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

At last, the preceding three, even four, impossibilities become under threat of annihilation, Kafka’s most precious property. Both a terrible and a privileged trauma, as I have often said. The interior and the anterior exile are transformed only now, in an extreme situation, one that cannot be escaped: exile itself. Exile from a language “stolen” and made one’s own to the point of self-identification; exile from the country that had been the Homeland. To someone for whom it had always been a contested issue, the simplicity and the force of the notion of “Homeland” is reaffirmed at the very moment it is abolished. Let us remember again Celan’s words after the Holocaust: language is the homeland of the writer even when the language is German and the writer a Jew.

The possibility of expatriation was not only just one more demonic variation of the impossible which tempted Kafka, whose seeker and slave he acknowledged himself to be. It was also a command, sometimes concrete and immediate, coming both from the ancient past of the tribe that had been driven off, and from a tangible immediacy, from the proximity of the environment he inhabited. “I have spent all afternoon out on the streets, bathed in Jew hatred”—he had once written to Milena. “ Prasive plemeno [Czech expression for ‘filthy brood’] is what I heard them call the Jews. Isn’t it only natural to leave a place where one is so bitterly hated? … I’ve just looked out the window: mounted police, a riot squad ready for a bayonet charge, the screaming mob dispersing, and up here at the window, the ugly shame of always having to live under protection.” 3

The Homeland, the place where he is wished dead … a revealing truth regarding a certain Homeland … but also regarding a larger and more heterogeneous family: “the Homeland” as the place of birth, not only a linguistic locus but a geographical, historical, and national locus, and, by extension, a family of nations. From this point of view, the text of The Metamorphosis can be seen as one of the most terrible literary portraits of the impending Holocaust, symbolizing not only the individual’s but also a collective destiny of rejection and annihilation.

The German-Jewish writer lived and survived in his “Homeland” through the contradictory and creative convergence of three, even four impossibilities. Should he abandon them in favor of a more severe, a more complete, contradiction, one even less inhabitable? Translated with the other four impossibilities into a radical and opaque fifth impossibility, that of total estrangement, the exile is now faced not only with a reductio ad absurdum , frequent in mathematical problems without an immediate solution, but also with the extrapolating annihilation of the absurd. This he inhabits and allows it to inhabit him, in the fullness of absurdity and intensified estrangement from himself.

Exile itself, the reiterated and radicalized exile, transforms him into the most expressive symbol of impossibility. Given the proportions of the estrangement, the impossibilities — having become the impossibility— become an almost comic “negation of the negations,” providing the tragic with its depth, taking it to its limit, and freeing it simply by offering it the energy of the carnivalesque, the acute conscience of the farce of being in the world.

Further than ever before from the sedentary normality of those hosted by a Homeland, a language, a community, an illusion of stability and of meaning, only now does the many-times-over exile embody the true human condition, valid always and everywhere, the inevitable condition of any mortal, called — so that all may understand — the vanity of vanities.

In its tragicomic extremism, this global “impossibility” continues to become more and more global today, in our cosmopolitan, postmodern, centrifugal world, a world that is both post- and intensely Kafkaesque, a world in which — whether it be New York, Mexico City, or Mumbai — the writer who writes in German, or Russian, or Spanish personifies exactly the unforeseeable potentialities of the fifth, the most encompassing, impossibility, that which has become the emblem of our time: an age which has been called the age of “all possibilities” and not only by the ironists.

It seems surprising that Franz Kafka did not mention this fifth impossibility, the most Kafkaesque of all, though he thought about it more than once. “I am here, at the General Society of Insurance, and still I hope to be in faraway countries, at a window above sugarcane plantations, or looking out towards Muslim cemeteries.” The exile of his family, of love and profession, the exile par excellence, any time and anywhere, did not necessarily have to meditate on the hypothesis of expatriation. We see this hypothesis in “The Hunter Gracchus,” in “Jackals and Arabs,” or in a shorter text like “The Wish to Be A Red Indian,” which one should cite in full: “If one were only an Indian, instantly alert, and on a racing horse, leaning against the wind, kept on quivering jerkily over the quivering ground, until one shed one’s spurs, for there needed no spurs, threw away the reins, for there needed no reins, and hardly saw that the land before one was smoothly shorn heath when horse’s neck and head would be already gone.” 4

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.