ABSTRACT

In “The Great Wall of China” Kafka’s narrator describes in detail the faulty greatness of the defensive wall, as well as its failed goal of unity against the northern nomads, who were not even aware of their role as the assailant. It is this primal purpose of unity that indirectly connects the Great Wall and the Tower of Babel, another major if failed achievement in the eyes of Kafka’s narrative voice. In the similarity of their aims, the wall can be seen as a great horizontal tower whose mission is to protect and separate the chosen from the undesirable and to offer those within a sense of unifying self-hood. In the carefully crafted layering of Babel, some characters remain homeless, trapped in the wounds and gashes of the contemporary world. If landscapes are scripts that construct particular understandings of place, Babel fuses landscape and language to articulate a place of enunciation from the gashes and wounds of the contemporary world.