An axe for the rising sea: Kafka’s Anthropocene afterlives

Abstract

This article analyses the influence of Franz Kafka on contemporary writers who engage with the climate emergency, focusing in particular on the Australian writer Richard Flanagan and the Polish author Olga Tokarczuk. This transnational corpus is warranted not only by the scale of the crisis, but also by Kafka’s status as a writer whose work refuses to sit neatly within the borders of a nation or ‘Nationalsprache’. The article details both writers’ direct allusions to Kafka, and — under the rubrics of ‘bounds’, ‘scales’ and ‘parables’ — identifies aesthetic techniques they adopt and adapt from his work. These include a disruption of the inside and outside of texts, the rendering of complexity in pithy or parabolic form, and a concern with the mechanisms of denial. The extent of this engagement with Kafka, I argue, suggests that his literary models are uniquely useful in the struggle to give form to the ‘Anthropocene’.

KEYWORDS:

• Kafka
• Ecocriticism
• Scale
• Parable
• Tokarczuk
• Flanagan
• The Overstory

Anxieties about the relationship between the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of books can be seen across a wide range of contemporary literature that engages with the climate crisis. The copyright page of Richard Powers’ The Overstory (2018), for instance, proclaims that the book is printed on 100% recycled paper, saving ‘408 trees, 393,576 gallons of water, 132,228 pounds of greenhouse gas emissions, and 40,272 pounds of solid waste’.¹ This sustainability disclaimer as entry point into the world of a book is a perfect example of what Timothy Morton describes as ‘an inside-outside opposition untenable in an age of ecological awareness, in which categories such as “away” have evaporated. One doesn’t throw a candy wrapper away — one drops it on Mount Everest.’² For Norah Campbell et al., too, the vast complexity of climate change means nothing less than ‘the end of demarcation, the end of a background’.³ They refer to this quality of climate change as its ‘unboundedness’: the collapse of any sense of things being inside or outside of it, of being able to say where it begins or ends.⁴ Along with its paratextual disclaimer, The Overstory appears to respond to this problem with an attempt to become an all-encompassing book. This quixotic quest is suggested not only by the novel’s doorstopper size and efforts to extend omniscient narration to a non-anthropocentric perspective — that of trees — but also by its pseudo-biblical beginning:

First there was nothing. Then there was everything.⁵

and refusal of an ending:

This will never end.⁶

This preoccupation with insides and outsides is just one aesthetic feature that recommends Franz Kafka as a literary forebear for contemporary writers concerned with ecology. When faced with the central problems of representing Anthropocene conditions in fiction, these writers draw time and again on aesthetic models that can be traced back to the modernist outlier of twentieth-century Prague. I will focus in particular here on the Australian writer Richard Flanagan, recipient of the 2014 Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North, and the Polish Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk, both of whom are known for their ecological themes and experiments with the novel form. Where The Overstory takes a maximalist approach to the problem of climate ‘unboundedness’, frantically trying to keep pace with the complexity of the crisis, Flanagan and Tokarczuk opt for nimbler and more elusive narrative strategies. In tracing the aesthetic approaches both writers adopt from Kafka — described here under the rubrics of ‘bounds’ and ‘scales’, with reference to Flanagan, and ‘parables’, with recourse to Tokarczuk — I aim to show that Kafka’s works hold the key to many of the central questions facing prose writers in the struggle to give shape to the Anthropocene.

Bounds

Near the end of the 2001 novel Gould’s Book of Fish, the breakthrough work of the Tasmanian writer Richard Flanagan, the narrator William Gould reflects on his handiwork. This consists of the titular book of fish paintings he has made while imprisoned on the eighteenth-century penal colony of Sarah Island, where he now finds himself sentenced to death. ‘This business of smuggling hope’, Gould thinks of the paintings, ‘might make them wonder, might be the axe that smashed the frozen sea within’.⁷ The Kafka quote schlechthin is a Flanagan favourite, returned to again and again throughout his journalism and non-fiction. Criticising the decision of the Brisbane Writers’ Festival to drop controversial guests, for instance, Flanagan asserts the prerogative of writing to disrupt conventional thinking — to be, ‘as Kafka put it, the axe that smashes the frozen sea within’.⁸ The allusion seems at first too blunt an instrument to accomplish much with. In planting it both within and outside his fiction, however, Flanagan opens up one of the most fundamental issues of writing about the Anthropocene: the relationship between the world and the book.

The new resonances of this ‘frozen sea’ over a century after its original iteration are striking, with the disappearance of sea ice one of the most salient images of global heating.⁹ The act of smashing, meanwhile, is legible enough: it is what those of less poetic bent might call ‘impact’, a translation of the written word into real-world affects and effects. Even Flanagan’s choice of translation is telling: where Kafka’s German means simply ‘the axe for the frozen sea within [us]’,¹⁰ with its relation to ‘stinging’ and ‘biting’ allowing for a reading of this as a process of gradual chipping away, the later writer’s more forceful metaphor suggests a longing to shatter the boundary between the ‘inner’ world of the book and the world of material reality ‘outside’. The increased urgency is noteworthy. It is perhaps only in the hundred years separating the original from its citation that the image of ‘smashing’ a sea — of sudden, cataclysmic change, great sheets of ice crumbling and falling away — has become intuitive or even imaginable. In his seminal essay The Great Derangement, the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh outlines how industrial modernity was dominated by a ‘gradualist’ understanding of geology — comparable to the Axt as pickaxe, chipping away piece by piece — that wilfully suppressed the ‘catastrophism’ of earlier epochs, a mode that has regained ground in the face of a changing climate.¹¹ It is apt, then, that Flanagan’s version implicitly longs for the dam to break, for the book to burst its bounds.

These bounds are themselves twofold; they are circular in structure. In order for the book to affect the material world beyond its pages — the first inner/outer divide at play — it must first cross the threshold into the inner world of a reader. If we read Kafka’s Axt as a pickaxe, this first step appears as an end in itself: for a book, through the act of reading, to be transmuted into something that can pierce the skin dividing reader from the outer world and affect their interiority, is metamorphosis enough. In Flanagan’s adaptation, however, a second crossing is implied: not only must the axe break through into the reader’s interiority, but in doing so, it should cause a total and irreversible change of state that results in an outpouring, channelling the inner affect back into the external world.

If this seems at first to present too close a reading of Flanagan’s citation, it is affirmed by the wider context of his work. Along with this particular allusion, references to Kafka abound in his journalism and speeches not least when they constitute an immediate call to action. Several paragraphs are dedicated to a discussion of Kafka in the lecture ‘Does writing matter?’, for instance — a plea for Australian readers to force their government into ending the inhuman practice of offshore detention centres.¹² Flanagan walks the walk: his 2007 exposé of corrupt and ecologically destructive logging practices in Tasmania, which subjected him to harsh attacks from the island’s politicians and media, eventually resulted in the collapse of the worst offender, the logging company Gunn’s. The magical realist approach to empathy with non-human animals pursued in Gould’s Book of Fish was followed, twenty years later, by a damning journalistic indictment of Tasmanian salmon farming; in Toxic (2021), Flanagan outlines the damage this practice inflicts both on the biosphere and on the wellbeing of the island’s residents.¹³ This spirit of active intervention via the written word also shapes his most recent novel, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (2020), which responds allegorically to the devastation of the natural world. One review describes the novel as having been written ‘more or less in real time’ during the nightmarish bushfires that ravaged the continent in 2020.¹⁴ It is, above all, this temporal urgency that has added a new dimension to familiar literary conundrums about insides, outsides, and where to begin — paradoxes, that is, most often addressed in literary forms that trace their genealogy back to Kafka.

With texts like ‘In der Strafkolonie’, Kafka is the progenitor of a whole tradition of meta- or labyrinthine texts that fixate on the relationship between writing and bodies, language and materiality. The story sees an educated European traveller visit a brutal, surreal penal colony after the fashion of Gould’s Book. If Kafka’s work specializes in the ‘radical literalization of truths we tend to treat as metaphorical’¹⁵ (most famously the notion of calling someone an ‘Ungeziefer’), then the metaphor which is realized here is that of ‘am eigenen Leib erfahren’.¹⁶ The ‘Apparat’ of the story — a writing machine turned torture instrument — inscribes the injunction its victim has transgressed against on their very body, albeit in an elaborate, indecipherable script known only to an Officer who devotes himself to the machine. In the story’s denouement, the Officer places himself inside the machine, both to convince the visitor of the metaphysical power of this violent process, and to experience its transcendence first-hand. Instead of inscribing the Officer with ‘Sei gerecht!’¹⁷ as it is supposed to, however, the machine unceremoniously impales him in the process of malfunctioning and disintegrating — as though the mysterious script has escaped even more radically from language into materiality, enacting the Officer’s command in a brutally literal manner.

Character after character in Flanagan’s works is haunted by the sensation that their body is contained within a text, which itself seems to take on frighteningly physical form. William Buelow Gould often seems uncannily aware of his status as the literary pawn of an unknown author, feeling himself, for instance,

slowly suffocating, as though pages as large as houses were falling upon me, pressing in upon me as if I were only a flower to be desiccated & preserved through flattening; as though a book as vast as the sky were wrapping around my humbled form, soon to close forever [GB 348].

In the course of the narrative, nineteenth-century Gould picks up a book that seems to be the very same one the reader holds in their hands, and soon recognizes his own story among the pages in a type of waking nightmare:

Trying desperately to avoid the conclusion that if this book of fish was a history of the settlement, it might also just be its prophecy, I then realised that the book was not near ended, that it contained several more chapters, & with mounting horror I read on the succeeding page of how —‘I realised the book was not near ended, that it contained several more chapters, & with mounting horror I read on the succeeding page of how —’ [GB 383]

Where Gould appears anxious to wake from the ‘unruhigen Träumen’ of life inside a never-ending book, the characters of Flanagan’s most recent novel take a rather different view. Another feature of Kafka’s work that is of obvious interest for thinking about climate change, after all, is its dry observation of the mechanisms of denial. The opening of Die Verwandlung is a tour de force in this regard. In The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, the allegory used for environmental destruction is that of body parts inexplicably vanishing. When the protagonist Anna first notices that her ring finger has disappeared, the nods to Die Verwandlung are impossible to overlook. Anna seems to consider this bizarre disappearance above all as an inconvenience, and responds by first matter-of-factly searching around on the car floor for the missing digit. Where Kafka’s text is quick to point out ‘Es war kein Traum’,¹⁸ Anna acknowledges that ‘it wasn’t a strange illusion or delusion’ — before proceeding, like Gregor, to test out the bodily features of her new physical state: ‘There was — it was undeniable — no ring finger. She wiggled the thumb and her three remaining fingers. They seemed fine, doing the finger things fingers do’.¹⁹ Just in case anyone had missed the parallel, Anna next ‘dropped her hand and put the odd event down to the exhaustion she was feeling’, having that morning caught an early flight.²⁰ Where Gregor reasons that if others aren’t shocked by his appearance, he must be fine and can go to work, and if they are shocked, he must be sick and can be excused from work, Anna too bases her response to the vanishings on the reactions of those around her. In this version, however, the real horror is that nobody else seems to notice her metamorphosis, and she in turn pretends not to notice theirs. We are left with a whole world of Gregor Samsas living in collective denial of unfolding catastrophe.

Along with the book as axe, Flanagan, accordingly, has another favourite Kafka soundbite. Invited to speak on the subject of ‘producing fiction from fact’, the Tasmanian cannot help but begin by sowing doubt about such topics, which ‘seem to be in Kafka’s memorable phrase, “a cage in search of a bird”’.²¹ This allusion to the 1917 aphorism ‘Ein Käfig ging einen Vogel suchen’²² also crops up unannounced in Flanagan’s 2017 novel First Person — this time in the context of a meditation on ‘wildness’, and the inability of language to capture it. Remembering the wildness of the Tasmania he grew up in, late in a life that seems increasingly to have taken the wrong turn, the writer-narrator Kif Kehlmann comes to realize that.

words were and are inadequate to all that we felt, all that we knew, all that I have lost. Words were part of it, but they were also cages in search of a bird.

And we were the birds […]²³

Having retraced his steps back to the rainforest of his youth, Kif finds in place of this remembered freedom a site of devastation. Standing in the car park that now scars the mountain’s summit, he surveys numbly ‘the once great wild lands, some partly logged and repalmed by woodchippers, the rest in torment as they dried up and burnt in the new age, as the incinerated rainforest gave way to the future: a damp desert, moss and tundra and wet, charred gravel’.²⁴ The wrongness that Kif has come to inhabit in his first-person life — a wrongness born of desperation to be a writer, leading him from ghost-writing the autobiography of a conman to scripting reality TV — coincides grimly with this all-too-real image of paradise lost.

This second Kafka allusion, then, is the equal opposite of the first. Rather than the suggestion of literature as active intervention — a vision of books as instruments with powers of immediacy — language as a cage is always already behind the thing it chases. Without the things it seeks to enclose, it is empty; in containing them, it robs them of their defining features. In the twenty years or so between the first cage citation and the second, we can detect a further important change. In the 1998 instance, a clear separation is implied between task-oriented work like journalism or activism and the domain of art or fiction, which as the bird in the analogy conjures up lightness and liveliness. In the second version, however, fiction itself is the trap while light and life disappear beyond its pages, suggesting that fiction itself is somehow culpable in the face of these facts. It’s an increasing sense, to paraphrase Brecht, that in these times it is a crime not to talk about trees. As with the frozen sea, of course, the metaphor of cages and birds hits differently in an age of rampant biodiversity loss. It is Kif, after all, who offers the reading of the cage as words. Reading First Person, we could just as easily take the bird to be the words he has devoted his life to, and the cage the dreadful reality that has come creaking shut around him.

For writers who openly wish for their books to bite and sting, the fascination with literary labyrinths can be read not least as a vision of endless frustration, of what The Overstory calls ‘a horror inseparable from hope’: the desperate wish that ‘somewhere in all these boundless, compounding, swelling canyons of imprinted paper […] there must be a few words of truth, a page, a paragraph that would break the spell of fulfilment and bring back danger, need, and death’.²⁵ If turning the book inside out doesn’t achieve this effect, you can always try turning it outside in. Interviewed about The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2014), Flanagan attempted to make the unfathomable destruction caused by the Death Railway manifest for readers by pointing out that it produced ‘more corpses than there are words in my novel’.²⁶

Scales

‘You are lost in a small town,’ begins Timothy Clark’s groundbreaking article on problems of scale in climate discourse, ‘late for a vital appointment somewhere in its streets.’²⁷ If this premise sounds suspiciously familiar, it should come as no surprise. The scenario alone — of being late since before the beginning, finding yourself lost in a place that should be überschaubar — seems to transport us immediately into Kafka’s universe.

In Clark’s mini-parable, a stranger, when asked for help, offers a map with the words ‘the whole town is there’.²⁸ Once they have passed by and the paper is unfolded, it turns out to be a map of the earth. For Clark, this is the condition of humans in the face of climate change: we always seem to be viewing things on the wrong scale. We zoom in when we should be zooming out, and zoom out when we need to zoom in; we cannot seem to find the right point of focus. This is exemplified by the everyday figures of speech that equate switching off unneeded lights or buying an electric car with ‘saving the planet’, or by posters showing ‘the whole earth as giant thermostat dial, with the absurd but intelligible caption ‘You control climate change’.²⁹

If the ‘Kafkaesque’ names anything at all, meanwhile, it is perhaps a destabilizing of scale. Physical proportions refuse to say put; time neglects to flow uniformly; the infinite fails to remain contained within the finite. In one text of just a few lines, a grandfather cannot fathom how a younger person could decide to ride to the nearest village without fearing that a lifetime would prove too short for the journey.³⁰

Scale effects, as Clark points out, present a persistent challenge to an intuitive, human-sized view of the world. In engineering terms, for instance, the consequences of an increase in scale do not follow an immediately predictable, linear pattern: a design that is structurally sound in a miniature wooden model of a building will not necessarily prove stable in a full-sized construction made from the same material.³¹ Climatology finds it easier to make predictions for the planet as a whole, a closed system, than for any one of the regions it is composed of.³² Behaviour that seems perfectly reasonable on the scale of individuals, meanwhile, appears inexplicably self-destructive on a species level.

The short Kafka text ‘Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer’ — and the thematically linked fragment ‘Unser Städtchen liegt … ’ — exhibit an obsession with various versions of such scale effects. ‘Ich hüte mich vor Verallgemeinerungen,’ declares the narrator of ‘Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer’ towards the end of their analysis, ‘und behaupte nicht, dass es sich in allen zehntausend Dörfern unserer Provinz so verhält oder gar in allen fünfhundert Provinzen Chinas’.³³ Despite this claim of humility, the narrator’s confidence suffices to identify ‘immer wieder und überall einen gewissen gemeinsamen Grundzug’ across this mind-boggling proliferation of geographical units, creating a sense of each village as a microcosm of the whole [BB 355]. The opening paragraphs of ‘Unser Städtchen liegt … ’, meanwhile, represent an attempt to repeatedly up the ante by adding and multiplying units of a similar kind. ‘Man wird müde wenn man sich einen Teil des Weges vorstellt,’ we learn of the distance between this Städtchen and the border,

und mehr als einen Teil kann man sich gar nicht vorstellen. Auch große Städte liegen auf dem Weg, viel größer als unser Städtchen. Zehn solche Städtchen nebeneinander gelegt und von oben noch zehn solche Städtchen hineingezwängt ergeben noch keine dieser riesigen und engen Städte.³⁴

Unlike most of the examples offered by Clark, this particular version of a play with scale is numerical in structure. Rather than zooming in or out to reveal the contrasting forms visible at different levels of magnification, the scale effect in these fragments consists in multiplying recognizable units until they exceed our mental capacity. By building out of ‘Teil[en]’, ‘Städtchen’, ‘Dörfern’ and ‘Provinzen’ compounds that tip over into the realm of the inconceivable, Kafka lays the groundwork for an equation of the numerically vast with the infinite: ‘Die Grenzen, die meine Denkfähigkeit mir setzt, sind ja eng genug,’ the narrator of ‘Beim Bau … ’ muses, ‘das Gebiet aber, das hier zu durchlaufen wäre, ist das Endlose’ [BB 346].

Another important innovation of Kafka’s work, then, lies in opening up a space for the metaphysical, one of the central features that connects his work with that of Tokarczuk. Scale derangement, after all, results from the overwhelming sense that climate change is both everything and nothing, in that it affects all things but is no one thing we can point at; it is, as Norah Campbell et al. write, ‘the 100 trillion objects that are in, that are the Earth, traversing the stomach lining of the Burmese python and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation’.³⁵ One response to this condition — the one proposed by Campbell and her co-writers — is to lean in to the absolutization of climate change, arguing that to conceive it as ‘some “thing” that we can divide and see behind, mis-ontologizes its very nature’.³⁶ The overlap between scale derangements and speculative or absolutizing moves of this kind is anticipated in the indeterminate status of Kafka’s Kaiser. In the vast expanse of this China, Beijing is ‘nur ein Punkt, und das kaiserliche Schloß nur ein Pünktchen. Der Kaiser als solcher allerdings, wiederum groß durch alle Stockwerke der Welt. Der lebendige Kaiser aber ein Mensch wie wir’ [BB 350].

The perplexity evinced here by the move of flipping back and forth between scales is a theological one. Faced with the difficulty of climate change making up the totality of everything without residing identifiably in any one thing, many of the models we have inherited for representing it — and, indeed, for representing the impossibility of such representations — verge on the religious or mystical. Such overtones are particularly evident in one of the aesthetic features that is most distinctive in Flanagan’s writing: the tendency to zoom out or pan away from one thing towards all other things in almost cinematic fashion. This technique is arguably at its most straightforward when it draws explicitly on theological traditions, appearing in such cases as another means of containing that which is infinite or absolute.

This vision of profound ‘entanglement’ appears to constitute its own endless knot: in disrupting the anthropocentrism that has caused such untold damage, it also presents a challenge to the notions of agency and accountability that might allow us to act and counteract. The scale effects in these texts leave the human as agent standing on shifting sands, overwhelmed by everything that is, as Kafka has it, ‘für den einzelnen Menschen wenigstens mit eigenen Augen und eigenem Maßstab […] unnachprüfbar’ [BB 338].

Parables

It is this element of ‘Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer’ that is captured, in microcosm, in the most famous part of the text. Like the intratextual parable ‘Vor dem Gesetz’, which encapsulates on a small scale the overall pattern of Der Process, the ‘Sage’ used to express the relationship between the emperor and his subjects was the only section of ‘Beim Bau […]’ published during Kafka’s lifetime, and stands alone as a vivid representation of scale derangement under the title ‘Eine kaiserliche Botschaft’. To the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, the success of the fragment might have a simple explanation. ‘What we are missing’, she claims in ‘The Tender Narrator’, ‘is the dimension of the story that is the parable’.³⁷

Like Flanagan, Tokarczuk is acutely aware of the climate crisis. In her Nobel lecture, she names ‘the climate emergency and the political crisis in which we are now trying to find our way’ as the forces her writing sets itself against.³⁸ Tokarczuk, too, nods explicitly to Kafka both in interviews and within her work: towards the end of her ‘constellation novel’ Flights (Bieguni, 2007; trans. Jennifer Croft, 2017), for instance, a preserved spine looks to the narrator like ‘a Gregor Samsa assembled out of nerves and plexuses’.³⁹ Much more than her Australian counterpart, however, Tokarczuk follows her Central European forebear in responding to this knowledge through a play with literary form, especially of the fragmentary or pithy variety.⁴⁰ Where Flanagan incorporates his chosen Zürau aphorism into the flow of a novel, for instance, Tokarczuk assembles many of her works from disparate episodes, narrative scraps and aphoristic observations. Her breakthrough novel Primeval and Other Times (Prawiek i inne czasy, 1996; trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones, 2010) takes a unique approach to scale effects. Where ‘Eine kaiserliche Botschaft’ portrays mind-boggling distance in the temporal terms of transmission, and where the Anthropocene concept draws our attention not least to inhuman time scales, Primeval and Other Times is told episodically through the ‘time’ of each narrative subject. These are most often human characters, but also include plants and animals (‘The Time of the Lime Trees’; ‘The Time of Dolly’, a local dog); objects (‘The Time of Misia’s Grinder’) and divine or seemingly eternal entities (‘The Time of Misia’s Angel’; ‘The Time of Primeval’). It is in Flights, however, that she departs from the more uniform structure of her earlier fragmentary novels, offering instead a Sammelsurium of mismatched pieces. Among these, towards the very end of the book, is a one-page parable à la Kafka titled ‘On the Origin of Species’.

‘The planet’s witnessing the appearance of new creatures now’, it begins, ‘ones that have already conquered all continents and almost every ecological niche’ [F 403]. It is another couple of paragraphs before the species in question is named:

The experts say these plastic bags open up a whole new chapter of earthly existence, breaking nature’s age-old habits. They’re made up of their surfaces exclusively, empty on the inside, and this historic foregoing of all contents unexpectedly affords them great evolutionary benefits. [Ibid]

Immediately, there are a few elements here that warrant further attention. The first is the description of the bags as ‘creatures’, a borderline anthropomorphism that serves the functions both of humour and of what Tokarczuk terms narrative ‘tenderness’. In her Nobel lecture, titled after this trait, she links it to a childhood memory of listening — ‘with flushed cheeks and tears in my eyes’ — to a Hans Christian Andersen story about a broken teapot. Tenderness, she writes, ‘personalizes everything to which it relates […] It is thanks to tenderness that the teapot starts to talk’.⁴¹ The same call to ‘subjectify the universe’⁴² can be heard throughout a whole strain of ecocritical theory, associated perhaps most strongly with the vital materialism of Jane Bennett. For Bennett, in turn, Kafka’s works often provide the touchstone for non-human sympathy, from the captured gorilla Rotpeter to the ‘animate wood’ of the mysterious being Odradek.⁴³ It is to Odradek that Tokarczuk’s plastic bags might most readily be compared. This strange animate object is described by Kafka as a ‘Wesen’ or ‘Gebilde’ — indeterminate words that are often rendered, in the English translations familiar to Bennett, as ‘creature’.⁴⁴ Odradek is both an ‘es’ and, as the story unfolds, an ‘er’. For Bennett, who views the climate and biodiversity crises as arising from a misconception of matter as passive and inert, Odradek’s key feature is that, if he or it is an artifact, ‘its purpose is obscure’.⁴⁵ ‘On the Origin of Species’, by comparison, takes an object associated almost exclusively with its use value — the poster child for single-use plastic — and divorces it completely from this human-centred function, reducing it to pure form while endowing it with a life of its own. It has become almost a commonplace that, as Robert Macfarlane puts it, ‘plastic […] the substance that has served as our most perfect container […] now overwhelms our systems of containment’.⁴⁶ Tokarczuk’s parabolic fragment refuses even this anthropocentric view of a rebuke to human mastery. Where Kafka’s story ends with a rueful nod to the longer timescale of objects — ‘die Vorstellung, daß er mich auch noch überleben sollte, ist mir eine fast schmerzliche’⁴⁷ — ‘On the Origin of Species’ takes a more detached view of the bags’ longevity, stating matter-of-factly that ‘their fleeting bodies won’t decompose for some three hundred more years’ [F 404].

This distance is closely related to the question of humour in Anthropocene fiction, including in Tokarczuk’s work. A growing body of criticism points to the crucial role humour can play in offsetting the potential preachiness and self-seriousness of environmentally engaged fiction. These discussions often hinge on the social functions of irony and self-reflexivity, as exemplified by Nicole Seymour’s groundbreaking work Bad Environmentalism (2018).⁴⁸ If irony is in essence a form of distance, however, then ‘On the Origin of Species’ takes this further still. It progresses past everyday irony into what Seymour has posited — with reference to Tokarczuk’s work — as a kind of ‘warm irony’, as opposed to the ‘cold irony’ that can serve to mock or belittle.⁴⁹ The joke of the text is, in part, that the trajectory of the bags mirrors our own early development so neatly: a destructive, invasive species more or less by accident, not meaning to be, just going about its business. It is for this reason that the bags are not named in the opening paragraphs, inviting — along with the Darwinian title — the initial assumption that the species in question is us. The humour of the fragment, then, lies in its polite distance from the fate of the human species as a whole. ‘Kafka’s humour’, David Foster Wallace claimed — in remaining ‘not only not neurotic but anti-neurotic, heroically sane — is, finally, a religious humour’.⁵⁰ The same technique, of observing with mild interest events which are otherwise tragic, dramatic or painful, is what distinguishes this fragment — and Tokarczuk’s writing more broadly — from the vast majority of climate-conscious contemporary fiction.

Indeed, the other aesthetic principle put forward in ‘The Tender Narrator’ is the dream of narrating from a ‘fourth-person’ perspective.⁵¹ The closest we have come to this radically distant viewpoint, Tokarczuk suggests, is the narrator of the Book of Genesis, who ‘with a steady hand set down on paper the incredible sentence: “And God saw that it was good”’.⁵² To take once more the counter-example of The Overstory, this might appear at first to be the same fantasy of an all-encompassing omniscience evinced by Powers’ opening line. Compared to the ex-nihilo approach of ‘First there was nothing. Then there was everything’, however, Tokarczuk’s example couples ineffable knowledge with the earlier call for tenderness. In her model of narrative, even God cannot exist alone. Where The Overstory is constantly at pains to spell out that ‘there are no individuals in a forest, no separable events’⁵³ — and where Gould’s Book proclaims that ‘implicit in a single seahorse was the universe’ [GB 402] — Tokarczuk’s prose tends to enact this knowledge through forms that are collective or reciprocal. Her answer to Gould’s sensation of being trapped in a book written by someone else, for instance, is to imagine that people are always mutually ‘writ[ing] each other down’ [F 409]. Where Gould reads in horror about his own act of reading, the narrator of Flights observes a man who ‘takes off his shoes, places his backpack at his feet’, and begins to write in a notebook: ‘So I also get out my notebook and start to write about this man writing down. Chances are he’s now writing: “Woman writing something down. She’s taken off her shoes and placed her backpack at her feet … ”’ [F 408; ellipsis in original].

In ‘On the Origin of Species’, this is mirrored by a final parabolic element inherited from Kafka: a tone of hearsay and almost folkish conjecture. For a critical and fictional discourse that so frequently emphasises a sense of mystical entanglement or unknowability, there is a striking amount of didacticism at play in Anthropocene fiction. Scientist characters abound, from the plant biologist Dr. Pat Westerford in The Overstory to the conservationist Lisa Shahn in Flanagan’s latest novel — often as a means of shoehorning relevant information into the story, and as tragic observers of denial and inaction. ‘The experts’ [F 403] exist in Kafka’s parables and in Tokarczuk’s fragment, too, but their findings are reported second-hand, with the element of perplexity and confusion already built in. ‘Es gab’, writes the narrator of ‘Beim Bau … ’ about a fictional anthropological study linking the Great Wall to the Tower of Babel, ‘viel Verwirrung der Köpfe damals […] Das menschliche Wesen, leichtfertig in seinem Grund, von der Natur des auffliegenden Staubes, verträgt keine Fesselung’ [BB 344]. The same mixture of metaphysical speculation with everyday bemusement is captured in ‘On the Origin of Species’:

Some, in a kind of metaphysical rapture, believe […] that [the bags] are pure form that seeks contents but immediately tires of them, throwing themselves to the wind yet again. Others, meanwhile, with their feet more firmly on the ground, assert that […] [F 404].

This structure of ‘some say, others say’ is exactly how the story of Odradek begins: ‘Die einen sagen, das Wort Odradek stamme aus dem Slawischen […] Andere wieder meinen, es stamme aus dem Deutschen’.⁵⁴ The uncertainty of both claims in this form, meanwhile, ‘läßt wohl mit Recht darauf schließen, daß keine zutrifft’.⁵⁵ Some, like Flanagan and Powers, say that this type of equivocation can only be a hindrance when faced with the urgency of the climate crisis. Others, like Tokarczuk, hold that the constant undermining of certainty is not only the wellspring of fiction, but also the path to more self-aware and tender forms of action. ‘Tenderness’, after all, implies not only care towards something outside of the self, but also a willingness to be vulnerable, to be unsure.

One thing, however, is certain: Kafka’s influence resounds throughout the recent fiction of Flanagan, Tokarczuk and many of their prominent contemporaries. Those writing under the sign of the climate and biodiversity crises find in his work not only a keen understanding of the state of denial and a palpable sense of disorientation and delay, but also a play with insides and outsides, scale and narrative distance that captures the complexity of the present better than any encyclopaedic novel. From the extent of these authors’ allusion to and engagement with Kafka, we might even speculate that his literary models have — in untimely fashion — found their most fitting content in the new context of the Anthropocene.

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Notes on contributors

Conor Brennan

Conor Brennan is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at Trinity College Dublin. His doctoral research, funded by the Irish Research Council, analyses aesthetic responses to the climate emergency in the works of Christoph Ransmayr, Olga Tokarczuk and Richard Flanagan.

Notes

1 Richard Powers, The Overstory (New York: W.W. Norton, 2018), p. iii.

2 Timothy Morton, Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (London: Verso, 2019), p. 6.

3 Norah Campbell, Gerard McHugh & P. J. Ennis, ‘Climate Change Is Not A Problem: Speculative Realism at the End of Organization’, in Organization Studies, Vol. 40 (2019), p. 740.

4 Ibid, p. 726.

5 Powers, The Overstory, p. 3.

6 Ibid, p. 502. Italics in original.

7 Richard Flanagan, Gould’s Book of Fish (London: Vintage, 2016), p. 440. Subsequent references to this edition will be abbreviated as GB and given in-text.

8 Richard Flanagan, ‘I didn’t want to write this, but the courage to listen to different ideas is vanishing’ <https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jul/29/i-didnt-want-to-write-this-but-the-courage-to-listen-to-different-ideas-is-vanishing> [Accessed March 22, 2022].

9 Hannes Bergthaller also notes the ‘oddly dislocated’ quality of Kafka’s metaphor in the context of climate change. See Bergthaller, ‘Climate Change and Un-Narratability’, p. V-1. <http://metaphora.univie.ac.at/volume2-bergthaller.pdf> [Accessed June 26, 2022].

10 ‘Ich glaube, man sollte überhaupt nur solche Bücher lesen, die einen beißen und stechen. […] Ein Buch muß die Axt sein für das gefrorene Meer in uns.’ Franz Kafka, in Franz Kafka: Briefe 1902–1924, ed. Max Brod (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1966), p. 27.

11 Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), pp. 19–20.

12 Richard Flanagan, ‘Does writing matter?’, The Monthly, Oct 2016 <https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2016/october/1475244000/richard-flanagan/does-writing-matter> [Accessed March 22, 2022].

13 Richard Flanagan, Toxic: The Rotting Underbelly of the Tasmanian Salmon Industry (London: Penguin, 2022).

14 Beejay Silcox, ‘A wrenching response to a devastated world’ <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/oct/16/the-living-sea-of-waking-dreams-by-richard-flanagan-review-a-wrenching-response-to-a-devastated-world> [Accessed March 22, 2022].

15 David Foster Wallace, ‘Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness From Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed’, in The David Foster Wallace Reader (London: Penguin, 2014), p. 851.

16 It would be useless to inform the condemned of his sentence, the officer explains: ‘Er erfährt es ja auf seinem Leib’. Franz Kafka, ‘In der Strafkolonie’, in Franz Kafka: Die Erzählungen und andere ausgewählte Prosa, ed. Roger Hermes (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 2013), pp. 149–80 (p. 154).

17 Ibid, p. 173.

18 Franz Kafka, ‘Die Verwandlung’, in Franz Kafka: Die Erzählungen und andere ausgewählte Prosa, ed. Roger Hermes (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 2013), pp. 88–146 (p. 88).

19 Richard Flanagan, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (London: Chatto & Windus, 2021), p. 15.

20 Ibid.

21 Richard Flanagan, ‘Tapping A Cracked Kettle’, in The Best Australian Essays 1998, ed. Peter Craven (Melbourne: Bookman Press, 1998), pp. 69–75 (p. 69).

22 Franz Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente II, ed. Jost Schillemeit. Franz Kafka: Schriften, Tagebücher, Briefe: Kritische Ausgabe (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1992), p. 117.

23 Richard Flanagan, First Person (London: Vintage, 2018), p. 389.

24 Ibid, p. 390.

25 Powers, The Overstory, p. 380.

26 Dwyer Murphy, ‘Richard Flanagan: More Corpses than Words’ <https://www.guernicamag.com/richard-flanagan-more-corpses-than-words> [Accessed March 22, 2022].

27 Timothy Clark, ‘Scale’, in Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change (Open Humanities Press/University of Michigan Library, 2012), pp. 148–66 (p. 159).

28 Ibid.

29 Ibid, p. 151.

30 Franz Kafka, ‘Das nächste Dorf’, in Franz Kafka: Die Erzählungen und andere ausgewählte Prosa, ed. Roger Hermes (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 2013), p. 311.

31 Clark, ‘Scale’, p. 149.

32 Ibid.

33 Franz Kafka, ‘Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer’, in Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente I, ed. Malcolm Pasley. Franz Kafka: Schriften, Tagebücher, Briefe: Kritische Ausgabe (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1993), pp. 337–57 (p. 355). Subsequent references to this edition will be abbreviated as BB and given in-text.

34 Franz Kafka, ‘Unser Städtchen liegt … ’, in Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente II, ed. Jost Schillemeit. Franz Kafka: Schriften, Tagebücher, Briefe: Kritische Ausgabe (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1992), pp. 261–69 (p. 261).

35 Campbell et al., ‘Climate Change Is Not A Problem’, p. 740.

36 Ibid, p. 726.

37 Olga Tokarczuk, ‘The Tender Narrator’ (‘Przemowa noblowska’), trans. by Jennifer Croft & Antonia Lloyd-Jones, 2019. <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2018/tokarczuk/lecture/> [Accessed March 22, 2022].

38 Ibid.

39 Olga Tokarczuk, Flights, trans. Jennifer Croft (London: Fitzcarraldo, 2018), p. 405. Subsequent references to this edition will be abbreviated as F and given in-text.

40 The author herself draws this connection in an interview from the time of her Nobel win: ‘But I also like this kind of parabolic writing, also rooted in Central Europe, like Franz Kafka for instance.’ <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2018/tokarczuk/159844-olga-tokarczuk-interview-transcript> [Accessed March 22, 2022].

41 Tokarczuk, ‘The Tender Narrator’.

42 Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘Deep in Admiration’, in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, ed. Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan & Nils Bubandt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), pp. M15–M21 (p. M16).

43 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 7; cf. pp. 52–53.

44 Franz Kafka, ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’, in Franz Kafka: Die Erzählungen und andere ausgewählte Prosa, ed. Roger Hermes (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 2013), pp. 312–13 (p. 312); Bennett, Vibrant Matter, p. 12.

45 Ibid.

46 Robert Macfarlane, Underland (London: Penguin, 2020), p. 320.

47 Kafka, ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’, p. 312.

48 Nicole Seymour, Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).

49 Nicole Seymour, ‘Satire’, in The Edinburgh Companion to Vegan Literary Studies, ed. Laura Wright & Emelia Quinn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022), p.

50 Wallace, ‘Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness’, p. 850.

51 Tokarczuk, ‘The Tender Narrator’.

52 Ibid.

53 Powers, The Overstory, p. 218.

54 Kafka, ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’, p. 312.

55 Ibid.