Faithfully Seeking Franz by Elana Wolff
A Review by Michael Greenstein
In her lifelong quest for Kafka, Elana Wolff marshals four epigraphs as companions. The first quotation is from Kafka himself: “I believe in the power of places … perhaps I’m not allowed to remain too long in one place.” (1923) One hundred years later, Faithfully Seeking Franz traverses many of the places Kafka lived in or visited. Wolff likewise does not dwell long in one place but manages to capture a sense of Kafka’s places through words and photographs. The second epigraph is from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, also a century ago: “the unseen part of us … might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places.” An homage to Kafka, Faithfully Seeking Franz is a creative melange of genres with varying shapes, tones, moods, and extensive bibliography wherein the author wears her learning lightly. When she writes that Max Brod’s biography of Kafka has been criticized for crossing into hagiography, she approaches that line as well. Hagiographic and geographic, Wolff’s itinerary never fails to interest and inform.
Her opening poem, “Before the Door,” interlaces through Kafka’s predicament: “In a story of parameters, a man from the country / comes to a door that’s guarded by a keeper.” This opening couplet addresses the original parable, for Wolff is a guide through Kafka’s guard. Free-wheeling couplets act as hinges for the door and dialectic between keeper and man from the country: “The keeper is a cog in the wheel, the countryman – let’s say – is free.” Dashes, ellipsis, parenthesis, and quotation marks contribute to the rhythm of hesitation: “(Isn’t ‘later’ the rub …)” This poem itself serves as an example of belatedness, wherein Wolff goes after her precursor wittily: “—just a smidgen’s whit –” that gets rhymed at the very end of the poem, “I have to shut it.” Whereas the countryman is ironically free, the keeper is subject to rules of f – furry-collared, fleas, and flinch. “Before the Door” serves as an apt introduction to what lies before, behind, and beyond Kafka’s doors and laws of meaning.
Wolff crosses over many thresholds as she segues from her opening poem to her first prose piece, “Kafka’s Death House.” In 2014 she and her husband M. spent four days in Vienna to visit Kafka’s Sterbehaus, 19 km northwest of the capital. A devotee, “I’ve slowly been tracing the author’s wake, M., my (sometimes) reluctant partner.” Her creative non-fiction mingles with Kafka’s life, as they cross paths through words and photographs. Indeed, many of the black-and-white photographs scattered throughout the book create an aura of authenticity and mystery. The very first photo reveals the spires of Klosterneuburg’s medieval abbey in a mist, as author and photographer attempt to penetrate the mists of Kafka’s life and work. Some of the photographs are a kind of counterpart to the X-rays of the patient’s tubercular lungs. Others give a much clearer picture of historic places that Franz visited.
One of the books that inspired Wolff’s experience is Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space where he writes: “Imagination augments the value of reality.” Wolff’s augmenting imagination appears in the serendipity of crows and jackdaws scattered throughout her search and research. (Kafka’s Czech name means jackdaw.) A photograph of this bird points to directions and meanings, as she develops portraits of Kafka’s friends – Max Brod, Georg Langer, and Robert Klopstock.
“Resurrecting Frank’s Foot” points to the nature of footnotes and following in Kafka’s footsteps. It also charmingly explains Wolff’s experience with the card game, Franzefuss, where she cites references to cards in Kafka’s fiction, letters, and diaries. As she traces the game of Franzefuss, she plays bridge with her precursor from her playful photograph with Kafka’s statue where she places her fingertips over Kafka’s toes – an artful linkage between sections in her book. Her “coda” to the card game reveals her own oversight: she had failed to notice the name of the game in Kafka’s letter to Felice on May 8, 1913. Wolff fittingly concludes shuffling and dealing her deck of cards: “Evidently, I didn’t see it for reading, which, I suppose is just as well. If I’d found it, my pursuit of it, which was a big part of the ferment, would have been much diminished.”
This pursuit of blindness and insight continues in “Two Short Talks,” an intertextual discussion with Anne Carson’s “Short Talk on Rectification” and “Short Talk on Waterproofing” – both talks dealing with Kafka. The former talk in sonnet form begins with “Kafka liked to have his watch an hour / and a half fast.” Carson’s and Wolff’s watches clock in a century after Kafka’s; like Felice, they attempt to set time right in their own belated forms of rectification. Wolff characterizes Carson’s talk as “the unsaid looming through the said,” which applies to Kafka’s writing as well. Admirably and admiringly, she fills in Carson’s omissions in her search and research mission. Similarly, she fills in the blanks of “Short Talk on Waterproofing,” which begins with “Franz Kafka was Jewish. He had a sis- / ter, Ottla, Jewish. Ottla married a jurist, Josef David, not Jewish.” In the centre of this short talk Ottla speaks about “sleep shapes.” What are these sleep shapes? The dreams and nightmares of Kafka and his sister rendered into mysterious prose poems? The shape of the Shoah that put millions to sleep? The shape of a short talk divided between prose and poetry where “sis-/ter” is split between Jewish and not Jewish, even as “ruck-/sack” and “naked-/ness” are divided in solemn somnolence?
Wolff’s poem “K.” encapsulates her approach to her precursor: “You sang the ancient wail of the sad animal, / made it always modern.” If this sad animal mediates between ancient and modern, then the double simile that follows stretches the wail, “Like infinite wind, the dark at dusk — // elegant as number.” Faithfully Seeking Franz is filled with detours from the lyrical to the factual. “The relatively straight line a reader hopes a search will take veers sometimes – suddenly and unexpectedly – to yield thrill and delight.” This veering is part of the book’s charm, as the author reveals her erroneous way: “In reviewing my notes from the day, I discover what I’d half-expected: I had incorrectly copied Milena and Ernst’s address.”
From Berlin to Vienna Wolff visits the Kunsthistorisches Museum to view a Rothko retrospective and is “moved by the huge, prayerful colour field paintings, the way the canvases resist my attempts to capture them.” Are there parallels between Rothko’s rectangles and Kafka’s parables in their resistance to interpretation? In these stories of parameters, one stands before the door, the law, and floating zones of colour. A chain smoker alternating between brush and cigarette, Rothko created smokescreens in the foreground to cover mysteries in his background behind the door and the law. As he wrote: “I have imprisoned the most utter violence in every square inch of their surface.” Similarly, Kafka’s abstract expressionism also exhibits prayerful fields, zones of hesitation, and revealed concealment. Rothko’s rectangles are masks; Kafka’s metamorphosis and penal colony mask modernism and millennia. With laboured breath, tubercular writer and depressed painter breathed life into their work.
Wolff’s faithful search is filled with felicitous coincidences so that the accidental becomes central to her quest: “the unexpected, compressed turn of the conversation – as in a Kafka story, where things often happen suddenly, oddly and by seemingly accidental leaping advancement.” Wolff’s serendipity of oversight and insight is the reader’s good fortune, as Kafkaesque concatenations abound in her thoughtful and thoroughly engaging reconstruction.
Elana Wolff has published six solo collections of poetry with Guernica Editions, including You Speak to Me in Trees, awarded the F.G. Bressani Prize for Poetry, and, most recently, Swoon, winner of the 2020 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry. Elana has taught English for Academic Purposes at York University in Toronto and The Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She currently divides her professional time between writing poetry and creative nonfiction, literary editing, and designing and facilitating social art courses.
Publisher : Guernica Editions (Nov. 1 2023)
Language : English
Paperback : 314 pages
ISBN-10 : 1771838205
ISBN-13 : 978-1771838207
Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English at the Université de Sherbrooke. He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.