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 alclass="underline" 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.