ROBERT ALTER
Modernism and Nostalgia
Kafka and Proust were Walter Benjamin's two touchstones of literary
modernism. He collaborated in the translation of two volumes of Proust's
vast novel, and throughout the 1930s he meditated on Kafka, from
his
1934 Jiidische Rundschau
essay to his 1938 essay-letter to Gersham
Scholem, by which time he was actually thinking about doing a book on
Kafka - the only contemporary to whose work he would contemplate
devoting such attention. In one obvious way, there was an element of in–
evitability in Benjamin's choice of Kafka and Proust as his two defining
modernist figures. Among the novelists whose masterworks were pub–
lished in the early 1920s, when Benjamin was emerging as a critic, the
three most radical innovators were Joyce, Kafka, and Proust, and though I
suspect Benjamin would have found much to admire passionately in
Joyce, the language barrier kept the Irish writer at a distance, whereas
Kafka and Proust were products, respectively, of Benjamin's native and
adopted European culture. The uncompromising radicalism of Kafka's
and Proust's literary projects clearly spoke to Benjamin's own problematic
sense of modernity. He begins his 1929 essay on Proust (available in
English in the volume titled
Illuminations)
by noting with approval the
idea "that all great works of literature found a genre or dissolve one."
This rather general notion is strongly reinforced by Benjamin's implicit
assumption in his discussions of both Proust and Kafka that European cul–
ture in the early twentieth century stood under a sign of historical crisis
that particularly demanded for its authentic expression the dissolution and
creation of literary forms. Proust thus may be a grand culmination of the
realist novel as it had been perfected in nineteenth-century France, but he
overflows its generic channels, sweeping fiction into autobiography, social
and moral analysis, philosophic reflection, and poetry. And Kafka, in quite
an opposite direction, invokes the antecedent tradition of the European
novel in a kind of fantastic recapitulation (as Marthe Robert has argued),
while willfully short-circuiting most of its operating assumptions about
causality, temporal continuity, the rep'resentation of character, place, and
social milieu.
The evident oppositeness of Proust and Kafka deserves reflection.
They are, in fact, so different from each other that most critics who have
