On Literary Plasticity: Readings with Kafka in Ecology, Voice, and Object-Life 3030441571, 9783030441579

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On Literary Plasticity Readings with Kafka in Ecology, Voice, and Object-Life

Heather H. Yeung

On Literary Plasticity

Heather H. Yeung

On Literary Plasticity Readings with Kafka in Ecology, Voice, and Object-Life

Heather H. Yeung University of Dundee Dundee, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-44157-9    ISBN 978-3-030-44158-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44158-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover pattern © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

A Paquito, who beat this book into existence and because for us all–—種語言永遠唔夠

Acknowledgements

The composition of this book occurred, hoveringly, in libraries, apartments, offices, train stations and airport lounges, and across continents and languages. To my colleagues and students in English and Comparative Literatures at Bilkent University, where the initial ideas for a study into literary plasticity and Sorge noisily gestated, sağ olun; in particular, to Patrick Hart for library hours logged, Sjoerd Levelt for Early Modern beer recces, and Spencer Hawkins for talking Blumenberg, translation, and poetry. Crossing from Anatolia to Tayside, to my colleagues and students in Humanities at the University of Dundee as the project came to fruition, vielen Dank, in particular to Mark Robson for thinking with Kafka alongside me from time to time, to Dominic Smith for being a tremendously resilient sounding board for mad forays into Benjamin and other wonky technologies of being. Thanks, too, are due to the other minds under which this project in its various guises has been passed in turns and counterturns, in particular to Anna Camilleri (and Fizz), Kenneth Weisbrode, Janet Yeung (and Whisky), Karen Yeung Hei-Laan, Marc Botha: Gesundheit! I congratulate you all on surviving. I am grateful to my anonymous readers for incisive critique, generous advice, and affirmation of the project’s worth, to Ranjan Ghosh for giving proof positive that the idea of literary plasticity sticks, and, finally, to the wonderful Allie Troyanos and Team Pivot USA for making the Transatlantic process of production so easy, and without whom these words as you are reading them would not exist.

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Contents

1 Plastic’s Long Reach  1 1 Plastic/Literature  5 2 Plastic/Ground 12 3 Plastic/Form 19 2 Odradek, or Non-biodegradable Object-Life 27 1 Invocation 29 2 Morphology 35 3 Tipping Point 41 3 Kurzprosa as Plastic Art 49 1 Architecture 52 2 Comparison 58 3 Mobility 66 4 The Hausvater’s Lyric Hauntology 73 1 Formation 76 2 Control 81 3 Vocalization 86

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Contents

5 Coda 97 Bibliography103 Index

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CHAPTER 1

Plastic’s Long Reach

Abstract  An exposition of our contemporary perspectives on plastic, and a counterpoint to this in a short history of plastic and plasticity. The ‘work’ of plastic and the literary work are linked together. High Modernism is established as a crux for our contemporary understanding of plastic. An introduction to the idea of Literary Plasticity. An exhortation to take care. Keywords  Plastic • Literary plasticity • Modernism and plastic • Anthropocene • Environment • Care Plastic has bad press. Thoughts towards this book began just as the National Geographic launched their multi-year ‘Planet or Plastic’ campaign. The front page of the related issue of their magazine bore a picture of a plastic ‘iceberg’.1 Look at what we have made of the world, the image warns: it is time to choose between the Blue Marble that we have come to romanticize and an alternative oikos whose bedrock is no longer rock but 1  Ellen MacArthur (Guest Ed.) National Geographic (June 2018). The photograph is in fact a plastic bag, floating partly above, partly below the water, ‘as if’ an iceberg. The very smallest font on the cover of the magazine, at the bottom left, gives a quotation from Sylvia Earle which goes some way to undercut the apocalyptic melodrama: ‘Plastics aren’t inherently bad. It’s what we do, or don’t do, with them that counts.’ Plastic, she hints, should inspire an attitude of care as well as one of concern (or worry). This idea of care with respect to plasticity is something with which the ensuing study, with attention to the double meaning of the German ‘Sorge’, is concerned.

© The Author(s) 2020 H. H. Yeung, On Literary Plasticity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44158-6_1

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polymer, whose ice is no longer ice but a plastic mass devoid of any life-­ form, and whose oceans are saturated with the stuff—visible and invisible—plastic marking time in the cycles of the Ocean Gyres. Now! the issue and campaign demands, we must wage war against plastic, in its material form, and with respect to our own habits. It is time for us to take stock of our daily dependence on plastic and plastic-related products. By the time this book was teetering on the brink of production, the National Geographic, again, had a plastic-centred headline article, ‘The Story of Plastic: Breaking the Habit’.2 It only took over a year, it seems, for plastic’s popularly conceived object-life to effect the shift from a lesser-observed object to one which is so phenomenalized, so implicated within our globalized day-to-day that narrative story-telling, addictive habit, even habitus are invoked. Globally collated statistical and scientific evidence demonstrates the extent to which plastic materials have far outstripped, or ‘outgrown’, even other human-made materials in terms of production, consumption, and waste.3 Marina Zurkow’s Petroleum Manga (2014) makes explicit on verbal and pictorial levels the extent of plastic’s reach, its interconnectedness with the late twentieth century, and the ongoing concern about fossil fuels, its potential afterlives. The global battle cry against plastic is seen, too, in the work of the Plastic Oceans Foundation and their landmark documentary A Plastic Ocean (2016). It is a call that has been taken up by the BBC and Sir David Attenborough in the second series of Blue Planet (2017) and which has been extended ever since. To draw our attention to the difficulty we have in fully conceiving of the global plastic cycle, as well as our dependencies upon it, British surf company Finisterre has launched surf and swim products made from regenerated nylon waste, as well as a ‘microplastics’ design collection, all of which you will receive wrapped in plastic-free totally biodegradable packaging (2018–ongoing); we can play a part in mitigating plastic waste by quite literally wearing the problem to the end of the earth. Alongside this plastic Zeitgeist in the media, celebrities, companies, lobbyists, and community groups have increasingly become ‘plastic aware’, an 2  National Geographic (December 2019). In the issue, the ‘Story of Plastic’ (68–80) comes after a dispatch on circular. Waste economies, promoting the updated interactive online element of the ‘Planet or Plastic’ campaign: the ‘plastic pledge’ (20). 3  Roland Geyer, Jenna R. Jambeck, and Kara Lavender Law, ‘Production, Use, and Fate, of all Plastics ever made’, Science Advances 3.7 (2017): n.p. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/ sciadv.1700782

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awareness previously reserved for surfers, fishermen, divers, beachcombers, eco-warriors, and those of us who live in areas which are recipients of plastic waste. XR, or Extinction Rebellion’s ‘Operation Plastic Attack’, and other responses to climate (and associated anti-plastic) activism take centre stage in world news. The EU has issued a series of directives regarding plastic use.4 To a greater or lesser extent, everything we have come to call Anthropocene life is touched by plastic; the newly minted global war against plastic affects us all. And yet it is quite plain that we have not yet plumbed the depths of our understanding of plastic’s reach over the planet, our plastic understanding of the planet, or our own relation with and conceptualization of what is and is not ‘plastic’. Indeed, by the time that you are reading this sentence, it is likely you will have supplemented the list of plastic awareness exercises above with some, perhaps more historic, perhaps more up-to-date, perhaps closer to home, of your own: ‘What about Curtis Ebbesmeyer’s rubber duck obsession of the ’90s and all the work that has, since then, been accomplished mapping the garbage patches around which the ocean gyres circle?’ you may be thinking. Or, ‘how has all the new research into photodegradation not been mentioned? Kansuke Yamamoto’s “plastic poetry”?’ Or, ‘what about the infamous plastic bag scene in Sam Mendes’s American Beauty (1999) and its arguable progenitor in Jem Cohen’s Lost Book Found (1996)? Jeffrey Meikle’s cultural history of plastic in America (1997)? David de Rothchild’s catamaran Plastiki (2009)? Susan Freinkel’s popular “out”ing of our plastic addiction (2011)? Robert Bezeau’s Panamanian Plastic Bottle Village? Vanuatu’s total ban on single-use plastics (2019)? The reactionary art of Mandy Barker or Kate V.  Robertson?’, or even ‘what about the rise of the so-called Plastic Studies in the Humanities?’ You may even question: ‘What about the plastic keyboard keys with which this has been typed?’5 We can read the traces of plastic in these words. If 4  ‘Annexes to the Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions: A European Strategy for Plastics in a Circular Economy’ (Brussels 16.1.2018). 5  Reading David Farrier’s Anthropocene Poetics as I edited the manuscript for this book, I was amused to read that he, too, draws our attention to the writer’s keyboard in his assessment of the ‘smoothness, fluency, and invisibility’, or difficult graspability, of plastic: ‘Each key on the keyboard on which I type has a slight concavity to better accommodate my fingertips. The plastic bottle I drink from has also been shaped to sit easily in my hand, with a ridged cap that twists off with minimal pressure.’ The writer’s interface with their typescripts has changed radically over the last century, but can we parse this back through Walter

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you are holding a printed copy of this book, look at the thin layer of protection on its cover, or its binding. The miscellaneous piles amass; the list goes on. Yet it is not the aim of this book to catalogue or expose an apocalyptic or post-anthropic vision of a world annihilated by the human creation of and subsequent addiction to plastic. Rather, the starting point for this study was an interest in the fascination that plastic holds for some of us, and the fact that it has done so for centuries, a fascination that has exhibited itself in the word’s changeable linguistic use, which is no less pervasive in its positive than in its negative manifestations, and which has led to and perpetuates the current public ‘war against plastic’. The plastic depths that we need to plumb in order to understand what plastic means for us today are not simply those of the now-much-maligned twentieth-century wonder substance. And even if we do take the twentieth century as a starting point, we must use the relative familiarity to look back at a deep plastic past which is as much (if not more) informed by the formation and rise of the modern humanities and the literary arts, as much as it is by scientific innovation in materials synthesis. We can only come to appreciate all that ‘plastic’ and ‘plasticity’ means to us by engaging deeply—substantively—with both plastic’s substance and plasticity’s action, positive and negative alike. Further to this, we shall come to see the importance of the inextricability of ‘plastic’ (materially, ecologically, figuratively, neuroscientifically) and literature; that is, read together, through a substantive engagement with Kafka’s Kurzprosa ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’, literature and plastic show us something fundamental about plastic and plasticity which is more generative than the twenty-first-century addiction to its destructive aspects might lead us to think. Plastic has conditioned culture, and we are always-already in a binary bind about it. And co-existing in these two minds—positive and negative, creative and destructive, material and immaterial—may be a good thing to be attentive to, rather than attempt to ‘pin down’, reject, or argue against that equivocal non-thing that is plastic. Being in two minds about plastic is a reminder of what it might mean to take time to care, as well as, perhaps, showing how ironic it is to mobilize the plasticity Benjamin’s pronouncement that the ‘typewriter will alienate the hand of the man of letters’ (Selected Writings v.11913–1926, Ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press, 457)? We are only beginning to think through the ecological aesthetics of the effects of these plastic alienation devices.

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fundamental to human understanding of the world to destroy the world’s plastic aspects. Without a deeper engagement and ‘close reading’ of plasticity and plastic, this book argues, we will never fully understand the hold that plastic exerts on us today.

1   Plastic/Literature 1919. A moment when the writer Franz Kafka publishes a collection of short prose works, Ein Landarzt, which contains a provocative story of which there apparently exist no manuscript drafts, ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’.6 A moment in High Modernity when ‘plastic’ takes on the physical and linguistic role that we now recognize as primary—a noun denoting a non-conductive synthetic polymer. Before the late 1910s, due to a lack of scientific advance in the field of polymer synthesis and the fact that global industrial plastics production and trade only really intensified in the post-war 1950s,7 the word’s primary force, and thus its effect upon us, was very different. Then, it was mostly adverbal and adjectival, to do with creation, dynamic form, expressions of powerful metamorphosis. Yet with polymer synthesis and a rise in domestic as well as industrial use of the synthesized material, the noun took precedence, as industry at all levels turned itself towards this new wonder substance at the time of and in the wake of both the First and the Second World War.8 It was with High Modernity that we saw the rise of plastic as a global commodity, to the 6  Neither reference to nor notes towards ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ are to be found in the Blue Octavo Notebooks, where Kafka first lists the prospective arrangements of the Country Doctor volume (different versions of this listing are found in the first and sixth of the notebooks; see The Blue Octavo Notebooks: 102, n.4). Kafka writes to Martin Buber in April of 1917 a  list of contents for the book that was to become Ein Landarzt, which does not include ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’. That August a letter to Kurt Wolff includes the Kurzprosa in the list. Subsequently, ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ appears in a magazine (1919), and is subsequently collected (d.1919 pub.1920). There exists no manuscript draft. See A Franz Kafka Encyclopedia Ed. Richard Gray, et al. (Westport CT: Greenwood, 2005): 254. 7  See Roland Geyer, Jenna R.  Jambeck, and Kara Lavender Law, ‘Production, Use, and Fate, of all Plastics ever made’, Science Advances 3.7 (2017): p.1/5 (n.p.): DOI: https://doi. org/10.1126/sciadv.1700782 8  The transition of dominant meanings of this word towards an emphasis on the synthetic polymer was remarkably swift. Bearing in mind that the development of early synthetics blossomed in the 1920s, and plastic’s industrial use was accelerated by the World Wars, and its domestic use by post-war economies, references pertaining to ‘plastic’ as a distinct material are seen charted in the OED from the 1900s onwards, and ‘plastic’ related compounds and specific objects enter the dictionary within the first few decades of the substance’s invention.

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extent that as early as the 1920s manufacturers diagnosed the era as an ‘age of plastic’, extolling ‘pride in the ingenuity of illusion’, alongside its other perhaps more important, although less aesthetic, properties (its malleability, and apparent indestructibility, amongst others).9 Plastic became adjective, verb, noun, and Zeitgeist. Thus, we take High Modernity as our starting point for a study of plastic and plasticity, as it was only then that the word took on the full significance to which we are used today. ‘Edward Moore’, one-time pseudonym of Edwin Muir, the Scottish poet and translator into English of Kafka alongside his wife, Willa, writes, ‘The believer in the future looks upon humanity as plastic’.10 Muir was not gesturing towards potential future innovations in prosthesis; rather, he wrote out of a more fundamental battle of good and evil (or, of Futurity vs. Original Sin), to emphasize our resilience and adaptability, and our ability to fashion our material world, to ‘remake’ ourselves, and to imagine worlds beyond current scientific possibility. Muir’s understanding of ‘plastic’ is at times a doggedly pre-modern one,11 but one that nevertheless sets the groundwork for a reappraisal of plasticity as not only a negative object but also a positive force, and a starting point for a mode of literary criticism which demonstrates how, through literature, we may begin to understand better how our own era was born from the early twentieth century’s ‘age of plastic’ and look more closely at our plastic future. 1919. From this crucible wherein the plastic aspects of the Modern human imaginary are formed, this study’s temporal scope takes two directions: the first is a move back into Antiquity, to our adoption of the idea (perhaps most notably Vitruvian) of plastic figuration not only as a mode through which not only to understand the formation of the world, but also as a way in which to understand our own acts of creation within it— creations both of the mind and of art. The ratio plastica is one in which 9  Jeffrey L. Meikle, American Plastic: A Cultural History (New York: Rutgers University Press, 1997): 2. 10  Edwin Muir We Moderns: Enigmas and Guesses (New York: Knopf, 1920): 69. Muir’s original publication of the essays in The New Age, the English collection of 1918 (George Allen and Unwin) bear this anglicized pseudonym, which was in later editions ‘corrected’, as H.L. Mencken’s Introduction in the American edition (1920) makes clear. 11  This resonates in turn with the overall tenor of the Muirs’ translations of Kafka, their, as Stanley Corngold so persuasively writes, diluting or domesticating of the broader than atropic, Gnostic, force of Kafka’s ethical positions (see Stanley Corngold, Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), particularly the chapter ‘Translation Mistakes’, pp. 176–93).

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the manipulation of matter is implicated, but is also a mark of the sculptor’s skill. It is a speculative mode. This idea of ‘plastic’ can be traced via Timon to Plato, and taken forward to the Romantic, through contemporary to current German and French use of ‘plastik’ or ‘plastique’ as associated with sculpture,12 and from thence its association with variant modes of literary creation and innovation.13 As late as 1907, we see the ratio plastica called into service as a parallel to literary art, in Rilke’s idea of the writerly ‘thing’ (geschriebene Dinge) being a necessary counterpoint to what is sculptural (plastische Dinge).14 Each of these moments of redefinition marks a turning point, even a proversus, for plastic literary thought; at each of these moments, significant additions or reinforcements are made to the manner in which we have used ‘plastic’ and therefore to how we have modelled literary plasticity. The second movement of this book’s argument is in the opposite temporal direction: away from the plastic past of the fine and evolutionary arts and into our lived now, the ‘now’ where ‘plastic thinks; plastic helps us to think; plastic thinking is our fresh meditative evolution’,15 the ‘now’ with which this study opened. In this time frame, we bear witness not only to the mass of physical evidence of Modernity’s global plastic project and our addiction to plastic material but also to the less-predominant resurgence of alternative, positive, dimensions of the work of plastic and our employ of this word, particularly in neuroscientific literature, and the recuperation of plasticity’s positive, productively ambivalent, attributes, in—for example— the works of the psycholinguist Maryanne Wolf and of the philosopher Catherine Malabou. Plastic destruction, so frequently seen as apocalyptic, is also essential to the construction not only of the human brain, but also 12  This common association is one which is not typically fully translated into English nowadays. See, for instance, Herder’s seminal work on sculpture (and the soul) of 1778, Plastik: einige Wahrenehmungen über Form und Testalt aus Pygmalions bildendem Traume, whose most recent translation by Jason Gaiger is entitled Sculpture: Some observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalion’s Creative Dream (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 13  Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe briefly traces this inheritance in Typography, also emphasizing both the witzig, or plastic, nature of the word itself in translation particularly with reference to the modality of the Attic plattein, and its evolution to plassein and the Platonic plastikos [πλαστικός], and the word’s relationship to ‘fashioning, modeling, [and] fictioning’. See Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, trans. Christopher Fynsk (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998): 96 and 126. 14  See Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé, Breifweschel. Ed. Ernst Pfeiffer (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1975): 105. 15  Ghosh, ‘Plastic Literature’, University of Toronto Quarterly 88.2 (2019): 288.

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to the construction of the absolute other.16 And the absolute other is the figure through which we can then double back and begin to understand ourselves. It is an essential paradox, and a paradox that is essential for the creation of a flexible, deep mode of understanding, even of memory work. It will later become apparent that such a doubled, bidirectional structuring of thought is essential to the work of plastic, which is nothing if not antilinear and ambivalent. The language of plastic has for a long time been entangled with how we think through and express human creation, our place on the earth, within the universe; even aids how we transport electric power from one place to another. It is thus, finally, that the plastic literary form, after reaching its zenith in the work and world of High Modernism, becomes, like plastic itself, a foundational aspect of culture. From these apparent temporal disjunctions comes the broad conceptual argument of this study, which is both a recuperation of past modes of ‘plastic’ use and an attempt to look productively, deeply, towards a plastic future. The work that plastic effects upon us demands attunement to form, language, substance, and metamorphosis, as well as to questions of environment, time, and existence. Since ‘plastic’, broadly conceived, is not new, and has in its many guises haunted us for millennia, it follows that in order to think effectively through plastic’s hold on the human imaginary, we must examine the proliferation of its cognates, the apparent unboundedness of its metamorphic, linguistic, formal, and temporal attributes. The work of plastic is substance and insubstantial at once, gesturing towards our domestic present as well as an unthinkable deep time; ‘plus qu’une substance, le plastique est l’idée même de sa transformation infinie’ [more than a substance, plastic is the very idea of its infinite transformation]17; we experience the ‘microplastic fall out’ of our plastic use18; ‘plastic is the 16  It is in her Ontology of the Accident that Malabou gives the most succinct account of this ‘destructive plasticity’ – of the possibility of ‘the appearance of formation of alterity where the other is absolutely lacking […] where no flight or escape is left’ (11). Recourse is perhaps inevitably made to Ovid and Kafka to illustrate destructive plasticity’s relation to absolute metamorphosis (the creation of the wholly other). See: Catherine Malabou, Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity Trans. Carolyn Shread (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013). 17  Roland Barthes, ‘Le plastique’, Mythologies (Paris, Seuil: 1957): 171. Translation from The Plastics Age: Modernity to Post-Modernity. Ed. Penny Sparke (London, Victoria and Albert Museum: 1996): 110–111. This translation is used throughout. 18  Steve Allen, Deonie Allen, Vernon R. Phoenix et al. ‘Atmospheric transport and deposition of microplastics in a remote mountain catchment’ Nature Geoscience 12 (2019: 339–344. doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-019-0335-5

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environment many of us live in’.19 Since plastic or plasticity has been employed as a paradigm through which to think and express questions of creation and being, it behoves us in thinking through our contemporary issues with, even ‘war’ against, plastic, to add the productive, aesthetic, ecological, and ontological dimensions to our quest. At the same time, it is true that the dynamic morphological nature of plastic not only haunts us but also provokes intrigue; as Barthes writes that plastic holds within it the sense of ‘miracle’, and Farrier that its characteristics are both ‘unruly’ and ‘apparently utopian’. Malabou writes: ‘Plasticity is essentially astonishing. To demonstrate that, it must first be constituted in a schema which is at once verbal and conceptual’.20 Only after constructing such a schema may form be attended to, but importantly so, since in looking at form we can observe how it contains within it traces of physical memory, of past metamorphosis,21 and only then may we begin to establish an understanding of plasticity in which we may come to realize fully—rather than superficially—how far we are implicated in its works. In order to begin to comprehend the swift grasp that the ‘new’ plastic (n.) exerted at the start of the twentieth century—what Ranjan Ghosh has called our ‘(en)plasticized’ nature22—we turn to literature. As Malabou has used the work of seminal philosophers of Modernity in order to work through difficulties in conflicting conceptions of plasticity in order to establish the neuroplastic as dynamic force for radical ontological change, as Wolf has used a current neuropsychological, developmental model through which to establish a plastic model for the reading brain, so this study thinks through plastic from the broadened standpoint that literature offers, and takes the literary work as a way through which to explore the multiple dimensions of the work of plastic. This study, like plastic, folds back upon itself, ever-conscious that any exposure to literature opens up to us otherwise-unthinkable realms of possibility. Reading plastic alongside literature can also teach us, through our experience of these otherwise speculative possibilities, to think through the plastic operations of form and language and to observe points at which we may look back and points at which we may have reached the limits of our thought. The work of 19  David Farrier, Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones, and Extinction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019). 20  Malabou The Future of Hegel: 186. 21  Malabou writes, ‘a form that attests from between the modes, that bears scars from its transitions’. See: The Heidegger Change: 231. 22  Ranjan Ghosh, ‘Plastic Literature’: 277.

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literature, like the work of plastic, is at once wholly natural to us and yet wholly synthetic, and synthesized by us. It resists being pinned down to any absolute meaning, whilst it also possesses a spatially finite form that implies that such an absolute may be possible. The literary work exists in a strange space in between. Its own states of existence, material and immaterial, written, vocalized, and imagined, attest to this. Like plastic, literature holds a certain fascination for us, an addictive power. We encounter the work of literature in a moment of material and linguistic stasis that nevertheless calls out to a dynamism, a multitude of metamorphic possibilities. Literature, like plastic, fascinates us even as we synthesize it, and retreats from us, even as we commit it to our scrutiny. Literature, like plastic, holds in it the power to effect change upon both the ways in which we exist within the world and our perception of that world. Through literature, a series of questions about plastic’s hold on us may be asked, in the hope that the relationship between these two globally influential and often controversial achievements of humankind may shed reciprocal light upon each other. By focusing in particular upon Kafka’s very short fiction, or Kurzprosa, ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’, I hope to expose the multiple and deep-seated nature of humanity’s ongoing relationship with plastic. This is a relationship that may best be read through a literary prism, as it operates on a number of levels: generic, formal, sonorous, syntactic, ecological, and ideological. In Kafka’s Kurzprosa, we will be able to see how quickly and in how short a space it is possible to build an oikos that is wholly plastic (a plastic ‘environment’), playing on all past meanings of the word, pointing towards a future world ecology of plastic unthinkable at the time of the work’s original composition. We will also observe how quickly the human brain can be brought to put aside, or forget, its reliance upon the equivocal, difficult, plastic life upon which it also depends for its own self-definition; it often does so through acts of over-phenomenalization. For these reasons, throughout the study that ensues tacit parallels or mirrors will be drawn between the insidiousness of the work of literature and the insidiousness of the work of plastic. Plastic changes, and there is no true or singular blueprint or method for its synthesis, material form, articulation, or use. Because of this, this study will read a particular genre and work of literature whose lack of blueprint, and strange form, articulation, and diverse critical and theoretical reception mirrors this quality, thus providing a way to see through a literary lens the work of plastic. Yet the study is not simply dyadic (of ‘plastic and…’). Rather, it will look closely at how all aspects of literary plasticity work in the literary work. In order to do so, it will ‘think through plastic’ by taking

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as its prism Kafka’s infamous very short fiction which, also, like plastic, exists without blueprint. Before turning fully to Kafka, let us first establish a literary groundwork. What can be meant by thinking a plastic oikos, environment, or ecology, through the literary imagination? What might literary plasticity be? Literature and plastic sit naturally together for the twenty-first-century environmental humanities scholar. But to think and observe ‘literary plasticity’ is not quite the equation of twenty-first-century plastic (its formal properties, its ubiquity, and its transitive/invasive invisibility) with the literary work that we read in David Farrier’s and Ranjan Ghosh’s recent work on literature and plasticity, both of which incisively dwell on modes of rethinking deep time’s framework as anthropogenic through the staging of literary encounters with plastic, even as this work is not quiet in its resonances with these important eco-critical reconfigurations with which it is contemporary. This is not to write that the work of literature is not equated firmly with the work plastic (it is, and ought to be!), but that their mutual implication has a long cultural as well as a scientific history perhaps more obscured in Anglophone popular understanding than it is in Romance or Germanic languages which make more readily the equation between aesthetic productions and ‘plasticity’.23 Reading the literary work with an attentiveness to the multiple plastic attributes it possesses is in fact a mode of radically re-assessing what the literary object may mean for the literary critic in the twenty-first century, and of establishing a new ecological ethics of reading—a new mode of critical care. And so later, through a simultaneously too close and too distant reading of Kafka’s Kurzprosa, the study will untangle the ways in which literature’s various formal, linguistic, and metamorphic articulations express themselves, setting the stage for future work on the history, ways, means, and effects of ‘literary plasticity’ over and above the dyadic study of ‘literature’ alongside or ‘with’ ‘plastic’. But to begin to answer the questions with which this paragraph opened, we must turn to observe both the literal and the literary ground, through reference, first, to a contemporary work which makes these connections between plastic’s literal and literary ground clearer, and then through the act of tracing some of the history of plastic’s literary relations. 23  This is to be seen in particular in the continued use of les arts plastiques, l’artiste plasticienne, die Plastiken or der Plastiker (‘plastic arts’ and ‘plastic artist’) in French and German where in an Anglophone context this may be as readily translated as ‘sculpture’ and ‘sculptor’, even as the former designations—subject specific in English, in the main, to art criticism and practice—have a much wider designation outside of an Anglophone context, and may cover fine art practice, architecture, aesthetics, and poetics.

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2   Plastic/Ground In an article of 2004, ‘Local Rock and Global Plastic’, Ursula K. Heise makes mention of Karen Tei Yamashita’s novel, Through the Arc of the Rainforest (1990), whose plot can in many ways be seen as a terrestrial precursor in prose fiction to the National Geographic’s cautionary plastic iceberg/bag. The novel is built upon the conceit that a very real bedrock of plastic exists across the globe –– the result of humanity’s overuse and thoughtless disposal of plastics –– which first fascinates and economically liberates but subsequently poisons and annihilates a series of human and non-human beings. The ‘Matacão’, the proper noun given to Yamashita’s imagined plastic ground, is a new sort of terra firma. Its ‘sudden’ discovery and the ‘puzzle’ of its existence, cause massive, global, social and economic speculation, and subsequently, destabilization.24 Scientific study is made of the Matacão, and ‘after 5,381 hours of human input and 3,379 hours of computer input, [we were] able to reproduce the complex molecular structure of the Matacão’s material composition […from the] Polyutherane family commonly known as plastic’, which was formed out of ‘enormous landfills of nonbiodegradable material buried under virtually every populated part of the Earth’.25 Plastic’ s a new sedimentary rock! Yet matacão is also a linguistic and conceptual repurposing; with its repetition in this new Anglophone fictional context, we are brought sometimes to forget that the Brazilian Portuguese word has long been associated with the earth: um matacão is a particular sort of geomorphological boulder. Thus, as with the word plastic itself, we trip up over an apparent disjunction between older ‘natural’ and the new ‘synthetic’ meanings, old and new sediment, cornerstones. And more often than not, it is the new meanings that gain dominance, even as they are inflected by the old. Yamashita’s Matacão is also, as Heise points out, a symptom of how modern synthetic materials are now sitting, apparently incongruously, amidst local natural environmental givens across the globe.26 The unthinkable future time of a plastic ‘bedrock’ sits in a strange disjunction with a ‘natural’ ‘deep time’ of an unthinkable geological past; the ‘temporal length added to the spatial

24  Karen Tei Yamashita, Through the Arc of the Rainforest (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2017): 84. 25  Yamashita, Through the Arc of the Rainforest: 85, 177. 26  See Heise ‘Local Rock and Global Plastic’, later rewritten as a chapter of Imagining Extinction.

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width of the planet’27 becomes distinctly unstable if we add the tangible, visible, accretion of the human-made to our expectations of a natural geomorphological given. Plastic ‘recreates the world as an alternate reality’;28 a plastic earth becomes the ground for speculative thought, for future projection nevertheless close to home. Yet the equation of plastic with the earth, human creation, speculative thinking, and environmental thought is not a new one. Indeed, the Complete Oxford English Dictionary marks the use of the English adjective ‘plastic’ in terms of the moulding or shaping of clay as early as 1624, in relation to the growth of natural forms in the 1640s, and the noun related to a sculpted or modelled figure in nature as early as the 1680s. There is similar etymological history and progress in the cognate Germanic and Romance languages. This is a lineage of plastic thinking with regard to our environment which has, for centuries, also been applied to literary creation, to the creation of humankind, and, in turn, to mythic humankind’s animated creations, to being itself. Hans Blumenberg’s Care Crosses the River traces its titular alternative fable of creation29 from Hyginus via Herder, Goethe, Burdach, and Heidegger. In doing so, Blumenberg not only instantiates ‘Care’ (Cura, or Sorge) as a figure essential to the Heideggerian conception of Dasein, but also makes the case for Care’s creative action (in crossing a river, she sculpts from clay what will become man), and the debate between Care, Tellus (earth), and Jove which ensues, as essential to the plastic fashioning, animation, and subsequent naming of Homo sapiens,30 and the ‘fundamental concerns of Being’, or Seinsgrundsorgen.31 In a sense this work is an inheritor of Herder’s Plastik and its interrogation of the relationship between sculpture and the soul. The important link between Sorge (care, or concern) and being is one which we will revisit later through Kafka’s tale, whose being-formation could be read as a Modern synthetic parallel to the allegory of Cura and the dreams of Pygmalion. In the fable of Cura, attentiveness is linked with creation and animation; in Kafka’s Kurzprosa, the titular ‘Cares’ of the 27  This is Wai-Chee Dimock’s local–global feedback loop of deep time thinking, and ‘denationalized space’ that this implies. See Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009): 23, 28. 28  Adam Dickinson, The Polymers (House of Anansi Press, 2013): 1. 29  Inasmuch as it is not Promethean. 30  Hans Blumenberg, Care Crosses the River. Trans. Paul Fleming (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010): 139–141. 31  Blumenberg, Care Crosses the River: 143.

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titular Hausvater precipitate the beginning of the Kurzprosa proper, and, in turn, are shaped through it. In both tales, there is plasticity at work regarding both the earth and the man—almost uncannily so—and the work of plastic is at once proper and improper to both. The telling of each tale undergoes a series of developmental or generic shifts or ‘turns’, metamorphosing from the oral, through the prosodic, and poetic, to the philosophical. But a ‘plastic’ geneology is not solely one of the progress from Romantic to Modern aesthetics, it is also one whose shaping concerns are shared, at a much earlier date, with Natural Philosophy. The natural and the ‘plastic’ (or human-made) have always existed in a coeval and overlapping relationship. One such example may be found in Robert Plot’s Natural History of Staffordshire of 1696. Here, Plot—significantly, perhaps, both the first professor of Chemistry and the first keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford—rails, ‘but how dame Nature came thus to miscarry in her plastics […] I shall not determin [sic], but leave the Reader freely to use his owne [sic] judgement’.32 Here, Plot employs the recent yet already-widespread conceit of anthropomorphized Nature as Plastician (a modeller, moulder, sculptor) of man and the world, linking this to the mid-seventeenth-­ century meaning of the word “plastic” as the procreative, and later creative, principle. But, significantly, Plot also gives ultimate interpretative agency to his reader. Plastic’s scientific and fabulous qualities are also a projective power. The resonances with Platonic plasticity, neoplatonic Christian view of God as plastic artist, and the mythic transgressions of Prometheus and Cura, or Sorge, are obvious, even as the direct connection between the work of plastic and the natural world as conceived in the relatively young discipline of Natural History is new in Plot’s writing. In the section from Plot’s Natural History of Staffordshire from which this quotation is excerpted, the author’s principal subject matter is the ability of humans (or, ‘dame Nature’, via humans) to gestate the monstrous and the deformed. To be ‘plastic’ implies a formal perfection (think of Herder’s treatise on sculpture; of ‘plastic’ surgery), yet, it is the seemingly monstrous forms of moments of arrested metamorphosis which Plot calls ‘failed plastics’ which most fascinate. These ‘failed plastics’ or ‘preternatural bodies’ are sometimes, quite literally, bodies without organs (without or with ‘some rudiments of’ limbs, teeth, hair, skin etc.),33 which  Robert Plot, The Natural History of Staffordshire (Oxford: 1686): 272.  Plot, 272.

32 33

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easily provoke visual and mental fascination and whose thought-based aspect verges too closely for comfort on blasphemy (‘[of Nature’s failures] I shall […] leave the reader freely to use his owne [sic] Judgement’34). A precursor to Deleuzian ontotopology, this ‘plasticity’ provokes ontological questioning. For Plot, these preternatural ‘plastiks’ extend from the ‘deformed’ to the ‘most perfect’ or ‘extraordinary’ births; as with the fable of Cura, the act of plastic creation is a feminine one. At this point, the natural, the literary, and the place-based meet, as the conceit of ‘Nature’ as ‘Plastic Artist’ extends through the creation of human to human’s creations. For Plot, ‘most perfect’ of Nature’s plastic human forms are defined not by appearance, but by accomplishment—in ‘Arts or Arms; for Piety or Munificence’—as well as by their places of birth (as for Plot, the crucible of plastic creation was place based)—and include amongst their ranks Homer and Chaucer.35 The literary creator is thus not only a plastic artist, but is also, in themself, a plastic being. ‘Plastic’ in this recycled Vitruvian sense, aligned through various often synecdochic shifts with the work of the artist, the clay of the earth, and the human figure, with the trials and adaptations of the human mind and the creation of the human body, persists as the dominant definition across most European languages until the nineteenth century. From this point onwards, what is ‘plastic’ begins its steady process of accretion of meanings which reaches its zenith in the early 1900s with the advent of synthetic polymers. In the 1800s, however, we see—in the rise of the ‘Plastic Arts’, which mirrors the rise of the disciplines of Art Criticism, Philology, and History—plasticity codified as the hallmark of an aesthetic genre. At the same time, and seemingly separately to the rise of plastic artistry of the high-cultural type, plastic’s links with embodiment see medical codification, with plastic becoming specifically linked to cell organization and tissue formation. Although many scholars of postmodernism regard bodily plasticity and its related terms (including the (de)formative nature of plastic surgery upon which Ollivier Dyens writes at length)36 as a distinctly twentieth-century phenomenon, and more recent scholars make much of the ‘becoming plastic’ of the flesh through the passive ingestion of  Plot, 272.  ‘No less than seven cities strove for the birth of Homer; and thus, Middlesex and Oxfordshire contest the birth of Chaucer’ (Plot: 272). He later devotes pages to listing of ‘Writers’ and their places of birth (i.e. the crucibles in which their genius was formed). 36  See Ollivier Dyens, Metal and Flesh: The Evolution of Man: Technology Takes Over. Trans. Evan J. Bibbee and Ollivier Dyens (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001). 34 35

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micro-­plastics,37 it is the nineteenth century to which we are indebted for the beginnings of this plastic process whereby physical form is at once constituted and effaced.38 It is the nineteenth century, too, which sees the rise of the idea of the great writer as ‘plastic artist’, defined in a way that builds upon but is distinct from the Classical sculptural ideal, and which paves the way for literary Modernism, Germanic modernism and prose modernism in particular, to emerge with and under a plastic aegis. It is a development also evident in Philosophy—in Catherine Malabou’s studies, first of Hegel, then of Heidegger,39 and in whose movement from High Romanticism to High Modernism we can observe the extrapolation of the creative and generative impulse of the plastic subject into the ultimate figure of destruction—the Plastikbombe (the atomic bomb).40 Turning, then, from the contemporary and the Classical, to the nineteenth-century and German Romanticism, we discover the roots of Kafka’s own plastic literary thought, the rise of ‘Plastic Art’ of literature, and its essential ‘groundedness’. In an essay of 1820, ‘Die Romantik’, Heinrich Heine, effecting the groundwork for his later, more substantial work of definition, Die romantische Schule (1833), writes, ‘So kommt es denn, daß unsere zwei größten Romantiker, Göthe [sic] und A.W. v. Schelgel, zu gleiche Zeit auch unsere größten Plastiker sind’.41 This leads Wilhelm von Blomberg, amongst 37  Richard Coyne’s Network Nature addresses the plastic food chain; Serenella Iovino’s ‘From Thomas Mann to Porto Marghera: Material Ecocriticism, Literary Interpretation, and Death in Venice’ addresses the distinctly twenty-first-century ‘trans-substantiation between plastic and flesh’. See: Coyne, Network Nature: The Place of Nature in the Digital Age (London: Bloomsbury, 2018); Iovino ‘From Thomas Mann to Porto Marghera: Material Ecocriticism, Literary Interpretation, and Death in Venice’ in Hubert Zapf (ed.) Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2016): 357. More generally, in ecotoxicological microplastic attentive studies, see Christopher Blair Crawford and Brian Quinn, Microplastic Pollutants (Elsevier, 2016), and for a popular anthropocentric take, Danielle Smith-Llera, Are You Eating Plastic Every Day: What’s in Our Food? (Oxford: Raintree, 2019). 38  The OED gives the first print appearance of ‘Plastic Surgery’ ca. 1836; by 1863, the Lancet uses without ambiguity the term ‘Plastic Surgeon’. Note how this is related to the sculptor’s art rather than the use of synthetic substances to mould; medics only began to experiment with the embedded use of synthetic plastics in the 1940s, and at this point it was rare to find a synthetic substance that would be tolerated by human tissues (see Ingraham, Alexander, and Matsen ‘Polyethylene: a new synthetic plastic for use in surgery’ (1946)). 39  Malabou, The Future of Hegel; The Heidegger Change. 40  Malabou, The Future of Hegel: 193. 41  Heinrich Heine, ‘Die Romantik’ (1820).

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others, to diagnose Heine’s work after the Frühromantik (or Jena) generation as also being a part of a new, plastic, writerly mode of expression: a ‘plasti[che] Dichtkunst’,42 a plastic poetic art which arbitrates between Romanticism, politics, and the (classical, sculptural, and mimetic) Plastic Arts.43 Through the process of critical logic and his own writerly practice, Heine links plasticity specifically to the writerly arts, and, in particular, the German school of prose fashioning, creating a formal ideal that is a synthesis of Classical and Romantic (i.e. contemporary) stylistics,44 all under the auspices of the formation of a new, practical, ideology of intellectual freedom, which will come to the fore more strongly in the work of 1833 onwards. Thus, via the ministrations of Heine, and the ‘new’ writing of Germany, does the work of literature as Plastik, the writer as Plastiken, and these things’ plastische tendencies enter Grimm’s Deutsches Wörterbuch in the early nineteenth century.45 From this point onwards a plastic attitude to prosodic fashioning emerged, extending between poetry and prose, and haunting European literary prose yet, even if our writerly or critical tendencies do not reach the extremes of generic abolition preached by the ideal of a ‘universal progressive poetry’46 of the Jena group. In addition to this aspect of Romantic Plastic thought, Catherine Malabou’s significant rereading of Hegel takes as its starting point Hegel’s description of the plastic subject in the Phenomenology of Spirit, and situates plasticity—the ‘double signification of plastic as adjective’—as central to the development of the subject in time; as characteristic of ‘the internal mobility of the system’.47

42  Quoted in Itta Scheldletsky, ‘Romantisierte Aufklärung  – aufgeklärte Romantik?’ in Walter Benjamin und die romantische Moderne, ed. Heinz Brüggemann and Günter Oesterle (Hamburg: Köningshausen und Neuman, 2009): 58. 43  I.e. Heine’s ‘Schilchtung des Streits “zwischen Romantikern und Plastickern”’. Norman Kaspar, ‘Hotho und Schnaase lesen Tieck Proto-Ästhetizimus  - Ironike(kritik)  – kunstgeschischliche Begriffsarbeit’ in Heine-Jahrbuch 52 (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 2013): 142. 44  Scheldletsky: 58. 45  Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch 16 Bde. in 32 Teilbänden. (Leipzig 1854–1961 Quellenverzeichnis Leipzig 1971) Bd. 13, Sp. 1900. Online. Accessed 04.07.2017. Tellingly, during Kafka’s studies at the University of Prague, Grimm’s etymological dictionary was a mainstay (see Corngold, Lambent Traces: 224 n.9). 46  Fredrich von Schlegel, Athenaeumsfragment 116 (1798): ‘Die romantische Poesie ist eine progressive Universalpoesie’. 47  Catherine Malabou, L’avenir du Hegel: plasticité, temporalité, dialectique (Vrin, 1996): 21, and Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: 68.

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However convincing a case there is for, firstly a seventeenth-century and, subsequently, a Romantic literary plasticity—in the emphasis in both periods on a synthesis of the ancient and the contemporary; the connexions drawn between the plastic work of the mind and that of the work of literature; the embracing of multiple genres in a single work by a single author—we know that the plastic work of literature can only really reach its peak in the twentieth century. Only by then has ‘plastic’ achieved its latest, and by now most culturally pervasive, meaning—a noun denoting a wholly synthetic, malleable, multiform, sometimes even utopian, substance. The ‘double signification’ of Malabou’s adjective undergoes yet further unprecedented metamorphosis. In this final addition of this meaning to our plastic pantheon of literary attributes—something that neither Plot and Schlegel nor Heine, and neither Plato and Hyginus nor Vitruvius, could possibly have foreseen—we meet the possibilities of the plastic work as something that copies and can be copied but which is not mimetic (or is a literal mimesis). Modern plastic is something that can be formed and reformed, which is not natural but not attempting to be so, which is strangely domesticated, and which appears to take on a life of its own. Its relationship with being sits in an uncanny parallel with that of its original synthesizer, or maker, humankind. From this point in time onwards, plastic as signifying creation or metamorphosis is wedded not only to world creation and effacement in a conceptual and literal sense (in the ‘plastic number’ which, mathematically, makes multiple dimensions possible; in the ‘neuroplasticity’ of our central nervous system), but also to the synthetic polymer, or ‘wonder substance’, plastic. Where for Plato the earth was the element whose attributes were plastic (πλαστικός), and, in Western myth, Prometheus (or Cura) makes man from this earthly clay, and man, once animated, goes on to fashion the Golem from that same substance, now what is plastic exceeds nature. ‘Man’, in an extended sense, no longer needs the earth in order to fashion their objects, their animate beings. Yamashita’s novel mentioned above is simply a new version of an old allegory in our ongoing creation myth. Plastic synthesis can be wholly synthetic. This new plastic work is perhaps most easily done in miniature, where we can control its individual objects (although not its potential proliferation), but myth does indicate that such animation, in the hands of Promethean-minded makers, can also achieve a maximal scale. In the synthetic Germanic Modernism of Franz Kafka, we can observe the collision of the logic of High Modern synthesis of the ‘wonder

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substance’ that is modern plastic, the ecological or world-forming sense of the word, and its classical, aesthetic, meanings. Furthermore, in later works influenced by Kafka, we can observe a specific sort of Kafkian literary plasticity emerge: not only through a material change, but also in the inheritance of formal manipulation and attention to literary structures of synthesis and forgetting which are a hallmark of literary plasticity. In the chapters to come, two of these influential strands are approached in relation to Kafka: firstly, the deconstructionists’ malleable écriture féminine (reading Kafka’s formal plasticity against that of Roland Barthes), and, secondly, the freewheeling difficulty of Latin American magic realism (looking at the effects of Borges’s resituating, even renaming, of ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’). Barthes and Borges are also largely influential to Yamashita’s novel with which this plastic literary ground was earlier established.48 Thus, after this study’s constitutive digression into the Kurzprosa and ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’, the plastic nature of the literary work leads to the beginning of a broader argument regarding oikos and the difficulty of placing plastic within our contemporary ecological thought which I will gesture towards in the coda. The plasticity of the literary work leads, changed in the interval, back to itself. Yamashita’s novel, with which this section began, in its foregrounding of what Donovan Hohn has diagnosed as the paradox of plastic’s wonder properties, is an aftershock of a radical Modernist change in our material world and our modes of literary expression. Plastic by now has, for nearly a century, been ‘intended to be thrown away but chemically engineered to last […it has] offered the false promise of disposability, of consumption without cost [and has thus] helped to create a culture of wasteful make-believe’.49 Plastic’s various states must undergo further formal scrutiny.

3   Plastic/Form In the body of the study that ensues we will read Kafka as haunted by plastic, and read plastic through a Kafkian kaleidoscope. But just as plastic is adjective, noun, and verb, object and action, this reading will be 48  Ted Geier even draws a line of influence between Kafka’s ‘dissociative’ narrative devices and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rainforest! See Geier, Kafka’s Nonhuman Form: Troubling the Boundaries of the Kafkaesque (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016): 3. 49  Donovan Hohn, Moby Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them (London: Union Books, 2012): 189.

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generically mobile, and will pay close attention to the effects of a plastic literary form. The Kurzprosa or very short prose work in general, and Kafka’s in particular, will be aligned less with a long tradition of Germanic prose writing which we can see exposed in Andre Jollés’s Einfache Formen, or Ur-Forms, and more with an even-longer Germanic tradition of Lyric form and expression—the tradition of the plastic poetic arts (‘plastische Dichtkunst’). Indeed, it is a lyric reading of the literary text in general, as well as of Kafka’s in this particular instance, that has informed this study of literary plasticity. The classical form of the Pindaric ode allows us to traverse etymologies, morphologies, sciences, and histories, through interlinked formulations and counterformulations, turns and counterturns.50 Lyric reading also allows us to bring a new sort of attention to the haunting narration, the sound world, the slippery subject, and the plastic ground of Kafka’s text. Even the structure of this book, indebted to the lyric tradition, takes the form of such an odic argument, chapters 2–5 mirroring and supporting the structural, lyric, and fundamentally plastic mode of literary apperception of the study in their own turns, counterturns, and returns. There is something uncanny about this. 1919. Return again to the newly minted ‘age of plastic’ and the literary innovations of High Modernity. Freud’s essay ‘Das Unheimliche’ is published. Kafka would have been conscious of the contemporary advances in the field of polymer synthesis, and the variant commercial and domestic uses of plastics in nylon, building and engineering materials, and domestic objects, and would perhaps, too, have noticed the uncanny change afoot apropos the nature of this word. Hermann Kafka, his father, a retailer of men’s and women’s clothing, would have given him first-hand access to plastic’s infiltration of the world of everyday fashion: a patent for ‘plastic compositions’ in casein was taken out in Germany by Krisch and Spitteler in 1899, the results displayed at the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1900, and within a decade these plastics became the dominant means of production of buttons in ‘artificial horn’ throughout Europe. In 1909, Leo Bakeland produced the first entirely synthetic plastic (‘Bakelite’), but for half a century before this breakthrough, partly synthetic protoplastics were 50  The Pindaric Ode is always comprised of an odd number of strophic units, as its poetic argument is developed across a series of paired and often opposed stanzas (the strophe/ antistrophe), culminating in the rhetorical flourish of the concluding epode (the final strophe). The work of such an ode, thus, formally (and so also in terms of its argument) represents a queered, haunting, dialectic of sorts.

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already being made and becoming quickly irreplaceable in industry and at home, Celluloid—a synthesis of plant cellulose and camphor—being perhaps the most well-known of these.51 Rayon was synthesized in the late 1800s, marketed as ‘synthetic silk’, and trademarked in 1924; the discovery of Nylon is also one of the 1920s. In Kafka’s unfinished short story of 1915, ‘Blumfeld, ein älterer Junggeselle’, the titular bachelor is disturbed upon opening the door of his apartment not by two India rubber, but two celluloid bouncing balls,52 who become, rather hauntingly, his companions. We also know that Kafka had read the works of Ernst Haeckel, encountering Haeckel’s theories of the ‘plastic instincts’ of various protean beings (an inheritance from the ways in which the early Natural Sciences wrote about the metamorphosis of species).53 We can be similarly sure that the writer’s work sits in some ways in a direct line of inheritance from the Romantic period’s plastische Dichtkunst. And his oeuvre also calls in various ways to the haunting strangeness of the Medieval Jewish Czech myth of the Golem, and other instructive plastic fables of creation and faulty human–other companionship. There is thus a case for the writer to be diagnosed not as the Landarzt but as the Plastiken of his contemporary man (even as we have seen, from Plot to Dyens, that these two figures—of doctor and plastic artist—can just as easily be combined). It is not difficult to find in the work of Franz Kafka a strange ally for an exploration of literary plasticity. We know Kafka’s works sit in a complex and often ambivalent relationship with literary genre, gesturing towards an unknowable. Their narrators, if they exist, are certainly not omniscient, and, when they indeed exist, exceed our grasp. Haunted by all aspects of his work, Kafka’s readers return frequently in search of new possibilities, new translations, and new interpretations. And these readers come to Kafka from a diversity of disciplinary backgrounds. In Kafka, we have an author whose work has global appeal, and whose critics are almost unilateral in their 51  The celluloid business was thriving by the 1870s, and sits in an interesting parallel relationship with the rise of cinematic representation; precedent moments in the history of organic plastics include the presentation by Alexander Parkes of ‘parkesine’ to the Great London Exposition of 1862. We also know of Kafka’s fascination with the rise of ‘medial technologies’ (see Corngold, Lambent Traces, 45). 52  ‘zwei kleine, weiße blaugestreifte Zelluloidbälle’. 53  See Mark M. Anderson, ‘Sliding down the evolutionary ladder? Aesthetic Autonomy in the Metamorphosis’ in Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Infobase, 2008): 77–94, and in particular pp. 80–81.

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agreement to disagree, often quite profoundly, with each other in regard to any meaning, narrative or otherwise, of his texts. Kafka’s mechanized, synthetic modes of narration give us pause; the manner in which the works so often seem to teeter on the brink of anthropic comprehension fascinates. It is the strange plasticity of the oeuvre which intrigues, as well as the enigmatic creator figure behind it. And it is in Kafka’s short works—from the more conventional short stories, through the ‘sketches’, all the way to the aphorisms, letters, notes—that we can most clearly see all aspects of this writer’s plastic imaginary at play. ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ is a text that exists in an unthinkable number of editions and translations, under different titles, and whose subject(s) exercise the critic’s, philosopher’s, artist’s, translator’s, even scientist’s dilemmas. These dilemmas mirror our neurotic care regarding plastic’s hold on the earth and, for the literary critic, are almost infinitely exacerbated: there is no original manuscript to fall back on, no Urtext. But aside from its messy, immaterial beginnings, we must now ask: What are the qualities that make ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ so inherently, demonstrably, a plastic text, a work to herald, expose, and hallmark the beginning of the Age of Plastic? Like the work of plastic, ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ commands our attention, gaining some of its metamorphic power through the counterpoint of its multiple levels of existence and forms, yet it lacks a single origin point, or blueprint. Via this short prose work, we can observe the literary plasticity of Kafka’s art, and read the work of Kafka as one which is in itself at once plastic and haunted by plastic. This idea, central to this study, is explored variously in the following three sections, through three contentions. The first contention, explored in the following section, ‘Odradek, or, non-biodegradable object life’, is that the Odradek, the literary non-­ creature par excellence, is a synthetic, or plastic, composition and that Odradek takes textual precedence in relation to and agency from the titular Hausvater. Odradek disrupts the work on many levels, forcing the story to change with every appearance of the word. As we will explore, Odradek has provoked critics, philosophers, and artists alike into morphological and behavioural speculation. Nothing is concrete. What Odradek is seems to change, supported by the evidence found in Kafka’s text, with every reading, demonstrating a sort of literary malleability in its object life that is entirely in concert with the overwhelmingly plastic nature of ‘Die Sorge

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des Hausvaters’ itself. It is not quite the Benjaminian ‘gestus’,54 but it certainly exists in a realm whose deixis is not practical, rather, bordering on the ontological. Further to this, Odradek is, demonstrably, synthetic: its name is an unspeakable composition of artificial elements, and its form, again, a series of un-pin-downable combinations. It is nationless, a-­linguistic, and physical yet disembodied. It is a provocation: calling to attention its presence in a literary work as something outside of both the literarily and the anthropically comprehensible. To cap it all off, Odradek apparently laughs, not with us, not at us, but without any seeming direction, and disappears. And this is a provocation that leads Walter Benjamin, in correspondence with Theodor Adorno, to exclaim that ‘in Kafka’s work, the most singular bastard […] is Odradek’, a frustration that leads to Benjamin, who previously wrote about the work’s deep concern with ‘Vergessenheit’ [forgetfulness],55 consigning Odradek ‘to oblivion’.56 The second contention returns to the generic and formal aspects of the work of plastic. This is that the genre of the work exhibits, and indeed is composed of, certain undeniably plastic qualities: ‘Kurzprosa as Plastic Art’. The dynamism of Kurzprosa is at once short but not curtailed; it is neither fragmented nor shattered but, rather, reformed around the fact of its concision. It allows for an exploration simultaneously of the possibility of lyric enunciation and argument, and of a sentence-phrase structure freed from the large architectures of the novel. In this way, Kurzprosa can allow for sensible (rather than sense-making) digression. Although the form may be superficially more tied to the logic of narrative progression than the lyric or prose-poem, it still allows, in the simple fact of its condensation, for the grammatical and sonorous plasticity, as well as aesthetically productive synthetic disjunction—the divergence from grammar as meaning-­making; disruption of the syntactic line or object–subject relation in favour of an alternative logic—that Ron Silliman has written of as being the hallmark of ‘the new sentence’. We observe qualities (including ‘quantity’ over logic, ‘torque’, and ‘polysemy’) which effect a ‘presence’

54  Benjamin, Selected Writings v.21927–1934: ‘Kafka could understand things only in the form of a gestus, and this gestus which he did not understand constitutes the cloudy part of the parables’ (129). 55   Benjamin, [‘Franz Kafka’, Gesammelte Schriften vv.2.2: 431] Selected Writings v.21927–1934. 56  Benjamin, Selected Writings v.21927–1934. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press): 810 and 811.

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rather than a ‘truth’.57 But is this formal play, this ‘dance on the border of conceptual knowledge and rational narrative’,58 an equivocation that we can accept? A renewed attention to prosody’s plastic attributes leads us to a comparative reading of Roland Barthes’s short prose work of 1956 ‘Le Plastique’, and Kafka’s Kurzprosa. Here, it is possible to foreground certain formal attributes and modes of address and tone, and, furthermore, to demonstrate how much ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ is a work whose dynamism and plasticity of form works to supplement and undercut any overarching meaning we may observe in the work. Indeed, a part of the aesthetic power of ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ is that these very formal attributes, when synthesized with each other, lead not to the sensation of architectural completion or permanence, but to its opposite. This is the difficulty of the ‘loophole’59: an architectural space that hinges on ingress and egress, a situation of attack and defence. Further to this, it is the difficulty of encounter with the narratological tripwire of ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ that demands of its reader a certain cerebral malleability in order to, actively, avoid a fall. The surprise of the text forces its reader into mirroring it in some way in an attempt to more fully understand it, and a certain sort of neuroplastic interaction with form is born. The third contention of this study, explored in the section ‘The Hausvater’s Lyric Hauntology’ is that the Hausvater too demonstrates major attributes of plastic being. Although a Hausvater has titular acknowledgement, it is his hauntology, rather than his status as protagonist, which precipitates the puzzled telling of the tale. There is tension between narratological and lyric foundations of the work. Approaching ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ as lyric, there is no proof that the Hausvater in fact narrates the work. This confounds the usual analysis of the work. Indeed, looking at ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ without attention to the innumerable critical, theoretical, and artistic mass of readings of the work, and only then returning to these readings, the imposition of this titular figure as narrator seems audacious, not to  Ron Silliman, The New Sentence, particularly p. 91.  Corngold, Lambent Traces: 72. 59  See Christopher Middleton, Putaxanadu (Manchester: Carcanet, 1977): 70. 57 58

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mention grammatologically impossible. If we consider the speaker of ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ less as a singular narrator per se and more as a dispossessed and dispossessing lyric ‘I’, we encounter a narrative voice that is ever ‘mine own, and not mine own’, and which, under the auspices of grammatical logic, may be read as subject to shifts both in focalization, which is expected, and in enunciation, which is less expected from a short prose work, but entirely cognate with the ways in which Kafka uses free indirect discourse. Examining the tangle of the figure of the Hausvater, his ‘worries’, and the vocalic figuration of the narrator of the text may also help us to work through the difficulty inherent in one of the major Benjaminian inheritances of contemporary readings of Kafka. This difficulty, or misprision, not only is seen in a heightened manner in Deleuze and Guattari’s much contested readings of Kafka’s work as a ‘littérature mineure’, but also provides ballast to the common mistake: the elision of the figure of the Hausvater and the narrator. This is an inheritance that is born from Benjamin’s reading of father–son and bureaucrat–worker relationships in Kafka; ‘the father is the one who punishes […] there is much to indicate that the world of officials and the world of fathers are the same to Kafka’.60 But even as the ‘Hausvater’ in the title of this story may be the father- and official figure made ambiguous par excellence, there has perhaps been too much emphasis placed on this overall character-based power play. The Kafkian address to the father, which Benjamin so astutely analysed, can become oversimplified into an association of power figures in the work with the father, and figures of textual and narratorial disruption with the author himself, leading to a preponderance of father–official–Hausvater figurations which are all too often analysed in opposition with Odradek-­ cum-­Kafka. In reading ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ through the lens of a literary plasticity, some of the problems of narration that seem to so puzzle critics—regarding what Michelle Woods has called the ‘notoriously enigmatic, even seemingly absent’ narrator, and his/her haunting control over the text—are dispelled.61

 Benjamin, Selected Writings v.2: 113.  Michelle Woods, Kafka Translated: How Translators have Shaped our Reading of Kafka (London: Bloomsbury, 2013): 137. 60 61

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Combined, these three contentions demand of the reader an exceptional level of malleability in engagement, in thought, and in environmental and vocalic apperception: a readerly plasticity; a changed engagement with time, and, indeed, belief; a kind of engagement that leads critics to write almost incessantly of the power of the literary work to haunt,62 to resist empirical definition and to transfigure63; and, even in its state of linguistic self-containment, to effect change.

62  For example, Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, ‘The Uncanny’ and ‘Ghosts’, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism, and Theory 3rd Ed. (London: Pearson Education, 2004): 34–41; 133–141. And haunting haunts all aspects of this study, namely the section on ‘The Author’: ‘the author only ever haunts’ (22); ‘Monuments’: ‘This, then, is what needs to be explained: the way that literary works remain with us, haunt us’ (50); ‘The Performative’: ‘Every performative […] is haunted by the necessary possibility that it will fail or go astray’ (238); ‘The Postmodern’: ‘It haunts’ (249). 63  I am thinking here in particular of Umberto Eco’s thesis of 1962: the opera aperta (the ‘open work’), especially the manner in which this aesthetics of openness, and of multivalent complicity between reader and work, how the reader brings his/her ‘own existential credentials’ to the work and the resultant change, is applicable to multiple types of artwork.

CHAPTER 2

Odradek, or Non-biodegradable Object-Life

Abstract  The start of a close reading of Franz Kafka’s Kurzprosa ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’, demonstrating plastic’s persistence in our domestic lives, its many guises and operations, material and sonorous. Keywords  Plastic • Literary plasticity • Modernism and plastic • Lyric • Translation • Kafka In a translator’s footnote to his version of ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’, J.A. Underwood notes, apropos the word Odradek’s appearance in the first sentence of the work, ‘∗Kafka made it up, and the critics are still divided as to what it stands for’.1 No further references are given. The sentence hovers at the bottom of the page, outside the body of the work. This note adds a needless paratextual register, disrupting the reading process further than the work itself already does, rendering what is eminently self-contained something quite other than that. Is the note extraneous? Do we need to be thus assured? Is the Kurzprosa too difficult or worrying for us without its help? Is the note an attempt to break or emphasize the strange self-containment of the work? An egotistical intervention? Or is this note, perhaps, a symptom of the translator’s, or even publisher’s own anxiety regarding the by-now notorious difficulty of translating Kafka’s

1

 J.A. Underwood (trans.), Franz Kafka Stories: 1904–1924 (London: Futura, 1981): 206.

© The Author(s) 2020 H. H. Yeung, On Literary Plasticity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44158-6_2

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idiosyncratic German? The note breaks up the work even as the work— and the word the note gestures towards—refuses to be broken down. In the face of the Kurzprosa’s dynamic, enigmatic operations, Underwood’s note, marked by an asterisk, appears to be a sort of graffito or posthumous paratext, the sort of critical grasping-after-truth that the work itself ironizes. Once read and digested, the note becomes a moment not only of impropriety but also of complete bathos. Of course, we could answer, smug readers that we are, that Kafka made it up; Kafka made up the whole of this work. There is an assumption that the reader of the work is always encountering it for the first time ∗here. But more than this, the note disrupts the printed text with a symbol, guiding us towards the manner in which the critical divisions Underwood gestures towards are played out through the figuring of Odradek. The reader becomes entangled in the equivocal machinations of the work. From critical tendencies in explorations of Odradek which are reliant on etymology or philology (the paratext pointing towards the impossibility of linguistic sense), to those which are reliant on morphology (the gesture, in the asterix, to appearance), to those reliant on ontology (in, for instance, the very presence of the note), we are fixated not by the possible (the close reading of the manner in which the work exerts this manipulative power) but by the impossible (asking, so what is Odradek?), and in the subsequent explorations thence enact precisely what the work itself narrates and counter-narrates. Regardless of the fact that Odradek’s primary attribute appears to be that it cannot be pinned down, it somehow persists in inviting attempts to do so. ∗Kafka writes ∗Odradek. Our translator provides us with a peritext, a threshold. Mirroring this, the note asks its reader to emerge from and return to the work. Plasticity, as we continue to see, is implicit and reactive, existing within the work itself and in the unimaginable exteriority of its multiple readers. The passage between the reader and Odradek, and thence the reading of the ‘problem’ of Odradek, gives rise to yet another level of the work’s plastic nature, an abiding sense of loss, of not quite. So let us look at what Odradek is not, or at least, what Odradek is not quite; what Kafka’s text is most certainly not quiet about. Let us return first to the graphic representation provoked in part by Underwood’s asterix, the presence of which becomes almost a parody of the description of Odradek in the ‘Sterne’/‘Stabchen’ morphology of the second strophic unit of the work. Indeed, the German for asterix is ‘Sternchen’, or ‘little star’; the note deposits something into the work that oughtn’t to be there, but, in an odd manner, it also reflects aspects of the work which have come

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under repeated critical and creative scrutiny. We will fast see how the purported subject of each strophic unit, and as a result the whole work, is unbalanced by Odradek’s resistant and uncompromisingly plastic presence; how each potential reading of the morphological, philological, and ontological presence of Odradek leads us out of the self-contained logic of the work’s lyric argument, and back to it again. How, productive of affect and persistent in presence, Odradek can provoke quite as much annoyance as the existence of Underwood’s diacritical interjection. We would like to swat it away, as we would do a fly or a piece of lint; we would like to relinquish our responsibility towards it, to erase its existence from our consciousness. And yet…

1   Invocation How can we ‘place’ Odradek without falling prey to the manipulative form and tone of the ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ more broadly? Or, if it is indeed impossible to place the Odradek, why won’t it disappear? Was it really present in the first place? Since permanently pinning down or parsing Odradek appears to be impossible and leads to more problems than solutions, let us begin by looking at the effects of ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ before empirical meaning asserts itself, attempting to meet on its own terms whatever is/are Odradek as we will also do Hausvater in the final section of this study. We will return to the start, armed with a series of questions for the opening, the tone, the grammar, the form, the sound world, and the argument apropos the figurations of Odradek in Kafka’s work. In thus approaching the work, we can also begin to destabilize the critical questions seen for a long time as central to the act of pinning down the art or aesthesis of this slippery work (the questions of morphology, philology, and ontology; the frequent critical refusal of an empirical shift), as well as productively destabilizing, in line with the strophic nature, the proversi of the work, Odradek itself. Afterall, it is in the dynamic nature of the Ode to turn around an ultimately unconstitutable, even imaginary, subject, constituting and reconstituting form through sound and rhythmic patterning, often disrupting, or sitting in contrast with, ‘logical’ linear or grammatical meaning. We encounter Odradek in the first strophic unit as a word, ‘das Wort Odradek’. Resonances of John 1.1 aside, our English encounter is multiple, only supporting the manner in which Kafka’s original immediately creates an atmosphere of unevenness, of equivocation. On the one hand:

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Die einen sagen, das Wort Odradek stamme aus dem Slawischen und sie suchen auf Grund dessen die Bildung des Wortes nachzuweisen.2 Some say the word Odradek is of Slavonic origin, and try to account for it on that basis. (Muirs)3 Some say the word Odradek is Slavonic in origin and seek to trace its derivation on that basis. (Underwood)4 There are some who say the word Odradek comes from the Slavic and they look for its etymology there. (Hofmann)5

If we surmise, alongside Underwood, that ‘das Wort Odradek’ is a Kafkian coinage and in calling up the synthetic name, the being, too, appears with full embodiment within the text, this is a formative literary speech act. But before ‘Odradek’ is called into existence, it is encountered indirectly—‘Die einen sagen’. ‘Das Word Odradek’ thus becomes a word whose existence is mediated through other people’s voices, improperly told and unattributed. We are placed in a world of hearsay and storytelling (say: ‘Die einen sagen’), at the same time as within a world whose empiricism is called up in the neutrality of scientific or journalistic discourse (repeat: ‘Die einen sagen […] Andere…’). The plasticity of ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ is as artificial as it is always-already mediated. Although tone and grammatical denotation indicate that Odradek ‘makes sense’, there is an ironic ambiguity in the co-existence of two tonal meanings: ‘Odradek’s’ nonsense existence in sound and sense, as well as its potentially coherent expression across a number of genres. Thanks to the nature of the 2  Franz Kafka, Drucke zu Lebzeiten. Kritische Ausgabe. Ed. Wolf, Kittler et al. (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1994): 282. All subsequent German quotations from the work are taken from this edition (the work appears in pp. 282–4). Unless salient to the argument, the English translations of the work will be taken from the translation by Edwin and Willa Muir, reprinted as The Complete Stories (New York: Schocken Books, 1995): 495. This is in spite of the spate of recent academic translations of Kafka whose accuracy, or Kafkian Stimmung, is argued to be greater; the Muirs’s translation (Edwin, also a poet, novelist, and critic; Willa also an essayist and novelist) in the context of this work on High Modernism and literary plasticity is fitted to the period under scrutiny—this is the version of Kafka that was most widely available for many decades, and which accrued an extraordinary level of literary resonance in spite of the misprision in the translations themselves. 3  Muir and Muir (trans.): 495. 4  Underwood, (trans.): 206. 5  Michael Hofmann (trans.), Metamorphosis and other stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2007): 211–12.

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Kurzprosa, this ambiguity is supported, and means that, even before the word is introduced into the text, it is ungraspable, and even more resistant to explanation outside of the work itself. And of course, we are always outside of the work. This is immediately compounded by the alien nature of ‘Odradek’ as both sight and sound. Try it aloud again! The voice trips over its strange combination of phonemes alien to their German context and made doubly strange to English speakers, just as we have already been lulled into slowness by pervasive sibilance of the whole first sentence, and its multiple subclauses and internal rhymes. The repetition of the senseless noises or syllables which comprise ‘Odradek’ combine into a word-object that is strange to German, ‘Slavonic’ (or ‘Slavic’), and indeed to any other language. Yet the noises of Odradek are somehow familiar. This familiarity exists even before the syllables, sounded as phonemes, accrete possible meanings through repeated enunciation. Familiar at the level of sounding, occurring on a phonemic level, ‘Odradek’ recurs in each strophic unit of the work, changing context but building in sonorous familiarity. ‘Odradek’, as we have already established, is a combination of sounds lacking any meaning apart from that given by its combination in the work, but the vowel sounds themselves, which shape the word, are, in contrast to the self-instantiating ‘Ich’, sounds which call up the effect of the lyric apostrophe. Thus, the ‘sound’ of Odradek sits in immediate sonorous and epistemological contradistinction to that of the titular Hausvater. Contrary to the Hausvater, whose meaning, as we shall see, is compounded (both head of household and caretaker), Odradek lacks sense completely; similarly to the Hasuvater, Odradek exists as the work opens, without a distinct meaning, or ground. Whereas the ‘Ich’, which is apparently the Hausvater’s, aids the reader in binding together in sound–sense the changeable units of ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’, even as the presence of the true ‘Ich’ is withheld until the final strophe, Odradek’s apostrophic presence, or ‘O’, works in quite a different way. ‘Odradek has no visual equivalence’, writes Gesa Schneider, ‘he is speech’.6 Reading ‘Odradek’ apostrophically should thus not present a problem, but again this critical movement destabilizes yet again the generic identification of the work, as the apostrophe (unless it occurs in the 6  ‘…kein visuelles Äquivalent für Odradek ausgemacht Werden. Er ist Sprache’. Gesa Schneider, Das Andere Schreiben: Kafka’s fotografische Poetik (Würzburg: Könignshause & Neumann, 2008): 7. My emphasis.

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reported speech of a narrative or dramatic expostulation of a play) is a ‘figure endemic to [lyric] poetry that finds little place in other discourses’.7 As the impossible constellation of sounds which comprises ‘Odradek’ can be said, thence apprehended, in one way and another (‘Die einen sagen’; ‘Andere wieder meinen es stamme…’), so the apostrophe calls into self-­ conscious being the formal and linguistic functions of the work to which it is attached, as well as gesturing to all that is incomprehensibly outside of the work’s sphere of control. The apostrophe is a part of literature’s alchemical, plastic arsenal, teetering on the brink of ritual language, containing within it the power to call to attention the outside of the literary work, to simultaneously generate and destroy language, to create and efface literary force, demonstrating through a profoundly human action of non-linguistic expression all that is non-human. Simply in the fact of its existence, the apostrophe exceeds both itself and us: Apostrophes invoke elements of the universe as potentially responsive forces, which can be asked to act, or refrain from acting, or even to continue behaving as they usually behave. The key is not passionate intensity, but rather the ritual invocation of elements of the universe, the attempt, even, to evoke the possibility of a magical transformation.8

One of the important constitutive aspects of the apostrophe is its sonorousness. Sonorousness can be outside of language both epistemologically and ontologically; the former, inasmuch as the basic unit of the apostrophic figure ‘A’, ‘Ah’, ‘O’ and so on is very often a vowel-based phonemic exclamation which lacks dictionary meaning implicating the text, the writer of the text, and the voicer (/reader) of the text at once. This singular moment can then become a metaphysical invocation to the limits of being, a part of the ontological invocation that Culler indicates here. This sort of invocation often operates, like ‘Odradek’, through phonemic accretion: frequent additions may indicate a tenor of affective orientation towards an as-yet-unperceived subject (‘Yes!’ ‘No!’, ‘Hail!’), and/or that imperceptible invoked subject itself (‘God!’, ‘You’), and, at its most extensive, can move through various of these constituent units, turning between 7  Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2015): 216. Ted Geier also reads Kafkian apostrophe as a significant ‘nonhuman’ and limit-exposing aspect of the work alongside the Romantic lyric. See Geier, Kafka’s Nonhuman Form: Troubling the Boundaries of the Kafkaesque (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016): 10. 8  Culler, Theory of the Lyric: 216.

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possible subject–object or accusative/nominative relations, questioning them, and simultaneously denying both, as in the infamous τίς σ’, ὦ / Ψάπφ’, ἀδικήει of the Sapphic ‘Hymn to Aphrodite’.9 The sonorousness of the apostrophe (and its ontological resonance) may be found in its simultaneous ‘calling out’ and ‘calling out to’ that we can see occur through the phonemic accretion; the movement from exclamation to transformative invocation of the universe which stops at a point short of total empirical narrative- or sense-making. As any human-­ constituted not wholly linguistic non-onomatopoeic sound unit, the apostrophe exceeds language and also exceeds that most human-made of forms, narrative. It is an inverse moment of epiphany, if you will—a calling out to an imperceptible beyond (rather than an act of dumbfounded witness to that imperceptible beyond). And so, the apostrophe is, even at its most negative, a materially positive formative figuration. Perhaps this positive materialism is down to its excessive or outsider status. The intertextual nature of Culler’s statement above indicates as much, refusing as it does the ‘worst’ in the apocalyptic vision of humanity which closes the first strophe of W.B.  Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’. The ‘key’ to the noise which becomes an apostrophe figure, therefore, is a plastic one—rather than destructive it is predicated on a principle of creation—and one which asks us to suspend our disbelief in the possibility of ab ovo genesis of the literary work. As Kafka’s most original literary creation, inasmuch as it is perhaps the only one called out from absolute non-being—and formed in the moment of its calling—Odradek is and also exceeds the apostrophe: it is a polymorphic figure—a series of minimal units of linguistic artifice joined together— operating on but not within the meaning-structures of language itself, and creating out of its minimal sounds a maximum effect which is yet impossible to fully comprehend. First, there is the standard apostrophic, continuant, ‘O’, followed by a prevocalic aspirated stop and secondary apostrophic continuant, ‘dra’, and finally the labial ‘d’ and then partially sounded ‘ek’. In all, this is a familiar series of sounds, but which in concert with each other demand a series of sounded and voiceless, aspirated and tenius, labial and glottal starts and stops. These starts and stops in turn demand a certain plasticity of movement and speech from the readerresounder, and which may even provoke, on first sounding, a literary 9  Anne Carson translates this with a wonderful sonorous resonance: ‘Who, O / Sappho, is wronging you?’. If not, Winter: 3.

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sneeze and ‘Gesundheit!’ from any listener close by. And thus the sounds of ‘Odradek’ are so necessarily familiar in essence and yet in combination strange to us. It could be that we fail to correctly pronounce both phonemic units and the whole, yet the noisy failure of ours is the difficulty the work circles around. Indeed, in whatever sounding of the word we should momentarily settle upon, we continue to note how marked its difference is—on volumetric and sonorous levels—from the mostly fricative firstperson point of identification, or ‘Ich’. ‘Odradek’ is a noisily implacable strangeness that will persist to the end of the work, even creating its own onomatopoeia with the observed movements of Odradek, and similar in nature to the sounds hauntingly attributed to the apparently animate ‘Odradek’ itself, which appears to ‘laugh’ at our very failure to understand, to mimic our inability to fluently sound its word, to play with our need to ask questions, and to demand that we take care in our approach to it. Underwood explains ‘Odradek’ away as a word entirely made up by Kafka, but this has not prevented the search for its origins and/or meaning. For Werner Hamacher, ‘Odradek is the ‘Od-radix’: the one ‘without roots’; in Czech, odrodek, the one without its own kind, the one who ‘steps out of the lineage’ (odroditi—to degenerate, to be uprooted). Here, ‘Odradek’ is, in short, the one who belongs to no kind and is without counsel, the one with neither a discourse nor a name of his own’.10 Similarly, Kevin Nolan pays close attention to ‘real’ etymological traces in ‘Odradek’, singling out in particular Czech resonances in odraditi as ‘to dissuade or dishearten’ and od-rad-ek as ‘the little creature cut off from order’, but, in concert with the twisting subject of the first strophe of Kafka’s text, Nolan also notes a Germanic resonance: ‘it is tempting to view Odradek […] as the embodiment of whatever is culturally abject or advulsible, oder drek’, and gestures towards resonance with the ‘oooo-da’ of the fort-da game which underpins Freud’s explorations of the uncanny.11 For Jean-Claude Milner, ‘Odradek’ is a broken part of an anagram of a Greek transliteration—dodecahedron—but is yet ‘lacking nothing’ and resonant, as Slavoj Žižek expands, with the Lacanian ‘père ou pire’.12 In 10  Werner Hamacher, ‘The Gesture in the Name: On Benjamin and Kafka’, Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996): 321. 11  Kevin Nolan, ‘Getting Past Odradek’, in Contemporary Poetics, ed. Louis Armand (Northwestern University Press, 2007): 43, 48. 12  Jean-Claude Milner, ‘Odradek la bobine de scandale’, Elucidation 10 (2004): 93, and Slavoj Žižek, ‘Neighbours and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence’ in The Neighbour: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013): 166.

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spite of these etymological excurses into non-meaning and abjection, it is safe to assume that ‘Odradek’, or, whatever it is that is designated by this word/sound, is, following Underwood in a way, without precedent. Turning around this sonorous newness, this apostrophic gesture which exists without time and meaning, the words of the work in the first strophe—Odradek’s initial context—also denote that ‘Odradek’ exists a priori in speech and tale-telling (‘Die einen sagen…’). The compounded effect of the beginning of narration in medias res, with its neutrality of address and a priori resonance, is profound. In turn, Odradek, within the text, undergoes a series of metamorphoses. The metamorphoses occur with each repetition of the word (in each strophe): from noun to essence, after which a causal relationship with the world of the work occurs. By the third strophic unit of the work, ‘Odradek’ is a form, then undergoes momentary zoo- or anthropo-morphosis, is given voice, and, by the final strophe, moves away from us in both space and time.

2   Morphology For the scientist engaged in the description and analysis of a hitherto unknown species, close attention to morphological detail is key. Yet it is important not to take any of these traits as read, nor to rely on current ‘knowns’ or modes of description of the appearance, habit, habitat, based on prior analysis of apparently similar species. As Odradek’s contexts change with the lyric argument of ‘Die Sorge Des Hausvaters’, it follows too that words associated with Odradek also have a habit of repeating, echoing, and repetitively metamorphosing. Odradek’s sonorous (and physical) attributes haunt the sound world of the work as much as the disembodied ‘Ich’ of the Hasuvater to which, we will see, they provide a counterpoint. Yet there is a counterpoint within Odradek itself: the word repeats in each strophic unit, remaining the same in textual appearance (but not in either grammatical or narrative context); it is the associated words that shift around this indestructible, ludic, sound-object. Odradek and its attributes are divided; Odradek’s noises create effects outwith the effect of the word itself, a word that will not biodegrade. We can observe these noisy secondary effects particularly in the tangles of the second strophic unit, effects which work to enact Odradek’s purported ‘aneinandergeknottete’ nature [Wesen], criss-crossing from one side (‘auf der einen Seite’) to the other (‘auf der anderen Seite’), pivoting around and about the aspects that come to be associated with morphological critical readings

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of Odradek, and which artistic representations are invariably heavily dependent upon—the star, the thread, the spool, and the stick. From sternartige to Zwirnspule; Zwirn to Zwirnstücke; Spule to Sternes; Querstäbchen to Stäbchen; Stäbchens to Sternes, we will now follow the trail. The second strophic unit begins not with a noun but with an adjective describing the ‘object’ under scrutiny. This is an object which is not to be pinned down, which is open ended, and which (through figuration) embodies the possibilities of the contingent. Sternartige (like, or as if, a star) makes clear that the world that will ensue is one whose comparative nature is ungraspable, even as its artifice is foregrounded. The entirety of this morphological strophe exists in the realm of simile. The nature of address has shifted in concert with the changed case in the opening sentence from the accusative indefinite to the nominalized pronoun—the intangible, or intractable, object again. Additionally, in line with the lyric impulse of the work to turn with and against itself, creating a metamorphic dynamism which only adds to the ungraspable nature of Odradek, the soundings and re-soundings of these particular physical aspects of Odradek work in a progression of internally contradictory sonorous pairs. The first pairing—‘Odradek’ as ‘star-like’ ‘thread-spool’—moves from a potential incompatibility of description, compounded by the combinative nature of German (unlike in many of the translations of the work, both words are compounds and so the doubling is doubled). The second pairing, carrying across the ‘thread’ or ‘twine’ of the first, modulates from the simple ‘twine’ to ‘twine-thing’ (or bit-which-holds-twine). The first word of this pair, Zwirn, carries within its single complex syllable the criss-crossing, or intertwined, nature of the work. The second, -stücke, creates a similar effect in a different way: the nature of the descriptions of Odradek become doubled and so tangled up within themselves even at this point that, although Zwirnstücke mirrors the Zwirnspule of the first pair, what sense it has gained in repetition it loses through indeterminacy of meaning, combined with an intimation, in -Stücke, of incompletion, disintegration. Following this, we twist around again, returning to the constituent nouns of the first pairing, given in shorter yet more multiple forms—words which are more complete in themselves, but incomplete variants of the initial compounds, a sense of incompletion which is underlined by the context in which they sit in the sentence, whose sense works against the structure of pairing we are uncovering here: ‘Es ist aber nicht nur eine Spule, sondern aus der Mitte des Sternes kommt es ein kleines Querstäbchen…’ [But it is not only

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a spool, for a small wooden crossbar sticks out from the middle of the star… (Muirs)]. The uneven movement of these descriptive pairs are estranged yet further from any possibility of logical resolution by the peculiarity of the pair that come next. The oddness, or anti-strophic, meaning of Querstäbchen is foregrounded. The compound itself, like the ‘Unsicherheit’, which underpins the first strophic unit of the work, exists on a level of physical precarity and internally conflicting comparison (Quer, being at right angles, or diagonal to; -Stäbchen—a little stick, rod, or beam). The work of Odradek is at cross-purposes to itself. The Muirs translate Querstäbchen as ‘cross-­ bar’; Michael Hofmann as ‘a little rod’. These different translations demonstrate to us the possibilities of Odradek-in-translation’s morphology and through this the possibilities of relational tone, ranging from the technical to the domestic or even cute. From Querstäbchen to Stäbchen (strophe to antistrophe) there is no ironing out of complexity; no diminution of uncanniness, no little amount of repetition or return. Rather the work rolls on in a manner implied by the one of Stäbchen’s meanings—a (little) spoke (thus a constituent part of a wheel). And Stäbchen’s plastic existence is not only to be found in its part in this sonorous process of metamorphosis, but in its meaning: it is not only something structural, which constitutes and turns—a spoke—but it is also something which ignites and self-destructs—a matchstick. One of these meanings is a part, the other a whole; one is wooden or metal and promotes structural integrity and movement and the other is wooden and chemical and promotes, in a promethean manner, its own de-creation as well as that of whatever it comes into contact with. In essence, these two meanings are contradictory within themselves as much as they are contradictory to each other. The word Stäbchen is strange to itself, is plastic, even before it comes to be associated with Odradek and the spectral Hausvater: it forms and deforms matter. In addition, Stäbchen’s alien, quer, nature is compounded not only by the queerness of quer’s adjective-turned-part-compound, but also in the de-centralized meaning of the Stäbchen itself, as, by the twentieth century it had also come to denote the chopstick—a foreign implement that aids consumption; whose constitutive materials range from bone, to wood, to metal, to plastic; which has a singular effect (it can stab but ought not to), but which properly works when paired and manipulated (in order to pick up), and whose origins can be traced back past 1 millennium BCE. Unlike the spoke-Stäbchen, the chopstick-Stäbchen must have a human wielder to function; unlike the matchstick-Stäbchen, the

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chopstick-Stäbchen relates to the technique of eating and thus to the construction and maintenance (through ingestion) of the human body. This simultaneously newer (in terms of the word’s German coinage) and older (in terms of the denoted object’s historical existence) sense of Stäbchen adds further colouring to the work: yet another foreign aspect appears to undo any Heimlichkeit that the titular presence of a Hausvater may imply; and Odradek is made to sit in an even stranger relationship with time. And so, as well as an extension of the difficult and often contradictory topographical, cultural, and temporal reach, this new change in the figuration of Odradek gives a further possible meaning to turn around in the accretion of possible, often internally contradictory and at times ridiculous, senses associated with Odradek. Can it be true that Odradek forces us, somehow, to orient ourselves? That its strangeness is something that is not wholly Western, which is sinister, not wholly dexterous?13 Up to this point in analysis, in spite of all the hirpling downwards movement (Hinunterköllern), the sonorous and comic turns of the Kurzprosa’s sound world have been demonstrably correlative to anthropocene thinking, related to so many techniques of domestic living, or of craft (the simile, the spool, the string, the various sorts of stick, etc.). But finally, we move from the worldly to the cosmic, from a littering object-life to a universal aspiration, as a combination of sibilance and vowel progression moves our sounding of the Odradek forward from Stäbchen to Sterne. This quite literal ambivalence of Odradek in sound-world and object-life alike, tips us from the comfort of the persistently domestic tangle of string and spool, into a hitherto unanticipatable level of universality, whether the starry aspect of Odradek’s apparent morphology is taken as a symbol (thus holding any level of cultural signification), or a hint towards Odradek’s alien, cosmic nature (thus, potentially, existing within the realms of myth). In either case, however, the star is radically different from Odradek’s spooling stick-like parts. Nevertheless, the morphology, which trips us up, demonstrating the danger of taking even the smallest, most apparently domestic of objects at face value, is essentially interconnected. It is from

13  There is an interesting echo of this prospect of re-orienting Kafka in Dimitris Vardoulakis’s recent study of humour in Kafka, as he writes of ‘Kafka’s humour [as] a response to the Western conception of freedom, which he tirelessly presents in this [sic.] narratives, and that this response implies an alternative conception of freedom’. Freedom and the Free Will: On Kafka’s Laughter (New York: SUNY UP, 2016): xiii.

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the middle of the star-shaped part of the Odradek that the cross-beam, ‘little rod’, or Querstäbchen emanates. The following two sentences, which we have already looked at in part, are absolutely entangled in indications that, in Odradek, the uncannily domestic and profoundly inhuman, potentially non-planetary, co-exist: Es ist aber nicht nur eine Spule, sondern aus der Mitte des Sternes kommt es ein kleines Querstäbchen hervor und an dieses Stäbchen fügt sich dann im rechten Winkel noch eines. Mit Hilfe dieses letzteren Stäbchens auf der einen Seite und einer der Ausstrahlungen des Sternes auf der anderen Seite, kann das Ganze wie auf zwei Beinen aufrecht stehen. But it is not only a spool, for a small wooden crossbar sticks out of the middle of the star, and another small rod is joined to that at a right angle. By means of this latter rod on one side and one of the points of the star on the other, the whole thing can stand upright as if on two legs. [Muirs]

It is through a combination of the spool, the spokes, and the points of the star—the movement from the everyday to the cosmic, epistemological, and ontological, from one side to the other—that (it seems) Odradek raises itself up. Its very movement, it seems, is predicated on the simultaneous morphological navigation of minimal and maximal scales. Here we see what Malabou diagnoses as the ‘plastic power of modification’14 at work. At work, not only in the morphology and movement of the noisily raised being, or not-quite Dasein, of ‘Odradek’, but also in the sonorous progression of that morphological description, as the /U/ of Spule becomes /aë/ (Stäbchen) and finally /e/ (Sternes)—from total vowel modulation to total vowel harmony across the word; from plosive to sibilant; almost the same progression of vowel articulation from open to closed, and, tellingly, low to raised, that can be found in the difficult name itself /o/, /a/, /e/: Odradek. The progress of Odradek is from spool to star, from creation to the universal. Were we to turn this on its head in the pursuit of logic we would reach a conclusion that it is out of the universal that the most human (the Stäbchen) emerges. Yet something of this constantly modifying description allows us to cling onto it; apart from the vowel progression, these sibilant morphological descriptors also hint at the same movement of case (and therefore subject/object) relations as does the openings of each of the strophic units of the greater text. The work 14  Catherine Malbou, The Heidegger Change: On the Fantastic in Philosophy. Trans. Peter Shalfish (Albany: SUNY Press, 2011): 231.

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turns around on itself, and its word endings indicate a movement from the nominative, through the accusative, to the genitive (e/en/es). It is in the hint of genitive possession that the logic of Odradek’s constitutive sound world combines with the logic of its hirpling, tumbling, morphology, and reaches its stand in the final word, or momentary cessation of metamorphic movement—‘stehen’. Yet, if we are to credit Blumenberg here, this act of standing, although different, is as much an action as are the noisy movements of the previous strophic units. If anything, due to the contrast, or turn, the act of coming to a stand is more active than the previous strophes. And it is an act that marks, too, the beginning of the shift towards the anthropic in the writing of Odradek. For this stand is as connected to the plastic ground of the work as much as it is to the inherent plasticity of Odradek: There is an anthropological aspect to the metaphorics of ground. The two legged human stands on the ground in a manner that is so peculiar to it that this standing is not a standing position [Stand] in the sense of constancy [Bestand] or a condition [Zustand] but rather is an activity. It is not language that leads us to believe this; rather, language follows the discovery that one has to do this in order to not not do it [um es nicht zu lassen].15

Language’s hints follow form’s force. Connect, too, the movement through figuration, from tenor to ground. At this point, we are at the centre of Kafka’s work. ‘Stehen’ stands at a brink; provides a stopping point for the lyric argument of the work. It is significant, also, that it is this verb that marks the end of the second, and the immanence of the third strophic unit, momentarily lulling us into a false sense of security, anticipating the ‘true’ lyric ‘stand’—the Schlussgesang—which we reach much later, in the final (fifth) strophe of the work. Although at this point the text begs us to consider that we have, we really have not come to a stopping point in the morphology of Odradek. In standing, momentarily, the text belies itself. The third and central strophe of the work continues a consideration of the morphology of Odradek, turning around a fuller perspective (albeit one riddled with negation). Each of the first two sentences of this third and central strophe oscillate rhetorically between two opposed conclusions: the first, that Odradek is a broken thing, an echo of a previously intelligible form; the second, that Odradek is complete in and of itself. We  Blumenberg, Care Crosses the River: 70.

15

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are not equipped to make sense of it. The first contention provokes our archaeological, deep time, imaginary; the second, the fantastic possibilities of our future thought. Broken or unbroken, however, the third strophe underlines for us that it is in the nature of Odradek that it cannot be grasped (perhaps exposing what we have been thinking all along). Indeed, the third (epodic) sentence of this strophic unit makes Odradek’s resistance to the empirical gaze quite clear: ‘Näheres läßt sich übrigens nicht darüber sagen, da Odradek außerordentlich beweglich und nicht zu fangen ist’ [In any case, closer scrutiny is impossible, since Odradek is extraordinarily nimble and can never be laid hold of]. At the same time, the possible humorously self-reflexive textuality here points towards the thwarted, or at least ambivalent, result of previous morphological endeavours. Having developed out of the positing of a clear argument through the balance of opposing perspectives in the first and second sentences, the third sentence is firmly inconclusive. It concludes against capture, perhaps even against the conventions of linear logic and perspective, since, at this point, in gesturing towards itself and the wilful uncanniness of Odradek, the text also provides us with a precursor to the haunting laughter of Odradek which we will encounter in the following strophe, laughter which tellingly also enters the text after a moment of exchange which appears for all practicable purposes to follow the progression of a narrative and conversational logic that we are conditioned to expect, and which is needless to say thwarted. Again, ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ mirrors its larger formal processes of lyric argument on a miniscule level, bound together by progressions of sound and disrupted by movements of sense. In some ways like a fractal, or at least the malleable possibilities of creation and growth given to us by the existence of so many nurdles, the work self-replicates in mirroring forms, only reaching a conclusion when its process is forcibly cut off, and so through its equivocal nature also unequivocally denying the very possibility of a singular conclusion.

3   Tipping Point Up to this point in ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’, it is difficult to realize how Benjamin’s ‘singular bastard’ of an Odradek16 could also be described by J.  Hillis Miller, with a great sense of relationality, as ‘the strange little  Benjamin, Selected Writings v.2: 810

16

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animal-person-machine that so much worries the father of the family’,17 by Vivain Liske as a ‘mobile creature’,18 or by Reinhart Göring and John Schimanski as ‘like a toy or a pet’.19 Odradek has, thus far, proven profoundly inhuman, non-animal, non-familiar. However, we will not return to the Borgesian re-categorization of Odradek as a logical denizen of a very Modern bestiary. There is sufficient morphological data on Odradek to be able to unpick the assumptions that underlie Miller’s description: ‘animal’ because Odradek moves; ‘person’ because Odradek’s habitus is apparently domestic; ‘machine’ because Odradek’s construction is seemingly angular, even geometric; ‘strange’ and ‘little’ as Odradek is small, and, we are soon to find out, is apparently spoken to ‘like a child’. But what is it that leads Miller and so many others, although they find Odradek ‘strange’, to place it under the bracket of a stable consideration of the haunting and narration of the ‘Hausvater’—an object of scrutiny? Even the text warns us ‘Näheres läßt sich übrigens nicht darüber sagen, da Odradek außerordentlich beweglich und nicht zu fangen ist’ [In any case, closer scrutiny is impossible, since Odradek is extraordinarily nimble and can never be laid hold of]. Odradek, made small, seems cute, childish, pet-like. If we look closely enough at what comprises this ‘cuteness’, we can also see reason for how the figure Odradek provokes strong affective engagement, both within the text and upon its reader. This is not as easy a process as it may seem, as the categories that we are brought to traverse sit within the operations of a peculiarly Modern aesthetic towards the apparently domestic diminutive, ‘an aesthetic disclosing the surprisingly wide spectrum of feelings ranging from tenderness to aggression, that we harbour towards the ostensibly subordinate and unthreatening’.20 Just as in the morphological descriptions of Odradek we reach a tipping, or tripping, point as we move from domestic to cosmic, incompletion to fullness, it is in the moment that this ‘Wesen’ is animated that we are brought to trip over our expectations again, and, as with each of these tipping points, are

 J. Hillis Miller, The Conflagration of the Community: 288, n.14.  Vivian Liske, ‘Making it Mean and Making it Matter: Modernism for the Twenty-First Century’, in Translocal Modernisms: International Perspectives, ed. Irene Ramalho Santos and António Sousa Ribero (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008): 121. 19  Reinhart Göring and Johan Schimanski, ‘Sovereignty’, in Border Aesthetics: Concepts and Intersections, ed. Johan Schimanski and Stephen F.  Wolfe (New York: Berghann Books, 2017): 118. 20  Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: 2. (on the ‘cute’) 17 18

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compelled to begin again, or at least reconfigure, our consideration of the work. What is this continued movement in and reconsideration of the work if it is not part and parcel of the plastic work of literature? Just as we, in reading, animate the literary work’s twists and turns and we animate the all-too noisy absent presence of the Hausvater, we, too, animate Odradek in all possible forms or guises. The work of animation ensures Odradek’s persistence, on the condition of the persistence of the work. To create such interlinked levels of narrative instability is a survival strategy par excellence, and one that is linked to the inextricable actions of the Kurzprosa and of plastic itself, the durable alchemy of the plastic work. On the subject of the form and wide-ranging effect of the Kurzprosa, August Kleinzahler calls on this alchemical presence, designating Kurzprosa as possessing, after Paracelsus, an ‘animular miniturism’ wherein ‘revery and animation mix in a kind of hypnogogic condition to produce unexpected constructs in miniature’.21 It is the unexpected, the metamorphic, the uncodifiable, that the ‘minimally prescriptive’22 aspect that the Kurzprosa does best, fusing and opposing the domestic or domesticatable with the slippery strangeness of the cosmic or ontological. As a result of this work in miniature, this prosodic alchemy, this formally manipulative process of literary voicing, we begin to encounter the cautionary, even ethical, injunction of Kafka’s work. It is a reliable quirk of human cognition that the operations of memory are laid down and reinforced by processes of repetition. It is also true that these processes allow for the comfort of quick recognition, and appraisal. From thence, all too often perhaps, the perceiving, thinking, person is brought, quicker than conscious thought allows, to endow things, words, actions, with both an affective- and a use-value predicated upon the level of their familiarity and whether they are, or are not, proper to their environment. What is slightly off, intrigues; what is totally alien disgusts. Only after that should we give what is under scrutiny enough time to unfold, may this initial reaction rewrite itself. In other words, once we have enumerated something, and thus consider a level of comprehension to have been reached, we far too often assume familiarity. Even worse, in attaching to that assumption of familiarly a related assumption of stasis and 21  August Kleinzahler ‘Introduction’, to Christopher Middleton, Loose Cannons: Selected Prose (New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press, 2014): vii. 22  Botha, ‘Microfiction’: 202.

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non-change, we begin to harm, by overlooking it, the thing in itself. We may be entranced by metamorphosis, compelled by ambivalence, but we cling on to all that is solid, all that says itself singularly and as it is. We too often cling onto solidity through an assumption of the primacy of human agency. ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ teaches us that this is an unhealthy assumption, and we have, thus far, seen this assumption undone with relation to the form of the work, the ghostly vocalic configuration of the Hausvater and our ventriloquized ‘Ich’, and the sound and sense of Odradek. Thus, Kafka’s ethical, and plastic, injunction emerges from the work: beware taking for granted human creation; beware taking for granted the literary work; rather, note the work’s alternative processes of logic, its powerful ambivalences, and allow the work to simultaneously take us over and resist comprehension. As we tip over into the fourth strophe of ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’, if we attend closely enough to the work of plastic, we are immediately privy to the reason for the numerous critical ossifications, or interpretive familiarities, which are brought to bear upon Odradek. The strophe opens in a logical progression from the last, as it delineates clearly the mobility and habitus of Odradek: ‘Er hält sich abwechselnd auf dem Dachboden, im Treppenhaus, auf den Gängen, im Flur auf’ [He lurks by turns in the garret, the stairway, the lobbies, the entrance hall]. Logical indeed, as in order to constitute a workable scientific description of a new species we must not only enumerate its morphological features, but also its habitus, and habits of movement. This consideration of habitus is one seen—again quite logically—in the speedy physical animation of the Odradek across the second and third strophic units of the work, and the final announcement, or challenge, of the third strophe. Odradek is too nimble to be caught. And yet with all this appreciable narrative progress, there is also, as this section opens, a moment of metamorphosis, of jarring change. Odradek has made a grammatological transition from non-living to living. Somehow, in the break between the third and fourth strophic units of the work, a work of animation has occurred. Odradek is, in this strophe, not ‘Es’ but ‘Er’, and has passed from a neutral to a masculine grammatical designation. This pronominal shift mirrors certain givens about our process of reading the work, demonstrating the strange process of alchemical formation and ‘birth’ of Odradek, our increasing familiarity with these strange appearances, and our increased ability, through repetition, to recognize the alien or nonsensical syllables that comprise the work and thus to sound them with increasing control. It also enacts all that the work warns us

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about our all-too-human reliance on habits and givens. Givens, in spite of habit, change, or slip from our grasp. Just as many critics, rather than embrace the work’s powerfully equivocal nature and argument, too often assume the Hausvater’s ‘Ich’, thus imposing upon the work a narrative perspective which is not substantiated by the work itself, they also assume Odradek’s ‘Er’, and thus impose upon the work a conclusive stasis which works against the plastic operations of a work whose argument is lyric, whose music is contrapuntal, and whose form is metamorphic. There is, as we have observed over and again, a critical danger in assuming anything of ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ apart from its constitutive plasticity. Odradek, ‘Wort’ or ‘Wesen’, ‘Er’ or ‘Es’, does not come to us from a long line of knowns. In English translation, we lose the grammatical strangeness of the shift—‘it’ becomes ‘he’, and thus something more ‘human’. But in German it/he resists any Darwinean or Linnean best practice in charting or taxonomization. ‘Es’ shifts to ‘Er’: we witness a point of radical grammatical metamorphosis, which also operates in counterpoint to the Ovidian metamorphosis from human to thing that we are conditioned, culturally, to expect of a plastic body. At this point, now Odradek has been called into being, described, animated, and gendered, we can either grasp onto the familiarity of the pronoun in all its false materiality or cry out at the equivocality with which we are faced. It is perhaps thus that it is possible for the fourth, and longest, strophic unit of the text to house as its centre point a conversation, in reported speech, with a being which names itself ‘Odradek’: ‘“Wie heißt du denn?” fragt man ihn. “Odradek”, sagt er. “Und wo wohnst du?” “Unbestimmter Wohnsitz”, sagt er und lacht; es ist aber nur ein Lachen, wie man es ohne Lungen hervorbringen kann’ [‘“Well, what’s your name?” you ask him. “Odradek,” he says. “And where do you live?” “No fixed abode,” he says and laughs; but it is only the kind of laughter than has no lungs behind it.’] With this conversation is foregrounded again the doubling, or irony, in tone, which pervades and is a hallmark of this text. A conversation without lungs; a body without organs, all hallmarks of a mostly indescribable plasticity. The conversation is reported to be ‘as if’ it were with a child, and does indeed bear up to this mode of reading. It also bears the attributes of a conversation with an unknown individual who is recalcitrant, and unwilling to engage in reciprocal questioning, elaboration, or discussion. The laughter is reported to be ‘as if’ the ‘rustling of falling leaves’. The ‘as if’ is important, pushing us back into the realm of figuration. In tone, too, there is an echo here of

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the opening of the text, as it oscillates between journalistic familiarly and scientific neutrality. Familiarity is again undercut by ambivalence. There is a further destabilization: even as an assumption may be that if conversation is possible Odradek’s being is possible, whatever definitions of Odradek we have previously formulated are thrown into doubt. Doubt then must also be cast upon what narratives of genesis, ideas of appearance and movement we have attributed to Odradek, to the Hausvater, to the absent narrative Ich, and even to the text itself. To recapitulate: the first strophe tells us of a word, ‘Odradek’. The second and third strophic units make of this word an object. By the fourth strophe, the object has also taken on a gendered subject-life. In the conversation reported in this fourth strophe, the subject under scrutiny (the ‘Er’) appears to name himself for the first time, thus contradicting its narrative of genesis that the prior three strophic units have demonstrated. Again, Odradek and ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ turn around on themselves. ‘Odradek’ is whole within itself, and the work turns around this self-contained, indescribable, intractable, unit. Yet being whole does not stop Odradek from being, at once ‘it’, and ‘he’. Whatever we do, however we impose on it or him, what Odradek is, was, or may be, resists our grasp, and we are left in the aftershock of a series of strange movements and formulations. It is at this point that a deep structural irony enters the text, an irony that reflects that of the doubled tone of the text’s opening, and the ‘childlike’ address of the fourth strophic unit’s reported speech, an irony that is compounded by the manner in which the turning progress of the lyric argument in each strophic unit espouses a similar form but also contradicts in some essential way that which has come before it, an irony that is underlined by the physical and conversational evasion of ‘Odradek’, the sound, reported through simile, of its/his laughter, its disappearance, its ultimate control. If we cannot pin down Odradek, we encounter the problem (and irony) which is the crux of the text. ‘Odradek’ is word and thing, stasis and movement, sound and form, absence and presence, non-being and being, neuter and gendered, shifty in language, appearance, and noise. We have established that the keynote of the work is its lyric argument, or turning address. If we look from a distance, we can see that it is around ‘Odradek’ that each strophe turns. No strophe bears ‘Odradek’ grammatically at its beginning or end; yet the only consistent thing across the work is the appearance of ‘Odradek’ at the centre of each strophic unit. Thus, ‘Odradek’ appears: ‘das Wort Odradek stamme’; ‘ein Wesen gäbe, das Odradek heißt’; ‘da Odradek

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außerordentlich beweglich’; ‘, sagt er’; ‘das trifft bei Odradek nicht zu’ [‘the word Odradek is of […] origin’; ‘a creature called Odradek’; ‘Odradek is extraordinarily nimble’; ‘“Odradek,” he says’; ‘but that does not apply to Odradek’]. From word, to essence, to movement, to ventriloquized enunciation, to negation, each encounter with ‘Odradek’ reinforces the paradox—completion or emptiness—at the centre of the work: we cannot pin down the very thing that makes the work consistent. Without the appearance of ‘Odradek’, reinforced by the cohesive soundpatterning of the hidden ‘Ich’, there is very little to connect the strophic units of ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’. Every time we return, and return, the givens of prior strophic units, previous works of interpretation, are contradicted, and fail us; new possibilities take their place even as the older habits haunt us. And it is only out of this continued, continually thwarted process of engagement with the etymological, phenomenal, conversational, ever-shifting world of the text that it is possible, finally, for the exposure in the fifth strophe of the most human aspect of the work to appear—the ‘Ich’ or ‘I’. By the end of the work the human impulse towards survival against what it does not comprehend takes over, just as our possible interaction with Odradek is negated, and as the imagined future bears both these expectations as a part of it its haunting. In Giving an Account of Oneself, Judith Butler’s engagement with Odradek, via Adorno and Benjamin’s correspondence, has a very different conclusion to that of J. Hills Miller. Butler first focuses on the uncanny nature of narrative voice in Die Verwandlung, where she sees demonstrated that Kafkian narration has ‘some propitious relation to survival’, even as ‘what remains peculiar […] is that this is a written voice with no body and no name, a voice extracted from the scene of its survival’ which is ‘ghostly, impossible, disembodied [yet] persists, living on’.23 This leads Butler to a reading of ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ which concentrates less on the absent-present Hausvater, but rather on the figure of Odradek. It is from a state beyond the possibilities of the animal, from beyond the possibilities of narrative, that Odradek stems. For Butler, the Odradek of ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ helps us to think through what else may exceed the animal, the narrative, what else may exceed our formal expectations. ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ helps us to think through a post-anthropocentric future, where anthropogenesis is nonetheless a part of the constitution of the global imaginary. Like plastic, synthesized of and from mers, polymers,  Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself: 60.

23

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and nurdles, Odradek enters the world of the Kurzprosa as a series of synthetic units, which only later accrete essence, form, action, and being. Like plastic, Odradek’s configuration is malleable, yet haunted by previous articulations of form; it exists beyond what is tangibly human within the work, indeed, repels it, and yet is the product of anthropogenesis. At once profoundly domestic and entirely alien, without any accession to logical argument or comprehensible time, Odradek is. Through the variety of modular units which comprise ‘Odradek’, we can observe the mode of progress of the plastic work, and can see mirrored in our interaction with the text the reconstitutive patterning which is the foundation of the process of neuroplasticity, as it, too, works to constitute form against oblivion. In a very odd way, Odradek, and the possible self-­ negation of Odradek, allows the work to gesture towards an unknowable future chronotope akin to that which we must contemplate when faced with the difficult non-degradation of many plastics. This is Odradek’s persistence, or non-degradability. It is a future-oriented hauntology that we see have effect on Giorgio Agamben: in Stanzas, he allows the figure of Odradek to haunt the second and the final parts of the book, through his readings of the ‘epiphany of the unattainable’ which we see at the zenith of the transformation of the work of art via the fetish into the commodity,24 and whose existence is as if ‘a Nachleben of the emblematic form’. Agamben’s universe is a ‘warehouse of jetsam where the uncanny fishes for its scarecrows’.25 However we choose to approach ‘Odradek’, in whatever chronotope it is encountered, word or Wesen, it does not degrade. And so, from the strands and oceans which constitute this strange and plastic universe, this plastic ground of literature, this world without the possibility of even a future-thinkable biodegradation of the object, what, now, can be salvaged? What story is there left to tell, and what form is most proper to its telling?

24  Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas. Trans. Ronald L.  Martinez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993): 38. 25  Agamben, Stanzas: 144.

CHAPTER 3

Kurzprosa as Plastic Art

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. Keywords  Plastic • Literary plasticity • Short fiction • Microfiction • Kafka • Barthes The poet and translator Christopher Middleton sees no real English equivalent for Kurzprosa.1 This is a literary form, he writes, which is 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

© The Author(s) 2020 H. H. Yeung, On Literary Plasticity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44158-6_3

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remarkable for its generic malleability, transformative on a readerly level; it is ‘liminal, ludic, and disruptive’.2 As opposed to longer-form prose (the short story, the essay, the letter, etc.), the deliberately ludic aphorism or violently curtailed fragment, the prosodically inclined poetic long-line or shaped verse, or even any of its apparent synonyms (kleine Literaturen, kleine Prosen, etc.)3 Kurzprosa, foregrounding prose’s etymological roots in the Latin proversus (to turn forward), is related in its textual manoeuvres to poetry’s argumentative verses. It does not turn forward in the search of empirical knowledge as such, nor does it accede to the explanatory and/or story-telling temptations of the majority of linear narrative forms. Rather, its language (and thence its form) is ‘attuned to the notion that truth cannot be beheld, only glimpsed’,4 and its acts occur most often at the ‘outer limits of the imaginable’.5 It follows therefore that this is a literary genre which, according to Marc Botha (using a more contemporary Anglophone equivalence for Kurzprosa in microfiction), is ‘maximally descriptive’ whilst remaining ‘minimally prescriptive’.6 The scalar nature of the work also implies the play towards its maximalization, containing and yet resisting complete accession to the anthropic realm—‘the pantomime of the entire nature and existence of mankind, in microcosmic form’.7 The very short form defies generic bounding, reshaping itself with 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.

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each iteration and slipping away from us even within every reading otherwise its cosmic potential would be impossible. It is a form that revels in this interior and exterior generic malleability. We already see, in this briefest and most general of formal expositions, taxonomic links between the formal, or strophic, ‘turning’ of Kurzprosa’s argument and that of the poetic ode; taxonomic links between Kurzprosa and the work of plastic. Plastic links persist as we consider Kurzprosa more closely. The root in ‘proversus’ of Kurzprosa, Middleton writes, is a short turn towards an unanticipatable, indescribable, future. Rather than a long excursus, or epic, map-making, journey, that we associate with most prose forms, its sister-­ form is the versus of poetic verse.8 Kurzprosa is a provocation, rather than a guide. And just as plastic is not only comprised of the substance from which it is made,9 so too does Kurzprosa extend in unanticipatable ways beyond its basic constituents. The form provokes our attention, and demands judgement. It often contains elements which force us, as readers, to contradict, or confound, that very judgement. The work forces us to change our point(s) of view alongside its own changes, all within the very short space and time of reading. And after being made subject to this changeability and launched towards the outer limits of the imaginable, how can we not, subsequently, suffer a hangover, a haunting, from the work. The Kurzprosa hovers on the margins of the contingent—it is that which we cannot quite grasp, and do not yet, and will perhaps not ever, fully know; its many ‘types’ shift so frequently, refracting so many possible genres, they are difficult to ‘do justice to’10 fully at any one time. It is a form in which the tightrope that reformulated itself as a tripwire in Kafka’s first Zurau aphorism reformulates itself again, this time as a loophole; and loopholes, we will see, create a formal architecture particular to the Kurzprosa.

 Middleton, Putaxanadu (Manchester: Carcanet, 1977): 70.  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). 8 9

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1   Architecture Kurzprosa and its many small relations (in German alone, the kleine Prosa or Literatüren, Skizze, Stimmungsbild, Prosastück, Witz, etc.11) is uncannily domestic. It is a form that is more often than not small enough to fit on a single page. We can pocket it. Read it in a single sitting, over a short coffee, whilst waiting for a train. Enclose it in a letter. Quote it in full. Take it inside. For Middleton, Kafka, Borges, and Barthes are examples. And in Middleton’s formulation, with these examples in mind, the Kurzprosa is doubly domesticated or domesticatable, and is bound by an ancient sort of architecture, which views the universe oddly and from the inside, ‘in anomalous perspectives’, through ‘loopholes’.12 In architecturalizing Kurzprosa, Middleton situates it alongside other short (often poetic) forms with a much longer history: the poetic ‘stanza’ as room and form, and thus the poem as room in the ‘house [of life]’ (Dante Gabriel Rossetti) or ‘Temple’ (George Herbert). Kurzprosa’s battlements also link it to the longer prose form and its perhaps most infamous practitioner (the uncanny architectures of the Franz Kafka of The Castle), whilst bringing us back to the implied Haus that is minded by the full-of-care Hausvater. In the extensions of this conceit in both poetry and prose, we find resonances of Simonides of Keos’s memory palace, and the inevitable links between literary creation, architecturalization, and memory/forgetting, and thence to Erasmus’s sixteenth-century revival of the commonplace book as site for the topographically indebted memory work of self-fashioning,13 and the idea of writing as Tagbüchfuren which Kafka adhered to. And yet, this domesticity, this architecture, which sits at the interstices of the private and public, is one which is also complicit in a violent sort of worlding: the loophole is an opening in a wall specific to a fortified architectural space; it is where we lie in wait, on guard, bracing ourselves for attack (to ‘loop’ 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).

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is both to look, and to watch out for), and it is from where we launch our counter-attack, or turn (the loophole is specifically designed in order to allow for the outward-going passage of an arrow, dart, or later, bullet; to ‘loop back’ is to turn back upon ourselves).14 To consider the Kurzprosa as loophole is to commit an act at once decidedly heimlich and profoundly unheimlich. One must be inside to look out, even if the only window space onto the world is quite literally medieval, likely castellated, and thus alien to our regular lifeworld. Middleton’s reference to the loophole as the ‘window’ of Kurzprosa’s literary world-­ view serves multiple purposes of generic definition. Looking through Kurzprosa’s loophole, no glass distorts our vision: we look directly upon whatever is at hand outside of the loophole. However, even in this looking, the clear elemental vision offered by the loophole’s direct and unmediated access to the outside, since it would defeat the point of such a space to be filled in with glass, is delimited by the opacity of the close-­surrounding stone. Vision from the inside out, with a loophole, is more stone than hole; the loophole thus forces a specific sort of seeing, a necessary turning-­ away from our immediate surroundings in order to look out. Looking at it from the outside, the internal organs of Kurzprosa resists all but our projective imagination which also makes us conscious at all times that our mode of vision (out of the loophole; into the world of the Kurzprosa) is artificially contrived. The Kurzprosa as loophole demands attention and action, otherwise its primary function ceases to exist. It is not a literary object, like Poe’s 1842 definition of the effective short prose narrative which ‘requir[es] from a half-hour to one or two hours in its perusal’.15 Rather, Kurzprosa maximizes its effect through condensation, provocation, and ambivalence, and it exists in a much smaller space and time than the short story. Due to its size, Kurzprosa formally has a tendency to the lyric over the narrative; it is not easily paraphrased. Lest we forget the 14  Alexandra Harris elaborates on the phenomenological difference between the Norseindebted 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 Germanicindebted 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.

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more modern resonances of the word, the loophole can also be a means of escape, the niggling ambiguity in a system which can allow us, if the loophole is exploited, to avoid customarily prescribed duties. The loophole is simultaneously a vector for attack (from the inside) and defence (from the outside); its structure is one of ambivalence, of equivocation, rather than linearity. Kurzprosa is ludic. It plays games with us (mind games, and probably war games too). The performance of such games is never wholly serious, although on occasion fatal. An ignis fatuus promising meaning, Kurzprosa’s games can lead us towards oblivion. Such games demand our complicity, our reactions, and play upon our natural state of changeability; playing, too, with our ability to move within our castle and to assume perspective from 360 degrees worth of loophole, the Kurzprosa also asks of us a certain level of environmental awareness; the loophole is not designed to let light in, rather, to allow for new perspectives out onto the inhospitable surroundings. Because of its nature, too, the loophole puts us on the defensive, indicating that what we are straining to view in miniature is not only a world which is inhospitable to us, but also a world which forces us to interact with it; in our loophole-based interaction with the inhospitable outside, we can gain multiple, albeit delimited, visions, by changing loophole. But this rigid structure leaves us open to attack from our own interior. The castle, after all, is only defensible if it provides 360 degrees of loopholes on multiple levels for its archers; in order to mount an efficient defence, we must temporarily relinquish any perspectives upon our interior. So watch out! We can as easily lose it or let it blow away as we can pocket it. And make sure that that gust of wind coming at you from the other side of Kurzprosa’s loophole doesn’t take your eye out at the same time. Moving on, like many small artificial objects, the Kurzprosa sits strangely within any single large context, and also gestures towards its own formation, wrong-footing us by so doing. Any seriousness it elicits is often undercut in its fickle changeability betwixt different points of view, genres, and tones. Should we misplace the pocket-size work, we are likely to trip over it in the most unexpected of places. It changes our attitude towards our own mobility. A work born out of a High Modern moment, synthesized at the start of the ‘age of plastic’, Kurzprosa also gestures towards the surreally self-conscious formulations of hypermodernity. Its aesthetic is as shifting in tone as it is in perspective, its generic instability tempered by its material persistence endows it with a ‘character’ of its own, forcing

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its reader to come to terms with its self-ironizing as much as its serious moments. ‘Vergeblich frage ich mich, was mit ihm geschehen wird’ [I ask myself, to no purpose, what is likely to happen to him?]; the final part of ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ opens by putting not only words but concern into our mouths. Throughout the text, the lack of fixity has constantly tripped us up, only, right at the end, to implicate us within it. In this way, Kurzprosa chimes as much with the dialectics of the Hegelian work of aesthetics as it does with Sianne Ngai’s revisioning of our categories of aesthetics in the light of hypermodernity by calling to modernity’s margins and discovering the operations of the zany, the interesting, and the cute. All three categories work alongside, and even within, the more staid canon of aesthetic effect, at all times calling our attention to our own engagement through the performative (in the case of the zany), the different (in the case of the interesting), and the affective (in the case of the cute).16 The spectrum of each of these categories is as minimal is it is maximal, destabilizing not only the text but also the reader by demanding in them a certain adaptability of readerly expression and involvement, sometimes across paragraphs, and even within the structure of a single sentence. In many ways, the Kurzprosa as defined by Middleton chimes with Kafka’s own idea of a kleine Literaturen, or kleine Erzählungen, out of which Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari developed their ideas of a modern ‘minor’ (mineure), deterritorialized literature, a literature of ‘bodies without organs’, a literature of multiple perspectives (or, we might venture, multiple loopholes)—of ‘multiple entries’ or exits.17 Yet, in spite of these multiple access points, this literature (Kafka’s in particular) is one which resists our own intervention or formative influence upon it: it is a form of writing which is one that remains composed of ‘unformed expressive material’,18 and yet is as such within itself. Ollivier Dyens extends this 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.

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t­hesis explicitly to ideas of plasticity in his study of Wells, Kafka, and Orwell, writing not only how ‘bodies without organs are plastic bodies’, but also that ‘the twentieth century has been one of plastic bodies’19 (might we return here to the twenty-first-century problem of microplastic ingestion?). Catherine Malabou traces a similar genesis of plastic, or the ‘concept of plasticity’ and its ‘great formal adventure’, through philosophical thought: ‘from Hegel to Heidegger, from Heidegger to Derrida’,20 later connecting this to the inherently dialectical formations and deformations of our body, central nervous system, and individuality; the plastic body is one ‘formed only by virtue of a resistance to form itself; polymorphism, open to all forms, capable of donning all masks, adopting all postures, all attitudes…’,21 one formed by a particular sort of accident. For Malabou, the change of Kafka’s Die Verwandlung is fundamentally a mode (‘successful, beautiful, relevant’22) of writing the accident, or destructive force, that is at the base of plasticity. It is not, Malabou contends, a metamorphosis, but something more than that. As if to emphasize the slipperiness of ascribing to Kafka’s short writings any genre, the Oxford Kafka Centre devoted an entire symposium, in 2008, to ‘Kafka and Short Modernist Prose’. The related collection of essays, published in 2009 (2010 in German) and edited by Manfred Engel and Richie Robertson, pays close attention to a maximalization of effect produced by Kafka’s experiments in short prose forms which correlates directly to the exponential ‘Minimalisierung des Erzählens’ in his work from 1900 onwards, a minimalizing or lyric concentration which reaches its most extreme point in Kafka’s turn, first to the fable, and finally, to the aphorism.23 We will meet these malleable generic perspectives again in the next unit of this study, through the figure and figuration of the Hausvater, and in the structures of play and joke in the final chapter of this section which chime so well with Kafka’s own emphasis on the short form’s native humour or Lebhaftigheit. The ‘unformed’, and ‘expressive’ matter of 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.

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Kafka’s writing and the ‘too transcendental, too isolated and reified, too abstract’ nature of the Odradek, as diagnosed by Deleuze and Guattari,24 its ‘endless mutation, metamorphoses, and transformations’,25 or inherent plasticity, as observed by Dyens, along with Malabou’s multiple theses towards a plastic imaginary in the philosophy of Mind and Neurobiology, are less paradoxical bedfellows than they may seem if we read this under the auspices of a specifically plastic literary imaginary. And this plastic literary imaginary must be one which is related above all to questions of being and embodiment: the questions of the creation and effacement, the alchemy of power, and effects, of literary form. Plastic is seemingly as quick to metamorphose as it is to domesticate itself as it is to pit itself against those two preceding states: it can be as much a part of the chair we sit upon or the bracelet we give our sister for a birthday present, as it can be the box into which we put our lunch or the pen with which we trace inky meanings onto paper. We know that from the turn of the nineteenth-century onwards, plastic becomes a creation, both noun and verb, utterly strange, utterly new, and utterly indispensable. It is also without precedent, and almost impossible to easily taxonomize; it migrates rapidly in its different forms and colours across the globe; for Roland Barthes, plastic ‘est moins objet que trace d’un mouvement’,26 for Ranjan Ghosh its paratactic ‘hyper plastic’ force allows us to reformulate how we think the world27; and yet in the process of its metamorphosis, plastic leaves no trace.28 Like Kafka’s Odradek, his Zelluloidbälle, his Gehilfen, and his Wesen, plastic haunts in its many guises the modern house: it ‘lurks by turns’29 in all sorts of places, visibly and invisibly. In this way, plastic is also profoundly heimlich. Yet plastic is also eminently disposable, is often unnoticed, and changes as it haunts—disembodied and made multiply  Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: 39–40.  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’. 24 25

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unheimlich.30 For Barthes, attempts at interpretation of this uncanny aspect of Kafka’s work are similarly disembodied and difficult to grasp— existing always in the shadows.31 Add to this the emphasis on plasticity in Kafka’s own considerations of his Germanic literary predecessors—he lauds Goethe, Heine, and Schiller the saviours of the German Language, these writers who, with Schlegel, formed the basis for the consideration of (Germanic) literature as Plastic Art—and we have a particular sort of plastic artist, plastic literary genre, and plastic mode of address, developing. Plastic possesses a different sort of energy—it does not conduct electricity, is stable within itself, yet becomes malleable, even liquid with heat, and its gaseous excesses in this process can be extremely toxic. The inviting pliability of plastic’s constitution holds within it destructive capabilities. These many formal attributes possess a peculiar sort of energy, or force, which is simultaneously projective and resistant, and inherently transgressive. Before we can argue about how the difficulty of many of our encounters with plasticity lead to plastic being ‘often misrepresented’,32 on a multitude of levels, let us first look to its representations, through a comparison of theme, genesis, and morphology in Kafka’s ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ and a short work of plastic by Roland Barthes, which takes plastic as its title, subject, object, and style: Le Plastique.

2   Comparison Between 1919 and 1957, plastic had silently taken hold of man. In an essayistic, meditative Kurzprosa of 1957, ‘Le Plastique’, Roland Barthes taxonomizes plastic as, ultimately, alchemical (‘le plastique […] est 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.

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essentiellement une substance alchimique’),33 drawing on the lexis of wonder and magic that has surrounded modern plastic since its advent. It is telling that he has used the ultimate in plastic literary forms to expose the myth of this substance, and that he calls on plastic’s ‘essential’ nature in order to diagnose not only its essence but also its meaning and function. Yet, meeting of form and content aside, Barthes’s alchemical diagnosis for all things plastic not only harks back to the Platonic or Vitruvian beginnings of the word in plassein’s crucible or furnace of creation,34 but also foregrounds the destructive future of the word’s contemporary, artificial nature as the synthesis of ‘substances that had never before existed’.35 For Roland Barthes as for Catherine Malabou, what is plastic exhibits for us its ‘essence as change and metamorphosis’.36 Out of the very building blocks of life—the essential molecules: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, which compose over 95% of the human body, and 90% of crude oil (the most common raw pre-matter of plastic)—the human mind and scientific practice have somehow managed to synthesize what is ultimately unnatural—non-biodegradable—modern, synthetic, plastic. In a previous age, this feat of synthesis—the creation of an inviolate final product from base materials—would indeed be labelled alchemical; in our own age, the ‘apparent alchemy’ of material synthesis, down to a Nano level, is still lauded.37 The resistance of this product to the ravages of human-­ measurable time would only increase our apperception of its nature as alien. Its extraordinarily quick domestication, too, calls to the multiple ‘plastic’ attributes which have formed its very nature. Inadvertently echoing the words of Edwin Muir half a century before, for Malabou to write of plasticity is to tell ‘the story of the past’ and to ‘portend’ the future.38 Was this level of entanglement always the case? When Barthes was writing his Mythologies and plastic, by now half a century old in its most synthetic modern guise, had ‘proliferated’, was

 Barthes ‘Le Plastique’: 171. ‘Plastic is […] in essence, the stuff of alchemy’.  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. 33 34

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‘taken for granted’, and had been ‘naturalised’.39 And in 1960, when Barthes responds at one remove to the culturally embedded yet slippery nature of Kafka’s work (‘l’oeuvre de Kafka se prête à tout le monde mais […] on l’interroge peu’),40 commercial plastics with an emphasis on play rather than use value (including the hula hoop, the Barbie doll, and the Lego block) are a major part of plastic’s global reach.41 Indeed, an English translation of Barthes’s essay is even published by the Victoria and Albert Museum in a book designed to accompany a 1996 exhibition on plastic.42 Plastic is beginning to play out all of the speculative futures articulated in ‘Le Plastique’.43 Might this linguistic and morphological metamorphic power of plastic combine with plastic’s swift genesis and apparent ability to provoke future thinking? Writing about materials (particularly plastics) synthesis, Mark Miodownik relates the process of ‘reading’ a material to past, present, and future; emphasizing the necessity of an understanding of prior works of synthesis, the immediate process of synthesis, structural qualities, and behaviour, as well as the philosophical implications, of the work.44 Now we have established both Kafka’s and Barthes’ relationship to the history of modern plastic, let us turn to the stage on which the subjects of this literary comparison, ‘Le Plastique’ and ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’, stand: the Kurzprosa. Perhaps the first literary ramification of Kurzprosa’s plasticity is its tendency to gesture towards various formally and thematically defined genres, but to not sit fully within any of them. Although this clearly denotes the synthetic nature of the work, it presents us with an immediate problem when it comes to situating the place Kafka’s and Barthes’s short works might occupy in a generic network. Indeed, the apparent genre of ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ ranges from the ‘story’ or ‘short story’,45 to the  Meikle: 1.  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. 39 40

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‘short text’,46 various translations of the Kafkian ‘kleine Literatur’ including the Deleuze-and-Guattarian ‘minor literature’, or, eschewing modern or deconstructive formations of genre for something more antiquated or pre-literary in scope, the ‘parable’.47 Whereas for Barthes, the generic signifier for the Mythologies was the ‘mythology’—a work which ‘empt[ies]’ or is a ‘perceptible absence’ in reality48—these Kurzprosa are more generally referred to as works of criticism, ‘essays’ (with both English and French inflections), or ‘studies’. In both the case of Kafka and the case of Barthes, no one label sticks. And if literary genres are above all ‘problem solving devices’, as Franco Moretti notes, citing among other precursors to his thought Freud, Lévi-Strauss, Althusser, and Jameson; if the aim of such devices is to ‘address a contradiction of their environment, offering an imaginary resolution by means of their formal organization’, then we realize immediately that the Kurzprosa is not going to provide us with ‘the vehicle through which a larger symbolic statement is shaped and assimilated’.49 Rather, we may be certain that the Kurprosa will look out, gesturing towards many possibilities of a larger statement, leaving us ‘damned if we know what it is’.50 The Kurzprosa becomes a problem presenting device to which it is natural that nothing quite sticks, and if it is natural that nothing will stick, and the device is outward facing, could it be that this very difficulty of taxonomization is in fact the generic hallmark of the form? Effecting a comparison between the morphology of Kafka’s ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ and Barthes’s ‘Le plastique’ provides a synthetically comparative case in point in terms of this generic, or taxonomic, difficulty, a difficulty that is an inherent part of each work’s literary plasticity. Both the pieces of short prose appear within collections housing variably small pieces of writing; both were written and circulated before being thus collected (or, habilitated). Both works appear to have as their literary object something apparently magical, or non-human, which both writers use to diagnose universal, or contemporary mythological, worries or problems: Kafka through the figuration of the Hausvater and/or Odradek, and Barthes through the figure of plastic. Both authors, too, play to this idea  Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature: xvi, 40.  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? 46 47

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of generic plasticity and taxonomic difficulty in the manner in which the context of their work’s eventual collection gestures towards the non-­ fictional, non-literary. The fact that this problem of generic definition is an external as much as an internal one in Kurzprosa as a whole supports this reading. As we have already seen, Kurzprosa looks out onto an environment that is demonstratively not its own; there is no possibility of resolution between what is seen through the work’s ‘loophole’ vision, and the angle of vision itself. Although by no means classically punning or intertextual, on an external level this then marks an effective formal and generic polysemy. In the year of its first publication, ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ appeared in two very different contexts. Only months before appearing in the collection published by Kurt Wolff (d. 1919, pub. Early 1920) Ein Landarzt, it was published in the Prague-based Zionist weekly newspaper Selbtswehr.51 The work, although unchanging in title, form, and content, was changed by its altered context: from its publication in a newspaper whose title and thus whose collected writings punningly shifted between the ideas of ‘self defense’ and ‘self help’, to its appearance in a collection of ‘kleine Erzählungen’, which makes play with the idea of memoir—what are collected therein are notionally the tales, or reminiscences, of a country doctor on his rounds; from a collection of writer’s voices, to a collection of works in one writer’s voice. Similarly, many of the writings which later comprised Barthes’s Mythologies (1957) had first seen the light of day as a nonfiction column as ‘monthly [contemporary] mythologies’ in the early 1950s in Les Lettres nouvelles. These works, too, have been replaced: out of the journal/essay tradition and into a long line of Ovidian, fictional, episodic epic, or at least endowing them with a certain cast of mythopoetic inheritance. ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ and ‘Le Plastique’ are a similar length and possess similar formal attributes: Kafka’s is a discrete five paragraphs, as is Barthes’s, although the length of Barthes’s paragraphs are slightly more 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.

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generous. Both works sit at the border of the same set of formal and thematic genres: too short to be short stories; too long to be aphorisms; too prosaic to be prose poems; too literary to be scientific or journalistic observation; too fictional to be real, and in all cases vice versa. Hover on the brink of these and other, writerly genres, the works also appear from some angles to be almost wholly non-literary, regarding which there is also an element of authorial intent. The counterpoint of this, for Kafka, rests in the highly aesthetic art of narrative condensation (what Dirk Göttsche has called a ‘Minimalisierung des Erzählens’52) as well as its secretive, domestic, nature (writing as diarizing, Tagbüchfüren), which distances the work from any ‘high literary’ mode of composition or enunciation even as this act is belied by the work’s frequent appearance in modern literary and philosophical criticism. Similarly, Barthes distances his writing from participation in any singular mode of enunciation with any particular readership, writing an essay to accompany Mythologies: ‘sa parole est un méta-langage, elle n’agit rien; tout au plus dévoile-t-elle, et encore, pour qui?’.53 The Kurzprosa poses more questions than it produces answers. It provokes. The taxonomic or generic difficulty of both Kafka’s and Barthes’s Kurzprosa extends, too, to a second outward-facing aspect: the matter and manner of their address. Neither ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ nor ‘Le plastique’ are written in a style, nor with a tone, that we would immediately associate with a work of fiction. Our sense of familiarity, of genre, is flummoxed once more. Consider the opening and ending of each work: Die einen sagen, das Wort Odradek stamme aus dem Slawischen und sie suchen auf Grund dessen die Bildung des Wortes nachzuweisen. Andere wieder meinen, es stamme aus dem Deutschen, wom Slawischen sei es nur beeinflußt. Die Unsicherheit beider Deutungen… […] Er schadet ja offenbar niemandem; aber die Vorstellung, daß er mich auch noch überleben sollte, ist mir eine fast schmerzliche.

[Some say the word Odradek is of Slavonic origin, and try to account for it on that basis. Others again believe it to be a of German origin, only 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.

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influenced by Slavonic. The uncertainty of both interpretations […]. He does no harm to anyone that one can see; but the idea that he is likely to survive me I find almost painful.] Malgré ses noms de berger grec (Polystyrène, Phénoplaste, Polyvinyle, Polyéthylène), le plastique, dont on vient de concentrer les produits dans une exposition, est essentiellement une substance alchimique. […] La hiérarchie des substances est abolie, une seule les remplace toutes: le monde entier peut être plastifié, et la vie elle-même, puisque, paraît-il, on commence à fabriquer des aortes en plastique.54

[Despite having names of Greek shepherds (Polystyrene, Polyvinyl, Polyethylene), plastic, the products of which have just been gathered in an exhibition, is in essence the stuff of alchemy. […] The hierarchy of substances is abolished: a single one replaces them all: the whole world can be plasticized, and even life itself since, we are told, they are beginning to make plastic aortas.] Each work begins by posing a puzzle, which is evidently left unsolved by its end. Each work ends with a gesture towards an unthinkable future (although, in Barthes’s case, it may be that aspects of his unthinkable comprise a twenty-first-century reality that we are currently battling against). At the end of each work, an unnameable something is changed. In leaving the puzzle open-ended, the reader is made complicit in the work’s internal taxonomic difficulties, rendering them external: How do we define the Hausvater, the Worry, Odradek, or the Plastic? How do we place this work we have just read and its contents? Yet where this complicity effect may imply that the reader encounters a personal address—the embrace of the ‘dear reader’ of the self-conscious novel—in both works, this is far from the case. What we encounter instead, in the opening sentence of both Kurzprosa, is an analytical neutral—‘Die einen sagen’; ‘on vient de concentrer’—a narrative tone and expression which in both languages denies the possibility of the full literary, fictional, narrative expression that the works, in a different context, are also a part of.55 We also encounter the puzzle of the  Barthes.  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 54 55

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absent narrator. In refusing to enact a fully fictional opening, the possibilities of the works’ being carried over or opening up into a different genre are maximized. By not privileging any particular mode of enunciation, readership or establishment, and thus refusing easy taxonomization through title, tone, or address, ‘such writing grows […] wild through cracks in the paving of established literary discourse’.56 In this way, ‘objects and relationships are not haphazard, but move like deformed replicas of each other’,57 calling the entirety of their literary environment into question. The haphazard mode of linguistic expression in both stories is also immediately called to our attention in the progress of their opening lines. Both find recourse in questioning their subjects’ etymological resonance rather than establishing any more stable definition or description: are the roots of Odradek German or are they Slav[on]ic or neither? Do Plastic’s roots in a bucolic Ancient Greece express meaning or serve a material function? As the works progress, their multiple moments of proversus render their opening salvos into etymological analysis redundant. In a similar way, they reject but resonate with different literary genera. Shifting swiftly after their titular and opening enunciations, the subject matter of both works changes, and it is no longer the word nor even the related object with which either Kafka or Barthes are concerned; rather, it is the resonance or feeling, Wesen or essence, that being in the presence of this word and/or object provokes. Rejecting their initial external relations, the works begin to articulate an exploration, or phenomenology, even as the opening phrases haunt. They gesture towards a possible genre of writing the work then turns away from. They set a tone that shifts distinctly across subsequent paragraphs, and often modulate on a smaller level internally: ‘the change in tone even within sentences […] lends a strange and funny aspect to the prose’.58 ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ and ‘Le Plastique’ foreground language, and language’s power not only to create ‘apparently phenomenal worlds’,59 but also to destabilize these 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.

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wor[l]ds through the very p ­ olysemy which constitutes them. They turn in upon themselves by animating spectral objects through the medium in which they are composed. In spite of this, the neutral, non-literary language in which they articulate and enact the haunting possibilities of etymology is one which is nominally transparent, and which is meant to resist the accretion of meanings or symbolic colouration. This transparency of address adds to the plastic nature of the works: they are generically changeable and inherently unstable, yet their address implies the articulation of a truth and their size means that their object-life is also in some ways stable, easily portable. In the same moment as the reader seems able to take them in hand, they elude her. Can it be that it is in plastic’s mobility that the truth—the Stimmung—of each work, perhaps equivocally, rests?

3   Mobility The portability of Kafka’s and Barthes’ Kurzprosa, thence a constituent aspect of their plastic potentiality, extends from the initial generic concerns apropos publication, titular resonance, tone, opening address, and mutable subject matter. This is a portability that is also bound up in the relative size (small; very small) of the works. Because of their size, Kurzprosa can be easily reproduced, reused, or incorporated. Thus, they can be synthesized within other, larger, works, of which (like the mers which comprise polymers) they become an inextricable part; they may even, in strange acts of esemplasticity, constitute a new whole. Because of their size, they are also readily translated. And because of their generic and tonal indeterminacy, their plastic movements are ‘maximally entangled’60; the possible translations know no apparent end. In fact, this latter point is anticipated in the preoccupations addressed within the very body of the works themselves, which look, perhaps vainly, towards their own unthinkable future material and linguistic presence.61 The reappearance, and thence  Ghosh, ‘Plastic Literature’: 289.  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. 60 61

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i­ndependent existence, of the Kurzprosa in different contexts and different translations, leads to a multiplication of critical approaches to the (by now multiple) works.62 For instance, ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ is renamed in its reprinting in Jorge Luis Borges’s Book of Imaginary Beings as ‘The Odradek’; the work moves from context in a short story collection to a bestiary, and one edited by no less than a founding father of Latin American fantastic or magical realism—a multitude of new points thus appear in its contextual journey.63 A notable later reprinting and recontextualization of the work (this time with a title recuperated from Willa and Edwin Muir’s translation: ‘The Cares of a Family Man’) sees it anthologized alongside works of fiction, history, science, astronomy, and literature in Volume Two (‘Vapor’) of the multivolume cross-temporal collaborative exploration Textures of the Anthropocene (2014) in which the editors are careful not to associate the work with any genre, literary or otherwise, addressing rather its conceptual preoccupations.64 The (singular) work becomes embodied multiple times, in multiple contexts. Reprinted under different titles, it sees its focus (or the focus of its readers) changing. Its small size and multiple shapes, like the body of Odradek itself, are differently animated in different contexts, reappearing sometimes predictably, sometimes unexpectedly, with various constituent elements disappearing from view at different points. We move from loophole to loophole. ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ is a plastic body par excellence, retaining in all its guises the core of ‘unformed expressive material’,65 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.

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whose ‘possibilities of permutation border on the infinite’66 out of which it appears to be formed: in some versions the paragraphing of the work is altered67; its critical afterlife has even referred to its size in terms of pages occupied in a book, as if this, also, were a stable quantity and generic indicator.68 The instability is seen most overtly in the untranslatable nature of Odradek’s expressive being; what Kafka writes as ‘Wesen’—Odradek’s essence or thingliness—is more often than not translated as ‘creature’— giving an aninimular, biological cast to Odradek which barely exists in the original version, yet somehow its being as word (‘das Wort Odradek’) is a constant across borders. Following the line of thought which interprets Wesen as a non-human animal being (albeit imaginary) the Borgesian representation of the Kurzprosa in German as ‘Das Odradek’ is entitled Einhorn Sphinx und Salamander: Das Buch der Imaginären Wesen.69 ‘Das Odradek’, as well as a word, becomes a figure of the imagination alongside the Unicorn, the Sphinx, and the Salamander—matter for depiction. In the Borgesian context, the framing mood of ‘die Sorge’ and the framing perspective of the Hausvater disappear from all but the body of the text. But the constant representation of Kafka’s Kurzprosa is not only a matter of the mobility inherent in its (textual) body or embodiment. It is also a question of the work’s minimal Erzählung and its maximal vocalizations, a question of the manner in which the work’s unstable form and sound-­world demonstrates, in counterpoint to its apparent meanings, a productive turning away which compounds its plastic mobility. The counterpoint of minimal and maximal gestural force, polyvalent meaning-making, and formal and sonorous attributes not only demonstrate the Kurzprosa’s inherently metamorphic nature, but also indicate another aspect of its literary plasticity, which is to be found in the readerly relationship with these aspects of the work. Thinking through plastic with Kafka, we are able to engage with a level of the work’s mobility which is even smaller than its constituent parts, and radically external to the work itself—its neuroplastic effect. This, in turn, allows us to think through the plastic nature of our brains, and leads us not only to an enhanced 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).

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appreciation of Kafka’s work as plastic but also to a neurological reason behind the power of Kafka’s work to haunt, and hauntingly change, its reader. It is the instability of the work which provokes attention, demanding a dynamic logic of reading which brings its reader to a state of having to be actively concerned with and through the work (mirroring the Sorge of the title). This is a process of reading and rereading that anticipates what Peter Sloterdijk calls a ‘self-shaping’ through attention, repetition, and practice, which elicits human ‘autoplasticity’ and thence ‘superadaptation’.70 Reading ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’, there is no simple narrative, or simple genre, to hold onto and so we must return, reread, and rethink. Haunted because of the ways in which the work displaces us because of the external and internal mobilities and the dynamic logic of the Kurzprosa, we find our turning elicits, too, the quintessentially modern attitude of care.71 But how can literary form haunt us and also teach us to take care? To recapitulate: ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ has a relatively simple strophic organization: it is composed of five units, each of which turns around a particular angle of the work’s lyric argument. This lyric argument may be read as a poetic appreciation of whatever ‘Odradek’ is. The form of the work underlines the idea of Odradek as lyric subject by its adherence to a formal structure we are perhaps more familiar with in the Pindaric ode. In this form of ode, the argument is classically ‘poetic’: it turns around its subject in opposed strophic and anti-strophic units, and reaches its capitulative point in the epodos or epode. In this way, the lyric argument, while maintaining an astringent structure is also naturally ambivalent, an ambivalence that is supported, in the best of odes, by the ways in which the poem’s argument and counterpoint occurs in the repetitions of 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.

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perspective, sounds, sense. This practice of turning certainly relates to the work of the plastic brain. I have previously written about how the nature of the avant-garde poetic or musical work eschews memory through its resistance of the formal features which we have been taught characterize the easily memorizable literary work.72 The avant-garde poem, or musical composition, provokes strong reactions from and haunts its readers through its only consistency being the ways in which it flouts expectation, and thus, cognition. The ‘traditional’ poem, or musical composition, be this ballad or sonnet, rondo or gavotte, does the opposite, although with no less an effect: through being constructed in ways that we come to expect, supported by logical developments of rhythm and sound, it appeals to our memory, is easily remembered, and easily recuperated. The generic and structural mobility of ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ is analogous to this. Where the balanced, or grounded, work reinforces literary or musical habit, the unbalanced, ungrounded, work, through its unfamiliar movement, moves us. The work that tips between both aspects—the provocative difference, and easily remembered simulacrum which is a hallmark of lyric’s embrace of and resistance to memory—forces us through its ambivalence to engage with it and our lack of mastery. We work simultaneously, as Catherine Malabou writes of the neuroplastic work of the brain, at the effacement and constitution of forms.73 Research across the sciences now demonstrates the significant capacity of the human brain for neural reorganization and growth, a capacity which we now know extends beyond the neuroplastic even to the extent that some gene expressions can be observed to be altered in accordance with our lifeworld (the daily exercise of our habits of cognition, rhetoric, and self-expression). Where habit formation can be a very positive, even essential, exercise (particularly when it comes to memory formation), it can also lead to the ossification of these habits and the creation of a cognitively embedded conservative attitude to change, whether this is aesthetic, physical, or ethical.74 Defamiliarization in an encounter—poetic or physical— not only ‘heightens attention and extends engagement’, but it can also stimulate neuroplastic change.75 The apparently simple act of reading 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 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

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l­iterature is one such provocation to care and change, and is one which precipitates complex affective engagements with both work and world; a reexamination of life, language, habitus, and habits.76 Increased levels of cognitive provocation can be found when skipping between reading a diversity of works, as well as in encounters with the poetic text.77 Literature, literally, makes traces or haunts: the neural connections made and changes provoked by the literary text persist in the brain beyond the time of reading.78 To keep practising a supple attitude to cognition, the self, and the world, it thus behoves us to work through those things that provoke us through contradicting our too-easily established expectations and habits; to encounter what is other to us in order to better engage with both it and ourselves; and to seek provocation. ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ is one such cognitively provocative work. It demonstrates at once how memory is constituted (through predictable formal units, lulling rhythmic structures, and sonorous repetition), and effaced (through the contradiction of the formal units it at first establishes, the disruption of rhythm, and in an argument which belies its sound world). This is of course a structure of recognition/re-cognition which provides much of the tension or force of poetic argument in both standard lyric and avant-garde poetry, a structure of profound, productive, ambivalence which we see foregrounded in the Pindaric ode. By espousing this lyric tipping, or turning, movement in its structure, argument, and sound world, any moment of solidity is very soon undercut by a radically different perspective; ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ provokes us into practising a cognitive mobility of our own. In our attentiveness to the work, we are also led to appreciate how the absolute is the plastic logic of the work’s 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, ‘Shortand 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

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formation, and to exercise our own plastic malleability to contextual change. Building up habits only to have them undercut relies on a certain neural suppleness, a readerly confidence which is not predicated on pinning down the work. And it is the figure of Odradek, described towards the end of the work ‘as [provoking conversation like] a Child’,79 which only underlines our relative lack of suppleness, or mobility, as it is in childhood that the body and mind exist in a period of critical formative plasticity. Like the figure of Odradek, ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ flaunts its mobility, is consistent only in that it evades our grasp and in so doing haunts us. Haunted by the operations of the work on ourselves, and moving from formal and generic considerations to those of narrative force and voice, we now come up against the crux of the plastic (malleable) plastic (synthetic) mind and its multiple vocalizations. We have seen, through the Kurzprosa, the nature of the narrative in the literary work to mimic in its interior its ability once read to force thought, to haunt, and to persistently effect change. But how do we now read this mobile work? What structure allows us to take the necessary shifting generic approach to its analysis? If the German ‘Plastic Art’ of literature has its roots simultaneously in the ontological impulse of philosophy and the formal articulations of poetry and is at its most concentrated in those writers who most adeptly combine these concerns, and if the plastic attributes of the literary work also work on a profound neural level upon their readers, we will discover lyric impulses in Kafka’s Kurzprosa which make plasticity the crux of the matter. To think a crux which shifts. Only thus are we able to pursue a readerly approach to the work as if plastic, an approach as mobile as the work itself. In this sense, we must be ready to encounter unanticipatable change, to be unseated or tripped up at each turn, or proversus, and to be persistently haunted, by the work, its translators, its champions, and its critics alike.

79  ‘Natürlich stellt man an ihn keine schwierigen Fragen, sondern behandelt ihn […] wie ein Kind’.

CHAPTER 4

The Hausvater’s Lyric Hauntology

Abstract  The final aspect of our reading of Franz Kafka’s Kurzprosa ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ under the auspices of Literary Plasticity, demonstrating how form, voice, and preconditioned readerly perception cause us to trip up and implicate us in the work of plastic. Keywords  Plastic • Literary plasticity • Narrative perspective • Haunting • Kafka • Borges

I rely in the main on Jacques Derrida’s idea of Hauntology as articulated first in Spectres de Marx, wherein what haunts is a sort of primitive ontology made animate—the Wesen as ideal and/or nightmarish belief or feeling (in this particular case, Derrida writes of the manner in which the present yet dead trope of a Communist revolution across Europe persists in spite of the impossibility of its ever coming to pass). In the light of a plastic reading of hauntology and literature, we may also add that literary form and sound, too, haunt, leaving profound traces on the reading brain (see previous section), and sometimes provoking real physical as well as affective change. Furthermore, hauntology is haunted by ontology itself, the two words being almost homophonous in the French in which Derrida was thinking/writing, and bearing an uncanny echo or subversion of each other in a certain sort of non-aspirate English.

© The Author(s) 2020 H. H. Yeung, On Literary Plasticity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44158-6_4

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Jorge Luis Borges’s introduction to J.A. Underwood’s 1981 translation of a selection of Kafka’s short prose fiction distinguishes the essential elements of these works from the characteristics which distinguish Kafka’s novels. The short prose pieces, for Borges, are comprised mainly of ‘plot and atmosphere’ which work over and above the ‘convolutions of the story’ or ‘psychological portrait of the hero’ to produce an overall (literary) effect. And their success, writes Borges, lies precisely in this emphasis; in each piece, he notes, it is of primary importance how the Kafkian homo domesticus—the Father, Caretaker, Big Boss, Hausvater—regardless of his environment, grapples with the uncomfortable inventions of atmosphere (where this ‘atmosphere’ is the one created by the text—the narration— itself).1 In many ways this is a reading of Kafka akin to that of Barthes, of a text that is allusive rather than allegorical, with an atmosphere active and rich with signification.2 Yet there is something strange going on in Borges’s diagnosis here, a strangeness which became apparent as we looked at the manner in which he has renamed ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ alongside his later description of the essential aspects of Kafka’s work. This throws light on the ways in which we may (and may not) read the ‘beings’ of the Kurzprosa and the ways in which they haunt the text; we are led thus away from Odradek and to examine the word-being made invisible in Borges’s recasting: the Hausvater. By re-anthologizing and retitling ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ as ‘The Odradek’ in his Book of Imaginary Beings, Borges effects an act of generic metamorphosis, altering the resonance of Kafka’s work on multiple levels. This is a far-reaching critical intervention, as the work, retitled and recategorized, loses key aspects of the ‘atmosphere’ and ‘plot’ which Borges sees as essential to Kafka’s work. In the act of substituting both care (Sorge) and homo domesticus (Hausvater) with the name, word-thing, or Wesen, Odradek, the focus and Stimmung of the story shifts. Further to this, Odradek itself is given a clearer definition than it is in Kafka’s text, becoming an ‘Imaginary Being’. Any conventional ‘portrait of the hero’ or possible ‘convolutions of the story’ are eliminated in this act of critical renaming, if we consider our reading of the work to be bound up in the permutations of the original title. Borges’s renaming shifts focus from two less obvious untranslatables in the work, to the major untranslatable—the 1  Jorge Luis Borges ‘Foreword’, Franz Kafka: Stories 1904–1924. Trans. J.A. Underwood (London: MacDonald & co., 1981, 1986): 7–8. 2  See Barthes, ‘La réponse de Kafka’, and Chap. 3 part 2 of this book (‘Kurzprosa as Plastic Art: Comparison’).

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Odradek—and in doing so relinquishes hold on key aspects of ‘plot’ and ‘atmosphere’. The potential loss of ‘atmosphere’ in this act of renaming occurs most obviously in the elimination of the ‘Sorge’ or ‘care’ of the title, which, as we have seen, is a word brimful with significance, and ‘variously translated as ‘care’ concern’, or ‘worry”.3 The potential loss of ‘plot’ in the act of renaming not only occurs in the elimination of the Hausvater, who provides the apparent focal point for the narration itself, but also, and perhaps more importantly apropos Borges’s reading of Kafka, in the disappearance of the name of the homo domesticus alongside whom Borges apparently navigates his readings of Kafka’s other narrative prose. ‘Atmosphere’ and ‘plot’ are replaced by the work’s Wesen, reduced to a word (‘The Odradek’) with no apparent origins, and no stable object-life. Yet this renaming does bring to the fore what is arguably the crux of ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’: the literary expression of Wesen. We encounter the Wesen of the untranslatable Odradek, that of the Hausvater, and that of the Kurzprosa itself which turns around the impossible articulation of some sort of essential, inarticulable, and plasticity. And although the strophic units of the work address the same point—‘das wort Odradek’ or the Wesen—they are not necessarily voiced in the same manner (or by the same ‘narrator’). The articulation of Wesen in Kafka’s Kurzprosa is more than a little evident throughout the permutations of the work. We can return to Borges’s diagnoses of ‘plot and atmosphere’ as the hallmark of Kafka’s short prose, or digress to Willa Muir’s characterization of the ‘sinuous flexibility’4 of Kafka’s prose; but in doing either (or both), we must, in the first instance, relinquish any idea that Kurzprosa may harbour the intent of being a work concerned wholly with the human, with the living, with a solid object-life. In replacing the titular anthropic Hausvater and his very human concerns with ‘The Odradek’, and redefining this Odradek as an ‘Imaginary Being’, Borges foregrounds the work’s hauntological, or impossible aspects, articulating what is neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive about (and within) the work. In returning to the original title, knowledge of Borges’s change highlights the manner in which the 3  See Paul Fleming’s translator’s note for Hans Blumenberg’s Die Sorge geht über den Fluß. Care Crosses the River: 139 n.1, which gives the most succinct précis of the untranslatability of the word/concept. 4  Willa Muir, Belonging: A Memoir (London: Hogarth Press, 1968): 150.

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Kurzprosa as a whole operates with double, metamorphic force, and how its plot and its atmosphere are formulated via the figuration and voicing of the absent/present Hausvater.

1   Formation It is the figure, voicing, and noises of the Hausvater which provide us with another, this time uncannily, plastic aspect of this short work. Where the Odradek has a sort of Bildung, or literary becoming, and where the form of the work exerts a physical force upon its reader, the Hausvater is interestingly disembodied. We see another plastic function of form—how plasticity occurs in this work in a way that appears to resist normative linear narratological or character-based analysis. In prose narrative, we are taught that what we encounter most immediately is the narration, and we are subsequently taught, more often than not, to conflate the point of view of this narration with a ‘narrative voice’ usually conceptualized alongside a ‘character’. From this apparently a priori state, the ‘narrator’ of a work develops his or her personality which is seen, ‘reliably’ and ‘unreliably’, ‘directly’ and ‘indirectly’, to pervade the text. In many ways, although partly complicated by the work of so many narratologists, this mode of reading literary prose persists. This persistence is all too often at the expense of the inherent ambiguity; that which exists before we establish narrator, character, or scene. This exercise of disambiguation allows critics to concentrate on more thematic, conceptual ambiguities, rather than those of form as perceived in the writerly use of voice and address and thence the manner in which the material of the work articulates itself. We see this same tendency towards disambiguation dampen otherwise potentially incisive readings of the work. It readily combines Borges’s championship of the Kafkian homo domesticus with the biographical tendency in scholarship to extrapolate from Kafka’s writing the conflicts and concerns of an inadequate Other, the perceived narrator of a given work, and a domineering father figure. We are lulled into assuming a singular narrative voice. Most recently, J. Hillis Miller writes of the work as the articulation of the way Odradek ‘worries the father of the family’,5 Tahia Thaddeus Reynaga conflates the ‘eponymous figure’ of the Hausvater with ‘the 5  J. Hillis Miller, The Conflagration of the Community: Fiction Before and After Auschwitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011): 288n.14.

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narrator’,6 and Eleanor Helms writes of the ‘human narrator’ and ‘the narrator’s family house’.7 Of course, the title of the Kurzprosa lends itself somewhat to this sort of reading, as does the dedication of Kafka’s Ein Landarzt to his own father. Yet Kafka’s work immediately confounds the disambiguating tendencies of the critic-reader. Its title, ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ contains implications beyond the personal idea of Hausvater as father, ‘family man’ or paterfamilias: Hausvater can also mean the impersonal, generic, paterfamilias, as well as a warden, or property guardian. In this way, the care, or worry of the work (die Sorge) takes on different aspects: it operates at once as an existential worry (in relation to the Hausvater-as-family-man), and as an impulse to maintenance, or care (in relation to the Hausvater-as-warden). The Hausvater is a disrupting force. If we align the Hausvater with the narration of the entirety of Kafka’s Kurzprosa, we render the narrative perspective monolithic and subject to generic mis-treatment in the imposition of a storytelling impulse throughout. If we try to ‘look through the eyes’ of the Hausvater (predicated on the assumption of ‘his’ presence from the beginning of the work) we diagnose Odradek’s present-absence through this very specific narrative perspective. Readings which suffer from this similarity of point of view often mirror, through conceptual similitude or denunciation, the infamous event of neurotic self-seeing, of ‘animalséance’, in Jacques Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am. The readings become self-regardingly anthropogenic: Souvent je me demande, moi, pour voir, qui je suis—et qui je suis au moment où, surpris nu, en silence, par le regard d’un animal, par exemple les yeux d’un chat, j’ai du mal, oui, du mal à surmonter une gêne. […] Malséance de tel animal nu devant l’autre animal, dès lors, on dirait une sorte d’animalséance: l’expérience originale, une et incomparable de cette malséance qu’il y aurait à paraître nu en vérité, devant le regard insistant de l’animal, un regard bienveillant ou sans pitié, étonné ou reconnaissant. Un regard de voyant, de visionnaire ou d’aveugle extra-lucide.8 6  Tahia Thaddeus Reynaga, ‘Agents of the Forgotten’ in Marc Lucht and Donna Yarri Eds. Kafka’s Creatures: Animals, Hybrids, and other Fantastic Beings. 72. 7  Eleanor Helms, in Lucht and Yarri, Kafka’s Creatures: 82–3. 8  Derrida, L’animal que donc je suis (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2006): 18. English Trans: The Animal That Therefore I Am. Trans. David Wills. Ed. Marie-Luise Mallet (New York: Fordham University. Press, 2008): ‘I often ask myself, just to see, who I am – and who I am (following) at the moment when, caught naked, in silence, but the gaze of an animal, for example, the  eyes of a cat, I have trouble, yes, a bad time, overcoming my embarrassment […].

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Whether by predominantly philological or morphological means, a reading which emphasizes the work’s mirroring of the human psyche and its difficult ontological position in the face of the non-human opens the door (or the loophole) to many questions: of being and non-being, of human and non-human life, of ‘life’ which is not animal but rather chemical or geological, and thus of lived and deep time processes. These perspectives twine around the critically projected Hausvater-narrator’s vision of the sticks and spools of the impossible figuration of Odradek, and are mirrored in an imposition onto the work of a poorly conceptualized readerly and/or narratorial Ich. This creates a highly mediated reading of the work based upon the assumption of a stable narrative point of view, a reading that is predicated on an undeconstructed reaction to the work’s formal, noisy, plastic Unsicherheit, rather than on the actual, textual existence of such narrative stability. In asking the basic question of the text ‘who are you in relation to me?’ is it possible to overcome our naked embarrassment? The opening sentences of ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ are written with a neutral tone of address that moderates the characteristic of personal domesticity with the establishment of scientific or journalistic prose. The work quickly turns away from the possible structure of fable with which its first words also resonate—the ‘once upon a time’ of ‘Die einen sagen’. The second paragraph, in turn, losing elements of the conditional which structure the first, upholds and continues this neutrality of tone. There is something distinctive in the manner in which narrative expectations are disrupted here, and as we have already mentioned, an element of this occurs in the modulation between seriousness and trans-generic parody in the tone. Lacking is a pronoun relating to the narration—an enunciating Ich—as well as the sense of a distinctive addressee at the work’s beginnings whose presence serves a great deal of narrative function. Where is the Hausvater in the work? Or is the Hausvater at all? We have also already seen how this Kurzprosa has a tendency to evade specific generic identification. It is not wholly fictional, not quite wholly non-fictional. It teeters between story, myth, and self-analysis. Some of the The impropriety of a certain animal nude before the other animal, from that point one might call it a sort of animalséance: the single, incomparable and original experience of the impropriety that would come from appearing in truth naked, in front of the insistent gaze of the animal, a benevolent or pitiless gaze, surprised or cognizant. The gaze of a seer, a visionary or extra-lucid blind one’ (3–4).

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core aspects (of narrative structure and voice) create a vocalic ambiguity that is best addressed with recourse to principles of lyric rather than narrative analysis. From its beginning, ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ is haunted by the titular ‘care’ (Sorge) of the husband, warden, or ‘family man’ (Hausvater), who, in fact, may or may not be fully present: any denotated voice or narrative agency on the part of the Hausvater as ‘character’ only occurs in the speculative conversations of the fourth paragraph of the work, which are divided in tone and form from the first appearance of the all-important first-person pronoun in the fifth and final paragraph, by which point we are four sentences away from the end of the work. Kafka defers first-person narration or tale-telling until the final paragraph. The disjunction between the work and its title is never fully resolved. The Kurzprosa as a whole operates in a time of suspense between different narratological perspectives, tones, and states; its secondary levels of form— particularly in terms of its structures of address and character—shift with each paragraph, and, even within each paragraph, across the very sentences of the work. To a general proversus, we add the internal volta. To apparently paragraphed structures we add the idea of a strophic ordering of the work. And finally, we add a concern with the construction of argument and perspective over that of plot.9 The generic and formal plasticity of Kafka’s work compounds itself if we look more closely at the ways in which it is constructed; the impulse of the work towards non-fictional prose narrative is met with an equally strong impulse towards lyric expression and poetic argument. More commonly used as a term in the formal analysis of poetry, the ‘vital dynamics of change’10 of the volta is also a formal element peculiarly suited to the twists and turns of Kafka’s prose in ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’—it is an integral part of the operations of plasticity in the work. As we will later discover in greater depth, the volta can, as in poetry, be a shift, change, or metamorphosis between the strophic units of a given work. This shift can be one of rhetoric, thought, emotion, or point of view. All of these variations on the manner of volta can be found in ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’. Added to this, the ebb and flow or voice and counter-voice of the strophic units of ‘Die Sorge Des Hausvaters’ are so composed as to mirror the 9  These observations have precipitated, amongst other things, the technical naming which runs consistently across this study, whereby ‘strophe’ or ‘strophic unit’ replaces the more prosaic ‘paragraph’ in my analysis of the Kurzprosa. 10  Rhian Williams, The Poetry Toolkit 2nd Ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2013): 94.

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‘turn’ (strophe), ‘counter-turn’ (antistrophe), and ‘stand’ (epode) of the Pindaric ode, whereby the direction of observation, voice, and argument shifts in paired strophic units, culminating in a final strophic unit which demonstrates a qualitative difference in form, address, and content from those which have preceded it. These turns and counterturns do not primarily serve a narrative function, nor are they primarily associated with the establishment of character. Like the figure of apostrophe, they often ‘present tonal problems for both readers and poets’.11 ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ is no different in its creation and accretion of such problems. Forgetting for the moment the figure (or absence) of the Hausvater and concentrating instead on the formal structure and narrative modes of the work, we can begin to pose some constructive questions. Does the opening of the work precipitate such metamorphoses of narrative presence that we can later observe across the strophic units of the work? What occurs before we reach these moments of change in address? How is voice established in the work? Returning to the first three sentences, which comprise the entirety of the work’s opening strophe, we can see how in its narrative turns and rhetorical suspensions, ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ enacts its own inherently plastic primary theme, how it creates, from the outset of the narrative voicing, a textual atmosphere neither absent nor present, in all cases unstable, unsure of its foundations, changeable in its articulated environment, of the sort that we perhaps more readily associate with the movements in enunciation of lyric poetry (and particularly those of the ode) than we do with the prose ‘story’. Before we even arrive at a sense of tone or narrative address, the first three words of the work demonstrate to us that, whatever its form and context, it will be a work which, refuting the singular, will provide multiple possible perspectives. As the sentence continues in the conditional, a grammatical, rhetorical sense of precarity is established, perhaps even the pellucid tonal neutrality (the powerfully ambivalent ‘mine and not mine’ of poetic voice) that we associate with lyric address. It is not immediately obvious as to whether this sentence is associated with one or any particular narrative perspective, much less any ‘character’, but its narrative control and power is evident from the start. What is also certain is that, although a ‘Hausvater’ hovers over the sentence, he is not present within the sentence.

11  Ann Keniston, ‘Trying to Praise the Mutilated World: The Contemporary American Ode’ in A Companion to Poetic Genre Ed. Erik Martiny (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011): 64.

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2   Control The first sentence of the work forces a ponderous speed of reading, not only because of the movement of the subclauses within the sentence, but because of the sentence’s sonorous nature, introducing the guiding, haunting principle of sound and word-patterning which will become all-­ important when it comes to diagnosing the absent-presence of the narrator or Hausvater within the work. As Ursula Heise notes, even in the work of prose non-fiction, the sound-patterning and rhythms of a passage can ‘drive home hidden connections that the human, at the moment of the narrative, intuits more than understands.’12 This first sentence, as much as its grammar and rhetoric establishes a neutral, scientific or journalistic conditional expression—a narrative mode of reportage—mediates between this and a very poetic mode of sonorous construction. Long vowels make for a slow reading speed, adding to the pedantic nature of the opening ‘analysis’ of ‘das Wort Odradek’. And in addition to this, the breaks in each grammatical unit provoke readerly pause, which is supplemented by the fact that each of these units close on a half-rhyme: sagen modulates to Slawischen, to dessen, to nachzuweisen; the emphasis on the half-rhymes supported by the natural tendency of the Germanic sentence to suspend action or verbal reason until its conclusion. If, in any sense (meaning) the work may open with a gesture towards precarity, the work is bound tightly together in sound from the start. The binding sounds (long vowels extending into frequent sibilants; internal rhyme) of the sentence, in forcing slow reading also combine with the meaning of the words in order to create an overall sense (feel), in the process of reading, of tentative exploration—a precarious double-sense of care or concern in both feeling and action—as noun and verb—that the ‘Sorge’ of the title asks us to expect. Interlinked patterns of address and of sound are upheld as the work goes on: the second sentence, revolving around the same subject (the etymological possibilities of ‘das Wort Odradek’), takes a contrary perspective in meaning to the first, emphasized in the neat parallelism in the opening structure of each sentence: ‘Die einen sagen’ [turn contra] ‘Andere wieder meinen’, establishing what Stanley Corngold has diagnosed as a ‘vain struggle for the word’ which will go on to dominate, in part, the

12  Ursula Heise, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meaning of Endangered Species (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016): 145.

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Kurzprosa.13 The ‘vain struggle’ is not one for sound however, as the first clauses of this second sentence continue with the rhythmic rhyme-­ patterning of the first: from meinen to Deutschen, and an internal gesture, too, to Slawischen. Even the punctuation, in both cases, supports the grammatical, rhetorical, and sound-sense, forcing the reader to stop, take a breath, and move with the turns between sentences, whose change in thought and point of view is additionally mirrored in the formal and sonorous aspects of the sentence. The manner of punctuation’s forcing of pause, as much through the creation of a space, a non-linguistic moment in the text, as with its conventional usage, provides a precursor to the forced rhythm of reading and reflection which dominate the work (in the turns between strophic units) on a larger scale. As if to emphasize the insubstantiality of the etymological hearsay of the first two sentences, the third opens with a level of ambivalence (in meaning, in sense) only hinted at in the turns of the first two: ‘Die Unsicherheit’. The word itself, when given in German, is something of a lexical shock—its length and meaning jar after the sonorous surety of what has come before, even as it is grammatically conditional. The in-built negation works against the turns of the previous sentences as much as does the suddenness of the sound and the acceleration in speed of reading through an increase in short vowel-sounds and sibilance heralded in the final words of the second sentence, ‘sei es nur beeinflußt’. Additionally, ‘Unsicherheit’ can be seen to look forward—to contain the first sonorous gesture in the work towards the flickering figure of the titular Hausvater’s ‘ich’ that will only appear unambiguously in the final strophic unit, or ‘epode’. ‘Unsicherheit’, translated by the Muirs and Underwood both as ‘uncertainty’ and Michael Hofmann as ‘doubt’, carries with it intimations of dangerous precarity, even uncanniness, which pervades the rest of the work and which does not exist in the same way in the English translations. Where Hofmann’s ‘doubt’ casts a wavering shadow over the work in terms of human-bound belief, and the Muirs’s ‘uncertainty’ does something 13  Corngold goes on to write that ‘the absence of univocal meaning in the thing-presentation is an aspect of its modality of unconsciousness that survives even its manifestation’. Note how, even as Corngold’s analytical emphasis is on the ‘chaistic reversal’ of the human-inhuman in Kafka’s metaphorical configurations, words which are hallmarks of plasticity and metamorphosis creep in: there is an absence of ‘univocal[ity]’ a modulation between (mental) unconsciousness and (physical/material) form. Stanley Corngold, Franz Kafka: The Necessity of Form (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988): 104.

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similar in terms of worldly knowledge, Kafka’s original word is bound more firmly to a word of objects (presaging Odradek’s multiform objecthood which emerges from the second strophe onwards), and of imminent, unknown, danger. ‘Unsicherheit’ chimes not just with character and object, but also with place—resonating with what is disembodied and unplaceable as much as with what is embodied and homely. The word demonstrates a sort of future-contingent hauntology, carrying within it the promise and negation of both physical safety and mental surety (‘Sicherheit’), and is something we will see played out in the opposition of the absent-present figure of the Hausvater and the uncategorizable-­ material presence of Odradek, and which we also see operate on a formal level, as it structures the turns, or voltas, of the rest of the Kurzprosa. This is underlined in the structure of the word itself, as the syllable which forms the centre- or pivot-point to this difficult word (Ich—UnsICHerheit) haunts the work on both narratological and sonorous levels, and has come to be associated with the Hausvater. And, as we shall later see, this is a haunting which is only resolved, although only then in part, in the work’s epode. The hidden ‘ich’ of the Hausvater provides a counterpoint to the explicitly present ‘Odradek’. Each time the work appears to have found a stable narrative point of view, any stability in form or content is undermined by sound. The inverse is also true. We have seen this turning method operate in the opening sentences of the work, and how similar effects of change occur across each of the work’s strophic units in relation to the figuration of the Odradek; the same is true for the Hausvater. Following on from the above analysis, note how the ‘Unsicherheit’ of the final sentence of the first strophe, as well as the strophe’s formal tone, is then turned on its head, as the second strophe opens almost colloquially, ‘Natürlich, neimand…’. But even this obviousness is precarious—after a strophe comes an antistrophe (which is also necessarily an antestrophe)—note again the balance of the negative and synthetic in the work, here emphasized by the alliteration of the opening words which binds them, liberating the ich of Natürlich from the ich of Unsicherheit, as well as the clash in meaning between these two alliterated words which divides them. Thus, from its beginning, the whole work resists the establishment of any empirical knowledge base or narrative perspective: as a formal ode circles around its chosen subject matter, highlighting the actions of immaterial perspective and vocal articulation alongside the purported subject itself, so too does Kafka’s writing. Again, this chimes with the Derridean principles of hauntology—as the act of

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attempting to figure what is neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive in a time which is, in the words of Hamlet, ‘out of joint’.14 Indeed, it is with the words and ghost of Old Hamlet that Derrida opens his first work explicitly on hauntology. And Derrida’s is a figuration which is at once ‘configuring and conjurement, Verschwörung and Beschwörung’,15 a hauntology which as a new coinage is irreducible to yet subject of ‘everything it makes possible: ontology, theology, positive or negative onto-­ theology’.16 We encounter again plasticity’s ability to form and destroy,17 its ecological work with and against the articulation of a definitive ‘Natürlich’. In the case of Kafka, it is a problem of figuring: in the first case, the ‘cares’, in the second, the Hausvater, and in the third, Odradek. The result after the proversi, strophic units, or argument, of the work, is to render the figuration immaterial. Should we read the work as a ‘story’ and expect a dominant narrative voice or character, we misconstrue as plot or monologue the argument of the work. The progression of the lyric, haunting, movement in ‘Die Sorge des Haunsvaters’ is perhaps best summarized by highlighting key nouns which resonate with the apparent narrative point of view, and which each strophic unit initially seems to establish as stable (‘Sicher’). Yet any stability is very soon undermined by the following (anti)strophe, setting up the whole as a ‘dialectical lyric’18 akin in many ways to the Pindaric Ode. From ‘Wort’ to ‘Wesen’ to ‘Form’ to ‘Er’ to ‘Ich’, each ‘key’ noun marks a point that each strophe turns around, charting the metamorphosis of the projective identification of the ‘cares’ or ‘worries’ with the idea of the Odradek from word (strophe) to essence (antistrophe), and then from form (strophe) to dialogue (antistrophe), and the subsequent introduction of the Hausvater’s ‘I[ch]’ (epode). Following this structure of lyric emplotment, narrative perspective moves from the comparative etymological possibilities of the word Odradek, to the comparative attempt to taxonomise Odradek, to the 14  William Shakespeare, Hamlet A.1 Sc.5. In Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994): 3. 15  Derrida, Specters of Marx: 50. 16  Derrida, Specters of Marx, 51. 17  I echo here the pupil of Derrida, Catherine Malabou: plasticity is at once ‘to take form (as in the plasticity of clay) and to give form (as in the plastic arts and plastic surgery)’. Changer de Difference: 75. 18  Benjamin Balint, Kafka’s Last Trial: The Strange Case of a Literary Legacy (Pan Macmillan, 2018): 280.

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non-comparative attempt to enumerate Odradek’s morphological features, to an exposition of Odradek’s various habitats and conversational abilities, to the speculative future existence of the Odradek. And, even as this patterning of word and meaning (the sense of the argument) appears to create a progression of sorts, in constantly circling back to the ‘Odradek’ in its wordy manifestation (‘Odradek’ occurs in every strophe of the work), a regression of sorts is created in the return not only to the word but to its strangeness, its profoundly changeable—metamorphic, ambivalent—existence. Perhaps ironically, ‘Das Wort Odradek’—the most changeable and plastic aspect of the work—is also the only part of the whole work that its translators do not, cannot, enter into dispute over. Each of these sections, or strophic units, establishes a fine balance between formation and dissolution. They are always turning—away from themselves and towards something utterly other than that which they contain—exposing alternative points of view and voice, and creating a dynamic expression of plasticity in form and in vocalic expression. The internal logic of each strophe revolves around the word which is the most foreign within, and persists in occurring in, each strophe: ‘Odradek’. This word is impossible to fully digest or habilitate, and thus, around this internal impossibility, the work creates itself. Catherine Malabou states that plasticity is, above all else, the expression of form. Plasticity in thought or articulation, and the resultant plastic work (philosophical, neurological, ecological, literary), is part of a logic internal to itself: ‘the movement of a constitution of an exit, there, where no such exit is possible’.19 The self-­ enclosed yet outward turning arguments of each strophic unit in ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ demonstrate such plasticity in form. As each unit looks to continue, it is cut off by the volta—the shifts in tone, subject, narrative perspective and voice become, in a way, the haunting, metamorphic essence (Wesen = Stimmung) of the work. We stop and start in the same manner as the movements observed in Odradek itself; like Odradek the work turns, spool-like, gathering different things about it. As each of these turns occur, so too does the narrative voice undergo distinct changes, alongside which similar demands of metamorphic capability are made on the reader’s engagement with the shifting vocalic registers displayed in the work. Let us now consider the impact of the critical accidents which the  Catherine Malabou, Plasticity at the Dusk of the World: 66.

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work has picked up during its progress through time: the accident of reading for narrative progression and character over voice, form, and essence. Perhaps, here, we will discover the Hausvater.

3   Vocalization Interpreters of ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ are all too often tripped up by the Hausvater, just as the Hausvater is too often tripped up by Odradek. In the act of reading and extending Kafka against himself, if we are not sufficiently tripped up we cease to follow sufficiently the work (or ‘true path’).20 The Hausvater haunts the multiple readings of this work, just as the Hausvater is haunted by the multiple shapes of the Odradek. It is as the narrative of the Hausvater that the work is almost always read. Yet this narrative voice, or the first-person pronoun and direct enunciation that we associate with the establishment of any narrative voice in (prose) literature, occurs for the first time in the work’s epode. Before this point, narrative perspective in the work exists in a shifting manner, modulating (as we have seen) between different tones, perspectives, and discourse styles. The antistrophic unit immediately preceding the epode, to be sure, gives a conversation in what narratologists would call ‘reported speech’, and yet, a quick glance at the case in which this speech is written is enough to notice its conditional, spectral, presence. It is a speculative conversation between the neutral (‘man’) and the recently gendered Odradek (‘er’). Except for its textual proximity, this speech has no grammatical relation to the ‘Ich’ of the work’s epode. Its tone is playful, mirroring a little the trans-generically parodic opening sentences of the work due to effect of the combination of case and ‘reported’ speech—a good example of what David Foster Wallace has called the inherently ‘funny’, ‘gross and gorgeous and thoroughly modern complexity’21 of Kafka’s work. Indeed, in the ventriloquial process of reading the work in this strophic unit, we find ourselves twisting and turning between the different ‘voices’ (the questioner and the questioned— Odradek) in a parody of the way in which we will have voiced the preceding strophic units, and even their constituent sentences:

20  See the Zürau Aphorismus, 1: ‘Der wahre Weg geht über ein Seil, das nicht in der Höhe gespannt ist, sondern knapp über dem Boden. Es scheint mehr bestimmt stolpern zu machen, als begangen zu warden.’ (‘The true path is along a rope, not a rope suspended way up in the air, but rather only just over the ground. It seems more like a tripwire than a tightrope’ (tr. from Franz Kafka, Aphorisms. Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir and Michael Hofmann (New York: Schocken, 2015): 3)). 21  David Foster Wallace, ‘Laughing With Kafka’, Harpers Magazine July 1998: 26–28.

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“Wie heißt du denn?” fragt man ihn. “Odradek”, sagt er. “Und wo wohnst du?” “Unbestimmter Wohnsitz”, sagt er und lacht; es ist aber nur ein Lachen, wie man es ohne Lungen hervorbringen kann. Es klingt etwa so, wie das Rascheln in gefallenen Blättern. “Well, what’s your name” you ask him. “Odradek,” he says. “And where do you live?” “No fixed abode,” he says and laughs; but it is only the kind of laughter that has no lungs behind it. It sounds rather like the rustling of fallen leaves.

Turning around and about between the multiple vocalizations of the work, we are forced by form and voice to play the role of the fool, and to cap it all, the work itself seems to laugh uncannily at us, in this, a rare moment when any answer at all is forthcoming!22 All aspects of the penultimate strophic unit of the work play out at a distinct distance from the tone, voice, and perspective which opens the final strophe of ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’. We encounter, between these units of the work, a break akin to that found between the final antistrophe and the epode of the classical Ode, where it is the epode, only, which provides a moment of stillness, a moment where the poetic arguments takes a ‘stand’. Take a fresh glance at Kafka’s work, and, starting (again) from the beginning, ask yourself if this mode of singular narration and monolithic narrative agency assumed by so many critics is actually possible. How is it that the capitulative ‘Ich’ of the epode of ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ is almost unilaterally critically associated with the voice (or narration) of the figure of the Hausvater? Why is it that these critics are obsessed with (their?) fathers? The Hausvater, apparently possessing an undeniable (stable?) first-person pronoun, is retrospectively read as the narrator of the whole of the work. The preceding strophic units—read as paragraphs—are seen as an extended form of free indirect discourse which opens in medias res: a narrative chain of events which all illustrate the ‘cares’ and inner permutations, of the thought of the Hausvater. It is possible that this critical tendency is not only down to the resonant effect of the final strophic unit. Begin again by tracing the manner in which the Hausvater haunts the work, and ask whether Kafka’s most outspoken critics give too much agency to this all-too spectral figure. Perhaps it is the sonorous way the Hausvater’s narrative ‘Ich’ is pre-empted from the ‘Unsicherheit’ of the first strophic unit of the work that provokes this possible (and dangerous) 22  “Übrigens sind selbst diese Antworten nicht immer zu erhalten; oft ist er lange stumm…” [Even these answers are not always forthcoming; often he stays mute for a long time…].

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misreading. Alternatively, in associating the work and literary power of ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ in part with the work’s formal machinations, the dominance of a narrative mode of understanding and reading is replaced by the more plastic aspects of literature: lyric form and utterance. Slavoj Žižek, like the Hausvater himself, can’t shake off the stickiness of the human in his diagnosis of Kafka’s story: circling around the point, Odradek becomes for Žižek ‘the knot in which the father’s jouissance is stuck’.23 Before and after this critical juncture, there has been a general assumption that the Hausvater is the ‘narrator’, or at the very least that the entirety of the work addresses his narrative agency—the way his narration or neurosis brings Odradek ‘to life’. For instance, Judith Butler, untangling some of the work’s other difficulties, speaks unambiguously of ‘whether we as readers – or, indeed, whether the narrator – can still respond to this being as a human’.24 The famous correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, concentrating in the main on a reading of Odradek, also comes to assume this aspect regarding the Hausvater, from the point when Adorno writes, in a letter of 17 December 1934, ‘If his origin lies with the father of the house, does he now then precisely represent the anxious concern and danger for the latter;…’ onwards.25 An analogue to this critical and philosophical assumption that the Hausvater presides with narrative agency over the entirety of ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’, would be to read the work as a dramatic monologue. In so doing, many of the elements of changing tone and address become symptoms of a neurotic or schizophrenic personality rather than discrete units of expression or lyric argument; the inherently plastic logic of the work is denatured. Yet all this changes if we consider ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ as a work predominantly of tone and atmosphere, rather than one of plot and action, and of voice, noise, and vocalic expression rather than of character. The sound of the ‘Ich’ rustles through the work. This Ich-as-sound, alongside the continued presence of ‘Odradek’, too, as a word-sound, is the sonorous glue that binds ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ together. Too  Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2006): 121.  Stuart J. Murray, ‘Ethics at the Scene of Address: A Conversation with Judith Butler’ in Symposium: Review of the Canadian Journal for Continental Philosophy 11.2 (2007): 417. My emphasis. 25  Adorno, Theodor and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence: 1928–1940. Trans. Nicholas Walker. Ed. Henri Lonitz. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001): 68. 23 24

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often mistaken as a sign of narrative coherence and plot, both ‘Ich’ and ‘Odradek’ are in fact lyric noise—an anticipation of the work’s rustling sputtering laughter and skewwhiff downward hirpling, ‘hinunterkollern’. This noisily absent ‘Ich’ is present in contradictory expressions of self ([ich]/mich) and other (sich), in hollow, and invariably debunked expressions of familiarity and stability (natürlich), and in the work’s guiding principle of mental and physical strangeness (unsicherheit). To assume all these hidden ‘I’s are an expression of the Hausvater’s narration is to assume a lot, since even as it haunts, the Ich as explicit word and ‘narrative I’ does not appear until the final strophic unit. But this does not mean, as previous critics have reacted strongly to, that the ‘I’ is not a strong presence in the work. Before the emergence of the ‘true’ Ich of the first sentence of the epode, the sound-world of the first-person pronoun, introduced in the first strophe’s ‘Unsicherheit’, appears in the majority of the remaining sentences of the text. As expected of the turning form of the work, there is an ebb and flow of the sound’s presence: every strophe has at least one sentence in which it is not contained. In addition to this absent-present ebb and flow of the sound, the world of meanings with which the sound is associate oscillates between affirmation (Natürlich) and negation (nicht), turning around the noisy expression of the self in the other ([s]ich). All this culminates not in the formation, but in the apparent total collapse, of any stable narration: ‘Er schadet ja offenbar niemandem; aber die Vorstellung, daß er mich auch noch überleben sollte, ist mir eine fast schmerzliche’. The final expression of the noisily absent first-person pronoun is in an expression of pain and difficulty which balances the ‘Unsicherheit’ of its initial introduction; the ultimate counterpoint to the sound-world of ‘Odradek’. If we do not assume traditional narrative conventions, our encounter with the Hausvater is as unstable as our encounter with Odradek. It is a mistake to assume that we encounter the Hausvater as the work opens. We are dealing with a figure that is, above all else, disembodied, and disembodied in a way that even the Odradek is not. ‘Ich’ haunts the work, and is a sound predominantly related to the titular ‘Hausvater’ and his cares. ‘Ich’ occurs in such radically different guises as to be almost unrecognizable at each time of appearance. But ‘Ich’ can never fully produce or narrate ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’. The reader is made to voice first the work’s and subsequently his (both the reader’s and Hausvater’s) own concerns. The reader, through the different permutations of each strophe must discover how to articulate the ‘mine and not mine’ of the sounds of the work; the

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Ich/Sich binary pervades each strophic unit without fully resolving itself. The Hausvater has no physical form apart from the final strophic ‘Ich’, even as this ‘ich’ haunts the sounds of the Kurzprosa up until this point. To realize that the moment of his emergence within the work is also a merger with the Unsicherheitlich ‘Sich’ of the marginally less-spectral Odradek is to acknowledge the pain of his disembodiment, and the difficult plasticity of the work. The Hausvater, in this interpretation, is abused even of the ability to speak, or, at least, his speech, his self-constitution, becomes so dangerously painful that the work ends. The Hausvater is Echo to Odradek’s Narcissus; it is Echo that we hear, but Narcissus whose skewed vision gives shape to the myth and name to the flower. And in a move that we shall see in greater depth in tracing the plastic nature of Odradek, by the close of ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ the Hausvater becomes a plastic body, a body without organs,26 and the painful noise of his failed physical and sonorous metamorphosis structures the sound-­ world of Kafka’s work. It is through the lyric form and noise of ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ that we may, again, make a mistake, and in doing so, trip up. This time, the danger of mistaken encounter is not with the absent-present Hausvater but with the work itself. We encounter this secondary danger not only in the work of revolution (in the volta or shifts between strophic units), but also in the work of interruption (occurring at the self-same moment of volta, or turn). ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ is a work as much of silence as it is of sound; of a bringing to account the interrupted, displaced, actions of the reading body to provide a mirrored image for what is staged in each strophic unit of the work itself. At each turning point, in the blank paragraph spacing, we can look up from the page, take a breath, digest matters contained in each strophic unit as it comes, and then resume with relative ease to our place. Each paragraph’s opening is clearly marked, as is the formal and semantic progression. ‘Die Sorge’ begins in the accusative, with a hint, swiftly dispelled, that we may quite simply be dealing with a direct object (‘Die einen sagen’), shifting to a formalized nominative (‘Natürlich würde sich…’), an indefinite nominative (‘Man wäre…’), before the first true Volta of the work as the fourth strophic unit opens with the masculine pronoun in the nominative singular (‘Er hält…’), a Volta that is upturned by the second true Volta, and, finally, the introduction of the personal pronoun (‘Vergeblich frage ich mich…’). The effect  Dyens, Metal and Flesh: ‘bodies without organs are plastic bodies’: 57.

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of this is one which mirrors the haunting, changeable presence of both the Hausvater and the Odradek in the work, one which mirrors the manner of being decomposed, or distracted, by cares (‘Sorgen’) and of constantly turning towards other things, other solutions, other potential forms. With each strophic turn/paragraph break, the world of the reader interrupts the world of the text; with each return, the reader does not quite return to the same text that she left. This is what Robert Hass calls the ‘forming, or coming into existence of the imagination as a shaping power’,27 a shaping power which characterizes the attempts of each of the strophic units of ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’. Form dictates engagement, which in turn influences the shaping of opinions about the work. The work itself asks us to interrupt it (our reading); it forces change in rhythm and in reading practice. We begin to be enfolded, controlled, by the actions of the work. The act of reading across the strophic units of an Ode-like work is a double act of estrangement: one that occurs inside the reading process and one which occurs between work and world (immersion and analysis). Note how the structure of the Ode is itself born out of the moments in Classical Drama where the chorus, speaking as one, from the stage but outside of the work being performed, turns first to one side of the audience (strophe), then to the other (antistrophe), and finally stands, head­on, facing the whole arena. The nature of the work (the play; the story) changes; the audience are complicit in this structure of change and are thus, themselves, altered. The vocalic movements within ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ are, in Derrida’s terms, ‘transformational’28; even as, in the act, we cannot fully get a grip on what is being transformed and how this relates to us, we are accordingly transformed. The work enacts its own preoccupations, its own nimble instability (‘Unsicherheit’), its grasping towards some sort of solid meaning or voice; it plays mind games not within itself but with its reader. Apropos to this, the closing sentence of the third strophic unit, with all the stickiness of the internal -ich rhymes: ‘Näheres läßt sich übrigens nicht darüber sagen, da Odradek außerordentlich beweglich und nicht zu fangen ist’ [in any case, closer scrutiny is impossible, since Odradek is extraordinarily nimble and can never be laid hold of]. Its unpredictability is discomposing, yet is a part of the manner in 27  Robert Hass, ‘One Body: Some Notes on Form’ in Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry (New York: The Ecco Press, 1984): 62. 28  Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1981): 63.

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which the work works at a formal level. And in these turns, these frequent interruptions, the truth of the work (its wesen, which, above all else is one of Unsicherheit) is exposed. We are complicit in this formation. The interruptions of reading—constituted by the form of the reading matter itself— are the key moments in the ‘truth’ of reading. Reading is always a turning away, a demand on the reader for a certain plastic interaction between the world of the work and the world of reading; when moments/passages that ‘capture the reader, and at the same time restore him to what he is, in his own life, quite apart from the book he had taken up and that he now puts aside’.29 In a notebook entry dated 19 February 1917, Kafka writes, ‘Today [I read … and] For the brief span of the next hour am a different person. True, all prospects as misty as ever, but pictures in the mist now different. The man in the heavy boots I have put on today for the first time […] is a different person.’30 The literary work effects its own plastic ecology. The reader turns back to life doubly transmuted; change occurs on both physical and metaphysical levels, and the change precipitates a level of thought, or care, hitherto unprecedented. ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ forces us into both thought and change. It does this through its subject matter and literary form, and the manner in which these turn around each other. The atmosphere of the work—both sonorous and thematic—is one of almost complete precarity. Its plot is not one we would conventionally associate with prose works, but rather takes the form of a lyric argument and a textual manipulation of the reader into complicity with the workings of the work and its according atmosphere. This is a plastic literary object whose presence is heightened by the natural grammatical suspension, in the German of the original, of the verb until the end of the unit of sense. Action is always suspended, an apparently clear series of statements starting only to be abruptly stopped, and the direction of address, of subject-object relations, changed. This work is as much about linear narrative progression as it is about the establishment of empirical knowledge. Which is to say, it is not. Existing between and turning towards and away from the crux of its matter, the work enacts its Wesen, awakens it within the work and within the reader. We return to the formulation by Borges of the aspects of 29  Yves Bonnefoy, ‘Lifting Our Eyes from the Page’ in Readers and Reading, ed. Andrew Bennett (London: Longman, 1995): 232. 30  Franz Kafka, Blue Octavo Notebooks. Edited by Max Brod. Trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (Exact Change, 2014): 7.

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narration essential to the short prose work, and through his idea of ‘plot’ to a definition of that same ‘narrative’ device by one of Kafka’s first translators, Edwin and Willa Muir. In a mode of approach to the literary work which will be echoed by Žižek in his critique of the Odradek almost a century later, Muir writes that modern plot does not aim towards verisimilitude; rather, it teeters between absence and presence; it shows us how affect works: ‘The plot, in short, is in accordance with our wishes, not our knowledge […] It is a fantasy of desire rather than a picture of life.’31 Modern plot as theorized by Muir and enacted by Kafka is less narrative than it is lyric. Modern plot’s formation provokes questioning and proversi in a similar mode to the act of creation in the work of myth (Care crosses the river, once more), or the twisting argument of the Pindaric Ode. It centres on the question’s, and the work’s, metamorphic force, its ability to induce an alternative mode of being. The hauntology enacted by Modern plot is not only one of sonorousness but one of the psychological force of the unanswered question: it begins with but refuses to complete the mythic structure whereby ‘a world is created for man out of this relationship between question and answer’.32 Rather, it plays with the possibility of a worlding devoid both of man and the possibilities of any sort of answer, stable or otherwise. In ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’, the crux of the matter of plot is a meeting of modes more complex than the various gestures towards genre that the basic aspects of the work provoke. We find, in the mediative strophic units of ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’, the simultaneous existence of the questioning praise of the ode, the metamorphosis of myths of making, the ethical act or pressure of concern, and the permutations and digressions of lyric voice and argument. One of the main questions that speculative discourse of the penultimate, and longest, strophe of ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ circles around, is less an inarticulate sort of ‘what is [it/he]?’, and more a ‘what could [it/ he] possibly want [of me]?’. Without sinking into the alternative (and unknown) ontology offered by the Wesen that is Odradek, we cannot even begin to approach this question, apart from (as the Kurzprosa makes very clear) to continue to ask it in a fashion which is almost wholly ventriloquial, even bordering on hysteria. And, after the dramatic shift from  Edwin Muir, The Structure of the Novel (London: Hogarth Press, 1928): 23.  Bianca Theisen, ‘Romantic Myths of Myth’ in Myth and the Making of Modernity: The Problem of Grounding in Early Twentieth-Century Literature. Ed. Michael Bell and Peter Pollner (Amsterdam, Rodopi, 1998): 22. 31 32

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Accusative to Nominative between the first and second strophic units of the work, we move between a series of pronouns: the ground of address shifts again. As we reach the final strophe of the Kurzprosa, the narrative voice and point of view changes in concert with the manner in which the pitch of the work’s questioning heightens; from the almost-concrete subject-­positioning of ‘Er hält’, we are finally introduced to the true Ich of the work: ‘Vergeblich frage ich mich…’ [‘I ask myself, to no purpose…’]. By partly ventriloquizing the ‘Ich’, and the apparent voice of the Hausvater, we must accept that Odradek (or the ‘Er’, and the other possible voice of the Hausvater) belongs to quite a different order of being to us. The classic paradox of literary identification, perhaps? But Odradek/Man/Er/ Hausvater will or cannot answer these ontological questions. And this is one of the aspects of Odradek which once it is noticed hangs around in the periphery of our vision, accompanying in its haunting the noisily absent ‘Ich’ of the Hausvater.33 Odradek offers us the promise of a mode of being which exceeds the human, demonstrates a multiplicity of forms and modes, but also makes obvious to us that these modes, these forms, are and will always be utterly foreign to us. The demands become, thus, as well as completely unanswerable, profoundly inhuman, and yet an inherent part of the manner in which, in shaping itself out of resistance, the brain forms itself ‘between determination and freedom’ giving rise to the ‘auto-­ constitution of the self’34 which is the hallmark of neuroplasticity. By ventriloquizing in our reading process the work’s atmosphere of care as concern and worry, we will always be compelled to ask it what it is, what it wants (of us), knowing full well that if we cannot answer that question, nothing will. In these questions we are led closer to the full scale of the plastic nature of ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’s; that is to say, the manner in which the Kurzprosa helps us to think through the very real problems of plastic (noun) itself, recognize how complicit we are in the action of plastic (verb), and begin to approach the very current, very human, problem of how to conceive of plastic’s strange object life and more-than-human 33  Jane Bennett’s essay ‘The Shapes of Odradek’ addresses precisely the peripheral nature of Odradek, as well as, both here and in Vibrant Matter, reading Kafka’s Kurzprosa within the context of ‘a political ecology of things’. See Textures of the Anthropocene: Grain Vapor Ray v.2 ‘Vapor’, ed. Katrin Kingan et al. (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2014): 16–28, and Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2010): 6–8. 34  Malabou, What Should We Do With Our Brain: 71, 30.

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temporality. Duncan Murrell opens his foreword to the recent The Petroleum Manga thus: What does a petrochemical want? This is the animating question we hope to raise here, although by ‘animating’ we don’t mean to suggest that a hydrocarbon could possess the qualities of thought and desire we typically think of as being some characteristic qualities of the human. We hardly notice the plastics […] that dominate our physical world […] their world is a separate space around us inhabited by objects that seemed to just appear one day, whose origins we don’t know, whose lore we have suppressed, whose presence we take for granted, and whose immortality we can hardly conceive.35

Substitute ‘petrochemical’, ‘hydrocarbon’, and ‘plastic’ for variations on a theme of ‘Odradek’, and it is difficult not to see direct analogical possibilities between this exposition of plastic’s durable hauntology and Kafka’s tale. Similar questions and similar multiple perspectives, tripwires, loopholes, and answers haunt both studies of plastic and studies of ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’. These are questions which address impossible taxonomies, yet-to-be confronted ontologies, and which move beyond human time. They are questions which demand a radical metamorphosis whilst also asking us to retain very human, very aesthetic and generic, memories in order to situate the difficulties encountered in this exercise of the literary imagination; the interaction of present-time function and embodied memory is an inherent aspect of modern plastic’s durability.36 ‘The Odradek’ (Borges) or ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ (Kafka) provides a new model for us to think through the idea of responsible inheritance vis-­à-­vis both literature’s and plastic’s grasp on the future of our planet, whilst also concerning ourselves with the importance of the lessons that Kafka through this Kurzprosa, and the operations of literary plasticity more generally, teach us: it is important to allow for, and to seek to comprehend, the equivocal.

35  Duncan Murrell, ‘Foreword’ to The Petroleum Manga, ed. Marina Zurkow (New York: Punctum Books, 2014): 1. 36  ‘Polymers retain memory of preceding life-cycle steps so the durability not only depends on what happens during service, but what happened before’. Lars Lunquist et al. Life Cycle Engineering of Plastics: Technology, Economy, Environment (Elsevier Press, 2001): 21.

CHAPTER 5

Coda

Abstract  A return to the broader concerns of Literary Plasticity, both in the light of the close reading of Kafka just performed, and plastic’s unequivocally equivocal ‘now’. A renewal of the exhortation to read contemporary plastic as implicated in plastic’s long history; a renewal of the exhortation to take care. Keywords  Plastic • Literary plasticity • Environment • Anthropocene • Care In the mid-1600s, Edward Stillingfleet’s antiquarian studies linked plasticity to the operations of the human mind reaching out of an episteme towards a possibility of ontological understanding: ‘The great enquiry then is, How far this Plastick Power of the Understanding, may extend itself in its forming an Idea of God.’1 In January 2020, a visitor to the White Cube gallery in London would have encountered a series of vitrines filled with plastic tubing and electrical cables, superinscribed with literary and mathematical quotations, as the plastic artist Anselm Kiefer charts an exploration of string theory, a plastic universe at once esemplastic and multiple, essential, and synthetic, self-forming and knowable only in 1  Edward Stillingfleet, Origines Sacrae, Or, a Rational Account of the Grounds of Christian Faith, As to the Truth, and Divine Authority of the Scriptures, and the Matters Therein Contained (London, 1662, 3rd Ed. 1666): 369.

© The Author(s) 2020 H. H. Yeung, On Literary Plasticity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44158-6_5

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parts.2 We read an echo of this as we think through the future possibilities of our brains, of the phenomenal and strange processes of neuroplasticity ‘at the dusk of writing’ when Catherine Malabou writes, ‘we have certainly not yet exhausted plasticity’s range of meanings, which continues to evolve with and in language’.3 The language of plastic has for a long time been tangled up in human creation, in how we express our humanity, our place on the Earth, even in the Universe. We observe this in glancing towards the perhaps-longer-than-anticipated history of plastic thought. We observe this in the fact that it is impossible to take either an etymological, morphological, scientific, aesthetic, ethical, phenomenal, or historical approach on its own; all are co-implicated, necessary in order to begin to address the totality of plastic’s unthinkable nature in a world age declared an Anthropocene. And yes, plastic also does the unthinkable as it is at once profoundly anthropic and breaks the boundaries of anthropocentric thought: it is and is not ‘us’. We observe this unthinkability again in the ways that critics from many disciplinary backgrounds have approached Kafka’s extraordinary plastic work, how, haunted by and ventriloquizing the Hausvater’s resonant ‘Ich’, they all seek to care for or take care of the ‘animate/inanimate biped/spool who/that is pure equivocation. Named ‘Odradek,’ a word of equivocal origins, the object may embody Kafka’s texts’.4 Elusive, equivocal, illuminating, ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ is one such work of the plastic arts which exposes as much of the twenty-first century as it does of the twentieth century. Let us return again to the questions raised at the beginning of this study. Across the short space of the century since the first synthetic polymers were developed and marketed, how can plastic have so taken over humanity? What has allowed it to flourish, unbound, for so long? How does it hold the ability to fascinate and repel us? To be the subject of unthinkable scientific innovations and also to sneak, unbidden, into our day-to-day lives? The answers to these questions naturally take us beyond 2  Anselm Kiefer, Superstrings, Runes, The Norns, Gordian Knot. Bermondsey: White Cube, Nov. 2019 – Jan. 2020. In an interview in the early 2000s, Kiefer expressed a prophetically complex attitude towards plastic: ‘I don’t use it. But may be one day plastic, too, will interest me: I don’t want to exclude it. Plastic has something fossil-like to it: it is a fossil. I’d approach the ideology of the greens if I decided not to use plastic.’ Merkaba (New York: Charta, 2006). 3  Malabou, Plasticity at the Dusk of the World: 67. 4  Laurence Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice 1800–1900 (Berkeley CA: U California P, 1990): 86.

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the Kafkian imaginary to dynamically reconsider and reconfigure the literary, cultural, ethical, and political ground upon which we stand. The work of plastic is not one which is solely exterior to us: it also forms a major constituent part of our physical, linguistic, neurological being. It is not only a ‘green’ problem, not something to be simply excluded, denounced, or denied. Plastic is not new or simple, nor is plasticity. In many guises, they haunt us, help us to formulate ourselves and our lived environment, and have done so for millennia. Their cognates proliferate; their attributes know very few metamorphic, linguistic, or even temporal bounds. To know this is the first step to doing anything useful about plastic’s overabundance and emerging omnipotence, and to begin the important critical work of ensuring we avoid reducing our interaction with plastic and plasticity either to an almost-fetishized, ossifying, over-phenomenalization or a fatuously dyadic comparison (‘plastic and …’). In spite of its long history, plastic has become, for humanity moving into the second decade of the twenty-first century a ‘poster child’, or material evidence, of a particularly apocalyptic vision of the Modern or contemporary chronotope. At the same time, plasticity has become a keyword heralding a new understanding of the human body and brain, and their abilities to make and break with themselves, to mend, to forget, to self-fashion. Look towards the ‘news’. We live and are told increasingly that we are surrounded by the work of plastic; we are dependent upon its presence and its ability to (or our government’s ability to make it) disappear itself from our everyday perception. We can pocket it, forget about it, attempt, in observing it, to throw it away, but it continues to exist. As Donovan Hohn writes of the plastic wonder-substance, ‘By offering the false promise of disposability, of consumption without cost, [plastic] has helped create a culture of wasteful make-believe, an economy of forgetting.’5 Fantastic? Plastic?—or is this all a world of ‘wasteful make-­ believe’ founded on a bedrock which, ultimately, shifts under our feet? It does not disappear; it only changes place, or shape. We interact with this change plastically. Like Odradek, the Hausvater’s voice, the form of Kafka’s work, the work of plastic continues (perhaps unseen, perhaps 5  Donovan Hohn, Moby Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them (London: Union Books, 2012): 189.

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glimpsed) to haunt us not only with the spectre of an organic co-­ dependence, or addiction, but also with the prospect of a radical change beyond metamorphosis, even extinction. For even as our minds in encountering difficulty enact certain modes of neuroplastic change, we are as yet unable to think the possibilities of plastic’s or our own being on earth; as far as we know, plastic’s multiform existence will long outlast that of its human inventors. And in these seen/unseen surroundings we are only beginning to realize the responsibility that this new synthetic environment brings to bear for us, a dawning realization which brings with it the dusk of an older conception of being, of a deeper sort of time. But literature can teach us, through the staged encounter with the literary work in all its plastic formations, its particular oikos, our affective interaction with it, what taking responsibility for these possibilities ought to be. Throughout this study, we have deconstructed the strange rise in prominence of Odradek as the central figure of ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’, the inherently plastic nature of Kurzprosa as a literary form, and the taking-­for-granted, even forgetting, of the Hausvater’s narrative voice, and have questioned what this means both for the work’s changeable oikos and for the ‘care’ it seeks to mobilize. We have discovered, with Kafka, that what is plastic is at once of the earth and of the imagination; wholly natural and wholly synthetic, holding within it the possibilities of monstrous or beautiful growth and of explosive destruction or quiet sidling into oblivion. ‘A living and vital notion, plasticity is also a mortal notion.’6 A moral as well as mortal notion, plastic is both of language and resists linguistic expression; it is fundamental to the mode in which we lay down memories but elusive within, even destructive of, those memories. Receding, it laughs at us, haunts us, provokes us to care even—or particularly—about that which we do not fully comprehend. What sort of analysis can be used to mediate the multiform, at times contradictory, senses of this word? What sort of analysis can call into question our being whilst also exists as that which absolutely resists those things which apparently (or generically; genetically) signify such being? It must be multiform, and the approach to it (paradoxically, plastically) synthetic, multidisciplinary, provoked by an attitude of holistic interest in the literary work at hand. It is above all an act of care. We have seen one such manifestation in this study. Through attending to (caring for) a small literary moment and a particular 6

 Malabou, The Future of Hegel: 193.

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literary-scientific juncture in history which has indubitably set the groundwork for our understanding of the depths of what plastic means and does, both to and for us today, this study has set a groundwork for further readings in literary plasticity. Tied through a long history of association to language and being, to embodied life on earth, to literary, philosophical, aesthetic, and scientific production, ‘[p]lastic is … remarkably so’.7

7  Marina Zurkow, ‘Postscript: Once Were, Now Are, Will Be’, in Marina Zurkow (ed.) The Petroleum Manga: 158. My emphasis.

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Index1

A Adorno, Theodor, 23, 47, 88 Architecture home, 18, 53, 57 loophole, 24, 51–54, 62, 67, 78 B Barthes, Roland, 9, 19, 24, 52, 57–66, 74 Being, 9, 13, 32, 33, 39, 46, 57 as plastic, 13, 15, 18, 24, 58 as Wesen, 12, 35, 42, 45, 46, 48, 57, 65, 68, 74, 75, 84, 85, 93 Benjamin, Walter, vii, 23, 25, 41, 47, 88 Blumenberg, Hans, vii, 13, 40 Borges, Jorge Luis, 19, 52, 67, 74–76, 93, 95 Butler, Judith, 47, 88

1

C Corngold, Stanley, 24, 81 D Deleuze, Gilles, 25, 55, 57 Derrida, Jacques, 56, 77, 84, 91 F Forgetting, 10, 12, 53, 99 extinction, 16, 29, 37 hauntology, 9, 21, 24, 26, 35, 47, 48, 65, 69, 72, 74, 83, 84, 93, 95, 99, 100 memory, 8, 9, 43, 52, 70, 71, 95 G Genre, 10, 15, 21, 23, 49n1, 50, 52n13, 56, 58, 60, 61, 63, 65, 67, 67n62, 69, 93

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

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Ghosh, Ranjan, vii, 9, 11, 57 Guattari, Félix, 25, 55, 57 H Heine, Heinrich, 16–18, 58 Heise, Ursula K., 12, 81 K Kafka, Franz Blumfeld, ein älterer Junggeselle, 21 Die Sorge des Hausvaters, 4, 5, 10, 19, 22–25, 27, 29–31, 41, 44–47, 55, 58, 60–63, 65, 67, 69–72, 74, 75, 77–80, 85–95, 98, 100 Die Verwandlung, 47, 56 Ein Landarzt, 5, 62, 77 Odradek, 22, 23, 25, 27–48, 57, 61, 63–65, 67–69, 72, 74–78, 81, 83–95, 98–100 translators of, J.A. Underwood, 27–30, 34, 35, 74, 82 translators of, Michael Hofmann, 30, 37, 82 translators of, Muir and Muir, 6, 37 Kiefer, Anselm, 97 L Literary plasticity, vii, 7, 10, 11, 18–22, 25, 45, 61, 68, 95, 101 form, 8, 20, 24, 49, 57, 58, 62, 69, 71n76, 92, 100 Lyric, 20, 23–25, 29, 31, 32, 35, 36, 40, 41, 45, 46, 53, 56, 69–72, 79, 80, 84, 88–90, 92, 93 apostrophe, 31–33, 80 ode, 20, 29, 51, 69, 71, 80, 83, 84, 87, 91, 93

M Malabou, Catherine, 7, 9, 16–18, 39, 56, 57, 59, 70, 85, 98 Metamorphoses, 5, 8, 9, 14, 18, 21, 35, 37, 44, 45, 56, 57, 59, 74, 79, 80, 84, 90, 93, 95, 100 Middleton, Christopher, 49, 51–53, 55 Miller, J. Hillis, 41, 42, 47, 76 Modernism, 5–7, 9, 16, 18, 20, 49n1, 54, 58, 62 Muir, Edwin, 6, 59, 67 Muir, Willa, 75 O Oikos, 1, 10–12, 19, 58n30, 98, 100 anthropocene, 3, 4, 38, 47, 67, 98 environment, 2, 8–11, 13, 42–44, 61, 62, 65, 71, 74, 80, 99, 100 ground, 11–13, 16, 19, 20, 31, 40, 48, 94, 99 stimmung, 66, 74–76, 85 P Plastic addiction to, 2–4, 7, 10, 100 and the body, 14, 15, 21, 84n17 phenomenalization, 2, 10, 20, 58, 99 Plastic Artist, 7, 11n23, 14–16, 21, 58, 97 as Plastiken, 17, 21 Plastic Arts, 7, 13–15, 17 Plasticity neural, 18, 48, 94, 98 R Rilke, Rainer Maria, 7

 INDEX 

S Sorge, vii, 4, 5, 10, 13, 14, 19, 22, 24, 25, 27, 29–31, 35, 41, 44–47, 55, 55n17, 58, 60, 62, 63, 65, 67, 69, 71, 74, 75, 77–81, 84–95, 98, 100 as care, 4, 11, 13, 22, 34, 52, 69, 71, 74, 75, 77, 79, 81, 92, 94, 98, 100 as Cura (fable of), 13–15, 18 as worries, 25, 42, 61, 76, 84

V Voice, 25, 26, 44, 79, 85, 88, 91

T Tripwire, 24, 51

Z Žižek, Slavoj, 34, 88, 93

W Wolf, Maryanne, 7, 9 Woods, Michelle, 25 Y Yamashita, Karen Tei, 12, 18, 19

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