KAFka and Lu Xun : Identity, Alienation and Assimilation

1. KAFka and Lu Xun: Identity, Alienation and Assimilation EN123 Modern World Literature Rochelle Sibley Rochelle.Sibley@warwick.ac.uk

2. Lecture map

3. Lu Xun (1881-1936) “Diary of a Madman” (1918) Franz Kafka (1883-1924) “The Metamorphosis” (1912)

4. Cannibalism and alienation Mr Chen brought me some food: a bowl of vegetables and a bowl of steamed fish – its eyes glassily white, its mouth gaping like the village cannibals. After a few slippery mouthfuls, I could no longer tell whether I was eating fish or human Lu Xun, “Diary of a Madman”, p.26 I now realise I have unknowingly spend my life in a country that has been eating human flesh for four thousand years. My sister, I remember, died while my brother was managing the household. He probably fed her secretly to us, by mixing her into our food. Lu Xun, “Diary of a Madman”, p.31

5. “Lu Xun's proposition is that the people of this great maimed and retarded, disintegrating China of the late and post-imperial period, his fellow citizens, are "literally" cannibals: in their desperation, disguised and indeed intensified by the most traditional forms and procedures of Chinese culture, they must devour one another ruthlessly to stay alive. This occurs at all levels of that exceedingly hierarchical society, from lumpens and peasants all the way to the most privileged elite positions in the mandarin bureaucracy.” • Fredric Jameson, ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’, 1986 • “Only Cannibalism unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically.” • “I am only interested in what’s not mine. The law of men. The law of the cannibal.” • Oswald de Andrade, Cannibal Manifesto, 1928

6. The China of “Diary of a Madman” (1918) 1911 Xinhai Revolution 1912 End of the Qing Dynasty (which began in 1636) Founding of the Republic of China 1915 Beginning of the New Culture Movement (focusing on vernacular literature, democratic/egalitarian values and an engagement with Western literature, culture and philosophy) 1917 China enters WW1 on side of the Allied forces 1919 May Fourth Movement in response to Treaty of Versailles awarding territories of Shandong Province to Japan 1921 New Culture Movement fades against rise of Chinese nationalism

7. Kuang-renriji(“Diary of a Madman,”1918) Two Chinese terms for ‘madness,’ fengrenand kuangren: -Feng: a pathological term denoting madness or stupidity -Kuang: a term denoting the inspired or ecstatic critique of ‘normal’ reason “My themes were usually the unfortunates in this abnormal society. My aim was to expose the disease so as to draw attention to its cure.” (Lu Xun)

8. Body horror as alienation [His] jaws turned out to be surprisingly strong; and with their help he actually succeeded in causing the key to move, paying no heed that he was no doubt injuring himself in the process, for a brown fluid ran out of his mouth and down the key, dripping onto the floor. Kafka, “The Metamorphosis”, p.12 His left side felt like one long unpleasantly contracting scar, and he was forced to limp outright on his two rows of legs. One of these diminutive legs, incidentally, had suffered grievous injuries […] and now trailed lifelessly behind him. Kafka, “The Metamorphosis”, p.17 Nothing can be accomplished with such a body… My body is too long for its weakness, it hasn’t the least bit of fat to engender a blessed warmth, to preserve an inner fire… Everything is pulled apart. Kafka’s diary, cited in Berman, “The Jewish Patient”, p.223

9. The most curious thing of all – that woman, hitting her son. “I’m so angry, I could eat you!” That’s what she said. But looking at me all the while. I flinched in terror, I couldn’t help myself. The crowd – their faces bleached greenish white – roared with laughter, exposing their fangs. Lu Xun, “Diary of a Madman”, p.23 Robert Crumb, R. Crumb’s Kafka (2004)

10. Loss of language and alienation [His mother’s] gentle voice! Gregor flinched when he heard his own in response: it was unmistakeably his old voice, but now it had been infiltrated as if from below by a tortured peeping sound that was impossible to suppress – leaving each word intact, comprehensible, but only for an instant before so completely annihilating it as it continued to reverberate that a person could not tell for sure whether his ears were deceiving him. (p.6) “Did you understand a single word?” the manager was asking Gregor’s parents. “Surely he isn’t trying to make fools of us?” “For heaven’s sake,” Gregor’s mother cried, already weeping, “he might be gravely ill, and here we are tormenting him. […] Gregor is ill. Quick, fetch the doctor. Did you hear him speaking just now?” “That was an animal’s voice,” the general manager said. (p.11)

11. װאָס איז ייִדיש? .ייִדיש איז געװען די שפּראַך פֿון קאַפֿקאַס משפּחה Vosizyidish? Yidishizgeven di shprakh fun Kafkasmishpokhe. Was ist Jiddisch? Jiddisch war die Sprache von Kafkas Familie.

12. Kafka on Yiddish It consists solely of foreign words. But those words are not firmly rooted in it, they retain the speed and liveliness with which they were adopted. Great migrations move through Yiddish, from one end to the other. All this German, Hebrew, French, English, Slavonic, Dutch, Rumanian, and even Latin, is seized with curiosity and frivolity once it is contained within Yiddish, and it takes a good deal of strength to hold all these languages together in this state. And this, too, is why no sensible person thinks of making Yiddish into an international language, obvious though the idea might seem […] and then too, because Yiddish was, after all, for a long time a despised language. Kafka, “An Introductory Talk on the Yiddish Language”, 1912

14. “Yesterday it occurred to me that I did not always love my mother as she deserved and as I could, only because the German language prevented it. The Jewish mother is no ‘Mutter’, to call her ‘Mutter’ makes her a little comic […] ‘Mutter is peculiarly German for the Jew, it unconsciously contains, together with the Christian splendour Christian coldness also, the Jewish woman who is called ‘Mutter’ therefore becomes not only comic but strange. Kafka’s diary, 24 October 1911 “What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.” Kafka’s diary, 8th January 1914

15. Karl Kraus, “Heine and the Consequences” (1910) “[Heinrich] Heine was a Moses who with his staff struck the rock of the German language […] water did not flow out of the rock […] but rather, Eau de Cologne.” “that Heinrich Heine who so loosened the corset on the German language that today every salesclerk can finger her breasts.”

16. “Did you understand a single word?” the manager was asking Gregor’s parents. “Surely he isn’t trying to make fools of us?” “For heaven’s sake,” Gregor’s mother cried, already weeping, “he might be gravely ill, and here we are tormenting him. […] Gregor is ill. Quick, fetch the doctor. Did you hear him speaking just now?” “That was an animal’s voice,” the general manager said. (p.11) “Ironically […] many Jews themselves, including those who fought heroically against various oppressors, shared their enemies’ belief that there was basically something wrong with them […] On the other hand, much of Kafka’s writing radiates Jewish pride. He only sometimes believed that there was something basically wrong with the Jewish people; what he never doubted was that there was something basically wrong with him.” Berman, “The Jewish Patient”, p.223

17. “That war, capitalism, industrialization, and technology destroyed the unity, the presence, of the European past is a well-worn myth […] This account misses how much of what is inadequately called ‘European culture’ was being reinterpreted, in this unprecedented way – a way that destroyed, in effect, traditional historical narrative – by those who, for reasons of race or religion or gender, had no ‘natural’ proprietorial claim to it: that the mode of disjunctiveness, and the problem of constructing a tradition, was not to do with the onset of industrialization alone, but liminality and disenfranchisement: for, say, Jews, Bengalis, and women, both political disenfranchisement and cultural inadmissibility. Amit Chaudhuri, “Introduction” to Walter Benjamin, One Way Street and Other Writings, pp. xi-xii