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.