The Break through Experience: Literary Origins in Franz Kafka and W. G. Sebald Open Access
Beeman, Naomi Cale (2012)
Abstract
Abstract
The Break through Experience: Literary Origins in Franz Kafka and
W. G. Sebald
This dissertation explores the intersection of autobiography and literary production in the works of two writers: the paradigmatically modern Franz Kafka, and contemporary writer of mixed-media prose, W. G. Sebald. The two cases are complementary. While Kafka's story "The Judgment" has been identified as his decisive literary breakthrough, critics maintain that Sebald, over the course of sundry publications, is always working on the same long novel. I ask why it is important for the critical reception of modern literature to situate an author's oeuvre with respect to its literary origins. In keeping with the modern uncertainty regarding what counts as literature, I examine how both writers undermine our ability to discern where the literary begins and ends. Many of Kafka's fragmentary fictions are recorded in his Diaries amidst autobiographical and theoretical passages which themselves have been canonized. Sebald's hybrid works unsettle the fictional in several ways: they are generically similar to his earlier pieces of literary criticism, and incorporate alien elements, such as unmarked quotations from European literature of the past several centuries, photographs, and images without captions. I argue that Kafka's and Sebald's mingling of autobiographical, literary-historical and documentary elements with fiction disturbs our ability as readers to ‘place' their writing in literary history. Modern acts of literary production scramble chronological approaches to the history of literature by revealing the way in which the history of writing fiction is always a fictionalized history.
I locate the emergence of each project in its 19th-century French literary sources. Flaubert's work guides my reading of Kafka. Via Kafka's fantasy of reading aloud Flaubert's L'Éducation sentimentale, I explore how the thematics of sound, acoustics, volume, breath and voice mediate the transactions between Kafka's fictions and his autobiographical writings. My Sebald chapters focus on a section of his debut novel, Schwindel. Gefühle., devoted to the life and works of the French novelist and autobiographer Stendhal. I uncover the aesthetic foundations of Sebald's project in the theory of occulted "realism" (both literary and pictorial), which he articulates anachronistically in response to Stendhal, as well as in response to the history of realisms in modern painting.
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION...1
Overview...1
Enlargement...3
Intervention...8
Expansion...9
PART I: FRANZ KAFKA
1. "Nur so kann geschrieben werden…"...12
Writing. Reading Aloud. (Schreiben. Vorlesung.)...22
2. The Magical Wholeness of the World...31
Abortive Writing or the Fictional Crime...43
Ahistorical Breakthrough and the Birth of Fiction: a Kafkan Literary History...47
3. Breakthrough/Breakdown...49
"…in einem Zug…"...51
"…as if at home…": Freud and Kafka Write the Train...58
Kafka, Adorno, Corngold: Three Perspectives on the Onrushing Train of Modern Prose...62
4. "The Essence of Magic"...70
5. Pulsions of the Plastic Voice: Reading Aloud Between Felice and Fiction...75
6. The Advocate (Der Fürsprecher) Summons Anxiety with "A Perfect Fool"...82
Involuntary Imitation...84
Original Plagiarism...89
7. Re-wording the Wound...99
Milena's Translation as Original Wound...103
Orphaned by Language: Kafka's Mother Tongue...108
8. Kafka's Flaubert and the Failure of ‘Bildung'...112
Fictional Incompletion...113
Unlearning How to Read: Flaubert's Anti-novels...115
Unlearning How to Write: Kafka's Anti-novels...120
To Experience the Trial (Das Verfahren erfahren)...121
Metamorphosis as Premature Aging and the Subject of Missed Experience in the Post-Bildungsroman...128
Immediate Reflections on the Deformation of a Genre...135
"…though it wasn't his habit to learn from experience…"...139
Habit on Trial: the Original Disruption...144
Beyond Habit: Kafka's Naïve Reader...147
PART II: W. G. SEBALD
9. Sebald's Intertextual Romance...149
Arbitrariness and Literary Origins: the First Detail...149
"Beyle oder das merckwürdige Faktum der Liebe"...153
The Intertextual Origin: Sebald Writes Stendhal...155
On Love (De l'amour) and Flawed Beloveds...157
The Cast Hand...160
The Writer's Hand...164
10. Sebald's Realisms...168
All Realisms Intersect at the Detail...170
Sebald's Rhetorical Dismissal of ‘Realist' Readings, and Realism in Sebald Criticism...172
The Historicity and Mediality of Realism: Flawed Details in Stendhal and Jan Peter Tripp...178
The Adorable Imperfection of the Work of Art...181
False Entry: the Origin as Façade...186
The Defective Reader...190
11. Sebald vis-à-vis Stendhal: A Literary Self-Portrait Occulted...193
Autobiography's Lost Subject...194
The Outing of a Genre...195
The Psychopathology of Autobiography: Strong and Weak Subjects...197
Self-authentication and Self-counterfeiting: "The Afterlife of Henry Brulard" by W. G. Sebald...200
Writing, Hypocrisy and Polemics: Sebald's Other Face...206
12. Listless History...211
Aesthetic Homogenization and Structural Discordance...211
Brulard's Initial List...213
Napoleon--Casanova--Don Giovanni--Stendhal...215
The Original Omission...217
Writing Poorly: Incompletion and the List...220
Discrete Terms...223
13. Postmodern Revisions of Realism: the Dubious Detail...226
"…down to the tiniest detail…" (Max Aurach)...228
The Pathological Unity of Milieu: Realism Caught Between First- and Third-person Perspectives...230
Teased by the Teas-maid: Extraneous Detail...235
Sebald vs. Balzac: Fragmenting vs. Totalizing Details...240
Incongruous Details and the Scene of Writing...243
14. A History of Painterly Realism in Sebaldian Detail, Part I: Matthias Grünewald...245
‘Detail' in Translation...246
Painted Pain and the Detail that Wounds...248
Realism's Death Drive: Singularity and the Mark of Death...251
Aurach's Psychic Wound as the Origin of the Text...253
The Universal Suffering of the Realist Gaze...257
15. Part II.1: Jan Peter Tripp...259
Deviant Realism: "…a much more deeply searching objectivity…"...259
The "Worldless" Subject of Pathographic Portraiture...262
16. Part III: Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn...265
Dissecting Realism...265
Soul Murder: the Metaphysics of Surgical Dissection...266
The Anatomy Lesson vs. the Moral Lesson...270
A Closed Economy of Light and Dark...274
17. Part II.2: Jan Peter Tripp...276
Stilling Life: Violent and Non-violent Realisms...276
"Wie Tag und Nacht--"...280
Tripp's Non-photographic Realism...283
The Creation of Death in Seven Days...284
Landscapes of an Abandoned World: "…the estate we leave behind…"...286
Conclusion: the Blind Viewer...293
BIBLIOGRAPHY...297
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