Just after the words about the “strange, mysterious, perhaps dangerous, perhaps liberating consolation of writing,” Kafka noted: “Although I wrote my name clearly at the hotel, and although they themselves have written it correctly twice already, they still have Josef K. written in the register. Should I explain the situation to them, or should I have them explain it to me?”
“It’s as if spiritual combat were taking place somewhere in a forest clearing.” Like some Father Scupoli restored to life, and without any modern mitigation, Kafka maintains that everything revolves around that combat. What else could it be about? But how to approach it? At this point the scene quickly becomes muddled and snarled, becomes a story without an ending: “I enter the forest, find nothing and quickly, out of weakness, hurry back out; often, as I’m leaving the forest, I hear or think I hear the clanging of weapons from that battle. Perhaps the combatants are gazing through the forest darkness, looking for me, but I know so little about them, and that little is deceptive.” If the forest, the aranya, is the place of esoteric knowledge, then the combatants are like the rishis, the sages who observe the world through the dark tangle of branches rather than from on high among the stars of Ursa Major. Whoever ventures into the forest feels stalked by their gaze but can’t manage to see them. And what has been passed down about them is by now very unreliable. Memory of names, of characters, is lost. What remains is the sound of metal clashing in the dark.
In the first weeks of 1922, when internal time breaks away from external time to run its mad race, wakefulness is constant, tormenting. Distance from the world grows. Demons throng — or phantasms. Whom else would Kafka mean when he writes: “Escaped them”? Them: the pronoun of the possessed and the obsessed. An invisible struggle is under way, a game of stratagems, a protracted dueclass="underline" “Escaped them. Some kind of nimble jump. At home by the lamp in the silent room. Unwise to say this. It calls them out of their forests, as if one had lit the lamp to help them find their way.” Demoniacal shorthand. Only the writer and the phantasms know exactly what is being said. The rest of us might notice, at most, a certain violent tremor in the still air, amid the snow, the woods, the squatting houses — the landscape of The Castle.
The last entry in the Diaries seems to imply that by now “the spirits” had taken Kafka’s hand. Once again: literally. Thus the writer is afraid to make marks on paper: “Every word, twisted in the hands of the spirits — this spring of the hand is their characteristic motion — becomes a spear pointing back at the speaker. Particularly an observation like this.” Writing itself has become the weapon the spirits use to run the writer through. And the process repeats itself “ad infinitum” for the man who sees himself now as “incapable of everything, except suffering.”
Appropriate precautions when approaching Kafka, according to Canetti: “There are certain writers — very few, in fact — who are so utterly themselves that any statement one might presume to make about them might seem barbarous. One such writer was Franz Kafka; accordingly, one must, even at the risk of seeming slavish, adhere as closely as possible to his own statements.”
Entry in the Diaries: “I don’t believe there are people whose inner state resembles mine, though I can at least imagine such people. But that the secret raven flies constantly around their heads, as it does around mine, this I can’t even imagine.” Approaching Kafka, the air is lightly stirred by those black wings.
VI. On the Waters of the Dead
The hunter Gracchus is covered by a “large, flowery silk shawl with fringe,” like a woman from the South. No signs of rigor mortis are visible, though he lies “without moving and, apparently, without breathing.” On the contrary, his sunburned face, his bushy, disheveled hair and beard, radiate the vitality and virility of a hunter. Or an old salt. One day — in the fourth century after Christ — this young hunter of the Black Forest, while stalking a chamois, fell off a cliff and died. Since then he has wandered on a boat, utterly adrift. Osiris had shown how to cross the night sky on the boat of the dead. Had described the route, the currents, the necessary magic words. But little was said about what might happen if one got lost because of an inadvertent turn of the rudder, “a momentary lapse of the pilot’s attention.” There seems to be no remedy for that. As Gracchus says, “the desire to help me is a sickness that can be cured only by bed rest.”
Was he a pagan, Gracchus? Was he a Christian? We don’t know. He was a hunter. Like a sailor in a tavern, and with the single-mindedness of a loner, Gracchus continues to repeat: “I was a hunter, is that some kind of crime?” He doesn’t know that his existence is like a trapdoor through which one tumbles down the walls of time. And the farther one falls, the clearer it seems that his question has an answer: “Yes, it’s a crime. Indeed, it’s the crime.” If there’s one thing humans have always felt as such, at every latitude, it’s that unprecedented transition, after having been torn to pieces for thousands of years by invincible predators, to becoming predators themselves, by inventing a prosthesis, the arrowhead, to rival the fangs of the great cats. The other animals never forgave humans for this leap. They kept on faithfully being what they had always been. They killed and let themselves be killed according to the ancient rules. Only humans dared expand their repertoire of gestures. Gracchus was the latest witness to that transition, the latest manifestation of the hunter in his pure state. The most modern, even if he is fifteen centuries old. His life — now so remote — appeared to him as the natural order itself: “It was my lot to be a hunter in the Black Forest, where wolves still roamed in those days. I would he in wait, shoot at my mark, hit it, skin it — is that a crime? My labors were blessed. The great hunter of the Black Forest, they called me. Is that a crime?” Yet a nagging doubt persisted, unreasonably. Unless perhaps because, in the long hours he spent lying on his bier, covered by the flowery shawl with the fringe, Gracchus was forced to look at “a small image on the facing wall, clearly a bushman, who is aiming a spear at me and taking cover as best he can behind a magnificently painted shield.” That image, “one of the stupidest” of the many incongruous, haphazard images that one encountered on all kinds of boats, taken from some kind of Magasin pittoresque, annoyed the hunter Gracchus because its absurdity reminded him of something. It reminded him of history, the history that gets lost in the shadows of time, that history in which his own part was negligible at best — and yet still excessive, if one sought to understand it, follow it. Too many things had happened in fifteen hundred years. And now, who knows why, Gracchus has ended up in that port on an Italian lake, and a stranger is asking him, with a grave and inquisitive air, to explain the “connections.” The connections! What did he expect to learn from them? Here Gracchus’s sarcasm, his painful sarcasm, erupts. “The ancient, ancient stories. All the books are full of them,” the hunter replies — and if we listen closely, we’ll notice that he’s about to be overcome by an unusual form of aphasia: the aphasia born of history. “So much time has passed. How can I keep it all in this overstuffed brain,” says Gracchus, as if to himself. For such a man, who lives amid an overpopulation of stories that can no longer be understood, nothing remains but to pour more wine for the ignorant stranger who continues to pester him with questions — he’s company, after all, someone to talk to. Such a companion might be found in any port and is always comforting, because he offers the chance to repeat certain phrases, phrases others before him have heard in countless other ports: “And here I am, dead, dead, dead. And I don’t know why I’m here.” Words to repeat yet one more time before the story breaks off and Gracchus turns his gaze back toward the bushman whose spear is pointing toward him.