Death Writes: Franz Kafka, Tubercular Soundscapes, and the Place of Literature

Analyzing previously unexplored medical records of Franz Kafka, this article reveals the significance of tubercular lung sounds—internal yet inaudible to the patient—for his penultimate story, “The Burrow.” Modern audio recordings of the sounds described for Kafka’s lungs are included. The asymmetrical access to sound is transformed in “The Burrow” into a narrative technique for exploring the relationship between the incommensurable positionalities of fictional and authorial worlds. Created as an external eavesdropper on its author’s breathing, the burrowing animal protagonist responds to the sound not only with anxiety but also with an expanded imaginative capacity, inventing in turn a creator god in its own image—a portrait of the author as a great beast. The text thus becomes a reflection on the legacy an author leaves behind, one that refuses presence in favor of strange representation. The involuted structure and the temporal paradox that result allow the text to mark proleptically the death of its own author. Drawing on sound studies, medical humanities, and text-immanent critique, this article traces the unequal access to the sound of the author’s breath by author, narrator, and, ultimately, reader as a series of encounters and provocations that transform capacities and faculties and perturb time and space.