Sometimes Kafka would allow that nonwriting was also writing, but that was after the publication of The Judgement. He was published, even if it was in the gaudiest almanac – on the cover, Stach writes, a nude woman lying beside a declaiming poet with an outstretched arm. Arkadia, as it was called – and this name in cursive added to the kitsch – sold few copies in May 1913.
Non-writing: Kafka wrote in bursts. For long periods, he knew, he would write nothing. But once he had published, it seems he could allow that nonwriting was part of writing. It was in this period he began to refer to literature, too. He was made of literature, he told Felice. Literature was the devil; he’d been seduced, and in such a way that he was nothing apart from what had claimed him.
He is his books, he tells her and that it wounds him she has not read his little prose collection, Meditation. He is them – but isn’t it that publication gives him that foundation he can then abandon? His writing – literature – is evident in the world. Now he can bear non-writing; now he has a wall against which he is braced.
‘I will write again’; ‘I will be able to write again’. But what is this ‘again’, now he is separated from it by the ocean of non-writing? It waits in him; it anticipates itself. The devil needs Kafka, and this is the point – he is nothing without him, he rests nowhere. Writing needs him; literature waits for itself in him. And who is he who must sacrifice himself in order for writing to arrive?
‘Again’. Returning, the ‘he’ Kafka becomes, and that writing demands. But isn’t writing non-writing in that moment? After all, what can he achieve, he who is voided of himself? Without initiative, without power: here is the most ancient sign of inspiration, which sets itself back into the passivity of exposure, before it can lead to the accomplishment of a task.
Why is it only in moments of crisis that Kafka can write? Perhaps because it is only in these moments – breaking with his fiancee, neglecting the family firm – that the devil can come close to him. Who is he, Kafka? The one who is broken by a thousand demands. Who is he?
Terror: it is the devil. But seduction, too, for he knows a dreadful substitution is the price of writing. Then when he writes, using this word in this most ordinary sense, setting words on paper, it is non-writing that pushes him.
‘There is nothing for me in the world. I am humilated, worse than a dog.’ But Kafka’s ‘masochism’ is everything: how else to work that change where he lets the devil take his place? His place – or rather, what reveals that there is no place – that pure streaming that is also the devil; Cratylus’s river, into which it is impossible to step but once. He holds himself into his substitution; he welcomes it. This is the correlate of the passivity to which it subjects him.
‘Now you can write. Now, remembering your humilation, you can write.’ This is the secret link between suffering and writing. For the devil comes when you suffer. The devil burns inside you. You suffer. You cannot coincide with your suffering, which is pure streaming, the river in which you are torn apart.
But then, writing, you can repeat suffering, living it again. Living what you did not live, the pain you cannot synthesise into a memory. Repeat it – write non-writing; write what did not allow writing to coincide with itself. Write non-writing in writing; inscribe it by letting words tremble – by allowing them to become thick and rhythmic. Write it in the sonorousness of words, by setting them in flight.
That is the poet’s option. What of the prose writer? A kind of ‘reduction’ whereby the novel no longer refers to a world outside of itself. That does not realise a world in the thickness of details. Or rather, that lets those details tremble with what cannot appear. And figure in the narrative the return of the devil; let the characters die – even the innocent Karl of Amerika – so that you can lie down, dying, in the narrative.
(Question: but how does the devil allow himself to be remembered? What survives the Cratylean flux? A minimal ipseity, a witness who knows he has lost his place (or that the he, burning, is the one who burns in the writer’s place). The self-givenness Heidegger no less than Husserl, than Merleau-Ponty, than Henry feel necessary to posit? Task: tear phenomenology apart. Klossowski, Deleuze …)
Sometimes Kafka will speak of his double. He may appear vacillating and indecisive, he tells Felice, but this is because there is two of him. Two – but united in him, in Kafka.
Is it this a tragic rending? Is this tearing his agony, returning anew? But it also bliss – writing, for Kafka, is beatitude. He is happiest in those working holidays he takes from the Worker’s Insurance Agency, in the two weeks when he writes In the Penal Colony for example. A happiness without tragedy. And he is happy when he reads his from his work, laughing with his friends at the opening pages of The Trial.
All this is marvellous. Why, then, his love for Felice, which threatens writing, as he tells her over anew. Perhaps because she, too, lets him write – that to compose a letter to her lets the devil burn in him again, displacing Kafka blissfully from himself. He needs the tension – needs to be broken against the wall of non-writing in order to write. He needs suffering to awaken the desire to write. And so, in his correspondence, he writes of writing; he redoubles it, and speaks of what does not cease seducing him.
What does he need? A kind of external pressure. The threat of non-writing. Marriage with Felice. The coming World War, which prevents him moving into his own apartment. His illness. And his father, too, or perhaps first of all. The incarnation of the masochism to which he would subject himself; the avatar of everything in the world that opposes writing.
(Task: read the psychoanalysts on subject formation and the superego.)
Kafka suffers; he is faint with suffering. At one point Brod writes concernedly to his mother. Is her son suicidal? In one sense, he wants nothing else than to throw himself from the window. In another, despair robs him of initiative; he founders; he is capable of nothing. But writing is asking for him, and by way of his suffering.
The devil is burning. Take my place, says Kafka. Use me, he says. And writes from this substitution, writes in bliss as the double he becomes when he is given to writing.
Lars Iyer's Blog 