We see it also in “The Great Wall of China,” as an opposition, but also as an unfinished and unfinishable preparation for a new Tower of Babel. A horizontally sprawling construction, a solid, infinite “foundation” which the collapsed Tower had never had (having been in too great a hurry to reach the heights). Built to protect against an enemy that no one had ever seen but which was thought to be human, certainly not divine, the Wall, in fact, defends the Authority; the construction of “portions,” whose meeting point is unknown, is at last divided into parcels and given to each individual citizen, who in turn comes to be identified with his or her parcel, whose existence is occupied and symbolized by a portion of the Wall. The force of the edifice is based on the weakness of each of its builders, all of whom are incapable of overthrowing the Authority, which resides in the enigmatic and far-off Center, by pulling this Authority towards them and so undoing it. This weakness fulfills the “unity of the people” and is the “earth” on which this population lives; its condemnation would mean the “shattering” not only of conscience but, even worse, of “the earth under one’s feet.”
The text, of a hallucinatory precision and stylistic aridity, perfectly adequate for a “report,” scrutinizes the illusion of total and totalitarian coherence, the never-reached “fulfillment” of the utopian Project. Life itself is home to estrangement and indifference, meaning exile, consumed in ephemeral “portions” of destiny without destiny.
One could name exile, the fifth impossibility — fulfilling an interrogatory function for all the other impossibilities — as the impossibility of the operetta, to borrow E.M. Cioran’s words, according to whom it is better to write operettas than to write in a foreign language.
Perhaps, it would also be suggestive to name it “the impossibility of the snail.” Meaning, the impossibility of continuing to write in exile, even when the writer takes his language with him. The shell allows for refuge anywhere the snail may happen to go, but how utterly endangered it is, through its relocation; the life of its inhabitant is glimpsed as soon as he imprudently raises his antennae, antennae unprepared for the new earth, new sky, and new creatures, or for the appealing or hostile sounds of their languages. The shipwreck of the snail in the torrid and tormented desert of the dynamic, modern Babel more than once destroys his chances of survival.
Such an extreme situation seems drawn from the Kafkaesque premise itself, and our forerunner K could not but be un-attracted by such an extravagant hypothesis of self-destruction. Meaning, salvation through self-destruction: “The idea that Tibet is far away from Vienna seems silly to me,” Kafka writes to Milena. “I am reading a book about Tibet; at a description of a settlement close to the Tibetan frontier, in the mountains, my heart grows suddenly heavy; this village seems so empty, so far away from Vienna. That which I call silly is the idea that Tibet is far away from Vienna. Is it really so far?” he asks her, asking himself, knowing all too well that the emptiness is not really far off at all, but dangerously close to Vienna, to Prague, to the house of his family, to the General Society of Insurance, to the room of his solitude. The sugarcane plantations had not really been far off either, nor the Islamic cemeteries, nor the Great Wall. It is not necessary to imagine Kafka in Saudi Arabia, or in communist China, or in Brazil, where the very un-Kafkaesque Viennese Jew, Stefan Zweig, would later, in exile, kill himself in order to authenticate one of the most expressive and most frequent Kafkaesque situations of the new millennium, hurrying to shatter memories and hopes. Similarly, it is not necessary to imagine Kafka in the New York of his protagonist, Karl Rosmann, in the city of exiles par excellence, or to imagine him nearby, in Newark, “in the room in the house of an elderly Jewish lady, on the shabby lower stretch of Avon Avenue,” as in Looking at Kafka, by Philip Roth.
In any case, in the nocturnal room of his Prague exile, Kafka had been in these and in many other places far away and nowhere at all. Like many of Kafka’s other premonitions, this “impossibility”—un-stated, but nevertheless lived and expressed with the same anxiety and force — would surprisingly go on to fertilize the topoi of contemporary reality.
Kafkaesque posterity has extended the condition of the Jew to many other categories of exiles, without, however, nullifying the Jewish “impossibility.” Primo Levi saved himself at Auschwitz through the German language. After the Holocaust, Paul Celan continued, despite Adorno’s warning, to write not only poems but poetry in the language of his mother’s butchers. To the end, the homeland of Mandelstam remained the Russian language, the language in which Stalin had signed his death warrant.
The generalized exile of postmodern global society has extended possibilities while trivializing the impossibilities of the exiled text, and all in a period which euphemistically calls its deviations and incoherence “mobility.”
Joyce, Musil, and Thomas Mann, Conrad and Nabokov, Gombrowicz and Bashevis Singer, Beckett and Ionescu, Brodsky, Cortázar, and Danilo Kiš have conferred a new legitimacy on expatriation, along with everything that the keeping or abandoning of the maternal language in exile means. They are the forerunners of the world of vast interferences in which we live. It is difficult to imagine Kafka in the New World of today and even more difficult to see him in the clownish role of telegenic prompter of his own Works, as the computerized entertainment corporation of the Planetary Circus demands. The manner in which the solitary Franz Kafka surpassed the impossibilities he faced without truly surpassing them, surviving in the German language of his estrangement, reminds our memoryless epoch of the hope without hope contained in his unrepeatable model.
If, in our fight against the world, we must, in the end, take the part of the world against ourselves, as Kafka advised us to do, the lay prayer of writing remains a last refuge for refusal, as well as for resignation. After all, the suspect who prays through writing doesn’t only exist as a mythic creation of profane letters spinning around the anagrammatic mystery of the world, still seeking his place in the repertoire of curiosities of so many derisory Homelands, but is real in his exile, and in his exiled reality embodies all of the impossibilities of his existence.
Translated by Carla Baricz, 2011
Notes
1. Here and throughout this essay, quotes from Kafka’s letters are from Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice, trans. by James Stern and Elisabeth Duckworth (New York: Schocken Books, 1973).
2. Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Touchstone, 2000), 135.
3. Ernst Pawel, The Nightmare of Reason (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984), 408–9.
4. Franz Kafka, The Complete Short Stories, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (London: Vintage Books, 2005), 390.
INDEX
Adorno, Theodor 203–4, 206, 213, 348
Algeria 35
America: as imperfect democracy 166, 189–92; presidential election circus 83–4; simplification of culture 307–10; see also Bard College; New York; September 11 attacks