Roberto Calasso - K.

Here the passage breaks off. The next begins: “All such literature is an attack on the frontier.” On the heels of that comes the reference to “a Kabbalah”—a further image. The chase and the Kabbalah: each unleashes the other.

But what feeds that chase its endless, unruly energy? Kafka knows that the frenetic “internal pace” may have “various causes,” but certainly “the most obvious is self-observation, which never allows an image to rest quietly, but rather keeps chasing it farther and farther, only to become an image itself and be chased in turn by a new self-observation.” The demoniacal, provocative, hounding element is, therefore, self-observation. Which in Kafka was extreme. But precisely because he was so adept at it, he always regarded it with suspicion, rather the way Homer’s characters regarded the gods — for they had occasionally encountered them and bore the scars to prove it. To Kafka, the avoidance of self-observation thus seemed, at times, felicitous, yet just two months before his chasing crisis, in November 1921, he called self-observation an “unavoidable obligation.” His reasoning behind that declaration is in itself suggestive of the movements of his stories: “If someone else is observing me, then naturally I ought to observe myself as well; if no one is observing me, then I must observe myself all the more closely.”

Self-observation appeared, therefore, inevitable, like breath. On the other hand, it was self-observation that instigated and aggravated the wild chase that later rendered his life intolerable, because of the enormous split it created between internal time — the time of the observing conscience — and the time of the outside world. Such a declaration did not allow any way out, except, perhaps, as Kafka suggested once (but only once and even then he quickly backtracked), a way out through writing: “Strange, mysterious, perhaps dangerous, perhaps liberating consolation of writing: a leap out of the murderer’s row of action-observation, action-observation, creating a higher type of observation, higher, not sharper, and the higher it is, the farther from the reach of the ‘row,’ the more independent it becomes, the more it follows its own laws of motion, the more incalculable, joyous, ascendant its course.” Trostlos , “unconsoling,” is a word Kafka often used at crucial points. “The good is, in a certain sense, unconsoling,” according to the thirtieth Zurau aphorism. And in The Castle , when Bürgel reveals to K. how the world keeps its equilibrium, he describes the “system” as wonderful but “in some ways unconsoling.” So it’s all the more surprising that Kafka attributes a certain amount of “consolation” to “writing.” Only here does writing appear as the one way to free oneself from ( hinausspringen , “to leap out of,” is Kafka’s strongly dynamic verb) the murderous chain of action and reaction, forged from matter and mind, that otherwise constricts and coerces our lives. The only chance for salvation lies in splitting one’s gaze in two . And the second gaze needn’t be “sharper”—it’s enough that it operate from a certain height (in order to observe the proceedings below in their entirety). The wound produced by the original split in the self-observing gaze can, therefore, be healed only by a further split. Thus every ingenious vision of a salvation reachable through a recovered unity of the subject is denied. Such a unity has never existed, except as a mirage inspired by the fear of disintegration. Kafka said nothing more on this theme in this entry, which is from January 1922. And he never took it up again. But his only expressible promesse de bonheur related to writing appeared in those lines.

Just after the words about the “strange, mysterious, perhaps dangerous, perhaps liberating consolation of writing,” Kafka noted: “Although I wrote my name clearly at the hotel, and although they themselves have written it correctly twice already, they still have Josef K. written in the register. Should I explain the situation to them, or should I have them explain it to me?”

“It’s as if spiritual combat were taking place somewhere in a forest clearing.” Like some Father Scupoli restored to life, and without any modern mitigation, Kafka maintains that everything revolves around that combat. What else could it be about? But how to approach it? At this point the scene quickly becomes muddled and snarled, becomes a story without an ending: “I enter the forest, find nothing and quickly, out of weakness, hurry back out; often, as I’m leaving the forest, I hear or think I hear the clanging of weapons from that battle. Perhaps the combatants are gazing through the forest darkness, looking for me, but I know so little about them, and that little is deceptive.” If the forest, the aranya , is the place of esoteric knowledge, then the combatants are like the rishis , the sages who observe the world through the dark tangle of branches rather than from on high among the stars of Ursa Major. Whoever ventures into the forest feels stalked by their gaze but can’t manage to see them. And what has been passed down about them is by now very unreliable. Memory of names, of characters, is lost. What remains is the sound of metal clashing in the dark.

In the first weeks of 1922, when internal time breaks away from external time to run its mad race, wakefulness is constant, tormenting. Distance from the world grows. Demons throng — or phantasms. Whom else would Kafka mean when he writes: “Escaped them”? Them: the pronoun of the possessed and the obsessed. An invisible struggle is under way, a game of stratagems, a protracted duel: “Escaped them. Some kind of nimble jump. At home by the lamp in the silent room. Unwise to say this. It calls them out of their forests, as if one had lit the lamp to help them find their way.” Demoniacal shorthand. Only the writer and the phantasms know exactly what is being said. The rest of us might notice, at most, a certain violent tremor in the still air, amid the snow, the woods, the squatting houses — the landscape of The Castle .

The last entry in the Diaries seems to imply that by now “the spirits” had taken Kafka’s hand . Once again: literally. Thus the writer is afraid to make marks on paper: “Every word, twisted in the hands of the spirits — this spring of the hand is their characteristic motion — becomes a spear pointing back at the speaker. Particularly an observation like this.” Writing itself has become the weapon the spirits use to run the writer through. And the process repeats itself “ad infinitum” for the man who sees himself now as “incapable of everything, except suffering.”

Appropriate precautions when approaching Kafka, according to Canetti: “There are certain writers — very few, in fact — who are so utterly themselves that any statement one might presume to make about them might seem barbarous. One such writer was Franz Kafka; accordingly, one must, even at the risk of seeming slavish, adhere as closely as possible to his own statements.”

Entry in the Diaries: “I don’t believe there are people whose inner state resembles mine, though I can at least imagine such people. But that the secret raven flies constantly around their heads, as it does around mine, this I can’t even imagine.” Approaching Kafka, the air is lightly stirred by those black wings.

The hunter Gracchus is covered by a “large, flowery silk shawl with fringe,” like a woman from the South. No signs of rigor mortis are visible, though he lies “without moving and, apparently, without breathing.” On the contrary, his sunburned face, his bushy, disheveled hair and beard, radiate the vitality and virility of a hunter. Or an old salt. One day — in the fourth century after Christ — this young hunter of the Black Forest, while stalking a chamois, fell off a cliff and died. Since then he has wandered on a boat, utterly adrift. Osiris had shown how to cross the night sky on the boat of the dead. Had described the route, the currents, the necessary magic words. But little was said about what might happen if one got lost because of an inadvertent turn of the rudder, “a momentary lapse of the pilot’s attention.” There seems to be no remedy for that. As Gracchus says, “the desire to help me is a sickness that can be cured only by bed rest.”