Respectively written in 1919 and 1920, Franz Kafka’s ‘The Cares of a Family Man’ and Virginia Woolf’s ‘Solid Objects’ employ purposeless and functionless things as their narrative focal point. The protagonist of ‘Solid Objects’ gives up a successful political career as he becomes increasingly obsessed with the collection of broken glass, china fragments, and pieces of iron, useless bits of material that completely overturn his life. In Kafka’s short story, a nameless ‘family man’ is confronted with the purposelessness, recalcitrance, and permanence of a mysterious object called Odradek, a ‘flat star-shaped spool for thread’ that ‘lurks by turns in the garret, the stairways, the lobbies, the entrance hall’. Through a close reading of the two short stories guided by theoretical reflections on waste, my talk explores the way in which this particular category of objects might enter a literary text, and the potential effects produced by the encounter with it. Both short stories show the ways in which things routinely deemed as useless or meaningless hold the potential, when considered closely, to ‘rebuke the normative assignations of things’ and to question a system of values based on production and functionality. 1 Rather than reassimilating useless objects into an established system of production and consumption by emphasising their potential aesthetic value, Woolf and Kafka highlight the recalcitrance of useless objects and their ability to actively defy set codes and expectations.
