I Write on Châteaureynaud for Words Without Borders

The preface to Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud’s The Messengers, now up at Words Without Borders!

An excerpt:

Kafka is one of only two authors to whom Marcel Schneider, in his Histoire de la littérature fantastique en France, devotes an entire chapter. (The other is Edgar Allan Poe; both are foreign, perhaps tacitly corroborating the complaint, oft bandied about, that the Cartesian duality of the default French mindset does not readily admit of the fantastic.) Almost forty years after its definitive version, Schneider’s tome remains an authoritative overview of francophone contributions to the genre. A scholar and fantasist himself, he charts a clear if crooked lineage from E. T. A. Hoffmann to Poe to Kafka, each an evolution in the French notion of the fantastic that marked an immune reaction of native rationalism to a powerful and pervasive foreign intervention. Kafka he calls a bombe à retardement. Perhaps we may seek farther than the first translation at hand, “time bomb,” for one that places, like the French, less emphasis on countdown and more on excruciating, seditious deferment, a translation fortuitously specific to the period in question and since fallen from use: “delay-action bomb.” Though translations of the Czech insurance agent began dropping in the 1930s—Alexandre Vialatte in France, Anita Rho in Italy, the Muirs in England and America—Schneider dates the start of Kafka’s “ravages” to the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. To hear Schneider tell it, one might think it took the Nazis to make bureaucracy more convincing. “Let us admire,” he writes, “the fact that so allegorical, symbolic, and secretive a body of work could have become the mirror of our own world: inconceivable before the 1940s, and seemingly self-evident ever since.” The first recorded use of “Kafkaesque” dates to this same postwar period. The scope of Kafka’s influence soon becomes apparent in works by Walter Jens, Dino Buzzati, and Maurice Blanchot, to the extent that in 1946, Action, the weekly of the French intelligentsia, asks: “Must Kafka be burned?” Too soon, Action, too soon . . . The next year, Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud was born in a liberated Paris where, at a Victory Ball, his young mother had met his father, freshly returned from Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg, emaciated and short a few teeth.