Disappearance of the Self and Its Constitutive Outside in Kafka and Woody Allen’s Zelig

Abstract

Although parallels between Kafka’s hybrid characters and Woody Allen’s Leonard Zelig
have been noted in literature studies (Bruce 1998), the underlying interpretative synergy is
not exhausted and occasions a revisit, timely in light of the social tensions of the centurylater-present. Juxtaposing counterfactual history with actual highbrow commentary in
quasi- or mockumentary film genre allows Woody Allen to transpose Kafka’s grotesque into
American realm of the 20s and thus Americanize it. The contention of this article is to
suggest that Leonard Zelig, a changing man, is a derivative of Kafka’s characters, primarily
cat-lamb in Hybrid, but Allen’s postmodern visual language in Zelig radically alters their
inner metamorphoses and hybridity serving as a social critique, if only seen through
triviality of its humour. Interpreting Zelig alongside Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Hybrid,
we can trace genealogy of themes of anti-Semitism, racism and fascism resolve into
contradiction of individualism versus petit-bourgeois mass culture marked by
commercialization, commodification and assimilation, features that still define our present.
The takeaway may be phrased in terms of a constitutive outside. That is, Leonard Zelig, the
omnipresent-self, renders certain truth about society predefined by the cult of individualism
by re-constituting his lack of individuality as inherently social phenomenon—constitutive
outside, and thus disturbing it. In an ironic twist then, Zelig, released around the time of
Margaret Thatcher’s famous denial of society, can be read as a structuring-absence
revealing fiction, that of a non-existent society.