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Apocalyptic Futures: Marked Bodies and the Violence of the Text in Kafka,
Conrad, and Coetzee by Russell Samolsky

Article  in  Research in African Literatures · March 2013

DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.44.1.194

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 Apocalyptic Futures: Marked Bodies and the Violence of the Text in Kafka, Conrad, and Coetzee
(review)

Carine M. Mardorossian

Research in African Literatures, Volume 44, Number 1, Spring 2013, pp. 194-195
(Review)

Published by Indiana University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/498369

Access provided by SUNY @ Buffalo (19 Jan 2017 15:39 GMT)

BOOK R E V IEWS  •  •  •
Apocalyptic Futures: Marked Bodies and the
Violence of the Text in Kafka, Conrad, and Coetzee
BY RUSSELL SAMOLSKY
New York: Fordham UP, 2011.
x + 237 pp. ISBN 9780823234806 paper.

In Apocalyptic Futures: Marked Bodies and the Violence of the Text in Kafka, Conrad, and
Coetzee, Russell Samolsky focuses on modern literary texts, Kafka’s “The Penal
Colony,” Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Bar-
barians, that fictionalize not “an open and utopian future” (1) but an apocalyptic
one that “reflects the future back into the present” (7). The reception in the middle
to late twentieth century of the works under scrutiny necessarily situates them
in the context of more recent “hearts of darkness,” namely the Jewish Holocaust,
the Rwandan genocide, and the revelations of torture in apartheid South Africa
and Abu Ghraib. Through a highly theorized juxtaposition of historical contexts,
Samolsky offers a careful close reading of his primary texts because “their use
of the apocalyptic figure of the marked or mutilated body” (9) highlights the
body not as a blank screen awaiting textual inscription but as an always already
inscribed text that both allows for and resists an “apocalyptic incorporation.” In
reading these works as “proleptic of future catastrophe,” he thus reframes the
relationship between literary reception and embodiment, bodily inscription and
identity, past and present.
In chapter one, “Metaleptic Machines,” Samolsky intervenes in the pro/con-
tra debate surrounding Kafka’s status as a prophet of things to come by showing
how Kafka’s writing both performs and predicts its future context, thus linking
the performative and the prophetic. Kafka, he argues, was “somehow coding in
advance the future reception of his texts” (47). He then goes on to read the Kafkan
text and its claims to a new kabbalah in terms of Harold Bloom’s Kabbalah and Criti-
cism. In chapter two, “Apocalyptic Futures,” Samolsky turns to the long shadow
cast by Conrad’s novella whose title, “heart of darkness,” appears again and again
in various mass media references to later atrocities. Samolsky reviews the critical
genealogy of Heart of Darkness as “prophetic of future cataclysm” (73) and offers a
new reading of the performative aspect of the novella as apocalypse, how it can be
said “to enact or embody its apocalyptic dimension” (75). Chapter three, “The Body
in Ruins,” takes on Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), a book whose focus
on the suspension of the law by the dying apartheid state is shown to be reborn
anew in the infamous CIA black sites of the beginning of the twenty-first century.

•  RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITERATURES, Vol. 44, No. 1 (Spring 2013). © 2013  •

 CARINE M. M ARDOROSSIAN  •  195

The first two chapters of Apocalyptic Futures focus on the modernist text’s
representation of mutilated/marked bodies as “floating or ungrounded” signs
that “left the text open to a future overcoding” as “mediations on the relationship
between an apocalyptic text and a future apocalyptic event” (126). By contrast,
chapter three discusses how J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians is concerned
with the ethical dilemma the author faces as his text’s representation of torture
accrues spectacular power. Samolsky argues that, in juxtaposing historical time
with a timeless present, Coetzee creates a historical allegory that makes “the
future coterminous with the present” and shifts “future events and bodies into a
continuous present” (133). Last but not least, in the coda, the author turns to Art
Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus as a self-reflective meditation on the relationship
between literary reception and the dead of the Holocaust. For Samolsky, while
Kafka, Conrad, and Coetzee “wrestle with the ethical futurity of their works and
how their texts might be taken as allegories of their struggle with their apocalyptic
futures,” Spiegelman reveals “a writer’s taking ethical account of his own respon-
sibility with regard to the encryption of the apocalyptic body into his own text”
(178). Maus, Samolsky argues, is haunted by the marked bodies of the Holocaust
itself rather than by the apocalypse to come, offering a “messianic counter-time”
to apocalyptic incorporation.
Apocalyptic Futures is an important contribution to the study of the literature
of catastrophe and the ethics of literary reception. It is a timely and convincing
response to the crisis that confronts humanistic scholarship today since it shows
why the questions raised by the arts and letters are central to ethics, politics, and
life in general. Its highly theorized and historically informed discussion will be
of interest to cultural critics, continental philosophers, and literary critics alike.

Carine M. M ardorossian
University at Buffalo
cmardoro @ buffalo.edu

Screens and Veils: Maghrebi Women’s Cinema

BY FLORENCE MARTIN
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2011.
x + 271 pp. ISBN 9780253356680 paper.

Florence Martin’s recent book, Screens and Veils: Maghrebi Women’s Cinema (2011),
offers an insightful and novel alternative to the usual postcolonial feminist
approaches to Maghrebi women’s film studies. Rather than providing the reader
with an encyclopedic summary, or a historical accounting of the topic, Martin’s
work argues for a transnational feminist reading of Maghrebi cinema that speaks
to the fluid interplay between various cultural systems, narrative structures, and
aesthetic forms across borders and among diverse cultural audiences. In line
with Will Higbee’s theorization of “cinema of transvergence” and Hamid Naficy’s
concept of “accented cinema,” Martin’s book aims to examine the fertile dynamics
that traverse women filmmakers’ practices in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. Her

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