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.