Modernism’s Preoccupation with motion, movement, travel, and migration.
Written by Bhagath Subramanian.
Despite having limited his travels to inside Europe, Franz Kafka was known to have displayed an affection for travel to far away lands. Growing into a young man at the turn of the century, Kafka was no stranger to the excitement that surrounded the new modes of quick and long travel that modernity offered European society. It was an excitement that found its way into Kafka’s work, as it did with the rest of the Modernist movement in Europe at the time. This essay will seek to establish an understanding of the crucial role that fin-de-siecle travel played in influencing modernism. By examining Kafka’s relationship with travel in the Modernist age, as well as his novella The Metamorphosis, we can understand the role that travel played in giving rise to crucial modernist ideas such as the absurd and the new, and how these ideas were internalised in Kafka’s work to portray a new image of Europe in the age of modern travel.
At the age of six, Franz Kafka was photographed in a studio adorned with palm fronds. Clutching a wide brimmed hat typically worn by Spaniards at the time, the image echoed a fascination for the foreign and the exotic (Zilcosky 2003, p.19). As Kafka grew older, his fascination with travel also grew. He spent time reading travel writing and travelled a lot himself, albeit limited to Europe. He was also known to have a fondness for colonial fantasy stories primarily written for boys. Kafka, and many others of his time, displayed a keen interest in the strange happenings of these far off strange lands, of which they’d heard colonial stories about but never had the chance to visit. The rising secularism and migration to Europe that came with the turn of the century began to breakdown the gap between story and reality for the collective imagination of many. Colonial narratives and preconceptions were being reconsidered, thereby making modernism’s rise deeply embedded in conversations that stem from colonial and neo-colonial discussions (Aguiar 2008).
One of the other most important cultural contexts responsible for the sharp increase in interest in Modernist literature was transport. At the turn of the century transport had quickly developed to a point of high accessibility and high speed, allowing a larger number of the population access to the rest of the European continent and beyond. This, along with other factors such as the rise of secularist thought, technological advancement, and new artistic mediums such as cinema and photography, created a new world that required new ways of artistic exploration to better grapple with these new concepts (Goldman 2004, Preface). Embracing modernism allowed for this. However, it was not meant to just be an endless pursuit of the new. Modernism allowed for artists to engage with and relate to their contemporary present. Through this, modernity became a practice of interrogating the present that rejects both immediate past and the present (Aguiar 2008).
If we begin to look for an intersection between interest in travel, technology, secularism, migration, and colonial narratives, we can say that the railway and its spread throughout the world, particularly in Europe and South Asia, stands as the ultimate material symbol of evidence for the rise in modernity. For western society and modernity, the railway as a symbol can stand for secularism, nationalism, technology, and deterritorialisation. The train carried occupants from environments with which they were familiar with, to strange new places, and vice versa. It helped to recontextualise people and their relative geography, to such a degree that it helped to shape the identity of these people (Aguiar 2008).
In Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (2003), Gregor Samsa is a traveling salesman. Most of his travel is done on the railway, and his primary worries at the beginning of the story is about being unable to catch his train in time for his work. In his 2003 book, John Zilcosky argues that Gregor’s being a traveling salesman is an important, deliberate choice made by Kafka. His job puts him on the road, away from his family, for days on end. His character is identified with “constant motion and perpetual unsettledness.” This is in stark contrast to the state in which we as the reader first encounter Gregor. At the beginning of the story, after he first realises his post-transformation state, he spends the first pages struggling to get out of bed. He can only move around the room and manoeuvre his body with incredible awkwardness and difficulty. He then spends the rest of the novella, except for two extremely brief instances, confined to his bedroom. He is defined by his inactivity (Zilcosky 2003, p.77).
His prior life as a traveller then begins to take on a symbolic meaning, as an extension of the symbolism of his confinement. Just as Gregor was defined by his travel before his transformation, he is defined by his travel after his transformation- his movements around his room, how the walls of the room are new to him, the way he controls his new body to move in new ways, and the difficulty he finds in these new movements. It is still travel, but now limited to inside his bedroom. Zilcosky argues that this is clear evidence of Kafka using travel as a metaphor for Gregor’s internal turmoil (p.72). Gregor is attempting to interface with his environment as he did in the past- through travel. It is an expression of Gregor’s identity, and his confused movements through his room symbolise an internal crisis. His identity is thrown into question. He is cut off from the world of modernity and travel, the world that he knows and has built his identity through. He must now face his new identity and this new state of being, while confined to a recontextualised world, one where familiarity with space ends with the four walls of his bedroom.
This re-evaluation of Gregor’s identity creates an absurd situation. This absurdity exists in the disconnect between Gregor’s identity and wishes at the beginning of the story and the state of his body. His taking the shape of a giant insect reflects the sort of creatures that were prominently featured in travel writing about colonial lands (Zilcosky 2003, p.78). The space immediately outside his room, like the Samsa living room, is foreign land to this new Gregor. His new body can even be considered to be a vehicle, much like the train, travelling around his room. Only this time, the foreign space is one that is relatively normal, and it is the occupied space that is strange. It is almost as if Kafka has internalised the exotic in Gregor’s transformation, inverting the relationship between what is local, European geography and what is foreign geography, that which is to be travelled to. In doing so, Kafka is calling into question the meaning of Gregor’s identity, and if it is any different from the lives and identities of those in strange, colonial lands that can only be accessed using modern travel. The absurd then becomes the epicentre, the originating point, for this exploration, and not the end goal. Gregor’s identity can no longer be tied to far off travel and lands away from home. That is now lost to him, and he must now confront the absurd reality of an identity that must be made sense of in his homeland, to which he is now unrecognisable and which to him is now unwelcoming.
Gregor’s absurd situation is reflective of a fin-de-siecle Europe that would soon have to grapple with its own identity. Much like how Gregor’s experience with travel and space was inverted so as to centre the unfamiliar and turn to familiarise the foreign, Europe would have to embrace its new identity as a land shaped by secularism and the ghosts of colonialism. The internalisation of the exotic in Gregor is emblematic of Europe beginning to internalise the changes that modernity would bring to society, changes that would have only been possible with modern transport. Kafka therefore was able to use the railway, and his protagonist’s experiences with it, as a symbolic extension of not just personal identity, but the identity of an entire continent undergoing a shift into modernity. Gregor’s transformation then is an entirely modernist attempt at giving physical form to a sort of absurd European identity crisis. Gregor himself is a testament to the gargantuan contribution that travel, its related concepts and technology had in developing modernism during the early 20th century. He is an extension of the railway, and the railway is an extension of European identity in the modern age. It then goes without saying, that Europe’s extension into colonized land allows those lands to then extend back into Europe, like how travel and the railway works two ways. What is foreign and exterior becomes internalised. What is familiar begins to take on new forms and new identities in a new age, like how the exotic manifests a new identity in Gregor, and how a secular Europe builds a new identity in modernity.
Cover photograph by Bhagath Subramanian.
© Bhagath Subramanian. All rights reserved.
REFERENCES:
Aguiar, M., 2008. Making Modernity: Inside the Technological Space of the Railway. Cultural Critique [online], 68, p.66-85.
Goldman, J., 2004. Modernism, 1910–1945 Image to Apocalypse [online]. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kafka, F., 2003. The Metamorphosis and Other Stories [online]. New York: Barnes and Noble Classics.
Zilcosky, J., 2003. Kafka’s Travels [online]. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.