Roberto Calasso - K.

A few days later, and still as part of his attempt to explain to Felice why he considered himself unsuited to spending his life with another person, Kafka described himself as a creature who “is bound by invisible chains to an invisible literature and who screams when approached, thinking someone is touching that chain.”

It’s awkward to speak of symbols in Kafka, because Kafka experienced everything as symbol. It wasn’t a choice — if anything, it was a sentence. Symbols belonged to everything he perceived, just as fluidity belongs to our perception of water. He didn’t call them Symbole , but rather Sinnbilder , “emblems,” at least in the beginning. That noun is composed of Sinn , “sense” or “meaning,” and Bild , “image.” Images that have meaning: Kafka felt himself compelled to live perennially among them. At times he wanted to escape them.

When his tuberculosis manifested he wrote Brod: “In any case, there remains the wound, of which my wounded lungs are merely the emblem ( Sinnbild ).” And in his Diaries , two days later, he wrote the same words: “If the wound to my lungs is merely an emblem, as you maintain, an emblem of the wound whose inflammation is called Felice and whose depth is called justification, if that’s how it is, then even the doctor’s advice (light air sun quiet) is an emblem. Seize it.”

But how does one move from symbols to the story? Kafka gave his illness a theatrical shape: first, subtly, in his letter to Brod where he spoke of his “wound”; then again, more crudely, in one of his first letters to Milena:

It happened that my brain could no longer bear the anguish and suffering it was burdened with. It said: “I surrender. But if there are any others here who care about preserving the whole, they’re welcome to take some of my load so that we can keep going a while longer.” At that point my lungs came forward, having little to lose. Those negotiations between my brain and lungs, which took place without my knowledge, must have been frightening.

The scene is already set. The characters enter. The dialogue might be like certain exchanges that are sprinkled through his Diaries —disjointed, meandering. Something like this: “You kill him, I can’t do it.” “Okay, but I’ll need a little time.” “Fine, but don’t forget.”

Kafka’s intolerance for big words. If uttered by a young woman, breathlessly, he had the impression that they emerged “like fat mice from her little mouth.”

“The bystanders stiffen when the train goes past.” It’s the first sentence of his Diaries , set apart. The train is time, which doesn’t permit us to grasp its shape. Only a sudden wind, jumbled outlines. But we can tell it’s passing. And it’s impossible not to stiffen as we watch it: one last gesture of resistance. This is an example of what Kafka wasn’t able to avoid perceiving: reflexes, fixed gestures, involuntary gestures, dead metaphors that brood over their secrets like insects trapped in amber.

For Kafka, the metaphorical and the literal had the same weight. The passage from one to the other was smooth. The metaphorical could take the place of the literal and transform the literal into metaphor. That life may be a trial punctuated by punishments could give rise to the metaphor of an entire life as a judicial trial. But that judicial trial could then become literal, its articulation so ramified and subtle as to evoke as metaphor the proceedings of life itself. The back-and-forth between the two planes was continual and imperceptible. And the presence of the metaphorical plane also worked to distance the literal from its proximity to the ground of things, rendering it dense and muffled, lacking that breath that comes only with the capacity to split in two.

Like Wittgenstein in the margins of Frazer’s Golden Bough , Kafka revealed his “primitive gaze” only in passing or between parentheses. An exemplary instance can be found in a letter to Robert Klopstock from March 1922 (as The Castle was being written):

You need only keep in mind that you’re writing to a poor little man who is possessed by every possible evil spirit, of every type (one of medicine’s undeniable merits is having introduced, in place of the notion of possession, the consoling concept of neurasthenia, which has however rendered recovery more difficult and furthermore has left open the question of whether it is weakness and sickness that lead to possession or whether, on the other hand, weakness and sickness are themselves a stage of possession, preparing the man to become a bed of rest and pleasure for the impure spirits), a man who feels tormented if this condition of his isn’t recognized, but apart from that it’s possible to get along decently with him.

From Psellus’s treatise on demons to Judge Schreber and Freud, a long, jagged stretch of psychic history is covered with cool irony in those parenthetical lines, which seem written by a Desert Father, wise in the ways of spirits.

Kafka once recounted to Milena an episode that settled in advance a vast part of the literature that would accumulate around him: “Recently a Tribuna reader told me that I must have done great research in a madhouse. ‘Just in my own,’ I told him. And then he tried to compliment me again on ‘my madhouse.’”

Peremptorily, unexpectedly, Kafka one day wrote in his Diaries that “all such literature” (meaning first of all his own) was an “attack on the frontier” and could even “have developed into a new secret doctrine, into a Kabbalah” (adding, in a clarification that goes to the heart of his thought on modern Judaism: “had Zionism not intervened”). In the fragment that precedes this, “the attack on the frontier” is more explicitly an “attack on the last earthly frontier.” But how did Kafka arrive at that expression? The fragment appears in the context of an account of an extremely severe, overwhelming crisis experienced in January 1922, shortly before he began the draft of The Castle: “In the past week I suffered something like a breakdown, worse than any except perhaps that one night two years ago; I haven’t experienced other examples. Everything seemed over, and still today nothing seems much different.” What had happened? “First of all: breakdown, impossible to sleep, impossible to stay awake, impossible to endure life, or more precisely the course of life.” The cause of the breakdown is a tear in the fabric of time. External time and internal time now proceed at different rates: “The clocks don’t agree, the internal one chases along in a diabolical or demoniacal or in any case inhuman fashion, the external one limps along at its usual pace.” They differ not only in speed but in direction: thus “the two different worlds divide and keep dividing or at least tear themselves horribly.” The decisive word here has already sounded: “chases.” The internal process resembles a mad chase, a chase that “takes the path that leads away from humanity.” Its “wild nature” can’t be described in other terms — and in fact the word chase returns six times in the next few lines. In the end, however, Kafka recognizes that the chase is “only an image.” But what can take the place of an image? Only another image. Such as this one: the chase could be called an “attack on the last earthly frontier.” Thus the image is developed — and even more coded. Enigmas can be resolved only by further enigmas. And as if to prove that, Kafka immediately takes the image of the attack on the frontier and splits it in two. Because two types of attack can be made: an “attack launched from below by mankind,” which can be “replaced, since this too is only an image, with the image of an attack directed at me from above.” If there is one passage that distills Kafka’s peculiar process, it’s this one. Knowledge leads to the evocation of an image. And that image is immediately recognized as “only an image.” To move beyond it, it will have to be replaced — with another image. The process is never-ending. No image exists about which it can’t be said that it’s “only an image.” But neither does any knowledge exist that isn’t an image. This vicious circle offers no exit and perhaps approximates a definition of literature. Through image.