Franz Kafka’s “The Cares of a Family Man” and Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias” are two texts that contain an object as the center of each work. In Kafka’s short story, a family man attempts to interpret the lifelike object/creature Odradek. His story is notional ekphrastic because it is, as James A.W. Heffernan explains in his article “A Genealogy of Ekphrasis,” the “representation of an imaginary work of art” (Heffernan 14). In Shelley’s sonnet, the speaker remembers a story told to him by a traveler about the remains of a statue in a desert. The footnote provided with the poem informs the readers that this statue has a similar inscription as that of the largest statue in Egypt for Ramses II (Norton Anthology of English Literature 776). However, it is considered a mere inspiration since Shelley has never seen it. Both works are ekphrastic but use its conventions to produce different views on transcendence. While Kafka’s story concerns itself with the imperishability of Odradek, Shelley’s deals with the perishability of a fragmented statue. The point where the two works converge is in its illustration of the ways human transcendence are affected by the visual objects and by time.
The inability for a person to control they way an object is viewed through time is present in both texts. In Shelley’s “Ozymandias”, the speaker recalls a traveler he met “from an antique land” who told him about a shattered statue in the desert (line 1). The word “antique” already sets the story in ancient times emphasising a sense of history. The fact that the speaker is not the sculptor and that he has only heard about the statue further distances the readers from the power of the sculptor and sculpture. The poem begins with an “I” but that first person narrative swiftly disappears and the traveller speaks (line 1). This shift in speakers may spark misinterpretation since the speaker actually never saw the sculpture but holds on to the traveller’s words as truth. As W.J.T. Mitchell explains in his article “Representation,” the moment we “use representations in any social situation” there is a chance of misunderstanding and “miscommunication” (Mitchell 12). The statue that is meant to display the power of Ozymandias is reduced to something “antique” and fragmented, misrepresenting the purpose it had in the past (line 1). The statue is of “two vast and trunkless legs of stone” and on the sand “half sunk a shattered visage lies” illustrating its fragmented position (lines 2, 4). Although the king is not the sculptor, the statue is meant to feed his heart’s passions (line 8). However, even the sculptor’s “hand” mocks these passions from being successfully portrayed in his artwork (line 8). The sculptor “read” the “wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,” giving the readers his own interpretation of the king (line 5, 6).Therefore, he seems to wield some sort of power over what he creates. However, as James A.W. Heffernan explains in another article “Romantic Ekphrasis” that discusses the failure of transcendence in Shelley’s poem, the sculptor’s hands “mocks” any aspirations for the immortality of his art (“Romantic Ekphrasis” 117). Although he carved these features on the statue, the work is still “shattered” and “trunkless” demonstrating that through time, the sculptor loses his power over a perishable artwork (line 2, 4). Through shifts in narrative perspectives, the statue is subject to misrepresentation. These different interpretations demonstrates that the statue along with the person it is meant to represent is losing its significance to people as times passes.
Like Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” the point of view in Kafka’s “The Cares of A Family Man,” also affects the way the creature Odradek is displayed to the readers. However, where King Ozymandias and his work were deemed powerless and fleeting through time, in this short story the creator is also powerless but the object is powerful and unaffected by time. As mentioned in the title, the narrator of this story is a typical family man. In fact, he is not the artist. The creator is never mentioned throughout the story. He views the Odradek firsthand and attempts to give a detailed description of this object yet cannot create a clear picture for the readers. This demonstrates that Odradek is a creature beyond human’s capacity to convey in words. The Odradek looks like a “flat star-shaped spool for thread” with a “wooden crossbar” attached at the “middle of the star” and with another rod attached as well (Kafka 184). Unlike the statue, one cannot conclude that Odradek is a “broken -down remnant” (184). In fact, it stands more erect than the Ozymandias sculpture. The creator of this object is never mentioned throughout the story, allowing Odradek to stand on its own as a powerful image that engulfs the story. The differences in how each text approaches the relation between narrator/object and creator/creation through ekphrastic conventions effects the way each object is presented to the readers and questions the idea that the visual representation can outlive the verbal representation. Shelley’s “Ozymandias” challenges the “romantic ideology of transcendence” by not allowing the king’s moment of power to transcend time (“Romantic Ekphrasis” 93-94). The fragmented Ozymandias is only echoed through conversations. In contrast, the creature Odradek encompasses the narrator’s thoughts and words on the page with the possibility to transcend time. These conflicting ideas of transcendence are enhanced by the conventions of ekphrasis.
Both texts underscore the struggle between words and images through prosopopeia. Shelley looks upon the fragmented style of words and images. Inscribed on the pedestal are these words: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, / Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” (lines 10-11). By giving a voice to the whole statue, Shelley is “envoicing..a mute inanimate object…more precisely using the convention of prosopopeia” (“A Genealogy of Ekphrasis” 22). However, these two lines do not create what king Ozymandias wanted: an “immutable assertion of his power”(“Romantic Ekphrasis” 118). Not only the statue (the visual) fails him, but even words(the verbal) fail to overpower other generations and their leaders . These lines seem like the only thing intact amongst the ruins. It did have the effect of scaring people but through the passage of time, it lost its “sublimity of masculine power”(Heffernan 124). The words on the pedestal seem clear and straightforward but it is also fragmented at the same time. When the artwork is no longer intact, speech no longer works. From the start, Shelley reshapes the “kings of kings” before presenting the words on the pedestal (line 10). The statue’s “two trunkless legs of stone” and a “half sunk a shattered visage” already create an image in the reader’s mind of the state the statue is in (lines 2 and 4). All these descriptions contrast with these two lines that follow creating a sense of mockery towards the voice of the king. As Heffernan argues, these two lines of prosopopeia takes a “double meaning that looks backward and forward in time”(“Romantic Ekphrasis” 117). The words look back to the invincibility of Ozymandias but predicts the statues’ disintegration (117). Ozymandias believed that he was the best of all kings. Yet the irony of these lines is that it is incompatible with its surroundings. The king boasts “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” but what surrounds him is “nothing beside remains”(lines 11, 12). The word “remains” can also take a double meaning (line 12). It can be used both as a noun and a verb but still contribute to the same idea that his “Works” do not evoke fear (line 11). As a noun, it describes this fragmented statue as “remains” and as a verb it illustrates that nothing left of the king’s “Works” surrounds his statue (line 11-12).
While the use of prosopopeia demonstrates the decay of the visual and verbal in Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” it does not create the same effect in Franz Kafka’s “The Cares of a Family Man.” Prosopopeia transforms the fixed object into a narrative and allows it to overpower the narrator (“A Genealogy of Ekphrasis” 22). The Odradek is a creature that seems both inanimate and animate at the same time. In the first two paragraphs, the narrator refers to the creature as an “it” but quickly changes it to a “he” (Kafka 183-184). When the narrator asks him for his name and place of residence, the creature replies: “Odradek” and “no fixed abode” (Kafka 184). His response is followed by a mysterious laugh like the “rustling of fallen leaves”(184). The narrator describes it as a “kind of laughter that has no lungs behind it”(184). The laughter seems undecipherable but helps to understand the difference between Odradek and the narrator. This small detail is meant to disassociate Odradek from humans but actually gives him more power over human capabilities. To say that he does not have lungs is to verify that he is not human. Odradek does not go through the same processes of life and death. He does not need to breathe to live and thus this realization contributes to the narrator’s fear that he might outlive him (185). Thus Kafka’s use of prosopopeia and the narrator’s description overpowers the narrator and amplifies the image of a mysterious and imperishable Odradek. While both “Ozymandias” and “The Cares of a Family Man” approach prosopopeia differently, they both demonstrate that humans may lose their significance through time. In “Ozymandias” the verbal and visual king Ozymandias is susceptible to change in meaning through time whereas in Kafka’s “The Cares of a Family Man” the visual and verbal Odradek can live forever despite having no specific meaning. What connects the humans in both texts, the king in the sonnet and the narrator in the short story, is that they both lose their own purpose and meaning in face of death.
The use of form, structure, and genre in both texts emphasises the question of the transcendence of words and image. W.J.T. Mitchell explains in “Representation” that “the means of literary representation is language” but the different ways of “of employing that means” can create “all sorts of effects” (Mitchell 13). The “means” or genre and form in Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” amplifies the idea that powerful rulers with their material works are doomed to be forgotten and enhances the tone of mockery whereas in Kafka’s “The Cares of a Family Man,” the writing style contributes to the idea that material objects outlast humans through time and adds a sense of fear in the narrator. Shelley’s “Ozymandias” is a sonnet, a poem of fourteen lines that mostly follows an iambic pentameter, but it does not follow the common rhyme scheme of either a Petrarchan sonnet or Shakespearean sonnet. Its rhyme scheme ababacdcedefef intertwines the octave and sestet together. By slightly transgressing the traditional sonnet, it proves Daniel Chandler’s claim in “An Introduction to Genre Theory” that even the most structured genres are “shifting and becoming more permeable” (Chandler 2). By playing with the conventions of the sonnet, Shelley attempts to prove that even the most traditional and renowned poets’ writing styles are doomed to change through time. Like Ozymandias and his “Works” that failed to have the same fearful impact on later generations, the most powerful literary conventions are changed and given new meaning through time (line 11). Similarly, Kafka’s “The Cares of a Family Man” plays with the conventions of literature but does so to display how the narrator creates a lifelike image of Odradek. It is difficult to establish what genre this story falls under. It is not much of a narrative than a detailed analysis of a creature/object. It starts off like a nonfiction or an etymological analysis in the third person but shifts midway to an ekphrastic analysis in the first person. Mark M. Anderson in his article “Sliding Down the Evolutionary Ladder? Aesthetic Autonomy in The Metamorphosis” describes Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis as grotesque because a human wakes up and transforms into a human-sized insect (Anderson 172). The term grotesque is also applicable in Kafka’s “The Cares of a Family Man” because Odradek is described as fusion of human and an inanimate object or machine. The grotesque is also a literary term that is difficult to explain in a few lines as its conceptions have altered and changed through time. The genre or form that Kafka writes in parallels the appearance of Odradek: they are both undecipherable and do not have one meaning. Kafka uses multiple undecipherable genres and literary terms to represent an undecipherable creature. The different literary genres and conventions in Kafka’s story demonstrates that literary genres are not always “fixed forms” and suggests that not one genre’s “content” and “form” can fully establish the meaning and visual representation of Odradek because the humanlike creature is more powerful than simple words and conventions (Chandler 2-3). Both texts use form and genres but to achieve different views on the transcendence of words and images.
Punctuations and sentence structures in both texts amplify different conceptions on the perishability of words and images. Shelley’s sonnet demonstrates that like the materiality of the statue, there is the materiality of words (“Romantic Ekphrasis” 119). She further emphasizes that the letters on a pedestal are also doomed to lose its meaning and will perish along with the statue (119). Like the fragmented statue, Shelley works with alliteration and punctuation to create a fragmentary poem. Not only does she play with commas and enjambments throughout creating certain pauses for the reader but she also demonstrates that the description of the statue is just as fragmentary. The words are meant to represent the statue and thus mimics its fragmentary state. Alliteration in the last two lines also contribute to the materiality of letters and the idea that the statue loses its power: around that “colossal Wreck, / boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away” (lines 13, 14). The letters l and s in “colossal” is mixed around in the following lines but contributes to the idea that what surrounds the “colossal Wreck” are anything but “Mighty Works”(lines 11, 13-14). The “colossal” is connected with adjectives and adverbs that describe the deserted area where the fragmented statue stands. What is more surprising is that like the words on the pedestal and in the poem, even the “durability of the poet’s own language” is under jeopardy demonstrating that the struggle between word and image is more complicated and destructive than anyone can perceive (“Romantic Ekphrasis” 119).
Like the the sonnet that displays the fragmentation of words and images, Kafka’s short story works with small details in punctuation. The difference is that it makes the Odradek more alive than the inanimate statue. The narrator does not seem to like this Odradek. He tries to make meaning out of it through words but also coincidentally makes it alive to the readers. The beginning of the poem addresses the Odradek as a simple word but the readers soon realize that it is also a name. The fact that “Odradek” stays capital throughout the story makes him more lifelike than he is. The present tense throughout the story to illustrate Odradek’s actions not only anthropomorphizes him but also displays that the narrator has his full attention on him. Unlike the king in “Ozymandias” who is stuck in the past, Odradrek will always have a present, not a past or future like human beings. The king in “Ozymandias” fails to create a future where his power still reigns while this Odradek does not have any purpose and does not need to put any effort in anything but can still outlive humans. The style of the short story is anything but straightforward. From the etymological to the ekphrastic and from the objective to the personal, it demonstrates how Odradek slowly captures the story and engulfs the narrator’s mind. The multiple questions towards the end demonstrates that Odradek successfully creates anxiety in the family man. The family man fears that this meaningless object or creature will “always be rolling down the stairs…right before the feet of my children, and my children’s children?” (Kafka 185). Unlike the fragmented statue, this material is more likely to still be alive through time and that is what the family man fears: that “he is likely to survive me” (Kafka 185).
Although both texts approach transcendence or the issue of death and materiality differently, they both slightly reflect the authors’ personal opinions on the social situation they are in. As W.J.T. Mitchell argues in “Representation,” representations are not just descriptions of real or imaginary objects or images but a “representation of life” where all “social and subjective complexities get into the literary work” (Mitchell 15). For Shelley, it may be more than about a king and his work that will perish, but about the personal and political views he placed in the work. From early on in his life, he noticed “the petty tyranny of schoolmasters and schoolmates as representative of man’s inhumanity to man” and so he placed the themes of injustices in his works (The Norton Anthology of English Literature 788-789). He denounced “institutional religion, aristocracy, and monarchy” and that caused great critiques against him for the rest of his life (789). The year before the publication of his sonnet, the Duke of Wellington bought Hyde Park’s Apsley House and was adorned with “a triple arched screen and triumphal arch” as well as an “equestrian statue of the duke” (“Romantic Ekphrasis” 116). Shelley attacks the “icons made to represent and perpetuate” the duke or those in power and demonstrates his opinions on politics. Through his poetry, Shelley argues that the dominating rulers and leaders of his time will lose their power through time (Heffernan 116). Therefore, Shelley’s work is a representation of the political and social issues he sees in his time.
While it is clear that Shelley had some personal and political motives behind his work by using the theme of imperishability, Kafka’s work does not come easily as a representation of his social situation. However one can view this meaningless Odradek as Kafka’s work that will outlive him. He re-examines his own life through his work. He will die but what will still live is not the Odradek himself but the materialistic words that create this object. One must also note that Kafka’s first occupation was not a writer but was a lawyer. Writing was his night job so his writings might have represented the struggles he faced during the day and his aspiration to write. The story can also reflect a more personal situation in Kafka’s mind: the impact his domineering and anti-religious father had on him. Even though his father is no longer there, this object takes his place, “lurks” in his mind with “no aim in life” but to haunt him and take over his new family (if he had one) even after his death. The object is not the father per se but Kafka’s fear and lingering thoughts on life. Though this may seem a far fetched interpretation of Odradek, one must never forget that that was Kafka’s aim: to allow Odradek to have more than one meaning and that is why it outlives humans. While Shelley may demonstrate that the domineering authorities will lose their power and perish, Kafka hints that there work can perpetuate.
Franz Kafka’s “The Cares of a Family Man” and Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias” are both ekphrastic pieces that play with the conventions of literature and ekphrasis to illustrate two opposing views on the struggle between image and word as well as humans and objects. While Shelley believes that words and images cannot perpetuate due to the effects of time, Kafka concerns itself with the idea that an imaginary materialistic object can outlive humans through words. On opposite ends of the ekphrastic debate, both give a new insight on the fate of human beings when they face death: can they escape oblivion through their words and images? Ask Ozymandias the fragmented statue or Odradek the undefinable creature. They may or may not reply back.