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Kafka's Answer In
the duel between you and the world, back the world. A moment
has passed, the moment of committed literature. The
end of the Sartrean novel, the imperturbable indigence of socialist
fiction,
the defects of political theater - all that, like a receding wave,
leaves
exposed a singular and singularly resistant object: literature.
Already,
moreover, an opposing wave washes over it, the wave of an asserted
detachment:
revival of the love story, hostility to "ideas," cult of fine
writing, refusal to be concerned with the world's significations: a
whole new
ethic of art is being proposed, consisting of a convenient swivel
between
romanticism and off-handedness, between the (minimal) risks of poetry
and the
(effective) protection of intelligence. This question now receives an exact answer: Marthe Robert's Kafka. Is it Kafka who answers? Yes, of course (for it is hard to imagine a more scrupulous exegesis than this one), but we must make no mistake: Kafka is not Kafka-ism. For twenty years, Kafka-ism has nourished the most contrary literatures, from Camus to lonesco. If we are concerned with describing the bureaucratic terror of the modern moment, The Trial, The Castle, The Penal Colony constitute overworked models. If we are concerned with exposing the claims of individualism against the invasion of objects, The Metamorphosis is a profitable gimmick. Both realistic and subjective, Kafka's oeuvre lends itself to everyone but answers no one. It is true that we do not question it much, for writing in the shadow of his themes does not constitute a question; as Marthe Robert says, solitude, alienation, the quest, the familiarity of the absurd, in short the constants of what is called the Kafka-esque universe—don't these belong to all our writers, once they refuse to write in the service of a world of ownership? As a matter of fact, Kafka's answer is addressed to the person who has questioned him least, to the artist. This is what Marthe Robert tells us: that Kafka's meaning is in his technique. A brand new argument, not only in relation to Kafka, but in relation to all our literature, so that Marthe Robert's apparently modest commentary (is this not one more book on Kafka, published in a pleasant popularizing series?) forms a profoundly original essay, providing that good, that precious nourishment of the mind which results from the correspondence of an intelligence and an interrogation. For after all, paradoxical as it seems, we possess virtually nothing on literary technique. When a writer reflects on his art (something for the most part rare and abhorred), it is to tell us how he conceives the world, what relations he entertains with it, his image of Man; in short, each writer says he is a realist, never how. Now literature is only a means, devoid of cause and purpose; in fact, that is what defines it. You can of course attempt a sociology of the literary institution; but you can limit the act of writing by neither a why nor a wherefore. The writer is like the artisan who diligently fabricates some complicated object, as ignorant of its model as of its use, analogous to Ashby's homeostat. To ask oneself why one writes is already an advance over the blissful unconsciousness of "inspiration," but it is a despairing advance - there is no answer. Apart from demand and apart from success, empirical alibis much more than real motives, the literary act is without cause and without goal precisely because it is devoid of sanction: it proposes itself to the world without any praxis establishing or justifying it: it is an absolutely intransitive act, it modifies nothing, nothing reassures it. So then? Well, that is its paradox; this act exhausts itself in its technique, it exists only in the condition of a manner. For the (sterile) old question: why write? Marthe Robert's Kafka substitutes a new question: how write? And this how exhausts the why: all at once the impasse is cleared, a truth appears. This is Kafka's truth, this is Kafka's answer (to all those who want to write): the being of literature is nothing, but its technique. In short, if we transcribe this truth into semantic terms, this means that a work's specialty is not a matter of its concealed signified (no more criticism of "sources" and "ideas"), but only a matter of its significations. Kafka's truth is not Kafka's world (no more Kafka-ism), but the signs of that world. Thus the work is never an answer to the world's mystery; literature is never dogmatic. By imitating the world and its legends (Marthe Robert is right to devote a chapter of her essay to imitation, a crucial function of all great literature), the writer can show only the sign without the signified: the world is a place endlessly open to signification but endlessly dissatisfied by it. For the writer, literature is that utterance which says until death: I shall not begin to live before I know the meaning of life. But saying that literature is no more than an interrogation of the world matters only if we propose a technique of interrogation, since this interrogation must persist throughout an apparently assertive narrative. Marthe Robert shows that Kafka's narrative is not woven of symbols, as we have been told so often, but is the fruit of an entirely different technique, the technique of allusion. All Kafka is in the difference. The symbol (Christianity's cross, for instance) is a convinced sign, it affirms a (partial) analogy between a form and an idea, it implies a certitude. If the figures and events of Kafka's narrative were symbolic, they would refer to a positive (even if it were a despairing) philosophy, to a universal Man: we cannot differ as to the meaning of a symbol, or else the symbol is a failure. Now, Kafka's narrative authorizes a thousand equally plausible keys—which is to say, it validates none. Allusion is another matter altogether. It refers the fictive event to something besides itself, but to what? Allusion is a defective force, it undoes the analogy as soon as it has posited it. K is arrested on the orders of a tribunal: that is a familiar image of justice. But we learn that this tribunal does not regard crimes as our justice does: the resemblance is delusive, though not effaced. In short, as Marthe Robert explains, everything proceeds from a kind of semantic contraction: K feels he has been arrested, and everything happens as if K were really arrested (The Trial); Kafka's father treats him as a parasite, and everything happens as if Kafka were transformed into a parasite (The Metamorphosis). Kafka creates his work by systematically suppressing the as ifs: but it is the internal event which becomes the obscure term of the allusion. Thus allusion, which is a pure technique of signification, is actually a commitment to the world, since it expresses the relation of an individual man and a common language: a system (abhorred phantom of every anti-intellectualism) produces one of the most fiery literatures which has ever existed. For example, Marthe Robert reminds us, we have commonplaces such as like a dog, a dog's life, a Jew dog; it suffices to make the metaphoric term the entire object of the narrative, shifting subjectivity to the allusive realm, in order for the insulted man to become a dog in fact: a man treated like a dog is a dog. Kafka's technique implies first of all an agreement with the world, a submission to ordinary language, but immediately afterwards, a reservation, a doubt, a fear before the letter of the signs the world proposes. As Marthe Robert puts it, Kafka's relations with the world are governed by a perpetual yes, but . . . One can fairly say as much of all our modern literature (and it is in this that Kafka has truly created it), since it identifies, in an inimitable fashion, the realistic project {yes to the world) and the ethical project (but . . .). The trajectory separating the yes from the but is the whole uncertainty of signs, and it is because signs are uncertain that there is a literature. Kafka's technique says that the world's meaning is unutterable, that the artist's only task is to explore possible significations, each of which taken by itself will be only a (necessary) lie but whose multiplicity will be the writer's truth itself. That is Kafka's paradox: art depends on truth, but truth, being indivisible, cannot know itself: to tell the truth is to lie. Thus the writer is the truth, and yet when he speaks he lies: a work's authority is never situated at the level of its esthetic, but only at the level of the moral experience which makes it an assumed lie; or rather, as Kafka says correcting Kierkegaard: we arrive at the esthetic enjoyment of being only through a moral experience without pride. Kafka's allusive system functions as a kind of enormous sign to interrogate other signs. Now, the exercise of a signifying system (mathematics, to take an example quite remote from literature) has only one requirement, which will therefore be the esthetic requirement itself: rigor. Any lapse, any vagueness in the construction of the allusive system would produce, paradoxically, symbols—would substitute an assertive language for the essentially interrogative function of literature. This is also Kafka's answer to all our inquiries into the novel today: that it is finally the precision of his writing (a structural, not a rhetorical precision, of course: it is not a matter of "fine writing") which commits the writer to the world: not in one of his options, but in his very defection: it is because the world is not finished that literature is possible. 1960 Roland Barthes
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