A sort of contradiction in terms, since the desperation to which he had referred from the very beginning had become for him, as for other German-Jewish writers, and perhaps for more than them, as he had himself observed, a source of … inspiration, a stimulus for writing.
His suffering could only partially be abated by writing and could not be abated even by writing. As for language, Paul Celan had affirmed even after the Holocaust that language is the homeland of the writer even when the language is German and the writer a Jew. The despair to which Kafka refers becomes — as he confesses—“an enemy” of life itself, and so an enemy of writing, a sort of suicidal “moratorium,” the last wish and testament before suicide: “writing was, in this case, only a moratorium, as for someone who writes his last wish and Testament, before hanging himself.”
Only in his epistolary writings would Kafka use the word “Jew” to describe his despair; never in his literary works. “You ask me if I am Jewish,” he writes to Milena Jasenska at the beginning of their relationship. “Perhaps what you are really asking is whether I am one of those anxious Jews”—meaning those Jews who do not resemble Milena’s not at all anxious Jewish husband but rather are tormented, as Kafka himself, by their identity.
Kafka’s relationship with his coreligionists is none other than the relationship with his writing: inevitability and insupportability, an equivocal relationship exhausted by stimulation and handicap. If we remind ourselves of his relationship with his writing and of his wish that his manuscripts be burned, we understand better, perhaps, Kafka’s tortured and heroic acceptance even of this “impossible” premise, under which he continued to write and so to live. “What do I have in common with the Jews?” he asks in his diary in 1914. The possibility even when it is already an unshakeable reality might instantly become a typical Kafkaesque doubt and impossibility: “I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe”—is a Kafkaesque Jewish answer to the Kafkaesque Jewish question.
The acuteness with which Kafka felt his “estrangement,” his inadequacy in the face of existence as a premise of his life and writing, is clearly revealed by the four “impossibilities” he names. To these impossibilities I would add a fifth, surprisingly omitted by Kafka. It is an impossibility that, in a certain manner, includes all of the others, giving them potential and, paradoxically, precisely in this manner, also minimizing them, if not wholly neutralizing them; more precisely, it lessens their importance. We could name this impossibility “the translation,” or “the radicalization,” or “the carnivalizing of impossibility”: exile. The exile before and after exile, the alienation at home and that of the ever-after through the expulsion of the foreigner, with his stolen language; this, in a truly foreign medium — linguistically, geographically, historically, and socially.
At last, the preceding three, even four, impossibilities become under threat of annihilation, Kafka’s most precious property. Both a terrible and a privileged trauma, as I have often said. The interior and the anterior exile are transformed only now, in an extreme situation, one that cannot be escaped: exile itself. Exile from a language “stolen” and made one’s own to the point of self-identification; exile from the country that had been the Homeland. To someone for whom it had always been a contested issue, the simplicity and the force of the notion of “Homeland” is reaffirmed at the very moment it is abolished. Let us remember again Celan’s words after the Holocaust: language is the homeland of the writer even when the language is German and the writer a Jew.
The possibility of expatriation was not only just one more demonic variation of the impossible which tempted Kafka, whose seeker and slave he acknowledged himself to be. It was also a command, sometimes concrete and immediate, coming both from the ancient past of the tribe that had been driven off, and from a tangible immediacy, from the proximity of the environment he inhabited. “I have spent all afternoon out on the streets, bathed in Jew hatred”—he had once written to Milena. “Prasive plemeno [Czech expression for ‘filthy brood’] is what I heard them call the Jews. Isn’t it only natural to leave a place where one is so bitterly hated? … I’ve just looked out the window: mounted police, a riot squad ready for a bayonet charge, the screaming mob dispersing, and up here at the window, the ugly shame of always having to live under protection.”3
The Homeland, the place where he is wished dead … a revealing truth regarding a certain Homeland … but also regarding a larger and more heterogeneous family: “the Homeland” as the place of birth, not only a linguistic locus but a geographical, historical, and national locus, and, by extension, a family of nations. From this point of view, the text of The Metamorphosis can be seen as one of the most terrible literary portraits of the impending Holocaust, symbolizing not only the individual’s but also a collective destiny of rejection and annihilation.
The German-Jewish writer lived and survived in his “Homeland” through the contradictory and creative convergence of three, even four impossibilities. Should he abandon them in favor of a more severe, a more complete, contradiction, one even less inhabitable? Translated with the other four impossibilities into a radical and opaque fifth impossibility, that of total estrangement, the exile is now faced not only with a reductio ad absurdum, frequent in mathematical problems without an immediate solution, but also with the extrapolating annihilation of the absurd. This he inhabits and allows it to inhabit him, in the fullness of absurdity and intensified estrangement from himself.
Exile itself, the reiterated and radicalized exile, transforms him into the most expressive symbol of impossibility. Given the proportions of the estrangement, the impossibilities — having become the impossibility— become an almost comic “negation of the negations,” providing the tragic with its depth, taking it to its limit, and freeing it simply by offering it the energy of the carnivalesque, the acute conscience of the farce of being in the world.
Further than ever before from the sedentary normality of those hosted by a Homeland, a language, a community, an illusion of stability and of meaning, only now does the many-times-over exile embody the true human condition, valid always and everywhere, the inevitable condition of any mortal, called — so that all may understand — the vanity of vanities.
In its tragicomic extremism, this global “impossibility” continues to become more and more global today, in our cosmopolitan, postmodern, centrifugal world, a world that is both post- and intensely Kafkaesque, a world in which — whether it be New York, Mexico City, or Mumbai — the writer who writes in German, or Russian, or Spanish personifies exactly the unforeseeable potentialities of the fifth, the most encompassing, impossibility, that which has become the emblem of our time: an age which has been called the age of “all possibilities” and not only by the ironists.
It seems surprising that Franz Kafka did not mention this fifth impossibility, the most Kafkaesque of all, though he thought about it more than once. “I am here, at the General Society of Insurance, and still I hope to be in faraway countries, at a window above sugarcane plantations, or looking out towards Muslim cemeteries.” The exile of his family, of love and profession, the exile par excellence, any time and anywhere, did not necessarily have to meditate on the hypothesis of expatriation. We see this hypothesis in “The Hunter Gracchus,” in “Jackals and Arabs,” or in a shorter text like “The Wish to Be A Red Indian,” which one should cite in fulclass="underline" “If one were only an Indian, instantly alert, and on a racing horse, leaning against the wind, kept on quivering jerkily over the quivering ground, until one shed one’s spurs, for there needed no spurs, threw away the reins, for there needed no reins, and hardly saw that the land before one was smoothly shorn heath when horse’s neck and head would be already gone.”4