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

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.

In a letter to Max Brod, of June 1921, Kafka reminds him that “most of those who have begun to write in German wanted to distance themselves from their Jewishness, usually with the vague approval of the father — the vagueness was precisely what made the approval scandalous. They wanted to distance themselves, but their hind legs held on to their father’s Jewishness, while the front ones met with no firm ground. And the despair which resulted served them as inspiration.” The Other appears as a grotesque figure gifted with four legs, but grotesquely unstable, the hind legs rooted in the old paternal soil, while the front ones flail in the void above the precipice.

Just as the delivery of one’s own identity — negotiable through the command of the real — becomes a form of treason, similarly trading one’s identity for another implies a usurpation. Kafka expresses himself categorically in relation to the act of usurpation of a foreign “possession” (language) belonging to another, even when not one single linguistic error can be found in the writing of the Other. (Is one speaking strictly of an “ethnic” possession? Kafka and so many other writers and linguists have brilliantly proven in their works what G. Calinescu pointed out in relation to the great Romanian linguists of Jewish origin, in his History of Romanian Literature , which had appeared during the difficult period of the nationalist dictatorship: the intellectual character of language.) Today, in our centrifugal modernity, it would seem that intense “migration” accelerates the impurity and the mobility of all languages seized from their native cradle, and that the “foreign” child participates in the same hurried immersion in the hybrid language of the epoch, this language having become a global home. The premise from which Kafka begins, contradicted both yesterday and today by the writing of other master craftsmen like himself, as well as by an ever expanding world of the exiled, in fact speaks revealingly only about Kafka’s own suffering.

The linguistic “piracy” of the foreigner? … The severe and exaggerated accusation rather allows one to detect Franz Kafka’s own suffering, brought about by his contact with the real, his persistent suspicion with regard to the real. When he refers to the uncertain position of the Jew in the world, we might think today of the growing and diversifying population of all sorts of exiles, “uncertain”—as Kafka writes in a letter to Milena—“in themselves, and in the midst of humanity … urged to believe that only tangible possessions give them the right to survive.”

The impossibility of writing in German also means the impossibility of living authentically, with full accreditation, in German. Of course, we remember the famous episode of Kafka’s conversation with some fellow guests during a vacation, when his interlocutors, German officers, after a few of Kafka’s replies, probably intrigued by subtle and bizarre phonetic differences, inquired about the “real” place of his origin: