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Chapter 2: Franz Kafka and the Disappearance of the Writer

One of the tricky questions that confronts us when reading the narratives of Franz Kafka concerns the difficulty of making any sort of assertion about meanings, allegorical implications, or the act of interpretation in general. It seems too easy to find oneself in the trap of suggesting an underlying truth or transcendent principle to guide our reading; critics such as Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze have famously and correctly exposed the limitations of such readings. And yet a limited approach feels difficult to escape. Perhaps the temptation to “read for meaning”—insofar as that act threatens to be dangerously reductive, if unavoidable—begins with the sense that Kafka often tells stories about the search for meaning and the process of navigating the branching possibilities of our experience in and understanding of the world. Moreover, perhaps our arrival at interpretive conclusions participates in that process and affirms the inescapability of attempting to read the world in an empowered way, even if we are always missing the point. That issue marks a critical intersection of the writing of Kafka, the writing about Kafka, and, connecting back to the framework of this particular study, the writing of Blanchot. Kafka emerges as one of the central figures in Blanchot’s critical texts, and the way that Blanchot deals with Kafka’s writing reflects the various difficulties that arise when responding to his work. In The Space of Literature, Blanchot largely focuses on Kafka’s Diaries as a means of discussing the experience of writing and the disappearance of the writer in this solitary experience. Before exploring the question of the writer’s disappearance, and in particular the way that this disappearance takes shape in Kafka’s story “The Burrow,” it is necessary to address issues of reading and interpretation that arise when suggesting metaliterary connections between Kafka’s narrator and the figure of the writer.

In Benjamin’s essay “Some Reflections on Kafka,” he notes the way critics have heavily focused on Kafka’s personal writings as a means for interpreting his fictions—“to the neglect of his real works.”²² Benjamin’s comments point to the tendency to search for and supposedly locate the “key” to Kafka’s narratives, thereby reducing the labyrinthine nature of the texts to a single, navigable path. He tells us that “both the psychoanalytical and theological interpretations equally miss the central points [of Kafka’s works]” and goes on to explore the way that those works evoke a “prehistoric world” that lies underneath, before, and beyond their simultaneously familiar and foreign textual environments (23, 27). In effect, Benjamin argues that efforts to illuminate the meaning of Kafka’s narratives through, for example, the Freudian lens of his troubled relationship with his father, defy the relation to the dark and the unknown—a relation that remains central and must be maintained in the experience of Kafka’s work. In Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Deleuze and Guattari proceed in a similar vein, rejecting uniquely content-oriented analyses that drastically miss the proliferating character of the narrative and linguistic processes at play in Kafka’s work. They begin their study:

How can we enter into Kafka’s work? This work is a rhizome, a burrow. The castle has multiple entrances whose rules of usage and whose locations aren’t very well known. The hotel in Amerika has innumerable main doors and side doors that innumerable main guards watch over; it even has entrances and exits without doors. Yet it might seem that the burrow in the story of that name has only one entrance; the most the animal can do is dream of a second entrance that would serve only as surveillance. But this a trap arranged by the animal and by Kafka himself; the whole description of the burrow functions to trick the enemy. We will enter, then, by any point whatsoever; none matters more than another, and no entrance is more privileged even if it seems an impasse, a tight passage, a siphon.²³

Interestingly, Deleuze and Guattari’s anti-interpretive study of Kafka begins with what seems to be a series of metaphors.²⁴ Kafka’s work resembles a burrow, a castle with multiple hidden entrances, a well-guarded hotel with countless doors—comparisons that suggest a metaliterary relationship between the structures found within Kafka’s texts and the texts themselves. Yet the comparison undermines the relationship at the same time that it establishes it. If we accept that Kafka’s work is a sort of burrow (or castle, or hotel), then we also must accept that we have entered at a single point, no more or less important than any other number of points where we may choose to enter. Kafka’s work is indeed a burrow, and in being so, resists our efforts to read it as any one thing in particular, including a burrow. Regardless, Deleuze and Guattari seem to want the reader to experience the work as an animal getting lost in the proliferating passages of an underground world, or as a land surveyor wandering at the margins of the castle.

Benjamin and other critics suggest that Kafka’s narratives function as parables, although this categorization often comes with various qualifications that prevent one from coming to easy conclusions about the way that the parabolic form might point to a privileged meaning. As soon as Benjamin identifies Kafka’s stories as parables, he adds that “[i]t is their misery and their beauty that they had to become more than parables.”²⁵ If a parable signifies by pointing away from itself, then, traditionally speaking, its message depends upon the understanding of where the parable points. While Kafka’s narratives often take the form of parable, they emphasize the pointing away itself and resist attempts to locate the other side of this operation. Theodor Adorno clarifies this idea in “Notes on Kafka”:

Walter Benjamin rightly defined [Kafka’s prose] as parable. It expresses itself not through expression but by its repudiation, by breaking off. It is a parabolic system the key to which has been stolen; yet any effort to make this fact itself the key is bound to go astray by confounding the abstract thesis of Kafka’s work, the obscurity of the existent, with its substance. Each sentence says “interpret me,” and none will permit it.²⁶

Again, Adorno emphasizes the danger of interpreting Kafka’s work, at the same time that the work demands interpretation—especially when considering it as parable. Looking at Kafka’s narratives as parables brings attention to the paradox of our task as readers: we are asked to “go beyond” and then met with the refusal of a sealed door. Kafka’s texts send us away and then do it again wherever we arrive, pressing us to look elsewhere.

Kafka’s own narrative reflection on the subject, “On Parables,” provides an especially interesting look at the telling and understanding of parables. The text begins:

Many complain that the words of the wise are always merely parables and of no use in daily life, which is the only life we have. When the sage says: “Go over,” he does not mean that we should cross to some actual place, which we could do anyhow if the labor were worth it; he means some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us, something that he cannot designate more precisely either, and therefore cannot help us here in the very least.²⁷

Those who labor in the world, working to make everything available to comprehension, have no use for parables, which ask us to leave the world of light and understanding for another, much less locatable and graspable sort of space—one where we can’t ever really arrive and that we can only experience in its turning away. In this way, the sage, though defined as wise, does not impart wisdom or truth. In response to such a complaint about the uselessness of parables, a man counters: “If you only followed the parables, you yourselves would become parables and with that rid of all your daily cares” (457). Another responds, “I bet that is also a parable,” and we find ourselves immersed in a series of parables—a parable within a parable about parables—each asking us to “go over” apparently in order to determine the value of going over (457). At the end of the brief text (or parable), we learn that the second man, in figuring out that the first man’s statement is itself a parable, has “won” in reality but lost in parable. It would seem that his logical, singular understanding of the first man’s comment provides an answer of sorts, identifying and categorizing it as parable; at the same time, he is functioning according to the demands of reality, rather than to those of parable, which results in his loss. Of course, my reading brings me dangerously close to the trap that ensnares the second man, which I believe is part of the dynamic of reading suggested by Kafka (and later developed by Blanchot). The demand of “going over” in search of meaning often brings us to a point where we risk failing the parable—by grasping it and thereby missing it completely. This risk threatens every reading—certainly one which considers “The Burrow” as a sort of parable of the writer’s disappearance in the process of his never-ending work—but also allows us to respond to the demand of the text, perhaps precisely in experiencing the limitations of our reading.

Turning now to Blanchot in our meandering approach to “The Burrow,” we shift our attention to the process of writing. In “The Essential Solitude,” Blanchot explains that the act of journaling, in the case of a writer, becomes a desperate attempt to ground oneself in the world of everyday activities. Since the writer senses his or her own disappearance when responding to the demand of literature, it might make sense that he or she would seek to reappear in the world, where things can seemingly be measured in time and tasks. The writer runs the risk of losing the ability to say “I” when at work, but, in the journal, writing turns from the demand of literature and appears to establish a relationship with possibility—the possibility to express oneself and the truth of the world. Blanchot calls the journal a “memorial” where the writer remembers what has been lost or has disappeared in the practice of writing; he notes the irony that “the tool he uses in order to recollect himself is, strangely, the very element of forgetfulness: writing” (SL 29). And I would add that perhaps the journal is a memorial not only to the writer, but also to a type of language that would make things appear rather than disappear. The writer’s choice of tool suggests a desire to transform the tool into something useful and empowering, and momentarily to justify the sacrifice of one’s life to writing and to the risk it entails. Of course, this reasoning is problematic, as is the belief that the writer can say “I” in the journal any more definitively than he or she can in a literary work. Regardless, Blanchot brings our attention to the way that the writer’s journal expresses his or her struggle with the essential solitude imposed by the work, and often results in a difficult relationship with everyday life, where the writer experiences a sort of double exclusion—from both the work and the world.

In The Space of Literature, Blanchot spends much more time discussing Kafka’s Diaries than he does any particular story or novel. Kafka’s Diaries allow Blanchot to explore the experience of writing as it is documented throughout Kafka’s journaling—both in the sense that the Diaries include fragments of stories and show us something of the writing process, and in the sense that they demonstrate Kafka’s inability to find a place in the world or in his work. Blanchot writes in a footnote, “His is thus not only a ‘Journal’ as we understand this genre today, but the very movement of the experience of writing, very close to its beginning and in the essential sense which Kafka was led to give this term” (57). On the one hand, Blanchot is interested in Kafka’s Diaries because they do indeed demonstrate the general concern of journaling—to keep track of and establish one’s place in everyday life. And, on the other, Blanchot contends that Kafka’s journaling reveals much more than a desire to write as if he weren’t writing (to write without risking disappearance). Kafka writes about his job, his family, and his plans for marriage, often with a marked sense of despair over his inability to find contentment or fulfillment in any of these things. But, perhaps more importantly, it seems that writing both creates and responds to that despair and lack of fulfillment in the world. When discussing the demand of the work, Blanchot writes:

[ . . . ] [T]he artist who willingly exposes himself to the risks of the experience which is his does not feel free of the world, but, rather, deprived of it; he does not feel that he is master of himself, but rather that he is absent from himself and exposed to demands which, casting him out of life and of living, open him to that moment at which he cannot do anything and is no longer himself. (53)

Blanchot seems to respond here to the idea that art liberates the artist or writer from the concerns of the world and takes him or her to some higher realm of ideas and truth. Rather, Blanchot suggests, the writer experiences his or her exclusion from the world and from life, at the same time that the space of the work offers no solace and no sense of place that would counter such a profound exclusion. The writer begins to disappear from the world, perhaps coming back to it from time to time in order to try to re-establish a connection, a sense of existence. But these moments of “coming back” point to the demand of the work, which threatens to expose the writer to the loss and disappearance of himself or herself in both the world and the work.

Readers of Kafka necessarily note the difficulty he had in finishing his works. Max Brod and some of Kafka’s translators sometimes addressed this “problem” by making editorial decisions about what to include, what not to include, and how to piece the fragments together. Kafka himself discusses this issue in his Diaries, as he laments, “I can’t write any more. I’ve come up against the last boundary, before which I shall in all likelihood again sit down for years, and then in all likelihood begin another story all over again that will again remain unfinished. This fate pursues me.”²⁸ And, indeed, we actually see this take place in the Diaries, with several lines here and there that appear to be pieces of narrative, beginnings of stories. In Jorge Luis Borges’s preface to his translation of The Metamorphosis, he suggests that Kafka’s unfinished texts reflect the subject matter of the work: “The pathos of these inconclusive novels arises precisely from the infinite number of obstacles that detain and detain again his identical heroes. Franz Kafka didn’t finish them because the primordial issue was that they were unending” (11).²⁹ This makes sense, perhaps especially when reading works such as The Castle and The Trial, and the question becomes how to construe what appears to be a relationship between the task of writing and the heroes who inhabit the texts. Blanchot would certainly hesitate to solidify or affirm this relationship by reading the heroes as a definitive representation of Kafka himself, or the writer in general. But he does not deny the relationship; rather, he poses it as a question:

To what extent was Kafka aware of the analogy between this move outside truth [of both Josef K. and K.] and the movement by which the work tends toward its origin—toward that center which in the only place the work can be achieved, in the search for which it is realized and which, once reached, makes the work impossible? To what extent did he connect the ordeal of his heroes with the way in which he himself, through art, was trying to make his way toward the work and, through the work, toward something true? (SL 81)

Blanchot presents the relationship between the plight of the heroes and the experience of writing as a question that remains open. Whether Kafka was “aware” or not is perhaps beside the point. We do get the sense, though, that Kafka tells (and enacts) a similar story in a variety of ways over the course of his life, whether in his narratives or his Diaries, and that it is possible to see parallels and repetitions without imposing a definitive allegorical reading upon the text.³⁰ Blanchot continues:

This much at least is strikingly evident: the fault which he punished in K. is also the one with which the artist reproaches himself. Impatience is this fault. It wants to hurry the story toward its dénouement before the story has developed in all its directions, exhausted the measure of time which is in it, lifted the indefinite to a true totality where every inauthentic movement, every partially false image can be transformed into an unshakable certitude. (81)