Kafka’s Diaries and letters are a boon to any biographer but are also misleading. Compared to writing, everything, for Kafka disappoints. He falls short of his vocation and this is why, writing to friends, to his lovers, and to himself (but does he write to himself?) in his diary, it seems always that he is in lieu of his own existence. But one should not be too quick to understand the privation to which he seems bound by his desire to write, nor indeed to read his Diaries or even his literary writings as marked by despair. Think of what Kafka wanted from writing – think of what he allowed this word to name.
If I had the Diaries here, I would quote from them, but they are familiar enough. If you find despair in its pages, it refers to what is an impossible task: to pursue a story across days and nights, to maintain that prolific energy which allowed Kafka to write the tales for which he was famous in short bursts. Of course this energy failed him; stories were botched, and could not find their way to a conclusion. And if he had time, all the time in the world, would he be able to write? If he needed no sleep and just wrote, one day after another, would be create a work which would allow him to answer his vocation? Perhaps he was like that man from the country who asked the doorkeeper for access to the Law. The doorkeeper says he can’t let him in now. ‘Later then?’, asks the man. ‘Its possible’, says the doorkeeper, ‘but not now’. The man waits for days and years, until, in the last moments of his life, he realises that no one else has ever asked for admittance to the Law. Why?, he asks the doorkeeper. ‘No one else could have been admitted here, for this door was intended only for you. I’m now going to shut it’.
Perhaps this is what Kafka seeks as he pursues the work night after night. Does he realise that its essential characteristic is to be interminable and that to write lines on a page is already to betray the peculiar absence of time which marks the work? The absence of time? What does this mean? The impossibility of undertaking tasks, projects and personal initiatives, of suspending a kind of suspension which prevents action. For this is the peculiar absence which disjoins time from itself, a disarticulation which unjoins Kafka from the chance of even beginning the great task which opens to him. Of course it is a pseudo-task: you can’t complete what does not even allow you to begin and you can’t begin a task which seems to require that you relinquish the very possibility of setting out.
How to understand the strange drama of writing, this demand which sends you on a great detour before you ever write a line? Kafka’s Diaries and letters allow him to mark time with respect to the absence of time, to find himself just as he begins to lose himself; they save him, but what can we expect from them but despair? As soon as he writes, he is lost. And when he writes about losing loss – when he writes about writing he is lost again.
Doubly lost, and commenting on the great refusal to which writing is linked, I wonder whether Kafka doesn’t come closest of all to the condition of writing. For isn’t all writing a lament for what it is not? Whence the temptation to ally writing to a great political cause, or to give up writing altogether – for who can justify this vain effort? A temptation to which Kafka often resorts in his Diaries and Letters, setting out his plans to emigrate to Palestine or reporting his new habit of undertaking two hours of manual labour each afternoon. But he does not yield to this temptation; writing saves him. But from what does it save him? A life lived outside writing. But isn’t writing precisely the door which will not admit him? Isn’t the way barred by the great doorkeeper with his Tartar beard? The man from the country tries to bribe him, this doorkeeper, but he must return to his stool at which he sits and waits, as others, presumably wait by other doors. Kafka waits. He is eminently patient. And whilst he waits, he writes with a writing outside writing. It disappoints him, it is true, but at least it allows him to keep hold of himself. To keep hold? Ah, but that is what he doesn’t want!
A whole series of authors from Holderlin onwards wanted to write about writing, to seize upon the origin itself and make it speak. Each of them wanted to make writing speak of itself and only of itself, to give birth in their works to the impersonal words which were spoken without them. What did they achieve? Often, their lives are ruined, tragic. Still more often, their lives can be presented hagiographically: they are testament to a kind of purity, a flame which consumes only itself, or a star which has broken away from everything but the night. But written across their lives, written with the whole of their lives there is the writing that reverberates with a kind of murmuring or rumbling, as if, in it, there were allowed to resound the tuneless song sung in the absence of time, time’s void. What differentiates each author from another (Holderlin from Rilke, Mallarme from Beckett, Pessoa from Blanchot, Duras from Bataille) is only the way in which that resonance reverberates: the tone of the work.
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