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In terms of pure spirit, knowledge is necessarily empty, action nec–
essarily meaningless. For humanity, the dualism between matter and
spirit cannot be absolute. God must have become Incarnate.
Most plainly of all, Manichaeism is an aesthetic heresy. An art
work is matter. Form and spirit can exist in art only as shining
through or upon or out of matter. The ancient Jews were right: since
their God was pure Spirit, and not to be incarnate, there could
be no art.
Kafka thus set himself an impossible task-as in life he, like all
neurotics, set himself impossible tasks, set them for himself precisely
because it was certain in advance that they were impossible. "This
is the problem: ... to attain a view of life (and ... to convince
others of it in writing), in which life, while retaining its natural full–
bodied rise and fall, would simultaneously be recognized no less
clearly as a nothing.... Hammering a table together is really ham–
mering a table together to him, but at the same time it is nothing."
If
that is the problem, then it is insoluble. And Kafka found it in
fact to be insoluble. That is why he could not finish stories-how
could there be an end to what cannot even be begun?
And that is why Kafka was compelled to direct his executors
to destroy all his written work. In terms of his purpose all of it was
blasphemy and idolatry, it was totally a failure. But his purpose
was false, and therefore Brod was just in his decision to disregard
the instructions. Though Kafka wrote in order to deny the meaning
of human experience, by failing he succeeded in art's actual aim of
illuminating experience. We therefore refuse him permission to anni–
hilate the record.
Kafka realized, long before his death, that his task was impos–
sible, and that there was in truth only one consistent conclusion. In
the strange story
(A Sport)
from which I have already quoted, and
in which he seems to be imaging himself in the painful form of the
half-cat-half-lamb, he ends:
"Perhaps the knife of the butcher would be a release for this
animal; but as it is a legacy I must deny it that. So it must wait
until the breath voluntarily leaves its body, even though it sometimes
gazes at me with a look of human understanding, challenging me to
do the thing of which both of us are thinking."
jAMES BuRNHAM
