In the life and writing of Franz Kafka, uncertainty migrates, imposing its grip; it explodes even at the heart of the real, gaining in this manner an unexpected conspicuousness.
As much as he might have been attracted by the real and the possible, Kafka remained fixated on the pendulum and in the pendulations of the impossible, always interested in the mysterious game of the probabilities that destabilize reality, a reality which constantly fascinated him and for which he was always hungry, a reality which humiliated him and reconfirmed his alienation. Scrutinizing and experimenting with the one-on-one relationship between the possible and the impossible, between the real and the unreal, he did not hesitate to place the immediate and the expected chances of the real’s success under continuous interrogation.
Kafka often referred to the two enemies which made up and destroyed his being, which defined themselves through this exhausting antagonism, enemies which could not be stopped:
Among those at war within me, from whose confrontation I am primarily made — with the exception of a minuscule, tormented part — one is the good, the other one evil. From time to time, they change roles, which heightens the confusion of their already confounding confrontation. Until very recently, I could still imagine that the improbable would happen, a radiant perspective, the probable perspective being perpetual war. Suddenly, it seems that the loss of blood is too great. When the evil one will not find — possibly or probably — a decisive new defense weapon on his own, the good one will offer him precisely this. I thought that the war could last, but it can’t. The blood doesn’t come from the lungs, but from one of the combatants’ decisive blows … it is not the type of tuberculosis with which one sits on a daybed and is nursed back to health, but a weapon that continues to be of the utmost necessity as long as I continue living. And they [the combatants] cannot both live.
Kafka’s secret hope of failing in his efforts to adjudicate the possible, his hope of being a man like any other, is made possible and simultaneously denied by the obstinacy with which he tests the password that would grant him access to the impossible. The impossible appeals to him again and again, seeking complicity and concupiscence. At last, the impossibility of being in the world imposes a solution, which is nothing more than a trick, like the mathematical abstraction ad nihilum, but which nevertheless becomes the regimen of survivaclass="underline" living in impossibility, as one of the paradoxically animate forms of life.
“See how many impossibilities are in our letters. Impossibilities on all sides!” writes Kafka to Felice Bauer in one of the numerous letters addressed to the unknown — which is invoked and asked to assume a name and a face — rather than to the being who had caught his attention. “To write letters, to undress in front of the greedy ghosts that wait precisely for this,” the sender would note carefully.
When he mentioned the difference between “minor” and “major” impossibilities, Kafka still seemed willing to believe that his addressee was part of the latter category, justifying in this manner his epistolary fervor: “we must not bow down before minor impossibilities, otherwise the major impossibilities will no longer allow themselves to be perceived.”
With each new step on the unstable terrain of the underground, between the two types of impossibilities, Kafka underwent his true apprenticeship, not only the sentimental but the literary, coming to know and to embody himself. Felice Bauer, the fiancée whom he left and to whom he became close again only in order to break up with her definitively, is indeed the genuine embodiment of the “possible,” of the normality which Kafka had convinced himself he desired as a sort of salvation, but which he discovered to be foreign, annihilating, and inaccessible, a normality which, with all his efforts at “destabilization,” he did not succeed in toppling from its solid enjambment in the real. “For almost 5 years I have kept striking at her, or if you prefer, at myself,” Kafka will later confess. “Happily, she was unbreakable, that strong, invincible Jewish — Prussian mix. I wasn’t as strong; after all, she was only suffering, while I struck and suffered.”
At the tail end of many delays, the letter to Carl Bauer in which Kafka asked for his daughter’s hand in fact transcribes a last desperate attempt — not to transform the impossible into the possible but to place a definitive tombstone over the possibility of marriage. It is at this moment that the fiancée also receives the sentence of freedom, through which the marriage betrays its essence: “the mistake is precisely in this general impossibility,” the Kafkaesque verdict decrees.
We thus understand how exactly impossibility — a “major” impossibility, certainly not the banal chance of marriage — tempted the writer with masochistic predispositions toward self-blame; we understand why the “suitor” prolonged his game, with its damned black beads. “The union we have all wished for has now been recognized as impossible by each,” stands the conclusion of the experiment, after the breaking off of the first engagement, at the beginning of the long travail before the second engagement, which will lead to the inevitable: a last decisive breakup with Felice, by means of a letter in which the sender describes himself in an uncompassionate and unjust way in order to have the desired disastrous effect on the fiancée’s parents.
In the vast Kafkaesque underground of selfhood, the ambiguous interaction of the possible / probable/impossible proves more ample and more significant than reality itself. The dynamics of this disquieting turn also mark the Kafkaesque opus. The arrival at The Castle, a possibility seemingly on hand, though always put off, heightens its mystery not necessarily by means of its inaccessibility, but by means of the suggestion that the act of entering demands unexplored, or still unknown, solutions, which cannot and must not be differentiated from the traps in which they hide and with which they identify.
The Trial begins — seemingly without motive and without warning — from the vast caprices of the possible and gradually configures its own epic (which even becomes a motivation), in which the absurd, in the double role of cause and effect, plays the humble yet arrogant role of intermediary between more and more obscure trapdoors of implication — of culpability.
As a type of perfection, “the possibility” of being “A Hunger Artist,” who perfects his skill to its final consequence, meaning death, is in fact an impossibility which sets in motion the ambiguity of the role as a whole. In the Kafkaesque manner, the anthropomorphizing process enriches the canon of literary fable, as can be seen in “Investigations of a Dog” and “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk,” as well as in a text like “The New Advocate,” which begins thus:
We have a new advocate. Dr. Bucephalus. There is little in his appearance to remind you that he was once Alexander of Macedon’s battle charger. Of course, if you know his story, you are aware of something. But even a simple usher whom I saw the other day on the front steps of the Law Courts, a man with the professional appraisal of the regular small punter in a racecourse, was running an admiring eye over the advocate as he mounted the marble steps with the high action that made them ring beneath his feet.2
Paradoxically, in The Metamorphosis, the impossible is born and domesticated by the miraculous into a theater of complicities. The revelation of the impossible is not estranged from the revelation of the dangerous potentialities of an inoffensive possible. The border between the two states is frequently undermined, forcing the possible to offer up its disquieting unreality in the form of oneiric visions and bringing the impossible into the most banal and phantasmal proximity to the possible. Only when he becomes an insect does Gregor, in fact, become what he had always been but had understood only rarely. Only then does his true “place” in the family and in the world start to become clear. The interiority that had always been ignored can no longer be concealed, the questions that had been put off for so long become urgent.