“Ohne Ergebnis wurde die Kralle wohl niemals angesetzt”
Reflections on Kafka’s Zoopoetics in “Erinnerungen an die Kaldabahn” and “Der Bau”
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21814/2i.7212Keywords:
Franz Kafka, zoopoetics, rats and mice, metaphor, writingAbstract
This article reconsiders Franz Kafka’s little-known fragment Erinnerungen an die Kaldabahn (1914) [Memories of the Kalda Railway] as a key document for his zoopoetics. Set in a remote railway outpost, the narrative centres on a solitary station agent whose hut is incessantly undermined by burrowing rats, a nocturnal activity that gradually comes to figure the writing process itself. The animals appear both as agents of inscription and as a threatening force that destabilizes the very ground on which writing rests. Tracing a trajectory from Erinnerungen an die Kaldabahn to the late story Der Bau [The Burrow], the article shows how Kafka develops a poetics in which animality mediates questions of identity and mediality, exposing writing as a material practice that resists mastery and requires an uneasy accommodation with nonhuman forces already at work within language.
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