Inhabiting the Discourses of Belonging; Franz Kafka and Yoko Tawada

This piece examines the role of language in creating the identity of the foreigner in German prose. Writing at opposite ends of the 20th century, Kafka and Tawada serve as harbingers for a broader sense of alienation that comes with writing as an Other. Using lenses provided by Spivak, Butler, Said and Deluze, this essay surveys the broader cultural concepts and theoretical implications of the notion of the metaphorical subaltern that can be created in prose, and the particularities presented by the German language in creating and articulating this identity. This essay examines six texts, three by Kafka and three by Tawada, placing them in contrast with one another. Ultimately this essay seeks to shift the hermeneutics of reading the Kantian Ding an sich of subaltern as hopeless, rather to see the these six texts as a plea for understanding. Writing is born from and deals with the acknowledged doubt of an explicit division, in sum of the impossibility of one’s one place... it remains strange to itself and forever deprived of an ontological ground, and therefore always comes up short or is in excess, always the debtor of a death, indebted with respect to the disappearance of a genealogical and territorial “substance,” linked to a name that cannot be owned. – Michael de Certeau, L’Ecriture de l’historie (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), p. 327 In their prose, both Franz Kafka and Yoko Tawada challenge conventional notions of belonging through highlighting the absurdity of the quotidian. Both authors write from uniquely distinct perspectives and ethnic identities, yet their similarities highlight a nuanced conception of what it means to use language, in this case, German, to simultaneously understand and define their place in the world. This essay will examine three texts by Franz Kafka, In the Penal Colony, The Hunger Artist, and The Metamorphosis, and three texts by Yoko Tawada, The Reflection, Canned Foreign, and The Bath, the majority of these works having been translated by contemporary scholar Susan Bernofsky, to support this claim. In weaving together these texts with scholarly works, we will begin to see a picture of the German language as a simultaneous wall and tool for those chasing the elusive and protean definition of what it means to be German. Although Franz Kafka lived the majority of his short life in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Austria, his use of German as a means for communicating his prose has laid foundation to the claim that Kafka is a quintessentially German author. While the scholarly suppositions and implications of Kafka’s works are as endless as they are tenuous, it is advantageous to reiterate the understandings that will serve us as we analyze these texts alongside German-Japanese author Yoko Tawada. Although Kafka himself consistently voiced insecurity regarding his command of the German language, reviewers have maintained that his mastery remains unsurpassed. Hannah Arendt notes that Kafka “speaks the purest German prose of the century” (Butler 1.). In fact, Arendt’s review of Kafka is eerily similar to filmmaker and author Wim Wenders’ preface of Yoko Tawada’s work. Wenders says that “[Tawada] has indeed written this complex, subtle, intelligent and poetic book in German!... It flows effortlessly” (Tawada IV). This raises an important question: are Kafka and Tawada’s insecurities regarding the German language unfounded? The answer, as I maintain, is a resounding no. Both Kafka and Tawada’s uncertainties vis-a-vis their prose is indicative of a much larger anxiety about their identities and places within an increasingly protean Germany. Franz Kafka, a Jew in Europe at the apex of antiSemitism, and Yoko Tawada, a foreigner living in contemporary Germany during a major debate on multiculturalism, uncover spatial solidary despite their cen-