Finding Oneself Awoken From: Nonhuman Metamorphoses

Abstract

The forms of, and resistances to, narrative development in Kafka often rely upon strange “awakenings,” including Karl Roßman’s stunted progress in the oft-overlooked Amerika. Kafka’s narrators, characters, and readers cling together, negotiating unreliable aesthetic differences between abject existence obliged to sociation, “feeling” abject like some excluded atrocity, or “actually” being huge, fantastic, genderless vermin. This recurs in The Trial, but K.’s “literal” moment of waking is subtly erased: one morning, he was arrested (verhaftet). This is even more alienating—free indirect discourse dominates and subjects long after aperture. The in media res narration depends upon Kafka’s erlebte Rede, the primary mode of the “Kafkaesque,” where speculative narration and bureaucratic sociation in anonymous modernity are fused as, not “prior to” or grounding experience and reflection.