Swift and Kafka

Swift's excremental vision (to use Norman O. Brown's phrase) of man as Yahoo matched Kafka's sickening self-loathing. Cutting across two centuries, two languages, and two cultures, Kafka found in Swift (a posthumous child who never knew his father) the quintessential characteristics we now recognize as Kafkaesque. Swift's Gulliver traveled the world to find his agonizing experiences; Kafka's heroes turned inward, tormented by their fathers and themselves.

1 In "Franz Kafka andjonathan Swift: A Symbiosis" (DalhousieReview45 [1965]: 60-65), Peter Neumeyer discussed Kafka's references to Swift in his Letters, but did not relate them to Kafka's stories or Letter to His Father. In "A Splacknuck and a Dung-Beetle: Realism and Probability in Swift and Kafka" (College English 31 [1969] : 376-391), Elizabeth MacAndrew described the vise of realistic techniques in Gulliver's Travels and "The Metamorphosis," but did not quote Kafka on Swift or refer to Neumeyer's article.

WORKS CITED

Kafka, Franz. Letter to His Father. Trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins. 1919; New York: Schocken, 1966.

____. Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors. Trans. Richard and Clara Winston. 1958; New York: Schocken, 1977.

____. Selected Short Stones. Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. Intro. by Philip Rahv. New York: Modern Library, 1952.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Witness to My Life: The Letters of Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir. Ed. Simone de Beauvoir. Trans. Lee Fahnestock and Norman MacAfee. 1983; New York: Scribner's, 1992.

Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver's Travels. Ed. with an intro. by Ricardo Quintana. New York: Modem Library, 1958.

JEFFREY MEYERS, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, has recently published biographies of Orwell and Maugham. He has just completed Impressionist Quartet: The Intimate Genius of Manet and Morisot, Degas and Cassait, and is now writing a life of Modigliani.

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