We always have to go by the opposite of a statement like that. And then again by the opposite of the opposite. . we’ve worked at this art for a long time, practically done drills in it. You ought to take more of an interest in dialectics, that’s the science we need, as long as we’re still on our way. . and unfortunately you don’t show much sign of it. .
Feuerbach’s closing sequences were always especially impressive. These and many other phrases from the lips of his case officer had accumulated over time in W.’s memory, and during his leisure hours in the basement they would unwind almost of their own accord. The assessment was all too justified: W. had long begun to think exactly like his superior. — But this thought gave him no satisfaction.
His conversations with the Major sidestepped all hints as to how his career had begun. . by which W. meant his career as an Unofficial Collaborator or UnCol of the ‘Firm’ (this was the standard term, which the institution’s members had evidently put into circulation themselves). . he had always wondered whether Feuerbach even knew anything about it. He himself saw the memory lapse as a result of his overlong sleep phase; that was evidently why the time was referred to this way, serving as it did to obliterate all the reasons for your ‘collaborator’s’ existence, so completely that it looked as though you’d acquired the position in a dream. . that is, according to Freud, as the result of a wish fulfilment fantasy. — It was hard to say how this happened; evidently each prospective collaborator had moments in his past he found necessary to conceal, believing them to be irreparable lapses; it had to be a blunder capable of causing lasting remorse. And when the repercussions were out of proportion to their cause, and the patient saw his offence, or his transgression, as the kind of existential catastrophe he’d find it hard to live with, the ideal conditions were in place for a dependency on the Firm. . if necessary they had to be achieved by first stoking the patient’s sense of guilt. The patient’s sleep now served to heal his crisis of conscience; he awoke with the happy feeling of being a blameless, worthwhile person. . once this phase was over he was surrounded by a hermetic space of profound silence regarding his deed. — Was it even a deed, in W.’s case? This was exactly what the hermetic silence made it impossible to learn.
No wonder he got the idea that all such catastrophes in the former lives of the Firm’s employees had been meticulously planned and carefully constructed. The Firm was the world’s most moral institution, pedantically registering every transgression that could possibly be developed. And when W. gave it serious thought, it struck him that this was its one and only function: the collection of punishable factors, or what looked like punishable factors, for every subject it singled out. And as practically every subject came into question as a collaborator for the service, the never-ending task of the apparatus was to create conditions in which a reservoir of punishable factors stood at the ready for, in principle, everyone. And should the utopian state be achieved in which no more offences occurred, or hardly any, then the limit would have to be lowered and lowered until ultimately almost every action could be classified as an offence. When this system came to an end, what a seed of offence would shoot up from its soil. . I didn’t want to think about it: at any rate, we were essential for this reason alone.
Of course it couldn’t be about punishing everyone, it was about pressing everyone into service. This was the only answer to the question of each operation’s aim, this was the only reason they had been instituted. . each operation aimed only to engender as long a series as possible (best of all an infinite series) of further operations — and each operation had to end with a recruitment to the service of the organization.
The reality of this apparatus is the attempt to create a state of collaborators, thought W.; he thought it in the lethargic, muddled moments in which he emerged from his half-sleep. And if you see the whole story in these terms, it doesn’t sound very menacing at all.
What catastrophe began it for me? — Either he hadn’t had one, or there had been little occasion yet for him to be reminded of it. For of course the hermetic silence was sinister; the deeper it grew, the more it seemed like a lull before the storm; if you didn’t keep on track, the catastrophe could re-emerge at any moment. . from that half-sleep, and by then it would surely have blown up into an irreparable catastrophe. They kept this surprise in store, at any rate. — So in his case that meant he’d stayed on track so far. . that was a favourite expression at the Firm: he’d kept on track, he’d had a good track record, been a good tracking dog! — If he wanted to know his catastrophe, then in future he’d have to steer in a different direction, sniff a bit to the left and right of the track, not always bolt hot and blind towards the goal, they didn’t want that anyway, with their constant chatter about vigilance. .
On the other hand, too much vigilance also unnerved them. . this vigilance had to stay on track. There was a joke they often told at the Firm: At a big Party congress, one member of the audience is suddenly arrested. Why him? Because as we’ve always said: The class enemy never sleeps!
Don’t get distracted. . most of what you learn, you learn from the adversary! These could have been Feuerbach’s words. — For a while he was determined to ask the Major who he’d meant by the woman on whom he, W., had supposedly provided sloppy reports or none at all, forcing them to spend ‘a hell of a lot of time’ filling in the missing information.—W. had an idea who was meant, though; how long had they already been grilling her — W.’s ‘very good lady acquaintance’—up there on the higher levels. . did they also go into the things best described as his catastrophe? — He’d always told himself the catastrophe was that there’d been no catastrophe in his former life. . his signature was nothing but a symptom of fatigue. . a fatigue now encased by a further shell of weariness. — All the same, his vague memories weren’t very pleasant: this very good acquaintance was a creature who answered to the exotic name of Cindy (that didn’t mean it was her real name); at the time she was the ubiquitous appendage of a circle of young men in the town where W. lived. He couldn’t have said what advantages he’d gained by his entrée into this circle. . but this entrée itself, he now knew, was seen as an advantage and gained him a further entry: to a higher circle. . and there in turn entries opened up all the way to Berlin, as now he thought he knew. It was quite a few years back. . Feuerbach, W. said to himself, probably remembered better than he did, although surely the Major had never been in A. and before meeting W. hadn’t even known that the town existed. . that there existed towns in the Republic where the only hope of survival for citizens of the younger generation was alcohol. . or the hope of defection. The only thing W. had in common with these young men was the penchant for alcohol and the frequent patronization of the same pubs, of which the town admittedly had few to choose from. Unlike the establishments frequented by W.’s work colleagues, these were the gathering places of the slightly shady circles whose routines consisted principally of avoidance strategies: the avoidance of orderly routine and the drift away from the thick of the socialist production front. In other words, people whose abstinence from steady employment had made them lose the worker’s finely tuned instinct which would have flagged W. as a foreign body in their midst. More and more often he had the opposite experience with his work colleagues: they knew the pubs he went to, you didn’t have to explain it to them, they smelt it. . and in the wrinkling of their noses W. thought he detected an olfactory sense in no way inferior to that of noses lifted in more bourgeois fashion. They sensed an outsider immediately; he wouldn’t have minded if they’d taken him for a would-be intellectual slumming from sheer snobbery in the dingy dives. That’s how he would have explained it to himself; a writer must be able to distinguish local colour from cosmetics. And that didn’t preclude his occasionally developing understanding and sympathy for those who had fallen out the bottom of society and surfaced again in a pool of alcohol; they simply showed what this society was floating on. As often and as long as he tagged along in that loose-knit group, in his mind there was always an escape route open, and his tendency towards cool observation prevented him from fully acclimatizing to this circle where all differences were blurred by a haze of beer. . a cool observer is homeless everywhere, he consoled himself. — In this loose-knit group Cindy fluttered tirelessly back and forth; more precisely, she passed from hand to hand, or at least that was his impression. But he told himself there was no need to make a fuss about it never being his turn, even though Cindy had gone round the circle several times already. . each time he thought his hour had come, a certain Harry slipped between them. . and no wonder; this Harry was slender and slick as a fish. . besides, it was a point which kept re-establishing his outsider role, and that was what he wanted to cement. For all that, his relationship to Cindy wasn’t bad at all, on the contrary, this fostered a kind of trust between them, at least on Cindy’s part: he confined himself more to the role of her patient listener. In this way W. quickly learnt almost everything about the male members of the pub fraternity, disreputable things as a rule; it was a mystery to him why Cindy, with any number of embarrassing and occasionally horrific things to report, didn’t grow more attached to her confessor, who, given that he agreed with her unreservedly in all things, would seem by far the lesser evil in this circle. . incidentally, this Harry came off especially badly, even if her stories about him sounded a bit more cautious. . as though she had a certain fear of him. — One evening she told W. that she’d have to report for a prison sentence. He was sitting by himself in the pub, the door opened and Cindy made a beeline for his table as though she’d been looking for him, a moment that always cost him a struggle; she was a flamboyant figure in this small town, tall and radiating vigour, on her lower arm a purse laden with metal ornaments jangled with her long strides, her head bristled with a red- or black-dyed mane of kinky artificial curls known as an Afro-look, her eyes were always heavily made up, and her full lips beamed. . She’s almost a gypsy, thought W. — This time her lips weren’t beaming, her mouth was oddly shrunken. She sat down and tried to tug the very tight skirt towards her knees, then without beating about the bush began to discuss her immediate future; W. thought he detected a faint tremble in her voice. She would have to report by eleven the next morning to start serving her sentence; due to a series of negligible missteps that had come to light, she had been sentenced — a year ago already — to six or eight months in prison (a minor sentence whose exact length W. had forgotten; it could just as well have been seven or nine months). . and now her time had come! — She fell into the category of the self-reporters, people convicted of petty crimes who had to wait until a place opened up for them in the overfilled prisons, a stipulation which most experienced as an additional form of chicanery.