In the diary entry upon which I have been writing with Blanchot over the last few posts, Kafka proclaims himself puzzled as to how pain itself can be objectified by the writer. Blanchot comments:
The word ‘objectify’ attracts attention, because literature tends precisely to construct an object. It objectifies pain by forming it into an object. It does not express it, it makes it exist on another level. It gives it a materiality which is no longer that of the body but the materiality of words which represent the upheaval of the world that suffering claims to be. Such an object is not necessarily an imitation of the changes that pain makes us live through: it shapes itself to present pain, not represent it; first of all, this object must exist, that is, it must be an always indeterminate conjunction of determined relationships. There must always be in it, as in everything that exists, a surplus that one cannot account for.
The concreteness of my suffering is not expressed through my writing; it is, rather, transmuted, lifted onto a universal plane. Kafka loses the particular concreteness of his suffering as he begins to write. He gains literature, which is also to say, the impossibility of ever returning to his suffering in writing. But what has he gained?
Everyday speech has, at its heart, the ideal of a pure communication, which would transform ‘the heaviness of things’, in Blanchot’s words, to ‘the agility of signs’, the ‘materiality of things’ to ‘the movement of their signification’; they are nothing in themselves: abstract tokens to be used in exchange. The sentence in the story has another function: it does not seek to become the sign of an absent being, but to present that being to us in language. It is a question of allowing language to ‘revive a world of concrete things’. It is not, moreover, a question of revealing the concreteness of this or that thing, but a world of things.
‘In the novel, the act of reading is not changed, but the attitude of the one who reads it makes it different’, Blanchot writes. The value of words is no longer that of labels attached to particular meanings. Let’s say I hear the phrase ‘The head clerk himself called’; I am able to conjure up a world in which this sentence has meaning: I know the head clerk himself, the office in which he or she worked, and so on. The sentence is unobtrusive; I know what it means. When I read the sentence ‘The head clerk himself called’, in The Castle, the situation is different: it no longer belongs to a world with which I am familiar; the only access to the world of the story I am reading is through the words of that story. Literary works characteristically strive for verisimilitude by elaborately constructing a world. In the case of Kafka’s novels, however, we are left with the starkness of the words themselves.
In The Trial, Joseph K. is arrested – and our attention is arrested because we are not told why he is arrested or even, ultimately, by whom. We no longer have any distance with respect to the text; the reader is no longer a spectator, since there is no secure place with respect to the narrative from which to grasp its unity, but is, so to speak, enfolded in the very unfolding of a narration. But nor do we feel the reassuring presence of an author who is in charge of the narrative.
This is the uncanny experience of reading Kafka: there is no point of fixity to which one can anchor oneself. The work opens as a void or hollow. The events the novel narrates stand out against a kind of nothingness. The reader, for Blanchot, is more distant from Kafka’s narrative than she might be with respect to a more traditional novelist since she is unable to interpose a context for the events as they occur; they seem to come from nowhere. Yet in another sense, she is closer – too close, perhaps – because all she has are the words which attest, in Kafka’s work, to the void against which those words appear.
No escape: Kafka could not escape from his suffering; he wrote, and that suffering was transformed. And when we read Kafka’s fictions, born of suffering? Fascinated by the texts, close to them, far from them, there is no escape for us. Is this suffering? No: it is a kind of lightness, even a joy. And here is the difference between Blanchot and Levinas on being, a topic to which I will return very soon.
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