NORMAN MANEA
531
Joyce, Musil and Thomas Mann, Conrad and Nabokov, Gombrowicz
and Bashevis Singer, Beckett and Ionesco, Brodsky and Cortazar have
conferred a new legitimacy on the expatriate writer. They are no more
than forerunners of the world of disjointed conjunctions in which we live.
It is hard to picture Kafka in our New World, and harder still to imag–
ine him bearing the cap and bells of a telegenic promoter of his own
works, as is commanded by the computerized entertainments business of
the Planetary Circus. Yet the way in which the solitary Franz Kafka went
beyond these "impossibilities" without leaving them behind, surviving not
only in the German language of his estrangement, may remind our mem–
oryless society of that hope without hope contained in this unrepeatable
and impossible model.
We may wonder why and how Franz Kafka alone, the essential exile,
and the word "Kafkaesque," essential for the language of estrangement and
exile, became essential for our time. Some of us would probably like, child–
ishly enough, to believe this a proof that writing, as secular prayer, may still
accomodate parts of our daily life comedy.
Whatever the explanation may be, it remains a mystery or a joke that
is still trying to find its place in the curiosity shop of so many motherlands
and fatherlands.
