No safe landing

A review of A Winter in Zürau and Partita by Gabriel Josipovici

 

Gabriel Josipovici has said that as a critic he is conservative but as a novelist he is radical. The second claim may not be controversial but the first will come as a surprise to those who remember what he said about the big-name contemporary novelists in What Ever Happened to Modernism?. This novel and non-fiction combination offers an opportunity to experience the two in close proximity – two sides of an LP, as Nick Lezard put it. 

Side one is a study of the eight months Franz Kafka spent in the Bohemian countryside after a diagnosis of TB and in particular the collection of notes he wrote there known as the Zürau Aphorisms. On the other side, Partita is a novel written mostly in dialogue following Michael Penderecki on the run after a death threat in which he spends most of this time chasing a lover who herself keeps running away. The threat of death and the promise of escape are two links between the sides that otherwise seem to have little in common. Josipovici's two claims, however, provides another.

Before he left for Zürau, Kafka told Max Brod he intended to use the time to "become clear about ultimate things". Josipovici follows him through each day as recorded in the collection known as The Blue Octavo Notebooks. At first the entries include short stories, regular first-person diary entries and legalistic and theological speculations, the latter of which Josipovici is impatient as they lead Kafka into uncharacteristically "clunking" prose. But then the first aphorism appears:

The true way is along a rope that is not spanned high in the air, but only just above the ground. It seems intended more to cause stumbling than to be walked along.

Every edition dedicated to the aphorisms begins here but, Josipovici claims, this is deceptive. On that day in October 1917, Kafka writes a long and indeed clunking paragraph before interrupting himself with the line translated as "I digress". He then writes the aphorism. Every edition deletes this line. Reiner Stach's recent The Aphorisms of Franz Kafka is the exception but relegates it to an aside in his commentary, with the rest discussing the rope motif. Josipovici points out the original German is "Ich irre ab", which he translates as "I'm on the wrong track", backed up when I checked using Google Translate which has "I'm going astray". This he says marks a decisive change and relates directly to the form of the rope entry, which he describes as "the melding of fiction and discursive prose in extremely compact pieces". 

"Ich irre ab" is thereby closer to Dante's "I had lost the path that does not stray" before he begins his journey and gives the first aphorism a similarly salvific imperative. The difference is that Kafka has no Virgil or Beatrice to guide him; belief in God has gone and the means of salvation uncertain, and the word possibly meaningless. By removing the line, the editors place the existential peril at a safe distance from which a critical apparatus can flourish. The generic distinction of 'aphorisms' is therefore inappropriate as Kafka's notes are not the witty or pithy sayings of a wise man but "the anxious jottings of a man under sentence of death". Kafka's digression was not then playing with genre for the sake of it or to show off his talent as a writer but, as he said, to "become clear about ultimate things". 

The rope motif stands for Kafka's ambivalence about writing and Josipovici is rare in Kafka studies by bringing it into the foreground. Kafka recognised the grace it affords when in his diary he describes writing as "a merciful surplus of strength at a moment when suffering has raked me to the bottom of my being", but then he wonders "what kind of surplus is it?". In a letter to Brod, the doubts are expressed even more succinctly: "Writing sustains me, but is it not more accurate to say that it sustains this kind of life?" – a life in which he felt distant, a spectator unable to enjoy join in, as he described in a passage in his diary. Josipovici also shows how doubts about writing are dramatised in his stories. The officer in In the Penal Colony tells the traveller to read the sentence the machine has written on the body of the condemned man but he sees only "a labyrinth of lines crossing and recrossing each other". The machine takes twelve hours to kill so the engraving of the sentence has to be embellished to fill the time:

In so doing it brings out the paradox of the machine: meant to make the accused feel in his own body the justice of the punishment, it only helps to bring out that language can never be 'true' or 'just', that it will always contain flourishes.

In Zürau among simple farmers and labourers, Kafka saw no flourishes. He observed the centuries-old traditions embedded in daily life of the villagers governed by the seasons and centred on the church and recognised he was living the consequences of a society wrenched from such roots. Tradition had to be there already and could not be back-engineered. The best he could do as a writer was to distance himself from literary flourishes, to get as close to what Josipovici describes as "the unthinking life-activity that produces the works of Homer", in effect to disappear as a writer and for writing to disappear as a means of constructing ideas about the world. This was a common theme in the writers of the time. Josipovici cites Eliot's Prufrock and Wallace Stevens's snowman:

What they are all searching for in their art – and in their lives, actually – is a kind of perfect anonymity, something that is the opposite of the image of the entrepreneur, the figure of Progress, linked to capitalism in society and, in art, to fictions with beginnings, middles and a nice resolution at the end.

Blanchot calls this a "combat of passivity, combat which reduces itself to naught". Of course, that naught is still not disappearance as it is a combat for literature, an irony one aphorism melding fiction and discursive prose recognises:

Like a path in autumn: scarcely has it been swept clear than it is once more covered with dry leaves.

Josipovici notes how odd it is not to be told what is the path is like and admits that he's not sure why but the line "would be much weaker if it started with: 'I feel like' or 'My life is like a path in autumn'". The question of why it would be weaker is fascinating and maddening. Josipovici says "this is what Kafka’s best fictions and images do to you: in a few plain and simple words they set your imagination going and refuse to provide it with a safe landing". This is the gift of Kafka's quest to become clear about ultimate things, "a gift we do not receive" as Blanchot says in the same passage. The gift of A Winter in Zürau is that it makes us aware of the distance between us and Kafka, a distance between us and awareness of distance, a distance from the loss of tradition, a distance between us and ultimate things, and so a distance from the deep roots of fiction, as one of Kafka's melded commentaries on myth describes:

There are four legends about Prometheus. According to the first, because he betrayed the gods to men he was chained to a rock in the Caucasus and the gods sent eagles that devoured his liver, which always grew again. According to the second, Prometheus in his agony, as the beaks hacked into him, pressed deeper and deeper into the rock until he became one with it. According to the third, in the course of thousands of years his treachery was forgotten, the gods forgot, the eagles forgot, he himself forgot. According to the fourth, everyone grew weary of what had become meaningless. The gods grew weary, the eagles grew weary, the wound closed wearily. What remained was the inexplicable range of mountains.

The great books by the great writers is an inexplicable mountain range we admire only from a distance. We hurry to name contemporary equivalents but we know something is missing. For Kafka, the horror and the undivine comedy of modern life was close enough in time to contrast with village life to sense what was lost so there remained a tension: "From the true antagonist boundless courage flows into you" he wrote in Zürau, a single sentence that many of us would pass over without pause but for the close attention Josipovici provides: "the agon or trial of strength was the fulcrum on which Kafka’s imagination turned" and cites the father in The Judgment, but then adds a crucial note: "The question is whether for modern man such an antagonist exists." Side two of this edition offers an answer.

While Partita's features an Englishman with a Polish name on the run across Europe to escape a threat of death and then pursuing an unpredictable lover in variously dark, comic and surreal episodes, the title points away from the content just as music points away from itself. It has a non-musical meaning too: in Italian verb 'partire' means to leave, to go away, and the noun in the feminine describing someone who has left is 'la partita'. There are seven chapters each named after parts of the musical form; variations on a theme. In the Praeambulum, music is in the foreground when Michael Penderecki's host insists on playing Yves Montand singing Les feuilles mortes (Autumn Leaves) on his fancy record player:

A quiet voice of great beauty begins to tell a story. It tells of memory and of those happy days when the sun always shone, days when we were friends; it tells of the dead leaves of autumn swept up into piles, like our memories and regrets.

The dead leaves echo the fate of Kafka's true way, in this case one cleared by feet running into the future soon covered again as it becomes the past. The song recurs throughout the novel; a literary earworm reminding us that what ever joy we have, what ever hope we maintain, goes away. Everything passes. Perhaps this is modern man's only potential antagonist, the one we confront in every waking moment while music and dreams are the ineffable reminders of escape, the promise and impossibility of escape that we seek anyway in flight from death and in pursuit of love; poles of the same earth. We exalt both with all kinds of rationales from the purely subjective to the purely technical, except music is heard and love felt differently to how we spell it out. In the novel it has a comic equivalence in Michael Penderecki's surname: his name may be spelled Penderecki but he irritates people by telling them it is pronounced Penderetzky. And with two otherwise incompatible books, we have two versions of the name. A Winter in Zürau spells out Josipovici's advocacy of formal adventure in writing as he follows Kafka sounding out the losses and paradoxes that haunt its necessity, while in Partita the antagonist can only be experienced in its pronunciation; it is experienced as it leaves us, forever there and forever out of reach. In this sense, Josipovici is radical as a critic and conservative as a novelist.

Kafka's great fire

The centenary of Kafka's death was marked twelve years late. His diary records it in September 1912:

This story, The Judgment, I wrote at one sitting during the night of the 22nd-23rd, from ten o'clock at night to six o'clock in the morning. I was hardly able to pull my legs out from under the desk, they had got so stiff from sitting. The fearful strain and joy, how the story developed before me, as if I were advancing over water. Several times during this night I heaved my own weight on my back. How everything can be said, how for everything, for the strangest fancies, there waits a great fire in which they perish and rise up again. How it turned blue outside the window. A wagon rolled by. Two men walked across the bridge. At two I looked at the clock for the last time. As the maid walked through the anteroom for the first time I wrote the last sentence. Turning out the light and the light of day. The slight pains around my heart. The weariness that disappeared in the middle of the night. The trembling entrance into my sisters' room. Reading aloud. Before that, stretching in the presence of the maid and saying, I've been writing until now. The appearance of the undisturbed bed, as though it had just been brought in. The conviction verified that with my novel-writing I am in the shameful lowlands of writing. Only in this way can writing be done, only with such coherence, with such a complete opening out of the body and the soul.   [Translated by Joseph Kresh]

The story and its importance for Kafka has always intrigued me because its mundane setting and the petty concerns of the protagonists are hardly earth shattering, with the Freudian red flags, the extremity of the father's sentence and Georg's immediate self-execution suggesting a drama overdetermined in its compression: social realism and absurdity squash up and cancel each other out. What is left?

Gabriel Josipovici's review of the recent book collecting Kafka's drawings offers an understanding of what distinguishes The Judgment from what came before. He shows that the drawings are in keeping with his writing of the time such as in Betrachtung/Contemplation in which "what happens is governed not by the conventions of fin-de-siècle storytelling but simply by the feelings of the protagonist". In the drawings it takes for the form of "ludicrously tall or squat people stretching, twisting, leaning from or away from one another". What's notable for Josipovici is that Kafka more or less stopped drawing after that September night. Until then both writing and drawing came relatively easily, but it was precisely such ease that was the problem: 

Writing [dependent on feelings] may initially feel promising, but it soon palls. If I have simply to write something down to summon it into being, if everything depends entirely on my mood as I write, then what is the point of writing anything at all?

The point of writing for many is to win the world's favour, to be admired, fêted at literary festivals. Kafka had recognised it himself when as a child he tried to impress his family by writing a story in front of them, which, after some overt attention seeking, was dismissed by an uncle as "the usual stuff".

It is one of the clichés of our time that we all have our stories to tell. But Kafka tells us here that such stories are always self-serving, created by us to protect ourselves from reality and out of the desire to "shine"...

Kafka wanted something less tangible, as his reticence to follow the paths of his celebrated writers among his friends suggests:

What he is after in his writing, he notes in January 1911, is "a description in which every word would be linked to my life, which I would draw to my heart and which would transport me out of myself."

If Kafka was "made of literature" as he told Felice, then the story and Georg's suicide is Kafka's transport out of literature:

He has discovered that while words are far more recalcitrant than drawing, it is only in the art of words that narrative can be produced and can then turn against itself and uncover its corrupt origins and motivations. By so doing it reveals its beneficent and healing power: the power to speak the truth about our desires and the world of others. By writing stories that dramatize writing and the fantasies of the imagination and then dramatizing their destruction, he escapes the realm of fantasy, of solipsism.

The final sentence here compresses a question that has preoccupied me for a long time: how does one escape genre? In Kafka's terms, how does one turn out the light of the self for the light of day?

Four years ago I wrote that JM Coetzee's The Death of Jesus might be characterised as the last novel, as it took form and content into a limbo of indeterminate clarity. It dramatises the fantasties of genre fiction in which otherwise we find freedom and safety, and does so to the point of sabotaging both, hence the consternation of professional critics. Could it be in its own way a three-volume decompression of The Judgment? The trilogy leaves us exposed to the open much as Kafka's story does; a kind of metaphysical exile, as Robert Pippin's calls it. It may also follow Josipovici's description of The Judgment as "a ritual of exorcism", reinforced by the name in each title. This potential to strip literature of its layers of protection from the outside is invariably missed, repressed or misunderstood because it is soon absorbed into the process of literary evaluation. We can see it in the celebrations of the belated centenary in collections such as this one subtitled Ten Kafkaesque Stories.

What happens when some of the most original literary minds of today take an idea, a mood or a line from his work and use it to spark something new?

How about a great fire for the vanities of fiction in a complete opening out of body and soul?

From a future society who ask their AI servants to construct a giant tower to reach God; to a flat hunt that descends into a comically absurd bureaucratic nightmare; to a population experiencing a wave of unbearable, contagious panic attacks, these ten specially commissioned stories are by turns mind-bending, funny, unsettling and haunting.

Oh right, the usual stuff.

39 Books: 1989

Nowadays I would be put off reading a book labelled controversial and exciting gossipy attention on TV and in newspapers, but in 1989 I read Alexander Stuart's The War Zone that did exactly that. It was later made into a controversial film.

The only thing I remember of the novel is the comparison to Martin Amis made by the reviews, which may have been why I picked it up, and I mention it here only because, a few years later when I was studying at the University of Sussex and living in Brighton, my friend and fellow student Sean happened to be living in the house in which the novel had been written. We climbed the steep stairs to the attic room and there was the desk on which it was written, bathed in sunlight from a steeply sloping window. That was it. 

In June 1912, Kafka, accompanied by Max Brod, visited Weimar as a pilgrimage to Goethe's city. He records it in his travel diary:

Walked at night to the Goethehaus. Recognised it at once. All of it a yellowish-brown colour. Felt the whole of our previous life share in the immediate impression. The dark windows of the uninhabited rooms. The light-coloured bust of Juno. Touched the wall. White shades pulled part way down in all the rooms. Fourteen windows facing on the street. The chain on the door. No picture quite catches the whole of it. The uneven surface of the square, the fountain, the irregular alignment of the house along the rising slope of the square. The dark, rather tall windows in the midst of the brownish-yellow. Even without knowing it was the Goethehaus, the most impressive middle-class house in Weimar.

The next day, they go inside:

Reception rooms. Quick look into the study and bedroom. Sad, reminding one of dead grandfathers. The garden that had gone on growing since Goethe's death. The beech tree darkening his study. While we were still sitting below on the landing, she ran past us with her little sister.

She is Margarethe Kirchner, the teenage daughter of the Goethehaus' custodian, known as Grete. Kafka becomes infatuated, seeking out her company at every turn. She is polite but clearly not interested. The great writer and his house are relegated to a backdrop to his unhappiness:

Box bed. Slept. Parrot in the court calling Grete.

If a person could only pour sorrow out the window.

I choke up at the thought of having to leave. 

Two weeks later, he meets Felice Bauer. I have often wondered if the encounter at the Goethehaus was as significant as the one in Prague, momentous as that was, and was disappointed that Reiner Stach's biography lets it pass as a short diversion from the main story.

The only other writer's house I've visited, that is a writer who wasn't already a friend or indeed the house of the writer whose body I inhabit, was Goethe's, more aware of following in Kafka's footsteps, seeing what he saw. In particular, I wanted to find where Max Brod took this photo of Kafka and Grete in the garden and have my photo taken there too, but for some reason that day the garden was closed. Back home, I discovered the plastic tag I should have handed in before stepping onto the creaking floorboards.

It is clear from visiting a writer's house, you can't step into the same river, not even once.

39 Books: 1988

This is one of my most surprising discoveries in second-hand bookshop trawls in the far off days when they existed, especially because it was found in Portsmouth, not the most literary of cities despite Dickens and Conan-Doyle (or perhaps because of Dickens and Conan-Doyle). 

The original title translated by the great Ralph Manheim is Seul comme Franz Kafka and comes from Janouch's conversations:

"Are you as lonely as that? I asked.
Kafka nodded.
"Like Kaspar Hauser?"
Kafka laughed.
"Much worse than Kaspar Hauser. I'm as lonely as ... as Franz Kafka."

Marthe Robert contends that Kafka's loneliness was due to his relationship to Judaism. "The son of a prosperous self-made businessman, he grew up in a family that was half-assimilated, half-Germanized, vaguely traditionalist, and more conformist than religious." From the start, "Kafka was torn between diametrically contrary currents." I liked in particular Robert's line that, as Kafka moved towards full assimilation, he came to realise "he was Jewish even in his way of not being Jewish".

Any relationship with faith wouldn't have meant much to me then, not only knowing nothing about Judaism but also nothing about the Catholic religion into which I had been born. This may explain why I have not reread it. However, because of my new reading habit, being torn between contrary currents was to become more familiar.

Guildhall Square, Portsmouth

Dickens' statue is a few yards away from Portsmouth Central Library which began to feed my new habit in 1987. I wrote about my discovery and the importance of libraries many years ago.

Ultimate things: The Aphorisms of Franz Kafka

Although we are unmusical, we have a tradition of singing
    Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk

The first reason to celebrate Shelley Frisch’s new translation into English of Kafka’s short prose written in the village of Zürau, now Siřem in the Czech Republic, is that this is the first time they have been presented in book form alongside the German. The original is lacking from previously published translations into English: the Muirs’ in 1946, Kaiser’s and Wilkins’ in 1954, Malcolm Pasley’s in 1994, and Michael Hofmann’s in 2006. The second reason is that it is the first time they have been accompanied by a commentary, in this case by Kafka’s esteemed biographer Reiner Stach.

An exception to both is Michael Cisco’s blog and subsequent 260-page PDF made available in 2013, which is perhaps more faithful to the original as Kafka also never published them as a book. 

All this should remind us of the disorder in which Kafka’s work has been otherwise presented in English: multiple editions in multiple translations with only the occasional a sniff of scholarship. Germany has had a critical edition for over thirty years and in France this year a two-volume Pléiade boxed set was published in a new translation with everything Kafka wrote presented in chronological order. It is a minor scandal that an equivalent is lacking in English. Ross Benjamin's new translation of the diaries will provide some mitigation when it's published in January next year.

It is a disorder, however, that was there from the start: disordered chapters of unfinished novels, stories published and unpublished, sketches and parables, letters, doodles, the diaries of course, and, in the case of the aphorisms – Stach describes them as a "chaotic set of notes" – covered in corrections and crossings out. Or, rather, disorder was there from the end – of Kafka's life that is, although he didn't see it quite that way, as the aphorisms reveal. 

No doubt the disorder is why the Zürau aphorisms are nowhere near as well known as the novels and stories, though their brevity and generic uncertainty must be the main factor. In his preface to the Penguin Syrens edition pictured below, Gabriel Josipovici says the notes aren't really aphorisms, and while they may remind readers of "maxims, or parables, or reflections...or tiny stories", they aren't quite any of these either. Such labels, he adds, imply authority and control while the disorder in which they have come down to us and the biographical conditions under which they were written imply the opposite of both. This led to Maurice Blanchot's suggestion that Kafka instructed Brod to destroy his manuscripts because he saw his work “condemned to increase universal misunderstanding”. Destruction is itself a form of order and explains why our fascination with the instruction and its betrayal runs parallel to our fascination with finding order in the work.

The aphorisms were written in the aftermath of the bloody eruption of TB, the breaking off of his engagement to Felice Bauer, and in the shadow of a negligible literary career. On a visit back to Prague, Kafka told Max Brod that his task in Zürau was to "Become clear about ultimate things". Stach says this is an allusion to Otto Weiningers 1904 book Über die letzen Dinge "with which he was definitely acquainted" and which approaches "the pinnacles that defined western metaphysics", listed here as evil, truth, belief and the world of the spirit, and which he did by seeking, as Stach says, "the pithiest linguistic formulation".

Not that this creates an order, as many of the aphorisms don't obviously fit a metaphysical category. Here's Aphorism 2 in Kaiser's and Wilkins' translation:

All human errors are impatience, the premature breaking off of what is methodical, an apparent fencing in of the apparent thing.

I was very taken with this when I copied it into an exercise book during the excited naivete of youth. I don't know why it meant so much then, nor where I read it, as I had access only to the novels, stories and a disintegrating copy of the diaries. While the enchantment of those days has dissipated, the repetition of "apparent" has an appeal I recognise from my later discovery of Thomas Bernhard; a repetition acting, I suspect now, as a reflexive delay to interrupt impatience. Read in isolation like this, an aphorism can lodge in one's memory. Here's another, this time in Frisch's translation:

How can one take pleasure in the world other than when fleeing to it?

Wie kann man sich über die Welt freuen, ausser wenn man zu ihr flüchtet?

Which I need to compare to Pasley's:

How can one take delight in the world unless one flees to it for refuge?

The first translation is more accurate because the German for 'refuge' (Zuflucht) is not in the original. The second I had already memorised and without the extra words I have a curious sense of loss. I borrowed that part for the title of a post on re-reading Blanchot's The Space of Literature, as it challenged the rote understanding of literature as an unproblematic escape, thereby offering a renewed appreciation of the relation of book and world.

Here are the previous translations of Aphorism 2:

Michael Hofmann's:

All human errors stem from impatience, a premature breaking off of a methodical approach, an ostensible pinning down of an ostensible object.

The Muirs':

All human error is impatience, a premature renunciation of method, a delusive pinning down of a delusion.

And Malcolm Pasley's:

All human errors are impatience, a premature breaking-off of methodical procedure, an apparent fencing-in of what is apparently at issue. 

Perhaps instead multiple translations condemn a work to universal disenchantment.

Kafka in Zürau

What's new with Shelley Frisch's translation and Reiner Stach commentary is that the aphorism is given a precise context:

Alle menschlichen Fehler sind Ungeduld, ein vorzeitiges Abbrechen des Methodischen, ein scheinbares Einpfählen der scheinbaren Sache.   

All human errors are impatience, a premature breaking-off of a methodical approach, an apparent use of posts to prop up the apparent objective.

In this case, market gardening in Zürau, which Kafka had witnessed and taken part in during his eight months there. Einpfählen we're told is a word used in horticulture and means "to prop up and stablize young fruit trees ... or as posts to enclose a pasture". (Note the faint repetition of Fehler in Einpfählen in addition to the other one.) As a blogger, I'm well aware that a series of posts may well be an error as they likely prop up a tree of misunderstanding and misappropriation. Such facetiousness is meant not only in jest, as the appropriation of the double meaning leads back to ultimate things. 

When a historical category loses its meaning and threatens to disappear, an opportunity arises that has a strange consequence.

The first sentence of The Yield, Paul North's book on the Zürau aphorisms, to which he gives order by calling the notes a "treatise", refers to the category "Jew" in Kafka's time as "becoming too diverse to signify one thing" and prompted Kafka and others such as Franz Rosenzweig to rethink it. The general observation is not new: in 1938 Walter Benjamin told Gershom Scholem that "Kafka's work represents a sickening of tradition" and "Only the products of its decomposition are left", both of which echo Weber's notion of modernity's disenchantment of the world. The lack of metaphysical overtones in Aphorism 2 would explain my excited connection as it can be applied to any "apparent thing" of the moment, with the new context giving it a specific action. Aphorism 3, however, takes the theme to a pinnacle:

There are two cardinal human sins, from which all other derive: impatience and laxity. Impatience got them expelled from paradise; indolence keeps them from returning. Perhaps, though, there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Impatience got them expelled; impatience keeps them from returning.

This is certainly worthy of a commentary, but what can the category Paradise and those listed above mean to readers now if decomposition is complete and the presence of what constituted ultimate things in Kafka's time has disappeared in ours? We may imagine paradise via the old masters, but a tropical beach is more likely to be to the fore in our minds than the Garden of Eden. Reading Aphorisms 2 and 3 thereby encapsulates the experience of reading the 109 aphorisms together, oscillating between intimacy and rejection. 

In recalling my first reading of Aphorism 2, I associated it with Josipovici's essay An Art for the Wilderness written to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Kafka's death (and published in The Lessons of Modernism). But it isn't there. Instead, decades after first reading it, I rediscovered his experience of such an oscillation. The essay begins by discussing the discovery of the books we love and those that pass us by because they came at the wrong time. With those we love, "there is always the sense of an instinctive understanding, an awareness that what is lacking is really only the ability to make such understanding fully conscious":

Kafka is the only author I know to whom this does not apply. My own experience may be special in this respect, but I have found that, from the moment I began to read him, I felt at once infinitely close to him and infinitely distant. And ever since that time, as I have read and reread his novels and stories and diaries and notebooks and more and more of the voluminous correspondence that is slowly being made available, I have never had any sense of a gradual growth in understanding.

This experience is one that deserves more attention, and not just in Kafka. The furthest we may find ourselves is in Aphorisms 6 and 54, incidentally closer to the traditional form of aphorism:

The decisive moment of human development is everlasting. That is why the revolutionary movements grounded in intellect, which deem invalid everything that has gone before, are correct, for as yet nothing has happened.

There is nothing other than a world of the spirit; what we call the world of the senses is the Evil in the spiritual realm, and what we call Evil is only a momentary necessity in our eternal development.

As with Paradise, we are far removed from Evil with a leading capital and that of an everlasting spirit, let alone the latter taking precedence over the world of the senses. The ultimate things present to us as literature only; echoes from words become hollow. We may move closer to Kafka if we follow what he expressed in Kafka's famous letter to Brod post-Zürau that writing is "the reward for serving the devil", which then becomes a lament about having spent so much of his life writing and not living: "I died my whole life long and now I will really die." What, we wonder, albeit silently, off the literary stage, is the point of writing in respect of living and dying? Our impatience to answer has become literary appreciation, commentary, interpretation, blogging indeed; a frantic search for labels to prop up what has long since withered. For Kafka, at the end, at the apparent end, writing is an engagement with the sickening categories, their meaning and lack of meaning. The "pithiest linguistic formulation" is then not so much a genre choice as an undoing of authority and control, his words and theirs. Benjamin highlights the form of when criticising hasty theological readings of Kafka's work, such as the castle in The Castle being the seat of grace: 

it is the fact that his books are incomplete which shows the true working of grace in his writings. The fact that the Law never finds expression as such – this and nothing else is the gracious dispensation of the fragment.

Reading the aphorisms and the commentary prompted me to wonder if this oscillation between infinite closeness and infinite distance, an oscillation that is a single experience, explains the comparatively immobile experience of reading much of contemporary literature. When I think of the new publications that have meant most to me over the years, those that prompted a need to speak in response, to understand what the experience meant for me, and by extension for writing, I recognise, despite my confusion about this need – embarrassment even – a pattern of opening onto "ultimate things" albeit in variously indirect and necessarily incomplete manner – Knausgaard's books are the prime example – when I was unmoved by those I supposed I ought to be given how similar they are in many ways (curiously, another author whose surname begins with K may be the prime example here). As modern readers, we are like the mouse folk in the final story Kafka prepared for publication gathering to listen to Josefine sing or, rather, apparently sing, because the narration tells us it may not be singing at all but a "piping" expressing nothing distinct from the common piping of the populace who nevertheless gather to listen in silence (Kafka is almost as explicit about questioning the value of art in his work as in his letters). We seek order and understanding to convince ourselves that the song is real and ongoing, even if both are proof of the opposite. In the aphorisms, nevertheless, we can sense something in the distance, not only in the otherwise decomposed nouns and in the play of images and ideas, but perhaps more deeply in the delay of impatience produced by apparent and apparent – scheinbares and scheinbaren – and in the quiet echo of Fehler in Einpfählen, now in an English edition for the first time.

The Imperative to Write: Destitutions of the Sublime in Kafka, Blanchot and Beckett by Jeff Fort

"My compulsion to write does not occlude the uselessness of filling pages with words" writes Fernando Sdrigotti. "I know that what I do is pointless, one more message in a bottle in a moment when everyone else around me is also casting messages adrift". He expresses sadness at the sight of so many washed up on the shores of labyrinthine bookshops and, to mitigate the condition, offers a mutated version of Borges' infinite library in which an infinite number of alphabets are postulated with their own infinity to be filled, leaving more spaces than even Borges allowed for: "We go after those gaps, selfish that we are".

This admittedly contrived excuse to continue is one response to a problem that has confronted writers for over a century, with perhaps Samuel Beckett's response to Joyce being emblematic, though curiously it's a problem that fails to affect filmmakers, composers or painters. At least, it isn't visible in what they produce. While biographical material might reveal Alfred Hitchcock self-harmed in the presence of so many other psychological thrillers, what he produced does not bear its scars; or, rather, those scars are indistinguishable from perfectly powdered skin. For writers, however, consternation at the pointlessness of adding to an infinite number of books leads to at least three outcomes, the last of which is perhaps unique to writers: first, silence, in the form of never writing again, or at least never being published; second, denial or indifference, in the form of publishing regardless, and third, subjecting the writing to the condition. The last is unstable ground for sure, threatening idiosyncratic, fragmented structures invariably prompting disillusion and contempt from marketing departments and consumers wandering the aisles. Why not give up writing to make a living in what everyone says is the art form of the modern era? Well, if you need to ask, you might be free of the compulsion.

So what are the details of this pathological condition exactly? Sdrigotti does not analyse, preferring to leave the personal need to write in the shadow of the shelves, and given the historical conditions in which the publishing industry has come to define literature, setting mass market genre fiction and celebrity biographies alongside Beckett's novels and the poems of Paul Celan, it should be no surprise. Yet, as soon as the industry in the form of conglomerate publishing, chain bookshops and careers as a bestselling author is recognised as inimical to the compulsion, as soon as its shadow is removed, that sadness, that sense of pointlessness, is replaced by something much more interesting.  

God, goodness and silence 

Jeff Fort does this in his study of three writers who experienced "the literary vocation as an all-consuming task" when the time for such a vocation had apparently long passed. What results is a revision of the focus and purpose of modern fiction and should be vital reading for the sad writer. He begins by examining each author's stated reasons or excuses for writing. Kafka's grand self-torment is familiar to us – “God does not want me to write, but I, I must” – as is Beckett's self-deprecating manner – Bon qu'à ça; writing is "all I'm good for" – but the third less so. Maurice Blanchot's author biography heading his collection of essays The Book to Come includes the line: "His life is entirely devoted to literature and to the silence that is proper to it”. As this is both hyperbolic and self-effacing, it embodies Fort's contention that all three keep a flame alive however faint for "unparalleled satisfactions, not to say ecstasy" in writing and, what's more, some kind of transcendence, and this is what makes them stand out among so many others. The need for goodness is easily missed in the "good" of Beckett's statement, as is the need for salvation in Kafka's letter, but they are there, and both are sought in silence.

All three expressions are included in Fort's "downward displacements" of intellectual history following Luther's stand at the Diet of Worms and Kant's philosophy, making it clear The Imperative to Write places the predicament of the modern fiction writer in deep history and seeks to confirm the significance of these writers' work through its modesty, as it completes a trajectory from church pulpit through university lectern to solitary writing desk.

All three writers trail in the wake of the Kantian revolution in which reason replaced divine authority, disabling in its wake the religious function of art. In what Fort calls a cruel compulsion, but might also be called a categorical imperative, the artist, philosopher or scientist, is nevertheless left with reason's immanent drive to colonise what is beyond its limits, what we might call the ideal or the sublime. In doing so the imagination substitutes an image for the departed authority (hence words like 'ideal' and 'sublime'). In art this appears to have no more than a decorative function, while in more rational discourse it is a means of dismissing what cannot be contained. Resisting both, Fort argues the specific condition – the imperative to write – is the echo of the sublime behind the attractive images, which makes the impulse to write fiction significant. The echo is heard in as the uncanny space of Kafka's castle village, Beckett's 'timeless void' and Blanchot's 'literary space'; images haunting the pursuit of the ideal into the fictional void:

What is “real” in this radically fictive space has nothing to do with representational realism, but emerges rather from the sort of insistent and irreducible drive ... that stubbornly inhabits literary speech.

He calls this habitation "a literary alterworld," one that punishes the writer as much as rewards, as it "separates language from the world it names" and sets the author at "an irreducible remove" from the everyday world, perhaps embodied by the unpublished writer traipsing the aisles, where a book has at least an alibi for its emptiness in its physical, commercial reality. While this is also the celebrated freedom of creative writing – let your imagination run wild – it is also never far away from real world contempt and its timid apologists with their so-called Reality Hunger. However, writing fiction is not quite reality and it is this 'not quite' that is the "irritating breach, a hollow kernel in the language that cannot be voided" and one that "opens the spaces of an imperative that cannot be fulfilled". Such a residue, Fort says, "is all that is left of writing's sublimity".

Kafka, Blanchot and Beckett 

It is this residue that the three writers pursue in their own ways. Fort's three central chapters present close readings of their fiction in order to see how the imperative compels or structures specific works of fiction. These chapters were extremely difficult for me to summarise, so what follows is a crude outline that leaves out a great deal and may misrepresent as a result, for which I apologise in advance.

Fort characterises Kafka's cries of despair and defiance, anxiety and guilt, as a means of heightening the value of writing and dramatising his position when, in his time, as in ours, writing is essentially a discipline, an office job with all the conventions and competencies that this entails. When Kafka is not writing, he is defying the earthly powers who employ him and yet, when he is writing, he is going in the opposite direction, against society's grain, which may perhaps get him closer to God or what God forbids. The fictions of trial and punishment that result from this risk are those we know so well: the innocent one who is also guilty, the salesman who becomes a giant vermin and the son sentenced to death by his father. What sets Kafka apart from his precursors or those who might now be labelled Kafkaesque is that in these stories writing is at war with the writer:

The protagonists of these stories must plead a case for innocence before a hostile, aggressive, or at the very least highly skeptical judge; and the failure of their self-defense casts into doubt the very medium in which Kafka himself struggled to conjure them: language as the persuasive presentation of an otherwise occluded interiority.

The enigma of Gregor Samsa is that his innocence remains "invisible and unpresentable," as he is visible only in his socially beneficial role, which correlates with writing as a means of interactive and commercial utility rather than an extension into the voided sublime. Kafka's great task then is to mount a self-defence in the very form taken by the accusation; with Fort's emphasis: "to take hold of power in speech, in such a way as both to appropriate and undo that power in the very grounds of its possibility". The imperative in these works, which Fort gathers together as "judgment stories", is to present the inner reality of an individual against the law or as part of a sublime law now out of reach.

The later fiction is notable for being less melodramatic and more clearly projecting 'the destitution of the sublime' into writing. In A Hunger Artist, Kafka's great talent is presented as a negative, with showmanship displayed as a withdrawal from showmanship. This is the paradox in which his fiction must breathe. The story ends with the artist saying he didn't starve himself out of choice but because couldn't find the food he needed. But this is only another image of the void where there is no image: "the hunger artist's search is not for a food he 'never found' but rather for the nothing that he cannot grasp or make graspable". The sublime is as destitute as the showman.

What distinguishes Blanchot from what has passed so far is the premise that, in using language, we are already subject to "the abyssal fault by which 'the world' and 'life' are always already removed, remote, distanced". For our everyday reading and writing lives, the astonishment of this separation invariably passes by unnoticed, so it's one of Blanchot's great gifts in his critical writings to reanimate this revelation:

Apparently we read only because what is written is already there, laying itself out before our eyes. Apparently. But the first one to write, the one who cut into stone and wood under ancient skies, was hardly responding to the demands of a view requiring a reference point and giving it a meaning; rather, he was changing all relations between seeing and the visible. What he left behind was not something more, something added to other things; it was not even something less – a subtraction of matter, a hollow in relation to a relief. Then what was it? A gap in the universe: nothing that was visible, nothing invisible. I suppose the first reader was engulfed by this non-absent absence, but without knowing anything about it. And there was no second reader ...
                    (from The Infinite Conversation translated by Susan Hanson)

But it is in Blanchot's fiction that Fort wonders whether "ghostly returns" might traverse this gap, "an unloseable something that is not a thing", specifically something left behind by the 'feminine specters' in the récit Death Sentence, and present as we gaze at the death mask of l'inconnue de la seine, an image that Blanchot displayed on the wall of his study in Èze and is on the cover of this book. The separation is present in the movement of writing fiction, with the abyssal fault borne in these figures so that their presence in a life evokes "an extreme mode of loss". It is the imperative to write that provokes the haunting of these fascinating images, with fiction originating in the ghostly encounter rather than something reported after the event, not a confession projected into genre features but "something yet to come, an imminence whose lack of reality awaits its realization in the récit itself".

In this chapter, Fort takes issue with Blanchot's insistence on the separation of the biographical facts of a writer's life and the work, and this is also the focus of the chapter on Beckett, whose fiction lives in a similar relation to Blanchot's but differs in "the carefully cultivated melancholy, and even nostalgia" in responding to the loss of the world, which in Beckett's case maintains clear parallels to his life. Fort is especially good on the tension between formal precision of Beckett's fiction, which might hold these at a distance, and the "lyrical transports" that bring them close. The latter evidently allows what others call Beckett's experimentalism an alibi into mainstream appreciation. In July 2015, the actor Richard Wilson presented a documentary in which he conceded that Beckett's work "can be difficult and obscure" but added "there is one heartbreaking play that he wrote...his most autobiographical", so that his work is received as displaced self-expression alone, whereas it is according to Fort precisely the incompatibility of the abstract character of the fictive voice with the particularities of a singular life that sets Beckett's work apart. If the condition of possibility of such fiction is "the loss of the world" in the destitution of the sublime, the voice is also driven "by the indescribable charge produced by the unbridgeable distance from what has been left"; a distance, as we have seen, that is opened by language. And it is with this in mind that Fort makes a key point when he says "the words we read when we read The Unnamable are written words, and not the supposed stream of a supposed consciousness". It is in this novel that fiction is divested of characters and events, making it rely on its sources in the now-destitute sublime, which nonetheless, in an apparent paradox, allows the intrusion of reality "in a way that is impossible in more conventional or 'realistic' fictions".

Ending

We've come a long way from the initial compulsion to write, with the image of an infinite library replaced by an infinite nothing beyond its infinite shelves, and perhaps as a result a greater sense of the uselessness of writing. Except it is in the denial of reality in its widest sense as characterised in The Unnamable that our sad and frustrated compulsion to write persists. What excites me about The Imperative to Write is that it presents a perspective on what we carelessly call experimental writing that might catalyse many a writers' despondency and turn it into the work they were born to write. It is certainly one of the most extraordinary books about literature that I have ever read, one that has compelled me to write about in order to raise awareness of its ideas.

In the months it took me to read (the text including the notes reaches a quarter of a million words) I couldn't help but wonder about its own relation to the destitution of the sublime, and this intensified during my troubled attempts to summarise such a complex and detailed book, steeped as it is in philosophy and close readings of all three writers in their original languages. That is, what relation does this have in terms of literary history to the works under discussion, or, more specifically, are the works under discussion themselves kinds of summaries, albeit a highly stylised, of what such a profound study thickens and fills out, so that critical exposition is not so much secondary text feeding like a parasite on the larger organism but a continuation of the same movement in the form specific to our time, much as Luther and Kant might be considered as part of the genealogy of modernism despite the forms taken by their writings? In one aside, Fort refers to modernism as "a name for the sounding and unfolding of depth and interiority, its radical externalisation: inwardness as boundless exteriority," which happens to be a good way to summarise the first two volumes of Knausgaard's My Struggle, books that transcend their rather mundane, non-experimental form because they reach toward the distant horizons of a life. And remember, the writings by which we know Kafka, Blanchot and Beckett take many different forms – diaries, letters, short stories, novels, plays, poems, even critical essays and book-length studies – with not one demanding any fundamental priority. In contrast, contemporary works of such dispersed singularity and focus appear to be impossible, as if the disenchantment of the world, which might be another name for the destitution of the sublime, has been internalised to such an extent that fiction in particular is content to be trapped in its own freedom, its own blank space of infinite invention.

A book like The Imperative to Write might be able to jolt some writers out of such complacency, though I wonder if another version might be necessary to do that, one that is abridged to make it more financially accessible, much as My Struggle requires its excessive length to achieve its unexpected goal. Fort himself wonders if Blanchot "did not work too hard to maintain his noble manners" while Beckett’s "bawdiness and vulgarity" allowed for "a more palpably painful scattering of remains," and, when discussing Blanchot's preoccupation with dates and numerology, he inserts a moving footnote pointing out that Blanchot's fifth birthday on September 22, 1912 is the day Kafka famously wrote The Judgment, and that it is also the birth date of his late brother, to whom he pays "discrete homage" each time this date arises in his reading. What this latter signifies is left open to speculation and leaves one wanting more. What it also does is to reveal the possibilities of alternative forms that may be open to us to explore this strange imperative. As the contrast of noble manners and vulgarity suggests, the form of such explorations is also subject to the chance conditions, and perhaps only in submitting to the initial compulsion to write allows us to transcend them, a suggestion that itself contains the paradox in which writing must begin.

Kafka: The Years of Insight, by Reiner Stach

You have made me unhappy. I bought your "Metamorphosis" as a present for my cousin, but she doesn't know what to make of the story. My cousin gave it to her mother, who doesn't know what to make of it either.

So begins a letter to Franz Kafka written in 1917 by Dr Siegfried Wolff, a veteran of the trenches. He goes on to list other family members equally perplexed by the story and pleads for some help to protect his reputation: "Only you can help me". Apparently there is no evidence of a reply. Not that possession would help much: perplexity towards Kafka's fiction hasn't ceased despite the deluge of secondary material. Sometimes it is expressed with Wolff's politeness, sometimes with a journalist's boorish impatience. "Great antipathy towards Metamorphosis", was Kafka's own response. "Unreadable ending. Imperfect almost to its very marrow".

The problem with Kafka's fiction is that while in general the surface presents a generic world, recognisable even to those of us living a century later, the content is not familiar; it does not counsel the reader with wise observations on the human condition or provide practical information and descriptions of places for the reader to absorb and use in their lives; there isn't even a happy ending in sight. The only resort for the reader is critical: "What do I make of this?".

On a personal level the answer takes the regular form of what to say in discussion with friends on the common ground of 'a good read' but, in the public and more private arenas, this is more problematic. Over the decades there have been innumerable readings of Kafka's fiction named under various scholarly disciplines, each one underwriting his stories with a theoretical rigour lacking in everyday communication. This guarantees at least three things: that Kafka's fiction can be contained by structured analysis, has value only insofar as it confirms the premises of that analysis, and that the stories are capacious enough to accommodate an infinite number of disciplines. The first and second are full of promise for the reader keen to learn and use fiction as proof of theoretical authority. They also nullify the superstitious power of the object while allowing it to live like an insect quivering in a spider's web. However, these guarantees are possible only insofar as one is able to deal with the inherent bad faith of the third: why choose the Freudian reading over the Marxist? Or, if you think the Existentialist reading fails, what do you think of the Gnostic one? In bringing social esteem to the daydream of fiction, analysis raises fiction to new heights or depths of impenetrability, leaving the third guarantee full of despair because the number and variety of readings demands a decision, sending the reader back to the beginning of the search, only this time in the shadow of an entire library. Who is quivering now?

Biography offers a compromise in that it is a craft requiring certain constraints yet without the rigidity of a theoretical armature: it is both authoritative and curious. The Years of Insight, Shelley Frisch's translation of the third and final volume of Reiner Stach's definitive life of Kafka, begins with a scene-setter of Prague at the outbreak of the first world war and the crowd-pulling recreation of a trench from the frontline, which Kafka visited and which of course immediately suggests inspiration for The Burrow. We are on familiar ground here. But this is no series of suggestive coincidences. Instead Stach allows the reader to sense the free play of contingent conditions of Kafka's life, enlarging the picture when large events such as the war intervene, or switching the focus to characters like the actor Ludwig Hardt, the journalist Milena Jesenská and the agricultural adventures of his sister Ottla when their influence is entertaining (as in Hardt's case) or profound, as in the other two. This means there is much less of the prurient conjecture tainting Saul Friedländer's recent book. Stach continues with Kafka's magical reunion with Felice Bauer in Marienbad before the relationship ended for good, the postwar epidemic of Spanish flu, which Kafka caught and miraculously survived, the creative burst he found in his sister's tiny cottage beneath Hradčany castle and, finally, the discovery of his tuberculosis and the years of convalescence in various sanatoria; a time that included living on a farm in Zurau, writing The Castle, another fraught engagement, the affair with Milena and, finally, moving to Berlin with Dora Diamant.

Stach argues that such contingency troubled Kafka, which in turn infuriated his closest friend, Max Brod. Whereas Brod was constantly publishing in multiple genres, performing at readings, making a public stand for Zionism, his friend was fastidious in the extreme, preferring not to push himself, commit to a movement or even pursue a living by writing. However, there is a brief glimpse of Kafka's possible other life when in 1916 he was invited by an art gallery in Munich to present "a literary evening" using his own work. He would be mixing with the German avant-garde including Rainer Maria Rilke. But it was in the midst of war and Kafka's reading of In the Penal Colony did not rouse the audience. As always, Kafka accepted the criticism and was not apparently distraught by the poor reviews in the Munich press. Stach writes that for Kafka "the concept of twists of fate stood for the absolutely unendurable" and, despite its apparently failure to convince others, this event at least convinced him this was necessary: he was a writer in essence and not a celebrity cruising the social whirl.

We know how important the act of writing was to Kafka in regards of those twists of fate from the letter to his father written two years later. That it was unsent is less important than it was written. Stach argues that Kafka was "impervious to abstract reproofs" but was "receptive to prelinguistic gestural, spontaneous outbursts", and presents a list of an eclectic treasury where "absolute authenticity" could be found, so we might see the gesture of the letter as primary. It becomes clearer in the first line of the letter: he is unable to answer his father's question as to why he is so afraid of him precisely because he is afraid. He could not contain the answer in his head in order to answer. Silence is the answer. This made writing all the more challenging because it is always threatened by the gravity of rhetoric and overt content. Silence is the proof that cannot be admitted to court. So how to at least approach the prelinguistic in writing? We can see how Kafka tries in other first lines, this time of the diaries:

The onlookers go rigid when the train goes past. 'If he should forever ahsk me.’ The ah, released from the sentence, flew off like a ball on the meadow.

Plain observations were it not for the uncomfortable presence of what they release in meaning, or lack of it. In March 1912, after writing part of a story in his diary, he stops and reveals his dissatisfaction:

Nothing, nothing. This is the way I raise up ghosts before me. I was involved, even if only superficially, only in the passage, ‘Later he had.…’ mostly in the ‘pour’. For a moment I thought I saw something real in the description of the landscape.

These involving moments had their equivalents in his life. He regarded the eruption of tuberculosis as an outburst of authority and wrote in order to appreciate the meaning. More happily, in a letter from Marienbad, he tells Brod of Felice Bauer's trusting gaze in the time they spent alone: "I got my bearings somewhat while she, who had always held out her hands into the utter void to help, helped again, and with her I arrived at a human relationship of a kind that I had never known before". "This gaze remained the symbol of everything good," Stach writes, "the assurance that redemption was only conceivable but feasible". Just a gaze; nothing said. Four years earlier he had noticed Felice's "bony, empty face that wore its emptiness openly" and, no matter how suspiciously unromantic it may read to modern eyes like Friedländer's, he was immediately attracted to her and the possibility of a marriage in which "harmony ... runs beneath any opinions" and "cannot be analyzed but only felt". Marriage was otherwise the false, abstract, oppressive realm of the father. Their subsequent correspondence eroded that potential for harmony, the ghosts of rhetoric drinking their written kisses. He felt it again in Marienbad when he joined the Rabbi of Belz and his entourage inspecting the sights of the spa town, writing in detail to Brod about that too, fascinated by the "serene, happy faith" of the man and his followers yet not convinced he was in the presence of mystic knowledge: "I think that the deeper meaning is that there is none and in my opinion this is quite enough."

Reading the letter, one can't help but wonder what a biography might be like if the subject could be observed like the Rabbi of Belz, without interrogation and judgment. What might we see instead? This may be the province of another genre but the virtue of The Years of Insight is that it contains so many small details like Dr Wolff's letter and the Munich expedition that one is able to sense Kafka's as a living presence rather than a repository of secrets emitting evidence for the prosecution. But this is why Kafka has such renown: his stories hurtle forward, embodying what can only be felt not analysed: the pressure driving Georg Bendemann to throw himself from a bridge minutes after quietly sitting at a desk writing; the interruption of routine when Gregor Samsa is transformed into an insect and descends quickly toward death, continuing with his sister Grete stretching her young body on the family's celebratory picnic. What can we make of this terrible momentum? Perhaps Kafka felt Metamorphosis imperfect because its length obscured the overall gesture of the story and the short, aphoristic writings in the Bohemian countryside attempted a resistance to this tendency – sentences as gestures ("A cage went in search of a bird"). Writing seems to usurp metamorphosis and while at first its abstract definitions offer a defence from change, it then becomes a tormenting, unfulfilled promise of freedom ("My prison-cell – My fortress"). Writing's remoteness drives the perverse enthusiasm of the penal colony's officer for a form of execution in which writing is engraved in living flesh, guaranteeing its authority but, in this case, killing the one who values it so highly. In the opposite way, what kills the hunger artist is an absence of nourishment. Starvation is the truth misconstrued as art. For this reason it would have made no difference to Kafka had the audience in Munich been more enthusiastic about his story; it was not about confirmation of a writer's mastery.

The unfortunate irony then is that Kafka's own authority as a writer largely rests on Dr Wolff's misapprehension that there is a deeper meaning requiring more than the movement of the stories and which only the author or sundry experts can impart. While readers of The Years of Insight receive a rich and moving account of the pressures of one man's life in a certain time and place, the true authority of the biography is felt in what is glimpsed around the accumulated detail, and even more so in what gets lost: photographs taken with Felice Bauer ruined because she inserted the film back to front, the stash of notebooks written in Berlin confiscated by the Gestapo, the life not lived because it was ended prematurely by a disease that would soon be curable and, most of all, what happened to his friends and family years later. It is not an authority of power.

Death stalks the reading of any biography, even that of a living subject, but this one more than most. For seven years Kafka endured the tuberculosis that would kill him soon after he found domestic contentment with Dora Diamant. This makes for desperately sad reading. But nine years later the Nazis took power in Germany and the three-page epilogue registering without elaboration the fate of his family and friends is an exceptionally desolate space. Reiner Stach concludes by reiterating the fact that Kafka's world was thereby erased and all that remains is his language. This is true enough, yet his request to Brod to destroy all his papers was a necessary gesture in keeping with a deep mistrust of language, and a final gesture we should appreciate in kind.

A world without feeling

I don't know how people can read an emotional novel. Unless the reader is hoodwinked into thinking the novel can deliver 'real' emotion.
— Lee Rourke (@LeeRourke) August 14, 2013

Twitter is an unreliable arena for literary debate because terms cannot be defined – What is an emotional novel? What is a real emotion? – and one can only misunderstand by assuming answers. Better to move away. Displacement is therefore precisely Twitter's value for literary debate. Lee's rightful distaste for button-pushing novels displaced me to remember a passage in Saul Bellow's More Die of Heartbreak in which the narrator recalls the existential troubles of his uncle Benn Crader, a botanist, an expert in arctic lichens:

Benn once told me that when he landed by helicopter on the slope of Mount Erebus to collect samples, he had felt that he was very near the end of the earth, the boundary of boundaries. "Of course, there's no such thing," he said, "but there's such a feeling."

A scientist, a rationalist, Benn appears to have been hoodwinked into distress by a combination of reality and illusion, and yet, while he knows this, the feeling haunts him. What does it mean that he can't dismiss this illusion? The question might be familiar to keen readers of novels. We are surrounded by such events teasing us with unwarranted emotion, and not just in novels. Beckett's unnamable has bitter fun at the construction of emotion:

They love each other, marry in order to love each other better, more conveniently, he goes to the wars, he dies at the wars, she weeps, with emotion, at having loved him, at having lost him, yep, marries again in order to love again, more conveniently again, they love each other, you love as many times as necessary, as necessary in order to be happy, he comes back, the other comes back, from the wars, he didn't die at the wars after all, she goes to the station, to meet him, he dies in the train, of emotion, at the thought of seeing her again, having her again, she weeps, weeps again, with emotion again, at having lost him again, yep, goes back to the house, he's dead, the other is dead, the mother-in-law takes him down, he hanged himself, with emotion, at the thought of losing her, she weeps, weeps louder, at having loved him, at having lost him, there's a story for you, that was to teach me the nature of emotion, that's called emotion, what emotion can do, given favourable conditions, what love can do, well well, so that's emotion, that's love, and trains, the nature of trains ...

Love and trains, mere mechanics. Beckett had begun writing in French in part to get away from the sentimentality of English, so this – even when translated back – and the headlong nature of the prose, begins to dismantle the mawkish tendency of storytelling. And yet the rough grains of narrative remain and so too the seeds of emotion. The fatal dangers are present in the title of Bellow's novel, taken from a passage in which Benn discusses a journalist questioning him over his botanical research and his sense of guilt over the death of a neighbour:

... he wanted a statement about plant life and the radiation level increasing. Also dioxin and other harmful wastes. He was challenging about it. Well – I agreed it was bad. But in the end I said, 'It's terribly serious, of course, but I think more people die of heartbreak than of radiation'.

Why do we embrace such narratives in which unhappiness is amplified? In his 1920 diary, Kafka wrote a series of entries in the third person, one of which presents a diagnosis:

The fact that there is fear, grief and desolation in the world is something he understands, but even this only in so far as these are vague, general feelings, just grazing the surface. All other feelings he denies; what we call by that name is for him mere illusion, fairy-tale, reflection of our knowledge and our memory. How could it be otherwise, he thinks, since after all our feelings can never catch up with the actual events, let alone overtake them. We experience the feelings only before and after the actual event, which flits by at an elemental, incomprehensible speed; they are dream-like fictions, restricted to ourselves alone. We live in the stillness of midnight, and experience sunrise and sunset by turning towards the east and the west.

The distance of "he" is Kafka's freezer next to Beckett's microwave and extends Lee's twitter statement to affirm that we experience 'real' emotion only by elective agency. We turn to books in order to have emotion in the first place. Otherwise the chimes of midnight are all that we hear.

This kind of existence is deeply unsettling – reading fiction to fabricate meaning, to provide a telos for the interminable, even if we are reading a novel like The Unnamable. As readers, we are like Benn later in More Die of Heartbreak when, stuck in an apartment away from his research, this self-proclaimed "plant visionary" seeks solace by contemplating an azalea and gains emotional stability for weeks communing with its plant nature, only to discover that it is a fake, made of silk from Japan. More comedy, more distress. Yet if we believe this reveals human gullibility, we are correct only to the extent that we too are hoodwinked, because this is only a story, made of silk from Chicago. Benn Crader is an invented character who never visited Mount Erebus, never had such a feeling and never mistook a silk plant for a real one. There is no such thing.

But there is such a story, and we condemn susceptibility in the act of succumbing. Modern writers might suggest that, once cleared of sentiment, the novel has the potential to be the ground of truth, of clinical analysis, a place in which we are no longer hoodwinked; a world without feeling. Except of course this is maintained on a contradiction: storytelling is the means to this world. Beckett's comedy confirms that even the most constricted, stripped-down story is emotional. Even the most overtly heartless, realistic novel relies on a certain kind of sentiment. Swooning under the gaze of its gritty beloved, it refuses the possibility of error or unknowing. Contemporary fiction's impatience with this paradox and its refusal to confront it in form and content actually constitutes the bulk of contemporary fiction, and might thereby trace the fate of humanism. Apparently free of heavenly abstraction, humankind still struggles to ground its story and still swims in a sea without shore, and so, to save itself, clings like Pincher Martin to one remaining outcrop, repressing its fate.

Can the novel let go? The question is the starting point of Vila-Matas' Montano's Malady with its epigraph: What will we do to disappear? The writer's block suffered by the title character suggests it is necessary. He must stop writing in order to write. The author of the epigraph has emphasised that there is nothing negative in 'not to write': "it is intensity without mastery, without sovereignty, the obsessiveness of the utterly passive". If letting go is then obsessive passivity, how might that be written?

Passivity is what's notable in Ágota Kristóf's The Notebook, a novel recently celebrated by Slavoj Žižek and soon to be reissued. What's notable in his description of the story and his wish to be like the "ethical monsters" whose words we read, the twin boys who behave with "blind spontaneity and reflexive distance" promising a world "in which sentimentality [is] replaced by a cold and cruel passion", is that he doesn't mention the form the novel takes: a notebook written by the twins in the first person plural and the present tense. It lacks both the usual ornaments of novelistic prose, has no psychological or emotional description and offers no relief or guidance from a third person. The twins state that the notebooks consist only what they know to be true: "We must describe what we see, what we hear, what we do". This means the writing does more than "tell the story" as Žižek says, it embodies their behaviour and becomes their passion, their obsession, their passivity. The question then becomes: what do we do with this illusion? 

An everyday afterlife: Knausgaard revisited

A question arises from my breathless response to volume one of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle: have I contradicted my exasperated review of David Shields’ Reality Hunger? At least, this is a question I ask myself. After all, as the author explained, this autobiographical work was written only when fiction failed him. He had published two novels but:

I wanted to write something completely different, and I wanted to write about my father ... About his fall, how he somehow changed from being a father, a perfectly ordinary teacher, a local politician, to a divorced, dead alcoholic. For three years I tried to write a kind of regular, realistic but fictional work about his death. Nothing worked. ... And [then] I started just writing it as it was: the truth, no artifice, no cleverness. Reality.

Perhaps my enthusiasm was relief at the abolition of the generic niceties that even the most impressive novels observe and, like David Shields, I mistook disillusionment for truth. Here was something elemental, I thought, the word Thomas Bernhard uses to describe Dostoevsky's The Demons after he had read the novel on his teenage deathbed. But, in my review of Reality Hunger, I argued that such reality cannot enter into the work without conforming to the pressure of the conceptual unity imposed by a book, and that writing plainly about plain things is no more a guarantee of realism than – following Wittgenstein – rain experienced in a dream is a guarantee of its wetness, even if it is connected to noise on the bedroom window.

Of course dream rain does mean something: meaning fills the dreamworld like sunlight, even when it is dark. We can only speculate on the meaning. This is our experience of dreams, and our speculation never feels quite enough, never proportionate to the generic purity of the dream. The quality of My Struggle I perceived is precisely a persistent analysis that maintains a propulsive force because it is aware that is never enough. Had Knausgaard written a regular, realistic novel instead, it might have appeared to be enough: a function of mastery and controlled distance, hence his writer's blockage and compulsion toward "no artifice, no cleverness". However, My Struggle is something other than reportage and the fundamental error of Reality Hunger is to conflate the aims of journalism with those of literature.

For this reason, Mark Thwaite makes a very good case for treating My Struggle as a novel, arguing that the relentless focus on “quotidian dreariness” is its method of seeking the meaning of its dream, to engage with the presence of “something numinous [that] lies just beyond sight, beneath grief, [what] lies always beyond language”. He aligns this to Freud’s shifting definition of the uncanny: “He finds something deeply strange, something Unheimliches, during this work: secretly, heimlich is not the antonym of unheimlich at all, but rather its sometime synonym”. Words are thereby always in excess of themselves and “the yearned-for mot juste doesn't get us any further than just our everyday yearning". This is well put. Knausgaard must focus on "the stink, the misery, the pain, the boredom, the embarrassment" of everyday life in order to open up onto what it cannot name. "The subject here" he continues, "is death and whether writing/language has anything to say about this commonplace disaster that haunts and harries and shapes us everywhere we turn". Knausgaard himself is explicit that this can happen only when writing yields to literature's demand:

everything has to submit to form. If any of literature’s other elements are stronger than form, such as style, plot, theme, if any of these overtake form, the result suffers. That is why writers with a strong style often write bad books. That is also why writers with strong themes so often write bad books. Strong themes and styles have to be broken down before literature can come into being. It is this breaking down that is called “writing.” Writing is more about destroying than creating.

Writing as destruction is a striking contradiction and serves Mark's reading well, but "bad books" is vague and self-serving. He names no names here but My Struggle inevitably provokes comparisons with at least two. Who has stronger styles than Proust and Bernhard and what books have stronger themes than In Search of Lost Time and Gathering Evidence? (They are also named in My Struggle, Knausgaard having "virtually imbibed" one.) I regret mentioning them in my review, not because Proust and Bernhard cannot be usefully discussed in comparison but, in my case, they weren't usefully discussed and because doing so threatens the error that Marcel himself describes: when one hears of a great book, one can imagine only an assemblage of the great books one has already imbibed. It is only when one reads the new book that one becomes aware of its otherness and perhaps also its weakness in comparison. This has happened with three friends of mine who have read My Struggle, and it has caused me great consternation.

To compound this error, I shall now compare Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle to the work of Franz Kafka.

We can say Kafka’s work has more in common with Knausgaard’s in terms of style, that is, in its comparative disconnect from style. In both we are drawn more to the specific events described, their curious and horrific banality, rather than to immersion in aesthetic bliss, while at the same time we feel compelled to draw back and seek an organising principle, to imagine such events as part of a containable world view, and then to resubmerge in a newly configured aesthetic bliss. However, Kafka’s is the prime example of a body of work that is never quite enough, a lack into which it is impossible to submerge. The deluge of secondary texts does this for us. Maurice Blanchot asks what needs to done to rescue Kafka from this fate, one to which Kafka himself contributed, and his answer is to recommend regarding his work as Kafka had wanted: in its absence. He observes that, with the publication of the Diaries, Kafka the writer was placed in the foreground and he is the one we look for in the work. He wonders if Kafka foresaw such a disaster and that is why he wanted his work destroyed. The opposite is true of My Struggle: knowledge of Knausgaard life saturates the page and the interviews and reports of the scandalised response in Norway offer no room to move away in relief: there is nowhere else to look but the work. But what then is the work?

It certainly isn’t the everyday content of life. This is as much the subject of My Struggle as ice is the subject of Scott’s journey to the South Pole. An overwhelming sense of imminence is evoked by Knausgaard so that its banality becomes, as James Wood says, celestial. For example, when he walks home in the dark after a day of writing and describes his route with such precision that only an event of great significance would seem to justify it. As the event doesn't occur, another world makes itself felt instead; a possible world, just out of reach. This imminence has itself been promised by occasional epiphanies, which appear to open the work to its final destination, as well to align the author with the experience of Proust. But they are frustrated epiphanies, without message, each one a scintillating blank. The face in the sea and the inexplicable tears evoked by a patch of sky in an old painting appear as offerings of transcendence, but not an affirmative transcendence. Why not?

Blanchot places Kafka’s work squarely in the era after the death of God: his stories are “among the darkest in literature, the most rooted in absolute disaster”. Only it is not an anguished expression of lament but one of uncertainty and anxiety. “God is dead, which may signify this harder truth: death is not possible”. We think of The Hunter Gracchus fallen into a ravine and happy to wait for death: “Then the accident happened”. Not the accident of death but that of not dying: “I am here. I don’t know any more than that. There’s nothing more I can do. My boat is without a helm—it journeys with the wind which blows in the deepest regions of death.”

The theme is also clear in Metamorphosis: like Gracchus, Gregor cannot die even as his body transforms and disintegrates. Despite the utter misery and solitude of his condition, he still seeks moments of reprieve – food from his sister Grete, protecting the portrait on the wall – until, finally, he does die, only then for Grete, free at last from the burden of her looking after her brother and on a family outing, to stretch her young body, signalling life’s revival; one more metamorphosis. “There is no end,” Blanchot writes, “there is no possibility of being done with the day, with the meaning of things, with hope”. God is thereby not deprived of his infinite authority: “dead, he is even more terrible, more invulnerable, in a combat in which there is no longer and possibility of defeating him”.

We are battling a dead transcendence, Blanchot says, and notes the prevalence of the powerful dead in Kafka’s stories: the emperor in The Great Wall of China and the former Commandant in In the Penal Colony. We might add Knausgaard’s father. An absurd battle perhaps, something embodied in the comedy of Kafka’s stories (“he could hardly keep from laughing”) and by Knausgaard's solemn attention to the mundane. Yet it is perhaps the only battle left worth fighting; a combat of passivity. Blanchot believed that Kafka recognised his presentation of death had instead dimmed and erased it, and that our reading "revolves anxiously around a misunderstanding": we think we have witnessed what has in fact been hidden. Kafka wanted to destroy his writing because it hadn’t failed enough.

Similarly, My Struggle has been welcomed with astonishment and great sales, much to the author's horror: "I have given away my soul". He must also wish to recommend his own absence. Western man, Blanchot observes, has tried to make this bearable by focusing on the positive: immortality, of an afterlife that would compensate for this life, perhaps the afterlife of fine writing: “But this afterlife is our actual life”.