Roberto Calasso - K.

Don Quixote is only a puppet, charged with enduring Sancho Panza’s phantasms, who furiously attack and batter him. Sancho Panza sits quietly and reflects. He gazes tenderly on that shaky, feverish creature, whom he’s thrown into the world and into literature simply so that he himself — Sancho Panza — can stand back and catch his breath. Don Quixote can speak with impunity about theology — or chivalry — and can let himself be devoured by them. Sancho Panza observes it all quietly. And he “never boasted about it.” According to some, all he made of it was a novel.

In June 1913 Kafka noted in his Diaries: “The immense world I have in my head. But how to free myself and it without tearing. And a thousand times better to tear than to hold it back or bury it in me. It’s the reason I’m here, that’s entirely clear to me.” To tear, but what? His head, or the phantasms? Or both? Judicious action was called for, so that the phantasms, on being uprooted, wouldn’t injure his head — or disfigure themselves. In any case, the liberation was always a double one: of the phantasms and from the phantasms. That’s why Sancho Panza invented Don Quixote.

For Kafka, as for Sancho Panza, relations with the powers were so rooted in physiology, perceptible even in the act of breathing, that the first thought, and the rashest, was to liberate oneself from them. But Kafka knew that such a liberation would be illusory.

The greatest accomplishment consisted in establishing a certain distance. In sitting at a table and observing the powers — such as those apparitions of Don Quixote’s unbridled delirium — with relief, but also with something at stake. Following their transformations, but always standing off to one side, like an extra. That’s all one can ask. It’s the highest wisdom. Sancho Panza is the only person Kafka ever characterized as “a free man.”

There’s a point where all the powers get sucked into the same well. The closest approximation of that point was Kafka’s writing table. That’s why, as he would write one day to Oskar Baum, “the moving of a table in my own room” seemed no less terrible than the prospect of a trip to Georgental. And then he explained why the prospect of that trip frightened him so much: “In the last or next-to-last analysis, it’s only fear of death. In part also the fear of attracting the gods’ attention; if I continue to live here in my room, if every day passes as usual like the one before, it’s obvious that someone will have to attend to me, but the thing is already in motion, the gods hold the reins only mechanically, it’s so lovely, so lovely not to be noticed, if there was a fairy by my cradle it must have been the ‘Retirement’ fairy.”

The next day, in a letter to Brod, Kafka spoke again of this “fear of attracting the gods’ attention.” But this time the expression is the opening chord of a Leçon de Ténèbres on writing. What follows is the closest thing to a demonology of writing that has come down to us. Even if the writer restricts his field of vision to one room, and within that room to a desk, his condition is still not secure. What he’s missing is the floor, “fragile or positively non-existent” beneath his feet. And that floor covers “a darkness, whose obscure power surfaces of its own accord, and heedless of my stammering destroys my life.” What, then, does writing consist of?

Writing is a sweet, marvelous reward, but for what? In the night it became clear to me, as clear as a lesson for children, that it’s the reward for having served the devil. This descent toward the dark powers, this unchaining of spirits that are naturally kept bound, the dubious embraces and everything else that can happen down below, and of which you don’t recall anything when you’re up above, writing stories in the light of day. Perhaps some other kind of writing exists, but I know only this. At night, when fear won’t let me sleep, I know only this. And its diabolical element seems absolutely clear. It’s the vanity and the sensuality, they circle continuously around our own figure, or someone else’s — in which case the movement multiplies, becomes a solar system of vanity — and feast on it. What the ingenuous man sometimes desires (“I would like to die and see how they mourn me”), is played out constantly by a writer of this kind, he dies (or doesn’t live) and constantly mourns himself. This is the origin of his terrifying fear of death, which can’t present itself as fear of death, but might appear instead as fear of change, fear of Georgental.

The vortex swirls fiercely. But the most difficult and esoteric part isn’t that involving the “descent toward the dark powers,” in which the highest Romantic tradition and the distilled spirit of décadence seem to converge. The part that’s most coded, and most unexpected, is where Kafka speaks of “the vanity and the sensuality” that belong to a certain practice of writing, the only one he claims to know. What sensuality, what vanity, does he mean? And what is the “dark power” that assails the writer’s life in order to destroy it? Kafka pointed to it a little later in the same letter:

I’m sitting here in the comfortable posture of the writer, ready for all things beautiful, and I must observe without intervening — because what else can I do but write? — as my poor, defenseless real self (the existence of the writer is an argument against the soul, because the soul has plainly abandoned the real self, but only to become a writer, unable to go beyond that; could the separation from the self possibly weaken the soul that much?) is stung, cudgeled, nearly ground to bits by the devil, on a random pretext, a little excursion to Georgental.

When these lines are placed alongside certain shamanistic confessions, phrases that seemed obscure and thorny become piercingly clear. That abandoned body, that living corpse, that “forever corpse” whose “strange burial” the writer is quick to observe, is the shaman’s body, inanimate and motionless as his spirit travels widely, among the branches of the tree of the world, in the company of animals and other supernatural assistants. One can’t, however, take much pleasure in the journey (as “vanity” might wish): breaking away from the “real self,” the soul is left weakened, capable only of becoming “a writer, unable to go beyond that” (acme of sarcasm). And his activity will consist above all in “enjoying with all [his] senses or, which is the same thing, wanting to tell the story of” what happens with the writer’s “old corpse.” But this can succeed only in a state of “utter self-forgetfulness — the first prerequisite of being a writer isn’t wakefulness but self-forgetfulness.” Twice, in this phrase and in the parenthesis on the soul and its split from the “real self,” Kafka has gone quite far in his description of the prima materia of literature. This is his Kamchatka. For those who wanted to follow him, he left, at the end of the letter, the most concise definition of the kind of writer he felt himself to be: “The definition of a writer, of this kind of writer, and the explanation of the effects he has, if he ever has any: he is humanity’s scapegoat, he allows others to enjoy sin without guilt, almost without guilt.” Painful, abysmal irony in that “almost without guilt”: a nod to the illusory innocence of the pleasure that binds every reader to literature.

There was a graphologist in Sylt, in the pension where Felice was staying during a vacation. Felice asked him to examine Kafka’s handwriting and later sent Kafka the results. These seemed to him false and rather ridiculous. But “the falsest assertion among all the falsehoods” was this: according to the graphologist, the subject showed “artistic interests.” No — that was an insult. Kafka replied sharply: “I don’t have literary interests, I’m made of literature, I’m nothing else and can be nothing else.”