Implicit in this recognition is a reproach directed against a multitude of people. Among them are my parents, my relatives, a certain particular cook, my teachers, several writers, families friendly with ours, a swimming instructor, the residents of holiday resorts, several ladies in the city park who don’t show certain things, a hairdresser, a beggar woman, a tax man, the family doctor, and many others besides and there would be still more if I wanted and were able to call them all by name, in brief they are so numerous that one must be careful not to name anyone in the bunch twice.
[The reproaches] are directed against a multitude of people, this can be frightening and not only I but anyone else would rather look at the river through the open window. Among them are my parents and relatives, and the fact that they harmed me out of love renders their guilt even greater, because how they could have helped me with their love, then friendly families with a spiteful gaze, who aware of their guilt resist rising up into memory, then the legion of nannies, teachers and writers and among them a certain particular cook, and then, blurring into one another as their punishment, a family doctor, a hairdresser, a tax collector, a beggar woman, a paper seller, a park warden, a swimming instructor and then certain foreign ladies in the city park who don’t show certain things, several residents of holiday resorts, which make a mockery of innocent nature, and many others; there would be still more if I wanted and were able to call them all by name; in brief, they are so numerous that one must be careful not to name any of them twice.
These wild, exhilarating gallops revolve around Kafka’s favorite theme: guilt. They are attempts by the writer to list all those who have, to whatever degree, harmed him. Just as Josef K., shortly before being sentenced to death, will envision a crowd of his accusers as a solid, unanimous chorus, so the young Kafka looks around and sees all those who are guilty in relation to him — guilty to the point of becoming his executioners. Certain presences are essentiaclass="underline" his parents and relatives. But just as essential is “a certain particular cook” who had accompanied Kafka to school for a year. We finally meet her again in a letter to Milena from June 21, 1920: “Our cook, small dry and thin with a pointy nose and hollow cheeks, yellowish, but firm, energetic and superior, took me to school each morning.” These words suffice to admit us to the secret memory rooms of an individual named Franz Kafka. But, even as the dim psychologist is congratulating himself for uncovering the true material concealed behind every piece of literature, Kafka the writer snatches it away and renders it meaningless. For his lucidity goes much further. Among the guilty, father and mother certainly come first. But the others step forward in an inexorable procession. We meet not only the yellowish cook, but also some people who made the mistake, on a certain day, of walking slowly, some girls from the dance school, a hairdresser, a beggar, a paper seller. And in the end they will all be arranged together, as for a group photo. They’re a little embarrassed, since many don’t know one another, have never even seen one another before. But all are united by guilt. Even, lost and forgotten in that crowd, his parents.
In his mad rush, Kafka sets no limits; we even find, among the procession of the guilty, some people he met once on the street and others he is unable to remember. Guilt, then, extends not only to everything that has been perceived, even if only faintly and only once, but also to everything that happened, unnoticed, around us. At this point, every psychology collapses from within, opening a breach that leads toward literature. First of all Kafka’s.
Kafka was an expert on the feeling of being foreign or extraneous, and he began, in his last period, to consider it and represent it in his work in commonplace situations that became suddenly illuminating. For example, the family’s card-game ritual. For years, in the evening, Kafka’s parents played cards. For years they asked him to take part. For years the son said no. But that doesn’t mean he went elsewhere. “I stayed to watch, apart, a complete outsider.” One day he paused to reflect: “What does that refusal, repeated so often since childhood, mean?” The invitation to play a game represents a call to take part in the community. And the game per se, Kafka observed, “would not even have been all that boring.” And yet his reply was invariably negative. From such mulishness Kafka inferred something quite profound: his behavior with his family made clear to him why “the current of life” had never swept him along, why he had always remained on the threshold of things that then eluded him. There is something slightly comic, at first, in seeing which grave consequences can be deduced from a little domestic scene. But Kafka, imperturbable, goes one step further. On an evening soon after the day he recorded these observations, he decided to take part in the game, in a manner of speaking, by “keeping score for mom.” In doing so, he realized that his new situation corresponded mockingly to his typical rapport with the outside world: participating “didn’t give rise to greater closeness, and whatever hint of it there might have been was drowned in weariness, boredom, and sadness over the lost time. And it would have always been that way. Only in the rarest of cases have I forsaken this borderland between solitude and community, indeed it’s there that I have settled, even more than in solitude itself. How lovely and lively by comparison was Crusoe’s island.” Here Kafka has situated himself, defining himself almost as a geometric locus, in relation to communal life.
It was Kafka’s suspicion, and this too arose from his observations of the family card game, that any practical initiatives on his part to camouflage himself in normalcy (and these could be as diverse as an office job or halfhearted attempts to devote himself to gardening or carpentry) were simply palliatives or clumsy ways of masking behavior that remained as unmistakable, in its hopeless inconsistency, “as the behavior of a man who chases the wretched beggar from his door and then when he’s alone plays the benefactor by passing alms from his right hand to his left.” This behavior corresponds to the sensation of going through life pressing his head “against the wall of a windowless, doorless cell.” The rest—“my family, the office, my friends, the street”—were “all fantasies, some closer, some further off.” Of them, “the closest” was “the woman.” And thus the endless misunderstandings, with whatever woman. And thus the endless attraction, since that closest of fantasies could condense within it all the others and act as their emissary.
“Metaphors are one of the many things that make me despair of writing,” noted Kafka in December 1921, commenting on the last sentence of one of his letters to Klopstock, which says only: “I warm myself by it this sad winter.” A high-power lens comes upon an apparently innocuous sentence, recognizes in it the upsurge of metaphor, and despairs. Why? Kafka, a dogged naturalist of the metaphor, succeeded in bringing nearly everything, and most of all writing, back to that mysterious moment when the image breaks free from the letter — the very moment when what used to be considered real becomes precarious. But not in order to affirm the sovereignty of writing, which is already in itself a metaphor. Indeed, what gets revealed instead is its insuperable dependence on something else. Kafka continued: “Writing’s lack of autonomy, its dependence on the maid who lights the stove, on the cat warming itself there, even on the poor old man who warms himself. Those are all autonomous activities ruled by their own laws, writing alone is helpless, doesn’t dwell in itself, is diversion and despair.” Let’s isolate a few words: only writing “doesn’t dwell in itself”—writing, then, is first among all strangers. To recount the adventures of this stranger is therefore to give an account of writing itself, “diversion and despair.”