ROBERT ALTER
393
of the novelist's asthma. Of Kafka's illness, psychological and somatic, he
makes very little, though it can hardly have escaped his attention. It is
surely noteworthy that Benjamin's two exemplary modernists are two of
the most spectacularly neurotic writers in the modern pantheon. (There is
no necessary connection between their neuroses and their Jewishness,
unless one chooses to invoke the view of classic Zionism about the in–
evitable abnormalcy of the Diaspora Jew.) Neither was capable of nego–
tiating the physical and emotional trials of everyday life; each found a
crippling respiratory focus for his psychological vulnerability - asthma for
one, tuberculosis for the other - which would eventually prove lethal.
But there was more at stake in
all
this for Benjamin than some generalized
notion of art and neurosis. Sometimes neurosis interferes with art or is
tangential to it. What is extraordinary about the genius of both Kafka and
Proust is that each, in rather different ways, exploited neurosis as a power–
fully
concentrating vehicle of artistic vision; they were able to exert a
kind of sublime cunning in using their special condition of sickness as a
privileged vantage point from which to view the general condition of
humankind. Their ability to generate imaginative authority from neurosis
would have appealed to Benjamin on both personal and theoretical
grounds. He was himself an emotionally troubled intellectual, with his
own somatic weak-point (a chronic heart condition) , a man drawn to the
idea of suicide for a decade before the circumstances of the Nazi occupa–
tion led him to take his own life. But beyond such biographical consid–
erations, he more than once represented modernity as a condition of cul–
tural sickness, and thus it is not surprising that he should have been at–
tracted to these two novelists who made out of their sickness an exacting
and innovative literary art which answered the special circumstances of
loss and estrangement of the modern age.
I should like to show how Kafka and Proust respectively transform a
topos
of the nineteenth-century novel. Both, it should be said, went to
school with some of the same nineteenth-century masters, Flaubert and
probably Balzac as well looming large for both, and Dickens having an
obvious importance for Kafka and exerting some influence (as Edmund
Wilson argued, comparing the Verdurins with the Veneerings from
Our
Mutual Friend)
on the satiric aspects of Proust. A key modality of the nine–
teenth-century novel is the deployment of ocular inspection
("description" seems to me too pale and inert a term). Because it is the
common assumption of the writers that the world is there to be explored,
penetrated, mastered, explained, in the first instance by novelistic repre–
sentation through the omniscient narrator, in the second instance by the
protagonist pursuing his
Bildung
or his social ascent, there are abundant
