times and the darker ones that I would have found within myself.¹ The link between Dickens and Kafka may not seem obvious, but it has been suitably traced in German studies, not yet, however, in terms of the Gothic. Tracing these connections along the lines of several Gothic voyages, and several senses of translation, in and outside the works of both writers, a specific interest in technology emerges which can be seen as a Gothic response to ‘the brighter lights … from these times’, that is to Gothic’s ambivalent discursive relationship to the processes of modernization as a form of ’shadow of the modern’.² By focusing on Kafka’s ‘Dickensian’ translation, one can suggest a Gothic reading of a text not previously observed in this tradition, Dickens’s David Copperfield, a reading which also points towards Kafka’s own place in a European Gothic tradition. Secondly, both writers’ presentations of the very technologies involved in the spatial translation of voyages, the planes, trains and automobiles of the machine age, expand the links between Dickens and Kafka in their comparable Gothicization of technologies.