KAFKAESQUE ELEMENTS IN DAVID ALBAHARI’S NOVELS ABOUT EMIGRATION

Abstract

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari stipulate that Kafka’s major works, be it novels or short stories, all share an identical entity envisioned as a concrete construction, both physical and psychological, that has the goal of encasing the story’s protagonist inside a machine-like prison comprised of often illogical sequences that follow its own, to the protagonist wholly unfathomable rules. Thus, the machine can be found in the impenetrable judicial system of The Trial or the identically alienating walls of the title structure in The Castle, but it can also form the structural center of stories such as The Metamorphosis, where, in the absence of a literal machinic construction, a Kafka machine takes the form of the absurd change into which the protagonist is placed at the beginning of the text. This same type of structure – this machine – can also be found in Albahari’s novels dealing with the act of emigrating from one’s homeland and immigrating to a new territory, in a way that portrays the protagonist’s homeland as the machine, with the new territory merely highlighting the insincere nature of the act of immigrating and the inability of the character to earnestly remove himself from his original territory. One of the defining characteristics of a Kafka machine is the absence of a route to freedom and a blind wish to escape the machine, which are both present in the consciousness of the narrator during his failed attempts at acclimatizing to a new territory. Unable to mentally remove himself from his own history and that of his nation, the narrator of Snow Man finds himself inprisoned in the same type of machine that Deleuze and Guattari find in Kafka’s work.