Zadie Smith - Changing My Mind - Occasional Essays

It was meant to be obvious, to the college rereaders we once were, that any restriction on the multivalent free flow of literary meaning was not to be stood for. But to speak for myself, I’ve changed my mind. The assumption that what a reader wants most is unfettered freedom, rather than limited, directed, play, [39]or that one should automatically feel nostalgia for a bygone age of collective, anonymous authorship [40]-none of this feels at all obvious to me anymore. The house rules of a novel, the laying down of the author’s peculiar terms-all of this is what interests me. This is where my pleasure is. Yet it must also be true that part of the change in my attitude represents a vocational need to believe in Nabokov’s vision of total control. Nabokov’s profound hostility to Freud was no random whim-it was the theory of the unconscious itself that horrified him. He couldn’t stand to admit the existence of a secondary power directing and diverting his own. Few writers can. I think of that lovely idea of Kundera’s: “Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors.” This, in part, is what Barthes had to tell us and what Nabokov wanted to dispute. Maybe every author needs to keep faith with Nabokov, and every reader with Barthes. For how can you write, believing in Barthes? Still, I’m glad I’m not the reader I was in college anymore, and I’ll tell you why: it made me feel lonely. Back then I wanted to tear down the icon of the author and abolish, too, the idea of a privileged reader-the text was to be a free, wild thing, open to everyone, belonging to no one, refusing an ultimate meaning. Which was a powerful feeling, but also rather isolating, because it jettisons the very idea of communication, of any possible genuine link between the person who writes and the person who reads. Nowadays I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own. To this end I find myself placing a cautious faith in the difficult partnership between reader and writer, that discrete struggle to reveal an individual’s experience of the world through the unstable medium of language. Not a refusal of meaning, then, but a quest for it. Whether it is “ultimate” or “secret” meaning, seems to me besides the point and rather a sleight of hand on the part of Barthes; by using such terms he forces a monumental, essentialist, and theological discourse on a relationship that is in fact far more hesitant and delicate than he allows. Nabokov is not God, and I am not his creation. He is an Author and I am his reader, and we are stumbling toward meaning simultaneously, together. Zebra cocktail!

How to describe Kafka, the man? Like this, perhaps:

It is as if he had spent his entire life wondering what he looked like, without ever discovering there are such things as mirrors.

A naked man among a multitude who are dressed.

A mind living in sin with the soul of Abraham.

Franz was a saint. [41]

Or then again, using details of his life, as found in Louis Begley’s refresh ingly factual The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head: Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay: over six feet tall, handsome, elegantly dressed; an unexceptional student, a strong swimmer, an aerobics enthusiast, a vegetarian; a frequent visitor to movie houses, cabarets, all-night cafés, literary soirees and brothels; the published author of seven books during his brief lifetime; engaged three times (twice to the same woman); valued by his employers, promoted at work.

But this last Kafka is as difficult to keep in mind as the Pynchon who grocery shops and attends baseball games, the Salinger who grew old and raised a family in Cornish, New Hampshire. Readers are incurable fabulists. Kafka’s case, though, extends beyond literary mystique. He is more than a man of mystery-he’s metaphysical. Readers who are particularly attached to this supra-Kafka find the introduction of a quotidian Kafka hard to swallow. And vice versa. I spoke once at a Jewish literary society on the subject of time in Kafka, an exploration of the idea-as the critic Michael Hofmann has it-that “it is almost always too late in Kafka.” Afterward a spry woman in her nineties, with a thick old-world accent, hurried across the room and tugged my sleeve: “But you’re quite wrong! I knew Mr. Kafka in Prague-and he was never late.”

Recent years have seen some Kafka revisionism, although what’s up for grabs is not the quality of the work, [42]but rather its precise nature. What kind of a writer is Kafka? Above all, it’s a revision of Mr. Kafka’s biographical aura. From a witty essay of this kind, by the young novelist and critic Adam Thirlwell:

It is now necessary to state some accepted truths about Franz Kafka, and the Kafkaesque… Kafka’s work lies outside literature: it is not fully part of the history of European fiction. He has no predecessors-his work appears as if from nowhere-and he has no true successors… These fictions express the alienation of modern man; they are a prophecy of a) the totalitarian police state, and b) the Nazi Holocaust. His work expresses a Jewish mysticism, a non-denominational mysticism, an anguish of man without God. His work is very serious. He never smiles in photographs… It is crucial to know the facts of Kafka’s emotional life when reading his fiction. In some sense, all his stories are autobiographical. He is a genius, outside ordinary limits of literature, and a saint, outside ordinary limits of human behaviour. All of these truths, all of them, are wrong.

Thirlwell blames the banality of the Kafkaesque on Max Brod, Kafka’s friend, first biographer and literary executor, in which latter capacity he defied Kafka’s will (Kafka wanted his work burned), a fact that continues to stain Brod, however faintly, with bad faith. For his part, Brod always maintained that Kafka knew there would be no bonfire: if his friend was serious, he would have chosen another executor. Far harder to defend is Brod’s subsequent decision to publish the correspondence, [43]the diaries and the acutely personal Letter to My Father (though posthumous literary morality is a slippery thing: when what is found in a drawer is very bad, the shame of it outlives both reader and publisher; when it’s as good as Letter to My Father, the world winks at it).

If few readers of Kafka can be truly sorry for the existence of the unpublished work, many regret the manner in which Brod chose to present it. The problem is not solely Brod’s flat-footed interpretations; it’s his interventions in the texts themselves. For when it came to editing the novels, Brod’s sympathy for the theological would seem to have guided his hand. Kafka’s system of ordering chapters was often unclear, occasionally nonexistent; it was Brod who collated The Trial in the form with which we are familiar. If it feels like a journey toward an absent God-so the argument goes-that’s because Brod placed the God-shaped hole at the end. The penultimate chapter, containing the pseudohaggadic parable “Before the Law,” might have gone anywhere, and placing it anywhere else skews the trajectory of ascension; no longer a journey toward the supreme incomprehensibility, but a journey without destination, into which a mystery is thrust and then succeeded by the quotidian once more. Of course, there’s also the possibility that Kafka would have placed this chapter near the end, exactly as Brod did, but lovers of Kafka are not inclined to credit him with Brod’s variety of common sense. The whole point of Kafka is his uncommonness. Whatever Brod explains we feel sure Kafka would leave unexplained; whichever conventional interpretation he foists on the works the works themselves repel. We think of Shakespeare this way, too: a writer sullied by our attempts to define him. In this sense the idea of a literary genius is a gift we give ourselves, a space so wide we can play in it forever. Thirlwell again: