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

Today, when I entered the dining room, the colonel invited me so cordially to their table that I had to give in. So everything followed its course. After the first few words, it was made clear that I was from Prague. Both of us, the general, who was in front of me, and the colonel, were familiar with Prague. So I am Czech? Well. Try to explain to these veritable German officers what you are in fact. Someone suggested “German from Bohemia,” and someone else “from a small neighborhood.” Then the subject was dropped and the lunch began, but the general, with his acute linguistic sensitivity, schooled in the Austrian army, was not satisfied. After we finished the meal, he began again to marvel at the sound of my German, perhaps more disturbed by what he saw than what he heard. At this point, I tried to explain that I am Jewish. Certainly, his scientific curiosity was then satisfied, but not his human feelings. In that moment, probably simply by chance — since the others could not hear our conversation, even if a certain connection existed — the entire group got up to leave, even though yesterday they had stayed on quite a while after lunch. The general too was very anxious to go, even though, ever so politely, he had brought our small chat to a sort of conclusion, before hurrying, with great big steps, towards the exit. This didn’t really satisfy my human feelings either: why should I be a thorn in their side? To have to remain alone, without exploding in a ridiculous fashion, lest they then invent some disciplinary measure against me.

At a certain point, Kafka confesses in his Journal that even his love for his mother seems derailed by the alienation of German expression.

What about the fear and the horror, the attachment and the repulsion, the compassion and the awkwardness provoked by his love — hate relationship with his father? How would the famous Letter to My Father have sounded if it had initially been written in Czech or, let us say, in Yiddish? What would have become of Kafka’s feelings and resentments?

The third impossibility with which the Jewish-German writer is confronted while trying to follow his inspiration (meaning his despair) is “the impossibility of writing differently.” Does differently mean “in another language?”

In a letter to Milena, Kafka confesses: “I have never lived among the Germans, German is my mother tongue, my natural tongue, but Czech is closer to my heart.” This is not only an indirect declaration of love for his young Czech translator, with whom he would maintain close relations, but also a declaration of love for other virtualities of the impossible, a reiteration of his incurable suspicions regarding the “attainable,” regarding the deceitful and corrupting hospitality of the possible. Yiddish, he thinks, could instill “a belief in himself which would overcome fear.” Kafka would reaffirm this intuition — also aspiration — above all in his correspondence with Max Brod. His relationship to Hebrew is vague, from afar, but its invocation seems no less intense. Again, it is a sort of impossible , essential, and last rediscovery, a language which he would hear frequently on his deathbed thanks to the young Dora Diamant, a rabbi’s daughter, who not only brightened his last days on earth but initiated her moribund lover in the sacred language before he died. Nothing, however, could resolve the unsolvable. Kafka had been born in the German language, he had formed and deformed himself in the language of his writing. His servitude to the mother tongue? More than anyone else, as much as he might like to do so, the writer cannot give up the placenta. The borders of the mother tongue are both circumscribing and limitless. The writer himself makes possible the depths of the “possibility” in which he in fact lives. In Kafka’s case, to speculate regarding another way of writing would be a vulgar innocence and an impertinence.

As the American writer Cynthia Ozick accurately observes, Kafka’s fear was not that the German language didn’t belong to him — he possessed it brilliantly — but that he did not … deserve it. Is it “the wish and the crisis of the split of the psyche from the articulation of expression,” as Cynthia Ozick thinks? In fact, Kafka insinuates that it is impossible to be Kafka when he writes that “every day at least one line must be aimed at myself. I try constantly to communicate the incommunicable. After all, it is nothing else but fear … fear radiating over everything, a small and great fear, the paralyzing fear of uttering a word, even though this fear could also be the aspiration towards something greater than any fear.”

To the three assumed negations, Kafka adds a fourth, namely “the impossibility of writing” pure and simple: “since despair was not something that could be tamed by writing.”

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.