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

“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.

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.