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 fatherland. 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 writing in German, and of writing 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 abandon 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 impossibility, 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 impossible, expatriation was not just an extravagant variation of his estrangement. Expatriation had been sometimes an immediate, urgent, even demonic summons. "Filthy brood-is what I heard them call the Jews-" he tells us in one of his letters. "The heroism involved in staying put in spite of it all is the heroism of the cockroach," he adds. The Metamorphosis can be regarded, from this point of view, as one of the most powerful literary representations of the corning Holocaust.
Kafka did think of that fifth impossibility not only when he dreamt, in his last years, to settle in the Holy Land. ''I'm here at the General Insurance Company and yet I hope to sit sometime, in some far-away countries, at a window of the office of sugar plantations or to look to Muslim cemeteries," he had once written. Salvation through self-destruction seemed always to him a greatly appealing burlesque. "What I call foolish is the idea that Tibet is far from Vienna." Such words are indeed his. ''I'm reading a book about Tibet; at a description of a settlement near the Tibetan border in the mountains my heart grows suddenly heavy, this village seems so hopelessly deserted, so far from Vienna. Would it really be far?" Kafka asks Milena, asking himself too, and knowing too well that the desert is, in fact, not far away at all, but dangerously close to Vienna, to Prague, to the General Insurance Company where he works, to his family house, to the room and desk of his solitude.
Neither sugarcane plantations, nor Muslim cemeteries, nor the Great Wall of China of his famous story are far away. It is not necessary to imagine Kafka in the Middle-Eastern desert, or in Communist China, or in Brazil, where that thoroughly unKafkaesque Viennese Jew Stefan Zweig would commit suicide, in order to authenticate one of the most expressive twists of this century that is now counting its dizzying end.
Even imagining Kafka in the world capital of exiles, New York, the New York of his character Karl Rossman, or next door in Newark, "in a room in the house of an elderly Jewish lady on the shabby lower stretch of Avon Avenue," as Philip Roth suggested, would not add a lot to our knowledge about his or our predicament.
In his nocturnal room in Prague, the exile par excellence had already been in those and many other distant or nonexistent places.
And yet, like many of Kafka's premonitions, the snail's impossibility too, though not mentioned by him as such, would haunt the shadows of his unsettling, carnivalesque posterity.
Kafka's posterity extended the Jew's condition to many categories of exile, but it did not relieve the Jewish "impossibility."
Primo Levi saved himself in Auschwitz through the German language.
After the Holocaust, Paul Celan wrote in the language of his mother's butchers. To the end, Mandelstam's motherland remained the Russian lannguage, in which Stalin gave the order for his death.
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 imagine 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 memory-less 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, childishly 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.

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
PARTISAN REVIEW
Fall 1998

Franz Kafka's three impossibilities are the impossibility of not writing, of writing in German, and of writing 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 abandon 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.
Ba không thể của Kafka là không thể không viết, không thể viết bằng tiếng Đức, và không thể viết khác.
Và ông thêm vô cái không thể thứ tư, không thể viết ‘per se’, ‘bởi chính nó’, và, sau cùng, không thể viết bởi chính nó, trở thành không thể sống per se, không thể tiếp tục ‘kéo dài cuộc sống’ – như ông thú nhận trong thư gửi Carl Bauer vào năm 1913. “Trọn đời tôi hướng về văn học… vào lúc mà tôi bỏ rơi văn học, là tôi ngưng sống. Tất cả những gì tôi là, và tôi không là, là hậu quả của điều này.” Ít người có quê hương của mình cắm rễ thật cách thê thảm trong việc viết như là nhà văn Do Thái Franz Kafka, viết ở Praque ở trong tiếng Đức – một cách thức ngược ngạo để 'qua đi cuộc đời này’ trong cuộc chiến đấu với chính mình. “Tôi chẳng là gì ngoài văn chương, và muốn chẳng là gì ngoài điều đó ra”. Ông thường lập đi lập lại điều này.

Primo Levi saved himself in Auschwitz through the German language.
After the Holocaust, Paul Celan wrote in the language of his mother's butchers. To the end, Mandelstam's motherland remained the Russian language, in which Stalin gave the order for his death.
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.

Primo Levi tự cứu mình ở Lò Thiêu qua ngôn ngữ Đức. Sau Auschwitz, Paul Celan viết bằng ngôn ngữ của đám đồ tể đã làm thịt bà mẹ của ông. Sau cùng, quê mẹ của Mandelstam thì vẫn là ngôn ngữ Nga, thứ tiếng mà Stalin dùng để ra lệnh làm thịt nhà thơ.

Joyce, Musil and Thomas Mann, Conrad and Nabokov, Gombrowicz and Bashevis Singer, Beckett và Ionesco, Brodsky và Cortazar đem sự hợp pháp mới đến cho nhà văn biệt xứ. Họ đâu có khác gì những nhà văn đi trước, những tiền trạm, những đầu cầu, của một thế giới với những liên kết rã rời mà chúng ta đang sống.