Poor Kafka has to work; he cannot find enough time for writing. He lacks time, he is never solitary enough, there is always too much noise, he is always too weary. Then, becoming ill, he realises that there is still not enough time, that time is not time enough and that writing requires something else from him. But what is this demand? Blanchot compares his predicament to Abraham’s.
Recall: Abraham must sacrifice not only Isaac, but God – his faith in God. For Isaac is the bearer of God’s future on earth; he is the one from whom God’s people will find the Promised Land. Isaac is the promise, the future, and it is the future of God’s chosen people that Abraham must sacrifice. Abraham must act without guarantee; he does not sacrifice Isaac in the faith that all will be returned to him in the afterlife. Isaac himself is hope; he is the future – God’s future, the future of the chosen – which must be destroyed. But Abraham, we know, will receive the future through his willingness to obey God’s command. But this is not a simple resignation to a higher power. Remember Kierkegaard’s distinction between the knight of resignation, who, seeing no alternative, obeys God, and the knight of faith – Abraham – who can maintain his faith in what appears to the unbeliever to be simply absurd. What faith does Abraham maintain? That Isaac is the future. That God requires him to sacrifice the future, then, in order to receive the future.
Some say Isaac is a version of Regine, the fiancee whom Kierkegaard renounced in order to write. He had to sacrifice her – but to receive what? Another future; no longer one lived in the ethical sphere of existence, but in the religious one. But think of Kafka. If he sacrifices his engagement, what then? He will not enter the religious sphere; he will not receive the future by placing it at stake. And if he gives up work in order to write, if he does nothing else but write? Kafka links the demand of writing to his own salvation. He is a bachelor; he will have no attachments – why? Because his attachment to writing is greater. Greater than what? Than anything.
One might say that it is not a question of Kafka’s choosing to sacrifice everything to writing; he has no choice. But what is it that he sacrifices everything for? What does he sacrifice by writing and through writing? Read his notebooks. Kafka begins stories again and again; he does not complete them or trouble to rewrite them. They begin; another story begins, and it is as though it is not completion he wants, but something else. It is as though writing is nothing at all, as though his hope lies in an impossible writing that demands he complete none of his stories, that he sacrifices them to a still greater demand. Hardly a kind of writing, the labour to produced a finished and complete work, it is an unwriting, an unworking – Blanchot would perhaps call it a désoeuvrement.
‘I cannot write’ – ‘you must write’- ‘I cannot finish a story’ – ‘in not finishing, you write, you give yourself to writing’. Comparing Kafka to Abraham on Mount Moriah, Blanchot notes, ‘For Kafka the ordeal is all the graver because of everything that makes it weigh lightly upon him’; then writes, ‘What would the testing of Abraham be if, having no son, he were nevertheless required to sacrifice this son? He couldn’t be taken seriously; he could only be laughed at. That laughter is the form of Kafka’s pain’. The laughter, one imagines, of Kafka’s family, his colleagues: ‘you have produced nothing. You are wasting your life’. Incredulous laughter. Worse: there is the pain of the fiancée he deserts; the disappointment of those around him.
None of this matters when you think of the horrors that awaited many of those close to Kafka. The struggle of a writer with writing – what significance does it have? And the struggle of those of us who read in a manner analogous to the way Kafka writes – who feel the demand of a writing which draws us beyond a simple faith in verisimilitude, beyond the novel which would give us back the richness of the world, beyond a literature content to represent the world?
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