The Samsa family reveals itself as well through the self-consuming tragedy. Only after the most devoted member of the family, more and more estranged, suspect precisely because of his excessive devotion, is forced to exhibit his “dissociation,” and is no longer able to repress the secret, does the “normalized” family rediscover its cohesion and its responsibilities, its enterprising spirit and its hopes.
The metamorphosis seems scandalous because of the drastic and ultimatum-giving manner in which it acts on the real, but it exhausts its function not in the realm of the fantastic or in that of the impossible, in the unreal, as might be expected, but in the most modest routine of the quotidian. The metamorphosis imperiously demands to be considered and thus eliminated as a form of reality, as simple reality, not as shock or nightmare. Everything then reenters the sphere of fantastic normality. What else could we call the disappearance without a trace of the unfamiliar family member who had been, until the previous day, an inseparable part of the Samsa quartet? Gregor was not capable of defining himself outside the perimeters of the family, and perhaps it is because of this that he is at last forced to define himself outside the perimeters of the world. Only in this manner, incarcerated in his old self and in his new insect self, does his humanity breathe free, intensely, painfully, suicidally: the insect with a human soul proves to be more “human” than those around it, more human than they can bear to think.
When Kafka refers to the Jewish question, and related to this, to the problem of the Jewish writer’s language, the problem of his homeland, he is referring again to the impossible. To him — from his point of view, which to him is the central point of view — the Jewish question seems negated, forbidden, impossible. “You have your homeland and you can relinquish it, which is perhaps the best thing one can do with one’s homeland, especially since you don’t relinquish the unrelinquishable part of it. But he doesn’t have a homeland, he doesn’t have what is to be relinquished, and he must always think to seek it out, to build it up, even when he doffs his hat or when he lies in the sun or learns to write a book which you won’t translate … yes, Max must always think about this, even when he writes a letter to you,” Kafka writes to Milena, speaking of Max Brod, but no less of himself. “Writing a book which you won’t translate … even writing a letter to you” … Not only the question of belonging, but the question of language is already suggested with discretion and patience.
Kafka defines himself to his Czech lover and friend as “the most typical of occidental Jews. This means, with slight exaggerations, that I haven’t been given even one second of peace, everything had to be won, not only the present and future, but even the past — that which every human being has inherited, even this had to be won.”
We understand why, in a letter addressed to Max Brod and in his conversation with Janouch, Kafka maintains that the Jewish question or “the despair related to it” has, in fact, unified the inspiration of Jewish-German writers. A thematic full of “impossibilities,” Kafka explains … because this problem expresses itself in a (German) literature which seems to be a fitting destination only on the surface. In reality, however, given that there exists no rational reason for accepting this transfer (“since the problem is not really a German one”), the writers who assume such an undertaking are confronted with three impossibilities, which Kafka lists and analyzes. These impossibilities apparently refer only to the problem of language, but naturally they go on to overstep it. For Kafka, as for any writer and more than for any writer, the word is itself the essence of being, the deepest of all depths and the center of selfhood. In this sense, as in many others, Kafka pushes Jewish tradition to the extreme, pushes meaning to its true premise: “Language has been an issue of life and death for Jews ever since the nomadic tribe destroyed the idols and stood in their place the word as God. To live and to die as a member of this tribe means strictly following the word of God having become Law,” Ernst Pawel, Kafka’s biographer, accurately points out.
The first impossibility to which Kafka refers is “the impossibility of not writing.”
“I could have built the pyramids with the effort needed to keep me alive and to keep me rational,” he wrote to Felice Bauer on April 13, 1913. We understand what it means “to keep alive.” He himself admits it in another letter to Felice, just a week later: “I am awake only among my imaginary characters” (April 20, 1913). He will repeat it in his August 14 epistle: “I do not have literary interests, I am made of literature. I am nothing else and I cannot be anything else.” He repeats it even more drastically in a letter to Felice’s father of August 28, 1913: “my entire being is bent towards literature.” For Kafka, this is what it means “to keep alive.” “My entire existence is bent towards literature … the second I abandon it, I cease living. Everything I am and am not is a consequence of this.”
And, in another letter, on June 26, 1913: “My attitude towards writing and towards people cannot be changed; it is a part of my nature and not circumstance … just as the dead should not be and cannot be pulled from their graves, just so I cannot pull myself from my table at night …” “I cannot write and consequently live,” he notes seemingly in passing, tracing the indissoluble relation between writing and “keeping alive,” in an epistle sent less than two months before the one cited above, in April 1913: “I cannot write and consequently live except in this systematic, continuous, strict way … I have always been afraid of the world, not of the world itself, properly speaking, but of its intrusion into my feeble existence.” Lastly, an expected affirmation in a letter of August 20 of the same year: “In my view, the spoken word eliminates the importance and the seriousness from everything I say. Writing is the only form of expression that suits me.”
“To travel the night with my writing, this is all that I wish for. And so to die or to lose my mind, this is, also, what I wish for, given that it is the inevitable and the long anticipated consequence.” Such a profession of faith needs no commentaries. Kafka is nothing but literature not because literature is something different from life, but precisely because it is the most bizarre and most complete embodiment of life, more alive than life itself, and, at the same time, its posthumous quintessence. “The infinite feeling continues to be unlimited in words, as it was in the heart,” he writes.
In Kafka’s case, more than in anyone else’s, the impossibility of not writing equals not living, no longer being able to keep alive. “I am nothing else but literature and I cannot and I do not want to be anything else.”
Kafka formulates the second impossibility as “the impossibility of writing in German.” He sees a tragic estrangement and a vulgar usurpation in the use of the German language: “Openly present or masked, or perhaps a self-tormented usurpation of a foreign property … which remains in the possession of an Other, even if not one linguistic mistake can be pointed out.” The estrangement appears as a consequence of the ambiguity of an Other, a fissured, hunted being, in search of a “coming into possession” which would legitimize and justify it. Kafka seems to consider the acquisition and the use of the German language as a betrayal of identity, even as an act of piracy, imagined as the snatching of a foreign babe from its cradle and one’s abusive acquisition of it.