The Hidden Rabe

This essay explores the ways Kafka's transnational perspective works underground in Beckett's texts and mediates his move to French. The banning of Kafka's books in Germany, where Beckett spent parts of 1936–37, and Molloy (born “from my mother's arse”) are seen as Beckett's creative identification with the expelled. Moran's inability to digest the “Lager” in Molloy, and the visit of “Gaber”—anagrams “Rabe,” the Kafka/crow that escapes the “Grabe” or grave of banished but lively literary influences in this post–World War II process. Beckett's comment that Kafka's “form was not shaken by the experience it conveys” (1962) re-articulates such ingestion as part of the process of canonical creation. Beckett's translinguistic French style, and separation from Joyce, are shown to be mediated by Kafka, who provided Beckett with a “way out” from the impasse of following in Joyce's wake. “Ooftish,” with its English-Yiddish title, appearing alongside Kafka's “The Housefather's Care” (1938), are shown to be crucial to Beckett's transition to a postnational perspective. The essay concludes with Beckett's “Premier Amour” (1946) and 1938 essay “Les Deux Besoins,” where a kind of geometric method analyzes the interaction of “deux essences,” illustrated with a “sort of Star of David” (Rabaté): a “dodecahedron” that alludes to the re-creation of overlapping languages in Beckett's later work

Allegory · Art · Art history · Humanities · Linguistics · Literature · Object (grammar · Style (visual arts · Wife · Franz Kafka Literary Studies · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Samuel Beckett and Modernism

• Writing in Inclement Weather

  Open Access•Vivek Freitas•The Cambridge Journal of…•2018

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