The 1968 death of Max Brod in 1968, to whom Kafka bequeathed his literary estate with instructions to burn its contents, precipitated a tortuous legal struggle that came finally to a close in 2019, when a Swiss court ruled that papers in several Zurich safe-deposit boxes should be removed to the National Library of Israel. During that 50-year period, a mass of splintered thoughts and half-begun constructions, in the form of newly discovered fragments, letters, and drafts, has overspread the canon of Kafka’s polished work like a fluorescent dye illuminating the nervous system of the man who proclaimed “I am made of literature.” As a consequence, the point at which the creative subject ends and the oeuvre begins has become a moving target, with each newly excavated word of Kafka’s, no matter how quotidian, shedding its personal significance in order to serve, however humbly, alongside the scrupulously sculpted tales. Kafka thus stands before us like a performance artist so thoroughly vivisected as to effectively abolish our sense of the art shedding light on the life, or vice versa. The Lost Writings, a flickering collection of broken-off scenes and incidents culled from Kafka’s papers by biographer Reiner Stach and translated by poet Michael Hofmann, offers an intimate new look at the refractory relation between Kafka’s self-conception as literature incarnate and his artistic output.
The unwavering tone of this material — the unassuming invitation to listen on equal footing, as though to one’s own, distantly familiar mind — stands in marked contrast to the uninhibited caprices of its content. There is great restraint in the manner of presentation, and hardly any at all in what is presented. Whether it be the legend of Prometheus, two horses engaged in friendly chatter at a garden charity fete, or a farmer plagued by marital strife and “simple-minded children” who anxiously enlists a stranger to accompany him home and possibly “divert the ire of the wife,” the mode of narration is continuously and peculiarly self-possessed, in spite of there being, here and everywhere in Kafka’s work, no clear self to possess. I say peculiarly because no suspension of disbelief is asked of us — to disbelieve here would be as senseless as to believe. We are not treated to the unfolding of a world that the narrator sees and we do not; thus, no trust in his point of view (or ironic distrust) is requested. The words are bereft of that ubiquitous authorial artifice of saying less or differently than one knows, of expressing one thing by means of another. Hence, we face a curious interpretive blank. Gone is the encoded significance which guides imperfect, reiterated discovery.
Yet the geyser of strange happenings, fueled by feral imagination, constantly diverts one’s attention from this striking quality of the narration. Encountering “twenty little gravediggers, none any bigger than an average pinecone” who joyously perform their duties, though “no one pays them, no one equips them, and no one has given them any orders,” we cannot help but try to peek behind the arras. Some philosophically or ideologically dressed up iteration of ‘What does it mean?’ leaps to our lips. We feel our attraction and interest must be justified. The dream qua dream seems frivolous; only as a source of extractable significance, proffering commentary or illumination, can it earn its keep. And so Kafka, rescued from frivolity — though the rescue itself is obliquely carried out, for frivolous nightmare seems oxymoronic — becomes prophet of alienation, authoritarianism, hypertrophic bureaucracy, and so on.
Fortunately, the singularly microscopic, diaristic perspective afforded by this collection reinvigorates the struggle against this temptation. For on display here is not so much the work itself as Kafka at work. One thus discovers how tenuous is the separation of the two. Witnessing the somber flashes of introspection, in which thought and feeling hang limply from the jaws of the transcribing vision — the circumfusing aura of the external world introspected — one is confronted with a level of description wholly deaf to the clamoring of objective explanation. Kafka’s is a species of exploration in which it is no longer possible to pass judgment on human affairs. As Adorno observed in 1962, “Anyone over whom Kafka’s wheels have passed has lost both his sense of being at peace with the world and the possibility of being satisfied with the judgment that the course of the world is bad.”
Think, for example, of the exquisite chasm between Tolstoy’s “Kholstomer” — a horse’s reverent condemnation of the human world from whose degrading conceptual structure he remains tragically aloof unto death — and the dog Caesar, contained herein, who explains, “I do so dread this pointless running around, these vast empty spaces, what a poor helpless, lost dog I am there,” yet who nonetheless cannot restrain himself from embarking time and again on these unplanned, pleasureless journeys, “a habit that might one day cost me my senior position.” Where Tolstoy offers a quasi-fantastical perspective from which human institutions appear cruel and senseless, Kafka enshrines the institutions fantastically beyond reproach, bringing into view the strangeness, the endearing unfitness, of the perspectives themselves. Thus Kafka’s Abraham, saturated with housework, fails to ride with Isaac to Moriah in the transcendentally neurotic manner of a father pathologically unable to keep his promise to attend his child’s baseball game.
Yet Kafka pays a melancholy price for this staggering achievement. In a seemingly unadorned piece of autobiography, we are treated to a trenchant psychological illumination:
“It was my experience … that every effort was made, at school and at home, to expunge any individuality … An example: no one will ever be able to reason a child into putting down his book and going to bed. When I was told that it was late and I was ruining my eyes, and I would be tired and unable to get up in the morning, and that the silly story wasn’t worth the trouble, then I couldn’t refute such an argument point by point — mostly because it wasn’t even worth considering. Every one of the terms here was endless or so divided and subdivided that it might as well be: time was endless, so it couldn’t be too late; my eyesight was endless so that I couldn’t ruin it; even night was endless, so there was no need to worry about getting up …”
One is reminded of the meandering exchanges in Kafka’s novels between K. and various authorities in which K. obstinately refuses to accept the continually shifting terms of the debate, and consequently, the very idea of reaching any kind of resolution is made to seem increasingly ludicrous. For example, a discussion with the chairman in The Castleleads to the revelation that K. may have been summoned to the village in error, despite the fact that errors are not possible, for “one of the operating principles of the authorities is that the possibility of error is simply not taken into account … and even if an error does occur, as in your case, who can finally say that it is an error.”
The Lost Writings bears witness to the tremendous imaginative lengths to which Kafka ventures to avoid directly asserting his individuality. A sort of negative selfhood (self-assertion) sprouting frantically like weeds in the cracks of the preposterous claims of others (of rational argument) — “endless or so divided and subdivided” as to neither command respect nor allow for the possibility of meaningful insurgence. Like a kind of mutation of aristocratic decorum — dying off only to reappear on the impersonal level as a matter not of taste but of law and intelligibility — such ‘authority’ cannot slacken or recede without compromising the living latticework which sustains it. Life itself thus becomes a paradox, a series of enforcements that it is neither possible to obey nor to defy. In the same autobiographical fragment, Kafka explains: “It is nevertheless a certainty that I never accepted any real gain from my individuality that would ultimately express itself in the form of self-confidence. Rather, the consequence of a display of wilfulness was that I either ended up hating the oppressor or failed to acknowledge the willfulness … If I kept my wilfulness hidden, then the consequence was that I hated either myself or my fate and took myself for wicked or damned.”
However, the pendulum swings again, for this buried willfulness complements the rapturous perforation of a grim determinism which would otherwise tragically seal the Kafkan protagonist’s fate.
“I was sitting in the box next to my wife. We were watching a rather exciting play, all about jealousy … Tensely I leaned over the parapet, against my temple I could feel a lock of my wife’s hair. Just then we both shrank back; what we had taken for the velvet upholstered parapet was the back of a long thin man, who, slender as the parapet, had till that point been lying on his front and now turned around to shift his position … ‘Why are you alarming us?’ I demanded, ‘what are you doing here?’ ‘Forgive me!’ said the man, ‘I am an admirer of your wife’s; the sensation of her elbows in my ribs made me happy.’”
Would one really mistake a man for a parapet? Could this man plausibly turn out to be an admirer of one’s wife, having perhaps orchestrated the mistake? The point is not that we are forced to answer in the affirmative. Rather, the impersonal chain of causes to which we compulsively appeal in determining what can and cannot happen has become flimsy, a farrago of comedic rigor and ostentatious patchwork. Equipped with Kafka’s piercing vision of the instability of human life and reality, the fact that a person probably could not be mistaken for a parapet (or awaken one day transformed into a gigantic insect) is a mere blip, a perfectly conceivable lacuna in the objective fabric, a lacuna writ so large as to appear absurd and in need of allegorical resuscitation. Kafka’s artifice is to disguise the mundane, the painful everyday interaction, as the extravagantly unreal. Hence the uplifting experience of this reading—the joyous, half-heretical leaping from stone to stone of a pleasure imbibed and deepened at the expense of any prospect of human flourishing.
An eccentric heir of Chekhov’s gun is everywhere at work in this collection: if in the beginning you have hung a pistol on the wall, then it should turn out that that pistol is not a pistol, that no one has ever heard of a pistol, that the room in which it hung cannot be found, that that room is an open-air barber shop with no place to hang a pistol, and so on. The very notion of an essential element (as against an inconsequential, superfluous detail) has melted away. In this respect, Kafka’s is a realism so supreme as to forbid any neat exercising of control. How could one possibly hope to finish such a project? Fortunately for us, Kafka’s ineluctable confrontation with unfinishability is here crystallized into a solemnly digestible museum exhibit.
[Published by New Directions on September 1, 2020, 128 pages, $18.95 hardcover]