Norman Manea - The Fifth Impossibility - Essays on Exile and Language

Translated from the German by Tess Lewis, 2005

Like Kafka’s own life, his works explore both an individuality, and simultaneously, the essential territory belonging to no one. To no one, and to anyone, and to each one, but above all, and after all, they explore the territory belonging to Kafka himself: the vast territory of uncertainty and of questioning. This space — time of existence and of writing becomes increasingly dramatic as it comes to be claimed by the obsession and by the sign … of the impossible. The geography, the psychology, the therapy, even the theology of the impossible?

Kafka was greatly concerned with the impossible. He considered himself a product of the impossible, which became his native soil and sky, and which he recreated ceaselessly as poetry — meaning, as life — with a magical and austere fixation.

In Kafkaesque terms, both the possible and the impossible are linked to the essential, seen as a monster of mutually inseparable halves: love and literature.

When he speaks about the fulfillment of love, Kafka refers to “impossibilities,” almost in the same way as when he describes the manner of his writing: “And so, despite all, you want to bear the cross. To attempt the impossible?” Not waiting for an answer, Kafka hurries to sketch the premise: “There can be only three possible answers: ‘it is impossible, and so I don’t want to,’ ‘it is impossible, so I don’t want to right now,’ or ‘it is impossible, so I want to.’” 1

To forestall any remaining traces of confusion, he takes care to repeat what he has said before, on numerous occasions: “In an absurd way, I am terrified of the future and of the unhappiness that can result from my temperament and my deficiencies in our life together, which profoundly, and in the first place, will affect you, given that I am a cold, egotistical, unforgiving being, despite the weakness which conceals rather than tames these traits.”

Many years after his inability to stay together with Felice Bauer had been confirmed, Kafka mentioned the situation of the Jewish writer writing in the German language to Max Brod. Again three impossibilities (“the impossibility of not writing,” “the impossibility of writing in German,” “the impossibility of writing differently”). Not surprisingly, he added a fourth impossibility: the “impossibility of writing.”

Kafka will succeed in assuming, defeating, and reversing this “impossibility.” He will succeed in making it nourishing (if we can use such a term) and creative, difficulty having become devotion and destiny (“I don’t feel anything besides literature, and I can’t and I don’t want to be anything else”). He will do so only after understanding the personal impossibility of love, an impossibility which he will not cease to invoke, from whose trauma he will persist in extracting the aphrodisiacs of future failures. (“Impossible to live with F. Intolerable to live with anyone. I don’t regret this; I regret the impossibility of living alone.”) Only after he accepts and overcomes this “impossibility,” only after he makes it nourishing, will it become devotion and destiny: “I am nothing but literature and I cannot and do not want to be anything else.”

Walter Benjamin writes: “From the very moment he is certain of failure, everything seems to go without a hitch, like a dream. There is nothing more memorable than the fervor with which Kafka underlined his failure.”

As much as it is sought and reclaimed, the possible cannot compete with the seduction and the complicities of the impossible. One might say that the possible and the impossible exist in a continuous and paradoxical complicity, as if they contained, singly and together, codified and replaceable parts of failure. The real seems to become substantial, meaningful, only when it is filled with the stigma and the significance of the impossible; the extreme individualization makes the real denser and more obscure, modifying its consistency, its colors, and its integrity through a sort of instantaneous, dark alchemy.

The impossible is not only the simplistic, irrevocable negation of the possible; it is also its sumptuous, enriching wound, which validates the sickly, nocturnal augmentation of unexplored availabilities through contrast and complicity.

Seen in this manner, as part of, and relative to, the possible, the impossible becomes a sort of revenge of the possible’s deficiency transformed into proximity, an intense leap into nothingness.

Thirsty for the possible’s domestic empire, the writer completed his true existential and literary apprenticeship by testing his inadequacy against the all too accessible reality of other individuals. The impossible resulted — imposing its surprising connections through the ambiguous ravishing of the possible — as a fecund and protean “unreality,” whose enigmas the writer will explore, whose topography and topoi he will trace, and which will remain, in the end, the incomparable “K. Archipelago.”

Herman Hesse was right when he said that Kafka’s texts must be considered neither religious, nor metaphysical, nor moral, only poetic. Nevertheless, since Kafka remains the most Kafkaesque character of his own literary creation, his nocturnal existence as well as his intensely codified works cannot be purged of his unsettling questioning. The poetic relationship between the possible, the probable, and the impossible allows for a reading that repudiates limits, even the limits of poetry itself.

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 survival: living in impossibility, as one of the paradoxically animate forms of life.