NORMAN MANEA
The Fifth Impossibility
Kafka
did not often write about the country in which he was born. When
he writes about the language-that is, the homeland-which he came to
inhabit, he speaks about "impossibilities."
In a letter to Max Brod, he lists three impossibilities for a Jew writing
in German or, in fact, in any other language-which means in any father–
land. He considers these impossibilities as a matter of "the Jewish question
or of despair in relation to that question." Kafka saw himself as a product
of the impossible, which he recreated continuously as poetry, that is, as life,
with a magical and austere fixation.
Franz Kafka's three impossibilities are the impossibility of not writing,
of wri ting in German, and of wri ting differently.
To these he adds a fourth, comprehensive impossibility: namely, "the
impossibility of writing per se." Actually, the impossibility to live
per se,
the
impossibility "to endure life"-as he confesses in a letter to Carl Bauer in
1913. "My whole being is directed toward literature...the moment I aban–
don it, I cease to live. Everything I am, and am not, is a result of this." Few
people have had their homeland as dramatically located in writing as the
Jewish Franz Kafka writing in Prague in German-his paradoxical way of
"crossing over to the side of the world" in the struggle with himself. "I
am nothing but literature and can and want to be nothing else," he often
repeated.
It
may seem surprising that Kafka did not mention a fifth impossibili–
ty, one which is the most Kafkaesque of all: the impossibility of exile or
the impossibility of operetta, if we are to follow the Romanian exile
Cioran who held that one would do better to write operettas than to write
in a foreign language. And yet it would be more suggestive to call it "the
snail's impossibility": that is, the impossibility of continuing to write in
exile, even if the writer takes along his language as the snail does his house.
Such an extreme situation seems borrowed from the very premise of
Kafka, and our clownish forerunner K. could not but be attracted by such
a farcical hypothesis of self-destruction. For that guinea-pig of the
Editorial Note: This reflection on Kafka
was
part of the PEN-American evening,
"Metamorphosis:
A New Kafka" at Town Hall, New York, March 26, 1998.
