Idle thoughts on Kafka

“The onlookers go rigid as the train goes past”.

The sheer speed of the train steals their movement. As if it were a sudden metaphor for the collective force of the crowd. And their space - a determinate ‘scene’ - is sliced open for an instant, by this emissary, this promise. Then:

“’If he should forever ahsk me.’ The ah, released from the sentence, flew off like a ball on the meadow.

These two sentences are at the opening of the published Diaries.

I sometimes wonder (it is an idle thought, born from two days with flu): Suppose you were to read Kafka’s Diaries, or his letters to Felice, under the impression that it was a work of fiction, using the questions appropriate to a fictional work, or (as befits a work of fiction) trying to discover the appropriate questions. How would such an assumption light up the pages in front of you? The two sentences above, for example, might appear as two perspectives on movement and escape. Something breaks free from its holding or frame. A word escapes from a sentence; a sound breaks free from a word. The body asserts its separateness and won’t be reigned in. These occasional moments of rude freedom punctuate the Kafka world. There is a leap of analogy between these two apparently disparate sentences, but a leap that immediately slips through one’s fingers and vanishes.

Of course, there is a sense in wihc we read the Diaries as fiction or as precursors of fiction. You remember near the very beginning, there are several versions of the same passage concerning the narrator’s education – I must say that my education has done me great harm in some respects.

One of these alone would doubtless stand as a firm testament, eloquently final. Here, each version is jettisoned in favour of the next. Each reconfiguration of words and punctuation, each reorganisation of the net of language describes and constructs a new picture. Potentially, it is endless. No version quite ‘grips’ reality- each is 'revealed' as maddeningly provisional, the contours of one fade with and into the emergence of the next. But the effect of this is that reality itself seems to dissolve into the kaleidoscope of language. Reality can only be restored by the arbitrary imposition of the ‘final version’ – the Word as seal and guarantee. Again, the postponement of such a Word, and the consequent sense of suspended reality is hereby identified as a Kafka motif. As is the uncanny power accruing to the word through such postponement (power suspended and in reserve is thereby power augmented).

By ‘education’ Kafka isn’t just meaning the schoolroom. He includes all educators, transmitters of law and language, a ‘multitude’ of people, an adversarial world, the Symbolic itself, we might now say. They have ‘done him great harm’ because they ‘tried to make another person of me’: they barred the Self from emerging. And yet this bar was what let the self emerge and become conscious. This duality, too, is a theme, a herald of things to come.

The fiction of reading the Diaries as fiction produces identifiable ‘motifs’, signs, metaphors, correspondences. Particular sentences are suddenly antecedents or echoes of others. In fact, if you do this, if you bracket off the knowledge that this is a diary, or that the letters are to a real person, a whole new book is produced. From which we might conclude various things: that fiction is, in any case, perhaps always an act of such bracketing, or that reading fiction involves to some extent the ‘fiction’ that what you’re reading is indeed fiction. But also, and I think this might well be true of the letters to Felice, that writing was itself only an escape from events into their fictional equivalent.. Thus, the meeting with Felice and her Mother in the Hotel is simultaneously, a fictional meeting that any of us can step into. Here writing can be an extraction of the fictional seam implicit in facts and events.