In Franz Kafka’s Beim Bau des Chinesischen Mauer, there is a silence and juxtaposition between the official justification of the building of the Great Wall and the hidden knowledge of the Chinese. The lack of opposing rationales or reflection on
In Franz Kafka’s Beim Bau des Chinesischen Mauer, there is a silence and juxtaposition between the official justification of the building of the Great Wall and the hidden knowledge of the Chinese. The lack of opposing rationales or reflection on opposition makes it impossible for the subjects of China to gain freedom. The narrator, on the other hand, does not look to the Emperor and his classical teachings, but looks to the characteristics of the world around him – the people, the construction of the wall – to investigate the situation. This type of rationale is akin to modernism, a subject prominent in Chinese intellectual thought of Lu Xun, Kang Youwei and Liang Shuming. These thinkers, as well as Walter Benjamin, give us insight to the expression of modernism in terms of worldliness. The ultimate goal of this study is to provide a case for the worldliness presented in Mauer by highlighting themes of Chinese modern thought.
The Case of China and Kafka
It wasn’t only Kafka who likened himself, im Grunde, to the Chinese. For Kafka’s tenth Todestag memorial, Walter Benjamin contextualized Kafka’s mythic spirit in Chinese genealogy, “Unter den Ahnen, die Kafka in der Antike hat, den jüdischen und den chinesischen, auf die wir noch stoßen werden, ist dieser griechische nicht zu vergessen.” (Benjamin, 5) At once Benjamin invokes Kafka’s worldliness, grounding him in the primordial cornerstones of the early modern world. What makes Kafka particularly Chinese is essentially what makes him non-European: “Die natürliche Auslegung ist der eine, die übernatürliche ist der andere; am Wesentlichen gehen beide – die psychoanalytische wie die theologische – in gleicher Weise vorbei.” (ibid., 16) Unanswering to the investigations of European modernity, Benjamin uses the Zeitgeist to organize Kafka under the utter difference ascribed to the Chinese:
“»Ihm gilt grade die Fülle der Welt als das allein Wirkliche. Aller Geist muß dinglich, besondert sein, um hier Platz und Daseinsrecht zu bekommen« Das Geistige, insofern es noch eine Rolle spielt, wird zu Geistern. Die Geister werden zu ganz individuellen Individuen, selber benannt und dem Namen des Verehrers aufs besonderste verbunden.« […] Es ist nun freilich nicht Kafka, von dem hier die Rede ist – es ist China.” (ibid., 20)
What is most important about Benjamin referencing China is not what he suggests about Kafka’s work in its “inexhaustible intermediate world”, rather that Kafka’s Chinabild is canonized alongside him, confirming a cross-cultural process of modernity. Though Benjamin quotes Franz Rosenzweig’s Stern der Erlösung, a piece in which China is placed opposite the West, he is not polemicizing Kafka nor China, but emphasizing the unorthodoxy of Kafka’s contribution “um die Frage der Organisation des Lebens und der Arbeit in der menschlichen Gemeinschaft.” (ibid., 11)
In binding the Chinabild with Kafka’s fictional oeuvre, Benjamin posits that Western culture is “haunted by its own structural obverse”. That is, the West is comprised of systems of binaries: the subjective vs. the collective, and the material vs. the spiritual. “In seiner Tiefe berührt Kafka den Grund, den weder das »mythische Ahnungswissen« noch die »existenzielle Theologie« ihm gibt.” (ibid., 22) Kafka doesn’t ground himself in mythical divination or existential theologies that his Western upbringing supplied him with, but adds to the constitution of the West by exemplifying a critical antithesis. Benjamin positioned “Beim Bau des Chinesischen Mauer” in its profound contrariety to Western dualities, “eine Erfahrung, die tiefer geht als die des Durchschnittsbürgers, trifft auf sie auf,” (ibid., 19) and through this, brought forth the worldliness of his work. In this essay, I will respond to Benjamin’s assertion of Kafka’s worldliness in Mauer, looking not to Western dualities from which it differs, but to conception of worldliness that offers a framework for how we might understand Kafka. By analysing Kafka’s canonical European literature through the works of Kang Youwei, Liang Schuming and Lu Xun, his worldliness becomes an alternative dialectic of modernity.
Fragmentation in Beim Bau des Chinesischen Mauer
Kafka’s testament to the Great Wall of China is not a parable of reason or of God, but as the title infers, a parable beim Bau. Alluding to the Great Wall’s fragmented and episodic construction, Kafka’s title also requires his reader to consider its emblematic status in the development of China. Built across 6,259 kilometres of China’s northern border, the disjointed assembly of the Great Wall submits to its representation of cultural, geographic and historical continuity. Kafka’s German title already suggests an architectural and epochal fragmentation of the wall, while it’s English title, “The Great Wall of China”, misses this allusion.
Paradoxically, Kafka’s fragmentation became a prominent example for the construction of Europe’s “dominant literary tradition”. Advancing Benjamin’s conviction that Kafka cannot be “oedipalized by a mother narrative”, that is, categorized in European terms, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari allow Kafka a canonical exegesis as a “minor literature” in which “there is insurmountable discontinuity… in his mode of expression through fragments” (Deleuze, 72). Deleuze and Guattari distinguish three categories of “minor literature”, which have influenced my coming reflection on Kafka’s fragmentation: collectivity, politics as “neither imaginary or symbolic” (ibid., 7), and deterritorialization. They address Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer specifically: “the fragments refer so much to the imperial transcendence and a hidden unity that certain persons will feel that the discontinuous wall will find its only finality 