Who Writes in Kafka’s Texts?

Who writes in Kafka’s texts? Blanchot writes, meditating on the paragraph I quoted in my last post,

I am unhappy, so I sit down at my table and write, ‘I am unhappy’. How is this possible? This possibility is strange and scandalous to a degree. My state of unhappiness signifies an exhaustion of my forces; the expression of my unhappiness, an increase in my forces. From the side of sadness, there is the impossibility of everything – living, existing, thinking; from the side of writing, the possibility of everything – harmonious words, accurate exposition, felicitous images. Moreover, by expressing my sadness, I assert a negation and yet, by asserting it, I do not transform it. I communicate by the greatest luck the most complete disgrace, and the disgrace is not made lighter.

My unhappiness is such that nothing is possible. And yet I write, finding appropriate images and embellishments; one sentence is not enough; the description is incomplete; a second is still not nuanced enough; a third is necessary lest the first two appear too definitive, and so on.

Writing begins; sentence follows sentence; this is how books are made. But the possibility of writing has its price. I want to write, I suffer, but these words, and the whole medium of language is, as Hegel argues at the outset of the Phenomenology of Spirit, universal; as I write, I negate the situation I want to present. As Hegel argues, the ‘this’ of self-certainty ‘cannot be reached by language, which belongs to consciousness; i.e., to that which is inhertently universal’. Concrete experience has been lost in its particularity.

A second loss: as soon as I write I address the virtual presence of an audience; what I write is public and hence addressed to others. The author may claim her aim is simply to express herself: to write, for example, I am lonely and to let her loneliness resound. But as soon as she writes, she is no longer alone; her loneliness is destroyed, negated. Does this mean her loneliness is thereby sublated, as Hegel might have it – that the universality of language lifts her expression above the particularity of her loneliness? But lonelinessis sacrificed in the act of writing. The condition of possibility of writing of loneliness is the sacrifice of loneliness. Yet at the same time, the writer remains alone; her loneliness cannot be expressed even as it is expressed. Her work fails her; the novel she composes from her loneliness mocks that loneliness; she has said nothing of her loneliness even as she writes of loneliness.

Blanchot continues:

The more luck I have, that is to say, the more gifted I am in making my unhappiness felt by description, embellishments, and images, the more the bad luck this misfortune reports is respected. It is as if the possibility that my writing represents essentially exists to express its own impossibility – the impossibility of writing that constitutes my sadness. Not only can it not be put in parentheses, or accommodate it without destroying it or being destroyed by it, but it really is possible only because of its impossibility.

Writing is possible for our author only insofar as it prevents her expressing her sadness. That is to say, it is possible even as writing denies itself to her as a means of expression for the concrete particularity of her mood. Who writes, in Kafka’s text? What is born, as soon as Kafka writes, is the infinite task of answering this particularity. For it is not a matter of merely passing over the concrete, of lifting language to another level and articulating a universal speech. Kafka’s literature is born in the tension between what is possible and impossible. It is born in the strife between what was formerly immediate and the mediation accomplished in writing.