The state in which Kafka left The Castle is representative of the condition of his entire oeuvre. During his life, he published a few stories in periodicals, released one collection of fiction, and prepared another that appeared only posthumously. But he left behind the vast majority of his work incomplete—infamously, with a note beseeching Brod to burn every word. Brod approached the other novels he declined to destroy much as he did The Castle, omitting unfinished chapters from The Trial and altering the ending of Kafka’s first novel, The Man Who Disappeared, which he renamed Amerika. As for the reams of stories and aphorisms, Brod bestowed titles on many pieces that lacked them and amended aborted conclusions.
This new volume collects seventy-four short pieces—few longer than two pages, many unconcluded—curated by Reiner Stach, author of the definitive three-volume biography of Kafka. In his afterword, Stach argues that, though “the fragile, fragmentary quality” of Kafka’s work has been extremely influential, even “caus[ing] us to begin to take the literary fragment seriously,” the writer’s most fragmentary material has remained hidden from view: rarely translated, often out of print, barely read, and thus, even if not completely absent, still fundamentally “lost.” (...)
Though Stach does admit to certain Brodian concessions—he writes that the “selection seeks above all to be accessible,” presenting “highly approachable, ‘readable’ pieces”—The Lost Writings thrillingly foregoes any organizational infrastructure that might help us orient ourselves, from titles to sections to a table of contents. Besides the selections themselves and the afterword, there is only an index of first lines. This minimalist approach submerges readers immediately into Kafka’s world. The very first page fixes us in one of his classic traps: “I lay on the ground at the foot of a wall, writhing in agony, trying to burrow down into the damp earth.”
We might divide the pieces collected in The Lost Writings into gems and shards—the former seemingly conceptually complete, the latter obviously broken-off—each with their own particular kinds of obscurity. Within that scheme, this first text would be a gem; the few sentences that comprise the rest of the tale briefly sketch the scene, unfurling the plight contained in the opening. There’s the narrator as prey, a coach equipped with a driver and dogs already bored with the kill, and a hunter “greedily pinching [the narrator’s] calves.” Most startlingly, there is also a brutal expression of desire thwarted: “athirst, with open mouth, I breathed in clouds of dust.”
This opening parable of doomed impotence stutters into the next—another gem, in which the circumstances and mode are completely transformed, but the essential dynamics of predator and prey are unchanged. Here the narrator assumes the cruel, empowered position occupied by the hunter’s retinue in the first piece. He addresses the ensnared:
This same quietly suffocating phrase, “no way out”—a Kafkan fragment in itself—appears in another text, a dialogue between an unnamed interlocutor and a chimpanzee named Red Peter who has been seized from his jungle home by humans and eventually learns to behave like one. The ape is also the narrator of “A Report to an Academy,” one of the few stories Kafka finished and published in his lifetime. In the full story, Red Peter expresses his desire for a “way out” and devotes some time to glossing the meaning of the phrase: “I fear that perhaps you do not quite understand what I mean by ‘way out,’” he tells his audience in Willa and Edwin Muir’s translation. “I use the expression in its fullest and most popular sense. I deliberately do not use the word ‘freedom.’ I do not mean the spacious feeling of freedom on all sides”—leaving us to deduce what sort of comparatively inhibited liberty he seeks instead. In the version in The Lost Writings, a dejected Red Peter recounts the story of his capture, before which, he says, he “hadn’t known what that means: to have no way out.” He goes on to explain that he was contained not in “a four-sided cage with bars”; rather, “there were only three walls, and they were made fast to a chest, the chest constituted the fourth wall.” Everything hinges, it seems, on this fourth wall. In the Kafkan cosmology, three walls are presumed. The frightening tragedy is the way one’s own existence constitutes the final barrier.
The specter of this absent fourth wall haunts The Lost Writings. It returns explicitly in one other fragment, in which the narrator describes the space in which he’s held captive. “It was no prison cell, because the fourth wall was completely open,” he tells us in the first line. Here self-obstruction is expressed not in the character’s actual physical predicament, but in his interpretation of it: the fourth wall’s openness serves only to accentuate that he doesn’t even attempt to break free. In fact, the narrator says it’s for the best that his nudity prevents him from fashioning an escape rope out of garments; given the possible “catastrophic results,” it’s “better to have nothing and do nothing.”
Elsewhere, Kafka finds other ways to represent the structure of self-defeat. In one fragment, the narrator tells of being mysteriously unable to stay with a girl he loves. “It was as though she was surrounded by a ring of armed men who held out their lances in all directions,” he claims at first, but then revises this account: “I too was ringed by armed men, though they pointed their lances backward, in my direction. As I moved toward the girl, I was immediately caught in the lances of my own men and could make no further progress.” Another piece draws the self-abnegation deeper into the speaker, and exhilaratingly accelerates the velocity of its expression. “I can swim as well as the others,” the narrator says, “only I have a better memory than they do, so I have been unable to forget my formerly not being able to swim. Since I have been unable to forget it, being able to swim doesn’t help me, and I can’t swim after all.”
We might divide the pieces collected in The Lost Writings into gems and shards—the former seemingly conceptually complete, the latter obviously broken-off—each with their own particular kinds of obscurity. Within that scheme, this first text would be a gem; the few sentences that comprise the rest of the tale briefly sketch the scene, unfurling the plight contained in the opening. There’s the narrator as prey, a coach equipped with a driver and dogs already bored with the kill, and a hunter “greedily pinching [the narrator’s] calves.” Most startlingly, there is also a brutal expression of desire thwarted: “athirst, with open mouth, I breathed in clouds of dust.”
This opening parable of doomed impotence stutters into the next—another gem, in which the circumstances and mode are completely transformed, but the essential dynamics of predator and prey are unchanged. Here the narrator assumes the cruel, empowered position occupied by the hunter’s retinue in the first piece. He addresses the ensnared:
So, you want to leave me? Well, one decision is as good as another. Where will you go? Where is away-from-me? The moon? Not even that is far enough, and you’ll never get there. So why the fuss? Wouldn’t you rather sit down in a corner somewhere, quietly? Wouldn’t that be an improvement? A warm, dark corner? Aren’t you listening? You’re feeling for the door. Well, where is it? So far as I remember, this room doesn’t have one.Absent exits recur throughout the collection, as do impassable doorways, the portal’s useless presence only heightening the atmosphere of entrapment. In a later fragment, a shard, a pack of beasts return home from stealing a drink of water from a pond, only to be chased by punishers wielding whips into “the ancestral gallery, where the door was slammed shut, and we were left alone.” In another, a gem, the narrator inexplicably paces “an averagely large hall softly lit by electric light.” “The room had doors,” he reports, “but if you opened them, you found yourself facing a dark wall of sheer rock barely a hand’s breadth from the threshold, and running straight up to either side, as far as one could see. There was no way out there.”
This same quietly suffocating phrase, “no way out”—a Kafkan fragment in itself—appears in another text, a dialogue between an unnamed interlocutor and a chimpanzee named Red Peter who has been seized from his jungle home by humans and eventually learns to behave like one. The ape is also the narrator of “A Report to an Academy,” one of the few stories Kafka finished and published in his lifetime. In the full story, Red Peter expresses his desire for a “way out” and devotes some time to glossing the meaning of the phrase: “I fear that perhaps you do not quite understand what I mean by ‘way out,’” he tells his audience in Willa and Edwin Muir’s translation. “I use the expression in its fullest and most popular sense. I deliberately do not use the word ‘freedom.’ I do not mean the spacious feeling of freedom on all sides”—leaving us to deduce what sort of comparatively inhibited liberty he seeks instead. In the version in The Lost Writings, a dejected Red Peter recounts the story of his capture, before which, he says, he “hadn’t known what that means: to have no way out.” He goes on to explain that he was contained not in “a four-sided cage with bars”; rather, “there were only three walls, and they were made fast to a chest, the chest constituted the fourth wall.” Everything hinges, it seems, on this fourth wall. In the Kafkan cosmology, three walls are presumed. The frightening tragedy is the way one’s own existence constitutes the final barrier.
The specter of this absent fourth wall haunts The Lost Writings. It returns explicitly in one other fragment, in which the narrator describes the space in which he’s held captive. “It was no prison cell, because the fourth wall was completely open,” he tells us in the first line. Here self-obstruction is expressed not in the character’s actual physical predicament, but in his interpretation of it: the fourth wall’s openness serves only to accentuate that he doesn’t even attempt to break free. In fact, the narrator says it’s for the best that his nudity prevents him from fashioning an escape rope out of garments; given the possible “catastrophic results,” it’s “better to have nothing and do nothing.”
Elsewhere, Kafka finds other ways to represent the structure of self-defeat. In one fragment, the narrator tells of being mysteriously unable to stay with a girl he loves. “It was as though she was surrounded by a ring of armed men who held out their lances in all directions,” he claims at first, but then revises this account: “I too was ringed by armed men, though they pointed their lances backward, in my direction. As I moved toward the girl, I was immediately caught in the lances of my own men and could make no further progress.” Another piece draws the self-abnegation deeper into the speaker, and exhilaratingly accelerates the velocity of its expression. “I can swim as well as the others,” the narrator says, “only I have a better memory than they do, so I have been unable to forget my formerly not being able to swim. Since I have been unable to forget it, being able to swim doesn’t help me, and I can’t swim after all.”
by Nathan Goldman, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Colin Laurel
