K.

V. Powers

In the same octavo notebook, a few lines apart, Kafka drafted two untitled apologues, the first twelve lines long, the second around fifty, which take as their protagonists respectively Sancho Panza and Odysseus. They constitute Kafka’s highest tribute to Western literature as well as to Western survival skills. Like all stories about essential matters, these have to do with demons.

Sancho Panza and Odysseus have this in common: both saved themselves using “inadequate, even childish means.” Don Quixote, however, was lost. But we will discover through Kafka’s story that Don Quixote was a puppet. It wasn’t he who spent years reading chivalric romances and losing himself in feverish daydreams. It was Sancho Panza, who quickly grasped that those stories, with all the demons they roused, would soon have killed him. So he concocted the figure of Don Quixote. That’s what he chose to call the “devil” that dwelt within him and whose destructive rage he wanted “to divert from himself.” Once he had found a name and it had become a character, it could be observed from a certain distance rather than simply endured. And above all he’d get a chance to think about other things. Sancho Panza knew perfectly well that nothing in life was as gripping as one’s relations with demons. Demons, however, soon caused one to undertake “the craziest exploits,” as indeed would one day happen with Don Quixote. Better then, for Sancho Panza, to redirect the actions of his demons onto another being. He could then resume his own life of modest interest while still following Don Quixote on his expeditions, mainly because he felt a certain “sense of responsibility,” since, after all, the knight was his creature. But also because Don Quixote was forever dealing with demons, and Sancho Panza recognized at once that such a situation would provide him “great and useful entertainment.” Thus Sancho Panza survived and, among other things, told us the story of Don Quixote.

In more ancient times, when people could still appear beautiful and bold, before it became obligatory to take on a clumsy, scruffy appearance, we find a precursor to Sancho Panza in Odysseus. In those days, it was common knowledge — and not just the domain of the few who went off by themselves to read adventure stories and daydream about them — that life consisted above all in waiting to be possessed by other voices, which brought with them every happiness and every grief. It had been passed down that the most irresistible of these voices, which offered supreme happiness followed at once by certain ruin, were those of the Sirens. Everyone knew that living meant being exposed — someday — to the Sirens’ song. Men employed a wide range of stratagems in their attempts to pass by the Sirens and survive. A few succeeded. They sailed by the Sirens’ rocks and saw them pass before their eyes. In the air, a perfect silence. They concluded that the Siren song had been only a superstition. But this discovery provoked in them such “arrogance” that they quickly committed some rash act and perished. Thus humanity never learned that the Sirens’ song simply didn’t exist, and people persisted in their erroneous belief that it was fatal.

Then Odysseus appeared. Common knowledge had it that no expedient, such as stopping the ears with wax or lashing oneself to the mast, was effective against the Sirens. But Odysseus placed his faith in those “poor tricks” alone. (And here Kafka’s version departs from Homer’s, according to which Odysseus was the only one among his crew not to stop his ears with wax.) When his ship passed before them, the Sirens — knowing full well that they were dealing with a powerful adversary — resorted to the weapon that was “even more terrible than their song, namely their silence.” And so Odysseus passed unscathed before them, believing that the Sirens’ song had failed to penetrate the wax in his ears. The weapon of silence couldn’t do its work, because Odysseus was convinced that the Sirens had been singing. He remembered their chests heaving, “their eyes brimming with tears, their mouths half-opened,” and believed those signals to be the accompaniments of “arias that were ringing out, unheard, around him.” If the Sirens let him pass unharmed, it was probably out of admiration for the man who had endured their silence while lashed to a mast with wax in his ears. A childish image, certainly, perhaps ridiculous. And yet Odysseus was the only one who, having passed before the Sirens, didn’t go off on a rampage pretending to have conquered powers that no one by this time could have overcome. Not just that: of all those who passed before the Sirens and survived, Odysseus was also the only one who didn’t doubt the power of their song. Perhaps the Sirens cast a benevolent eye on that tribute. And finally the last, most daring hypothesis, seemingly blasphemous but in truth the most devout: Odysseus “actually realized that the Sirens were silent and held up the fictitious version described above simply, so to speak, as a kind of shield, against both them and the gods.” If this hypothesis is true, it doesn’t conflict with the previous version of events: Odysseus would have been so complicit with the gods and the Sirens that their benevolence would seem to go without saying. In fact, Odysseus would appear to have collaborated with them to elaborate the legend of the Sirens’ song, an extreme metamorphosis of the song itself.

Don Quixote is only a puppet, charged with enduring Sancho Panza’s phantasms, who furiously attack and batter him. Sancho Panza sits quietly and reflects. He gazes tenderly on that shaky, feverish creature, whom he’s thrown into the world and into literature simply so that he himself — Sancho Panza — can stand back and catch his breath. Don Quixote can speak with impunity about theology — or chivalry — and can let himself be devoured by them. Sancho Panza observes it all quietly. And he “never boasted about it.” According to some, all he made of it was a novel.

In June 1913 Kafka noted in his Diaries: “The immense world I have in my head. But how to free myself and it without tearing. And a thousand times better to tear than to hold it back or bury it in me. It’s the reason I’m here, that’s entirely clear to me.” To tear, but what? His head, or the phantasms? Or both? Judicious action was called for, so that the phantasms, on being uprooted, wouldn’t injure his head — or disfigure themselves. In any case, the liberation was always a double one: of the phantasms and from the phantasms. That’s why Sancho Panza invented Don Quixote.

For Kafka, as for Sancho Panza, relations with the powers were so rooted in physiology, perceptible even in the act of breathing, that the first thought, and the rashest, was to liberate oneself from them. But Kafka knew that such a liberation would be illusory.

The greatest accomplishment consisted in establishing a certain distance. In sitting at a table and observing the powers — such as those apparitions of Don Quixote’s unbridled delirium — with relief, but also with something at stake. Following their transformations, but always standing off to one side, like an extra. That’s all one can ask. It’s the highest wisdom. Sancho Panza is the only person Kafka ever characterized as “a free man.”

There’s a point where all the powers get sucked into the same well. The closest approximation of that point was Kafka’s writing table. That’s why, as he would write one day to Oskar Baum, “the moving of a table in my own room” seemed no less terrible than the prospect of a trip to Georgental. And then he explained why the prospect of that trip frightened him so much: “In the last or next-to-last analysis, it’s only fear of death. In part also the fear of attracting the gods’ attention; if I continue to live here in my room, if every day passes as usual like the one before, it’s obvious that someone will have to attend to me, but the thing is already in motion, the gods hold the reins only mechanically, it’s so lovely, so lovely not to be noticed, if there was a fairy by my cradle it must have been the ‘Retirement’ fairy.”

The next day, in a letter to Brod, Kafka spoke again of this “fear of attracting the gods’ attention.” But this time the expression is the opening chord of a Leçon de Ténèbres on writing. What follows is the closest thing to a demonology of writing that has come down to us. Even if the writer restricts his field of vision to one room, and within that room to a desk, his condition is still not secure. What he’s missing is the floor, “fragile or positively non-existent” beneath his feet. And that floor covers “a darkness, whose obscure power surfaces of its own accord, and heedless of my stammering destroys my life.” What, then, does writing consist of?

Writing is a sweet, marvelous reward, but for what? In the night it became clear to me, as clear as a lesson for children, that it’s the reward for having served the devil. This descent toward the dark powers, this unchaining of spirits that are naturally kept bound, the dubious embraces and everything else that can happen down below, and of which you don’t recall anything when you’re up above, writing stories in the light of day. Perhaps some other kind of writing exists, but I know only this. At night, when fear won’t let me sleep, I know only this. And its diabolical element seems absolutely clear. It’s the vanity and the sensuality, they circle continuously around our own figure, or someone else’s — in which case the movement multiplies, becomes a solar system of vanity — and feast on it. What the ingenuous man sometimes desires (“I would like to die and see how they mourn me”), is played out constantly by a writer of this kind, he dies (or doesn’t live) and constantly mourns himself. This is the origin of his terrifying fear of death, which can’t present itself as fear of death, but might appear instead as fear of change, fear of Georgental.

The vortex swirls fiercely. But the most difficult and esoteric part isn’t that involving the “descent toward the dark powers,” in which the highest Romantic tradition and the distilled spirit of décadence seem to converge. The part that’s most coded, and most unexpected, is where Kafka speaks of “the vanity and the sensuality” that belong to a certain practice of writing, the only one he claims to know. What sensuality, what vanity, does he mean? And what is the “dark power” that assails the writer’s life in order to destroy it? Kafka pointed to it a little later in the same letter:

I’m sitting here in the comfortable posture of the writer, ready for all things beautiful, and I must observe without intervening — because what else can I do but write? — as my poor, defenseless real self (the existence of the writer is an argument against the soul, because the soul has plainly abandoned the real self, but only to become a writer, unable to go beyond that; could the separation from the self possibly weaken the soul that much?) is stung, cudgeled, nearly ground to bits by the devil, on a random pretext, a little excursion to Georgental.

When these lines are placed alongside certain shamanistic confessions, phrases that seemed obscure and thorny become piercingly clear. That abandoned body, that living corpse, that “forever corpse” whose “strange burial” the writer is quick to observe, is the shaman’s body, inanimate and motionless as his spirit travels widely, among the branches of the tree of the world, in the company of animals and other supernatural assistants. One can’t, however, take much pleasure in the journey (as “vanity” might wish): breaking away from the “real self,” the soul is left weakened, capable only of becoming “a writer, unable to go beyond that” (acme of sarcasm). And his activity will consist above all in “enjoying with all [his] senses or, which is the same thing, wanting to tell the story of” what happens with the writer’s “old corpse.” But this can succeed only in a state of “utter self-forgetfulness — the first prerequisite of being a writer isn’t wakefulness but self-forgetfulness.” Twice, in this phrase and in the parenthesis on the soul and its split from the “real self,” Kafka has gone quite far in his description of the prima materia of literature. This is his Kamchatka. For those who wanted to follow him, he left, at the end of the letter, the most concise definition of the kind of writer he felt himself to be: “The definition of a writer, of this kind of writer, and the explanation of the effects he has, if he ever has any: he is humanity’s scapegoat, he allows others to enjoy sin without guilt, almost without guilt.” Painful, abysmal irony in that “almost without guilt”: a nod to the illusory innocence of the pleasure that binds every reader to literature.

There was a graphologist in Sylt, in the pension where Felice was staying during a vacation. Felice asked him to examine Kafka’s handwriting and later sent Kafka the results. These seemed to him false and rather ridiculous. But “the falsest assertion among all the falsehoods” was this: according to the graphologist, the subject showed “artistic interests.” No — that was an insult. Kafka replied sharply: “I don’t have literary interests, I’m made of literature, I’m nothing else and can be nothing else.”

A few days later, and still as part of his attempt to explain to Felice why he considered himself unsuited to spending his life with another person, Kafka described himself as a creature who “is bound by invisible chains to an invisible literature and who screams when approached, thinking someone is touching that chain.”

It’s awkward to speak of symbols in Kafka, because Kafka experienced everything as symbol. It wasn’t a choice — if anything, it was a sentence. Symbols belonged to everything he perceived, just as fluidity belongs to our perception of water. He didn’t call them Symbole, but rather Sinnbilder, “emblems,” at least in the beginning. That noun is composed of Sinn, “sense” or “meaning,” and Bild, “image.” Images that have meaning: Kafka felt himself compelled to live perennially among them. At times he wanted to escape them.

When his tuberculosis manifested he wrote Brod: “In any case, there remains the wound, of which my wounded lungs are merely the emblem (Sinnbild).” And in his Diaries, two days later, he wrote the same words: “If the wound to my lungs is merely an emblem, as you maintain, an emblem of the wound whose inflammation is called Felice and whose depth is called justification, if that’s how it is, then even the doctor’s advice (light air sun quiet) is an emblem. Seize it.”

But how does one move from symbols to the story? Kafka gave his illness a theatrical shape: first, subtly, in his letter to Brod where he spoke of his “wound”; then again, more crudely, in one of his first letters to Milena:

It happened that my brain could no longer bear the anguish and suffering it was burdened with. It said: “I surrender. But if there are any others here who care about preserving the whole, they’re welcome to take some of my load so that we can keep going a while longer.” At that point my lungs came forward, having little to lose. Those negotiations between my brain and lungs, which took place without my knowledge, must have been frightening.

The scene is already set. The characters enter. The dialogue might be like certain exchanges that are sprinkled through his Diaries—disjointed, meandering. Something like this: “You kill him, I can’t do it.” “Okay, but I’ll need a little time.” “Fine, but don’t forget.”

Kafka’s intolerance for big words. If uttered by a young woman, breathlessly, he had the impression that they emerged “like fat mice from her little mouth.”

“The bystanders stiffen when the train goes past.” It’s the first sentence of his Diaries, set apart. The train is time, which doesn’t permit us to grasp its shape. Only a sudden wind, jumbled outlines. But we can tell it’s passing. And it’s impossible not to stiffen as we watch it: one last gesture of resistance. This is an example of what Kafka wasn’t able to avoid perceiving: reflexes, fixed gestures, involuntary gestures, dead metaphors that brood over their secrets like insects trapped in amber.

For Kafka, the metaphorical and the literal had the same weight. The passage from one to the other was smooth. The metaphorical could take the place of the literal and transform the literal into metaphor. That life may be a trial punctuated by punishments could give rise to the metaphor of an entire life as a judicial trial. But that judicial trial could then become literal, its articulation so ramified and subtle as to evoke as metaphor the proceedings of life itself. The back-and-forth between the two planes was continual and imperceptible. And the presence of the metaphorical plane also worked to distance the literal from its proximity to the ground of things, rendering it dense and muffled, lacking that breath that comes only with the capacity to split in two.

Like Wittgenstein in the margins of Frazer’s Golden Bough, Kafka revealed his “primitive gaze” only in passing or between parentheses. An exemplary instance can be found in a letter to Robert Klopstock from March 1922 (as The Castle was being written):

You need only keep in mind that you’re writing to a poor little man who is possessed by every possible evil spirit, of every type (one of medicine’s undeniable merits is having introduced, in place of the notion of possession, the consoling concept of neurasthenia, which has however rendered recovery more difficult and furthermore has left open the question of whether it is weakness and sickness that lead to possession or whether, on the other hand, weakness and sickness are themselves a stage of possession, preparing the man to become a bed of rest and pleasure for the impure spirits), a man who feels tormented if this condition of his isn’t recognized, but apart from that it’s possible to get along decently with him.

From Psellus’s treatise on demons to Judge Schreber and Freud, a long, jagged stretch of psychic history is covered with cool irony in those parenthetical lines, which seem written by a Desert Father, wise in the ways of spirits.

Kafka once recounted to Milena an episode that settled in advance a vast part of the literature that would accumulate around him: “Recently a Tribuna reader told me that I must have done great research in a madhouse. ‘Just in my own,’ I told him. And then he tried to compliment me again on ‘my madhouse.’”

Peremptorily, unexpectedly, Kafka one day wrote in his Diaries that “all such literature” (meaning first of all his own) was an “attack on the frontier” and could even “have developed into a new secret doctrine, into a Kabbalah” (adding, in a clarification that goes to the heart of his thought on modern Judaism: “had Zionism not intervened”). In the fragment that precedes this, “the attack on the frontier” is more explicitly an “attack on the last earthly frontier.” But how did Kafka arrive at that expression? The fragment appears in the context of an account of an extremely severe, overwhelming crisis experienced in January 1922, shortly before he began the draft of The Castle: “In the past week I suffered something like a breakdown, worse than any except perhaps that one night two years ago; I haven’t experienced other examples. Everything seemed over, and still today nothing seems much different.” What had happened? “First of all: breakdown, impossible to sleep, impossible to stay awake, impossible to endure life, or more precisely the course of life.” The cause of the breakdown is a tear in the fabric of time. External time and internal time now proceed at different rates: “The clocks don’t agree, the internal one chases along in a diabolical or demoniacal or in any case inhuman fashion, the external one limps along at its usual pace.” They differ not only in speed but in direction: thus “the two different worlds divide and keep dividing or at least tear themselves horribly.” The decisive word here has already sounded: “chases.” The internal process resembles a mad chase, a chase that “takes the path that leads away from humanity.” Its “wild nature” can’t be described in other terms — and in fact the word chase returns six times in the next few lines. In the end, however, Kafka recognizes that the chase is “only an image.” But what can take the place of an image? Only another image. Such as this one: the chase could be called an “attack on the last earthly frontier.” Thus the image is developed — and even more coded. Enigmas can be resolved only by further enigmas. And as if to prove that, Kafka immediately takes the image of the attack on the frontier and splits it in two. Because two types of attack can be made: an “attack launched from below by mankind,” which can be “replaced, since this too is only an image, with the image of an attack directed at me from above.” If there is one passage that distills Kafka’s peculiar process, it’s this one. Knowledge leads to the evocation of an image. And that image is immediately recognized as “only an image.” To move beyond it, it will have to be replaced — with another image. The process is never-ending. No image exists about which it can’t be said that it’s “only an image.” But neither does any knowledge exist that isn’t an image. This vicious circle offers no exit and perhaps approximates a definition of literature. Through image.

Here the passage breaks off. The next begins: “All such literature is an attack on the frontier.” On the heels of that comes the reference to “a Kabbalah”—a further image. The chase and the Kabbalah: each unleashes the other.

But what feeds that chase its endless, unruly energy? Kafka knows that the frenetic “internal pace” may have “various causes,” but certainly “the most obvious is self-observation, which never allows an image to rest quietly, but rather keeps chasing it farther and farther, only to become an image itself and be chased in turn by a new self-observation.” The demoniacal, provocative, hounding element is, therefore, self-observation. Which in Kafka was extreme. But precisely because he was so adept at it, he always regarded it with suspicion, rather the way Homer’s characters regarded the gods — for they had occasionally encountered them and bore the scars to prove it. To Kafka, the avoidance of self-observation thus seemed, at times, felicitous, yet just two months before his chasing crisis, in November 1921, he called self-observation an “unavoidable obligation.” His reasoning behind that declaration is in itself suggestive of the movements of his stories: “If someone else is observing me, then naturally I ought to observe myself as well; if no one is observing me, then I must observe myself all the more closely.”

Self-observation appeared, therefore, inevitable, like breath. On the other hand, it was self-observation that instigated and aggravated the wild chase that later rendered his life intolerable, because of the enormous split it created between internal time — the time of the observing conscience — and the time of the outside world. Such a declaration did not allow any way out, except, perhaps, as Kafka suggested once (but only once and even then he quickly backtracked), a way out through writing: “Strange, mysterious, perhaps dangerous, perhaps liberating consolation of writing: a leap out of the murderer’s row of action-observation, action-observation, creating a higher type of observation, higher, not sharper, and the higher it is, the farther from the reach of the ‘row,’ the more independent it becomes, the more it follows its own laws of motion, the more incalculable, joyous, ascendant its course.” Trostlos, “unconsoling,” is a word Kafka often used at crucial points. “The good is, in a certain sense, unconsoling,” according to the thirtieth Zurau aphorism. And in The Castle, when Bürgel reveals to K. how the world keeps its equilibrium, he describes the “system” as wonderful but “in some ways unconsoling.” So it’s all the more surprising that Kafka attributes a certain amount of “consolation” to “writing.” Only here does writing appear as the one way to free oneself from (hinausspringen, “to leap out of,” is Kafka’s strongly dynamic verb) the murderous chain of action and reaction, forged from matter and mind, that otherwise constricts and coerces our lives. The only chance for salvation lies in splitting one’s gaze in two. And the second gaze needn’t be “sharper”—it’s enough that it operate from a certain height (in order to observe the proceedings below in their entirety). The wound produced by the original split in the self-observing gaze can, therefore, be healed only by a further split. Thus every ingenious vision of a salvation reachable through a recovered unity of the subject is denied. Such a unity has never existed, except as a mirage inspired by the fear of disintegration. Kafka said nothing more on this theme in this entry, which is from January 1922. And he never took it up again. But his only expressible promesse de bonheur related to writing appeared in those lines.

Just after the words about the “strange, mysterious, perhaps dangerous, perhaps liberating consolation of writing,” Kafka noted: “Although I wrote my name clearly at the hotel, and although they themselves have written it correctly twice already, they still have Josef K. written in the register. Should I explain the situation to them, or should I have them explain it to me?”

“It’s as if spiritual combat were taking place somewhere in a forest clearing.” Like some Father Scupoli restored to life, and without any modern mitigation, Kafka maintains that everything revolves around that combat. What else could it be about? But how to approach it? At this point the scene quickly becomes muddled and snarled, becomes a story without an ending: “I enter the forest, find nothing and quickly, out of weakness, hurry back out; often, as I’m leaving the forest, I hear or think I hear the clanging of weapons from that battle. Perhaps the combatants are gazing through the forest darkness, looking for me, but I know so little about them, and that little is deceptive.” If the forest, the aranya, is the place of esoteric knowledge, then the combatants are like the rishis, the sages who observe the world through the dark tangle of branches rather than from on high among the stars of Ursa Major. Whoever ventures into the forest feels stalked by their gaze but can’t manage to see them. And what has been passed down about them is by now very unreliable. Memory of names, of characters, is lost. What remains is the sound of metal clashing in the dark.

In the first weeks of 1922, when internal time breaks away from external time to run its mad race, wakefulness is constant, tormenting. Distance from the world grows. Demons throng — or phantasms. Whom else would Kafka mean when he writes: “Escaped them”? Them: the pronoun of the possessed and the obsessed. An invisible struggle is under way, a game of stratagems, a protracted duel: “Escaped them. Some kind of nimble jump. At home by the lamp in the silent room. Unwise to say this. It calls them out of their forests, as if one had lit the lamp to help them find their way.” Demoniacal shorthand. Only the writer and the phantasms know exactly what is being said. The rest of us might notice, at most, a certain violent tremor in the still air, amid the snow, the woods, the squatting houses — the landscape of The Castle.

The last entry in the Diaries seems to imply that by now “the spirits” had taken Kafka’s hand. Once again: literally. Thus the writer is afraid to make marks on paper: “Every word, twisted in the hands of the spirits — this spring of the hand is their characteristic motion — becomes a spear pointing back at the speaker. Particularly an observation like this.” Writing itself has become the weapon the spirits use to run the writer through. And the process repeats itself “ad infinitum” for the man who sees himself now as “incapable of everything, except suffering.”

Appropriate precautions when approaching Kafka, according to Canetti: “There are certain writers — very few, in fact — who are so utterly themselves that any statement one might presume to make about them might seem barbarous. One such writer was Franz Kafka; accordingly, one must, even at the risk of seeming slavish, adhere as closely as possible to his own statements.”

Entry in the Diaries: “I don’t believe there are people whose inner state resembles mine, though I can at least imagine such people. But that the secret raven flies constantly around their heads, as it does around mine, this I can’t even imagine.” Approaching Kafka, the air is lightly stirred by those black wings.