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

Such an extreme situation seems drawn from the Kafkaesque premise itself, and our forerunner K could not but be un-attracted by such an extravagant hypothesis of self-destruction. Meaning, salvation through self-destruction: “The idea that Tibet is far away from Vienna seems silly to me,” Kafka writes to Milena. “I am reading a book about Tibet; at a description of a settlement close to the Tibetan frontier, in the mountains, my heart grows suddenly heavy; this village seems so empty, so far away from Vienna. That which I call silly is the idea that Tibet is far away from Vienna. Is it really so far?” he asks her, asking himself, knowing all too well that the emptiness is not really far off at all, but dangerously close to Vienna, to Prague, to the house of his family, to the General Society of Insurance, to the room of his solitude. The sugarcane plantations had not really been far off either, nor the Islamic cemeteries, nor the Great Wall. It is not necessary to imagine Kafka in Saudi Arabia, or in communist China, or in Brazil, where the very un-Kafkaesque Viennese Jew, Stefan Zweig, would later, in exile, kill himself in order to authenticate one of the most expressive and most frequent Kafkaesque situations of the new millennium, hurrying to shatter memories and hopes. Similarly, it is not necessary to imagine Kafka in the New York of his protagonist, Karl Rosmann, in the city of exiles par excellence, or to imagine him nearby, in Newark, “in the room in the house of an elderly Jewish lady, on the shabby lower stretch of Avon Avenue,” as in Looking at Kafka , by Philip Roth.

In any case, in the nocturnal room of his Prague exile, Kafka had been in these and in many other places far away and nowhere at all. Like many of Kafka’s other premonitions, this “impossibility”—un-stated, but nevertheless lived and expressed with the same anxiety and force — would surprisingly go on to fertilize the topoi of contemporary reality.

Kafkaesque posterity has extended the condition of the Jew to many other categories of exiles, without, however, nullifying the Jewish “impossibility.” Primo Levi saved himself at Auschwitz through the German language. After the Holocaust, Paul Celan continued, despite Adorno’s warning, to write not only poems but poetry in the language of his mother’s butchers. To the end, the homeland of Mandelstam remained the Russian language, the language in which Stalin had signed his death warrant.

The generalized exile of postmodern global society has extended possibilities while trivializing the impossibilities of the exiled text, and all in a period which euphemistically calls its deviations and incoherence “mobility.”

Joyce, Musil, and Thomas Mann, Conrad and Nabokov, Gombrowicz and Bashevis Singer, Beckett and Ionescu, Brodsky, Cortázar, and Danilo Kiš have conferred a new legitimacy on expatriation, along with everything that the keeping or abandoning of the maternal language in exile means. They are the forerunners of the world of vast interferences in which we live. It is difficult to imagine Kafka in the New World of today and even more difficult to see him in the clownish role of telegenic prompter of his own Works, as the computerized entertainment corporation of the Planetary Circus demands. The manner in which the solitary Franz Kafka surpassed the impossibilities he faced without truly surpassing them, surviving in the German language of his estrangement, reminds our memoryless epoch of the hope without hope contained in his unrepeatable model.

If, in our fight against the world, we must, in the end, take the part of the world against ourselves, as Kafka advised us to do, the lay prayer of writing remains a last refuge for refusal, as well as for resignation. After all, the suspect who prays through writing doesn’t only exist as a mythic creation of profane letters spinning around the anagrammatic mystery of the world, still seeking his place in the repertoire of curiosities of so many derisory Homelands, but is real in his exile, and in his exiled reality embodies all of the impossibilities of his existence.

Translated by Carla Baricz, 2011

Notes

1. Here and throughout this essay, quotes from Kafka’s letters are from Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice , trans. by James Stern and Elisabeth Duckworth (New York: Schocken Books, 1973).

2. Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories , trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Touchstone, 2000), 135.

3. Ernst Pawel, The Nightmare of Reason (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984), 408–9.

4. Franz Kafka, The Complete Short Stories , trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (London: Vintage Books, 2005), 390.

Adorno, Theodor 203–4, 206, 213, 348

Algeria 35

America: as imperfect democracy 166, 189–92; presidential election circus 83–4; simplification of culture 307–10; see also Bard College; New York; September 11 attacks

anti-communism in former communist states 299–300, 306

anti-Semitism: Cioran’s paradoxical statements 148–9; facing the past in Romania 44–62; Iron Guard atrocities 51–3, 58, 99, 112; Kafka’s experiences 343–4; post-communist retelling 305–6; and Steinberg’s disdain for Romania 180; see also Holocaust

Antonescu, General Ion 52, 53, 60, 99, 117, 129

Antonioni, Michelangelo 67

Arendt, Hannah 241, 270, 277

Arghezi, Tudor 117, 178–9, 260

art and simplification 307–10

artists as clowns 63–7

Atlas, James 244

Baader, Johannes 321

Bakhtin, Mikhail 124

Barb neagr , Paul 101–2

Bard College 157–74, 274–80

Barthes, Roland 255

Barzini, Luigi 67

Baudelaire, Charles 198, 260

Bauer, Carl 332, 336

Bauer, Felice 328, 331–2, 336

Bayley, John 123

Beckett, Samuel 171, 195, 214, 348

Bellow, Alexandra 244

Bellow, Saul 5, 234–46; The Dean’s December 234, 239; Manea’s meetings with 239–46; Ravelstein 234–8, 244

Benjamin, Walter 264–5, 328

Berlin and first exile 6, 7–8, 13–24, 77–8, 257, 258, 259, 284–5, 314

Berlin Wall 285

Bernhard, Thomas 9

Binyon, Laurence 123

Blanchot, Maurice 214

blasphemy and carnival 119–39

Blecher, M. 43

Bloom, Allan 235

Bollon, Patrice 145

books see reading

Borges, Jorge Luis 40

Botstein, Leon 241–2

Brandeis, Irma 241–2, 277

Brecht, Bertolt 6

Breton, André 31, 321

Brezhnev, Leonid 293

Brod, Max 328, 335, 337–8, 340–1

Brodsky, Joseph 348

Buber, Martin 204, 205, 206, 210–12, 229–31

Büchner, Georg 204

Bukovina 7, 53, 253

C linescu, George 117, 338

C linescu, Matei 147, 148

Campus, Eugen 181, 182, 186

Camus, Albert 9, 26

Canetti, Elias 268

capitalism 33, 34–5, 289, 316–18

Caragiale, Ion Luca 100

carnival and blasphemy 119–39

Casa Minima, Bard College 274–80

Ceau sescu, Elena 73–6, 78, 285

Ceau sescu, Nicolae 42, 113, 114, 115–16, 143, 274; Manea’s meeting with 86–90; Noica’s internal exile and trial 150–6; nostalgia for 129, 305; overthrow and execution 285; regime 67, 68–91, 257, 283–4