Kafka’s Strindberg

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Abstract

This chapter, the first of three case studies designed to carry the story of representations of connectivity forward from the moment in the history of literature in English at which Chapter 5 left off, develops its own version of island theory in order to revalue the two novels Strindberg wrote about islands in the Stockholm archipelago, The People of Hemsö (1887) and By the Open Sea (1890). Islands insulate and isolate. They insulate the connectivity which sustains both empire and international trade from social and political circumstance; and, in doing so, isolate their inhabitants. The popularity of local colour writing offers a context for stories of isolation by Strindberg, Lawrence, and Sarah Orne Jewett, as well as for Kafka’s rewriting of aspects of By the Open Sea, a novel he knew well, in The Castle. The chapter concludes by analysing the distribution of the term Verbindung (connection) in The Castle.