The Illogic of Kassel

10

That night at home I watched a television documentary about the growing power of modern China until my wife went to bed, when I started investigating Kassel. I learned that all the telescopes in the French-sounding Orangerie Palace were pointing toward Clocked Perspective, a piece by the Albanian artist Anri Sala, located in Karlsaue, two kilometers away. Beside the telescopes, an 1825 G. Ulbricht painting of a castle hung amid several clocks; the painting featured a real clock, and though the castle was seen at an angle, the clock surprisingly met the viewer face-on. Anri Sala — undoubtedly the Albanian my Getafe friend had referred to in her recent email — had corrected this error in his sculpture, and his clock told the correct time on its slanted dial, matching the angle of Ulbricht’s painted castle.

Two hours later, I fell asleep thinking I was going to Kassel to look for the mystery of the lost and irreparable universe, to be initiated into an unknown algebra and to search for an oblique clock. I dreamed that someone asked me insistently if I didn’t believe that the modern taste for images was nourished by an obscure opposition to knowledge. The question could be formulated more simply, I kept thinking. But in that dream, it grew increasingly twisted and bothered me infinitely, the intellectual side of it seeming so unnecessarily complex. In the end, everything was bothering me. I was returning very tired from my journey to the center of the labyrinth of contemporary art’s avant-garde, where I’d found myself in a pure nightmare, within a sort of quagmire, in which the same movement was repeated over and over again: in an intensely red Chinese room, I was implacably submitting the concepts home and feeling at home to an endless, skeptical scrutiny.

The intellectual plot of the nightmare had been so intricate that I was delighted to wake up and discover the real world was much simpler, I’d even go so far as to say much more idiotic.

It was five in the morning, and, since I was suddenly wide awake, I went to my study and began to reread the copy of Kafka’s The Great Wall of China and Other Short Works that I had in my library and hadn’t opened for years. I found there, among those other short works, one I didn’t remember called “Homecoming,” written in Berlin in 1923. I remember the emotion I felt as soon as I started to read it, because I realized that in some way the piece contained an explanation of why, in a letter to his fiancée, Kafka had written that somewhat mysterious phrase that he was Chinese and was going home. In fact, I had the impression — strengthened by the time of day — that this story, written in 1923, had been written for me so I would read it one day, when the hour came for me to travel to a Chinese enclave in the middle of Germany:

I have returned. I have passed under the arch and am looking around. It’s my father’s old yard. . I have arrived. Who is going to receive me? Who is waiting behind the kitchen door? Smoke is rising from the chimney, coffee is being made for supper. Do you feel you belong, do you feel at home? I don’t know. I feel most uncertain. . The longer one hesitates before the door, the more estranged one becomes. What would happen if someone were to open the door now and ask me a question? Would I not myself then behave like one who wants to keep his secret?

Did Kafka write this for me? Well, why not? I remembered that simple and guileless question he had pondered on a certain occasion: Could it be that one can take a girl captive by writing? Seldom has anyone formulated with such ingenuousness, such precision, and such depth the very essence of literature. It was the very task that Kafka was going to affix to writing in general, and to his own writing in particular. Because contrary to what so many believe, no one writes to entertain, although literature might be one of the most entertaining things around; no one writes to “tell stories,” although literature is full of brilliant tales. No, one writes to take the reader captive, to possess, seduce, subjugate, to enter into the spirit of another and stay there, to touch, to win the reader’s heart. .

Franz Kafka, son of the businessman Hermann Kafka, seemed there in front of his father’s house to perceive that, in spite of appearances, the home did not belong to him. One can easily imagine him hesitating for hours before the big old house and finally not entering, but devoting himself to pursuing his tenacious search for a place, for a home that perhaps he’d never find by actually going home, but that he might find one day along the way.