José Saramago and Franz Kafka: Shipwreck with Cleaning Woman

Abstract

In his obsessive search for an unknown island in The Tale of the Unknown Island (1997) by José Saramago, the character named “man” seeks to appropriate something new, unknown and strange; something that allows him to dock on new shores, to adopt new perspectives and to live new experiences. What stands out, from the beginning of the narrative, is the support – initially unnoticed and underestimated – of the cleaning woman. The poor man from the country in Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law” (1915), however, does not achieve this form of personal self-realisation. One might say that he lacks imagination or existential seriousness in his undertaking, or, following Hans Blumenberg’s reasoning, the necessary “triggering philosophical experience” (Blumenberg, 1997, S. 15). But perhaps the Kafkaesque man lacked only a cleaning woman who could sharpen his eye to gain mastery over his own destiny. On the basis of Hans Blumenberg’s metaphorology (Schiffbruch mit Zuschauer, 1997), as well as questions of intertextuality drawing on Genette and Borges, the article aims to establish a dialogue between Saramago’s short story and the Kafkaesque parable, which he unfolds in an absolutely unusual way.