The Imperative to Write: Destitutions of the Sublime in Kafka, Blanchot, and Beckett

INTRODUCTION

Why Do You Write?—The Fault of Writing

How is it that certain writers of the twentieth century were able to experience the literary vocation as an all-consuming task, an exclusive and absolute necessity, a compulsion as demanding as it is ineluctable, and therefore even as a kind of categorical imperative? This study will seek to provide not so much an answer to this question as an analysis of the paradoxes that allow us to pose it, and of the conditions shaping the textual elaborations of such an imperative. One of the most important of these paradoxes, the one from which the readings in this book take their starting point, is that these writers, whose work systematically withdraws the possibility of literature’s absolutes, took up such an absolutist position with respect to the necessity of writing itself, as though there could be any grounds for doing so. This introduction will lay out the contours of this impossible position, the unstable forms of the cracked and hollow ground it claims.

The writers discussed in this study expressed themselves repeatedly, and in the strongest terms, on the extreme and exclusive nature of their calling. Indeed, we can say at the outset that a certain hyperbole, a drive to totalize and to exaggerate, a wary tendency to overstep boundaries, is constitutive of the position they appear to share. Kafka: God does not want me to write, but I, I must.¹ This is one statement among dozens that could be drawn from a corpus of writing that attempted to generate itself from the constraints of an exclusive vocation, which, as is well known, pressed the writer into a brutal struggle with the conditions and circumstances of his own life. In a similar vein, Blanchot the writer refers in the third person to his irrelevant biographical avatar, in order to subsume the latter completely under the silence of a being who is other, and stranger: Maurice Blanchot, novelist and critic, was born in 1907. His life is entirely devoted to literature and to the silence that is proper to it.² The necessity of writing outstrips that of living, as the latter is reduced to the minimal acknowledgment of having been born, sole requirement for all the rest, which is literature. And Beckett, who perhaps more than any other writer integrated such statements into the fabric of his fictional works themselves, large portions of which are spun from their paradoxes: I must to on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on (U 179). Whereas Beckett was not so starkly dualistic as Kafka and Blanchot tended to be regarding the breach, rift, or fault separating writing from life, he did pronounce an unequivocal sentiment on the latter, in a curse that raises many questions about the thing that writing is unable not to do: Fuck life.³ Of course this is not the last word on the matter, but that very fact, like the birth that somehow must have happened, is precisely where all the trouble begins.

These programmatic statements may serve as initial emblematic markers for the strangely nonnegotiable imperative one finds articulated, performed, and thwarted in the writings of these authors. We can already see that if this imperative verges toward the categorical, it does so by severing itself—in a paradoxical attachment—from something called life, as writing strives to articulate its own irreducibles. And yet there is more than one kind of life, more than one mode of living, and for each of these writers, writing itself takes the radical chance of seeking a much more strange and uncanny form of existence under this category. In the meantime, what each of them encounters in attempting to strip writing of everything but its own most essential compulsion—in a movement that systematically confounds the difference between elevation and depth, between exaltation and baseness—is an empty necessity that insists all the more brutally for being voided of its contents. In Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s formulation, it is by means of an imperative without content [that] ‘literature’ . . . is given over to its own naked existence as a fact and to a sort of duty without reason.⁴ This empty insistence, and the implied devaluation of writing rendered over to compulsion, is certainly not the fault of the writer. If anything, it is the fault of writing: the tiny but irreparable fissure opened as an irritating breach, a hollow kernel in language that cannot be voided, but that opens the space of an imperative that cannot be fulfilled. Such a residue, I will argue, is all that is left of writing’s sublimity—in which, despite everything, the writers in question here have a considerable stake. In order to understand this residual investment in the sublime, the faulty position in which it places them must first be delineated.

In responding to the simple but impossible question Why do you write? Blanchot sketched out just such a position. In 1984 the newspaper Libération sent out a survey to several hundred writers asking this question. Blanchot responded with a surprising degree of substance and seriousness, providing a commentary on the irreducibility of writing’s exclusive and compulsive necessity, and on the writer’s position, literally and in every sense:

Certes, la question est traditionnelle. Ma réponse ne sera pas originale. Je l’emprunterai au docteur Martin Luther, lorsque, à Worms, il prononça la déclaration de son irréductibilité: Je me tiens là debout, je ne puis autrement. Dieu me vienne en aide. Ce que je traduirais modestement: Dans l’espace de l’écriture, écrivant, n’écrivant pas, je me tiens là courbé, je ne puis autrement et je n’attends nul secours des puissances favorables.⁵

Certainly the question is traditional. My answer will not be original. I will borrow it from the learned doctor Martin Luther, when, at Worms, he put forth the declaration of its irreducibility: Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise. May God help me. Which I would translate modestly: In the space of writing, writing, not writing, here I sit hunched over, I cannot do otherwise and I expect no help from the beneficent powers.

Aside from the very interesting (if incidental) gesture of positioning Martin Luther as above all a writer, and thus locating the religious dimension of his stance primarily in a kind of literary intransigence, this modest translation encapsulates a number of the distinctly downward displacements that will concern us here. From a resolute upright position, in which a categorical necessity is rendered up to divine authority, Blanchot reduces the irreducible fact in question to a strange curving over on itself, a bowed and downward leaning position whose dictated text, as it were, does not have its source in the higher realms. Indeed, there is a hint that if no help is expected from there, it may come nonetheless from lower and more obscure regions (Kafka, for one, will explicitly vindicate such a movement).⁶ At the same time, it can be seen as a more sober gesture severing writing from all such powers, high and low, and returning the writer to the earth (to a table . . . a piece of paper). In this sense it puts one in mind of Hölderlin’s commentaries on Sophocles, with their Kantian-inspired figure of a categorical turning away, the kategorische Umkehr that severs man from the sacred in a sobriety which alone has any chance of retaining something of the sacred it renounces, but that, most importantly, betokens a law that "compels [zwinget] the eternal anti-human course of nature, on its path toward another world, more decidedly toward the earth.⁷ Blanchot’s modest translation of this otherworldly trajectory would then contain, perhaps, the entire stakes of his relation to Romanticism, a disjointed relation that was mediated through a reading of Hölderlin (and in particular of the text just quoted)⁸—which, however, does not preclude following a certain path toward another world, as is the case with Kafka and Beckett as well. But as we will see, this other world" is not one, for it is purely (or perhaps merely) literary, a world of letters and mere images, a worldly way of leaving the world behind in order to enter a space in which the more modest task of writing would seek its essentially impoverished conditions. We are in very close proximity as well to Rimbaud’s Adieu at the end of A Season in Hell, whose exclamations proclaim the same movement of demotion and return to the earth: "je suis rendu au sol, avec un devoir à chercher, et la réalité rugueuse à étreindre! Paysan! (I am returned to the soil with a duty to seek and a rough reality to embrace! Peasant!) And a few lines later: Mais pas une main amie! et où puiser le secours? (But no friendly hand! and where to turn for help?).⁹ Blanchot’s refusal of help is no doubt less pathetic" (in the strict sense), but it is clearly located on a similarly sobering downward trajectory that is, so to speak, helpless in every sense. Hölderlin’s madness, and Rimbaud’s abandonment, might well be taken as signs of the difficult impoverishment of the position here vindicated.

The vindication, however, is not only a vindication, and the helplessness I just evoked gives some indication that Blanchot’s translation is also a neutralization of the ethical stance implied in Luther’s statement.¹⁰ For not only does it evacuate the good implied in the beneficent powers visited on the writer (whether from God or Muse); we can also note that this not being able to do otherwise can indeed be heard, at some distance from its residual heroic overtones, in a register of helplessness. If Blanchot’s repetition of the phrase continues to make resound a kind of steadfast resoluteness, it nonetheless vacillates according to the very movement of translation to which he submits the rest of the statement. Blanchot’s translation of Luther, given as "je ne puis autrement, is so to speak left untranslated within the statement (it is the only element that is simply repeated in his restatement), but what does this phrase translate? The famous phrase attributed to Luther is: Ich kann nicht anders." We know it in English in the version I gave above: I cannot do otherwise. But surely an equally fitting translation of Blanchot’s own use of the phrase would be one that rings quite differently: I can’t help it. This version touches on a mode of helpless compulsion that necessarily shadows any pretentions to an ethical, much less a sublime, dimension in the task of writing. The resistance to this slippage in certain of Blanchot’s narratives (despite their clear and constant suggestions in this direction) will be a prominent feature of the readings of his texts in the section devoted to his work below. The important point to begin with, which applies as well to Kafka and to Beckett, is that the irreducibility of writing’s imperative is itself subject to disturbing vacillations that remove it from the sphere of ethics, and that reduce its echoes of sublimity to the varied and empty figures of its failure—figures of a law in default. For in literature writing takes on the law, in every sense, for it not only inhabits and assumes the law (with certain effects of guilt and bad conscience, as we will see), but in doing so it also touches on the essence of law, leaving it in ruins that necessarily fail to embody it; literature thus both wields and undoes the force of law in speech.¹¹ At the same time, if the search for the irreducible remains a constant, what is found to be irreducible takes many questionable, and singular, forms. In a certain sense, then, it is with the various and telling shapes, figures and figurations of these irreducible forms, the insistent remains and leftovers of a sublime vocation now curved down onto the poor space of letters, that the present study takes as its specific material. We should recall as well that Kafka’s hunger artist proffers yet another version of the "ich kann nicht anders," as he sinks at last into the straw—de facto shroud of his unceremonious burial, his disappearance into mere hunger.

By way of elaborating the peculiar nature of that material, its ambiguous vacillation between poverty and riches, I would like to quote Beckett’s rather different, and yet really quite similar response to the very same survey, which also carries out a steep downgrade, but much more succinctly. Unlike Blanchot’s relatively elaborate reflection, Beckett’s answer sits like a little lapidary lump on the page. To the question, Why do you write? Beckett shrugs: "Bon qu’à ça."¹² But even this little hiccup gives much to be read (and that is perhaps the very form of the curse that Beckett always attached to meaning). First, of course, by way of translation: the phrase means, it’s all (I’m) good for, as though in self-deprecating response to the Hölderlinian "Wozu?" implied by the survey’s question.¹³ Why do I write? Because I’m good for nothing (else). The phrase thus speaks of exclusivity (bon qu’à ça), but precisely in the mode of abjection and default, a reduction not so much to the irreducible as to a last shred of something still left over, luckily (or not), at the end of a near-total process of elimination. This reduction almost to nothing also happens to be the regular course of Beckett’s fictional world in general, a homology which suggests that the extreme stripping away carried out within the writing is also the very form of the writing vocation itself, as it dwindles into the recesses of a life reduced to little else. In Beckett’s fiction, especially in a work like The Unnamable, this remainder is the very thing that, ravenous for silence, obstructs the dissolution of speech and keeps the torture going. In this respect, the sheer painful abjection of the writer’s position is most deliberately and explicitly staged in Beckett’s work (although Kafka is certainly a forerunner in intimately linking writing with torture, not only in In the Penal Colony but also in many statements in his letters and diaries).¹⁴ Indeed, Beckett’s work poses, more sharply and urgently than either Kafka’s or Blanchot’s, the question of a troubling limit between literary language, as a cultural and ethical value, and a kind of speech that in its compulsive brutality crosses into an experience that must in some sense be considered nonliterary. When one listens to oneself, said Beckett in an interview, it’s not literature that one hears.¹⁵ The vocation of writing thus verges toward a harassing vocalization that bears its compulsions openly, risking an exposure that might exceed—that is, fall far short of—the categories that would dress it in more redemptive terms.¹⁶ There is more than a hint of shame to be read in some of Beckett’s hilarities and melancholies, and the residues of so much elimination and stripping away have affective tonalities, even (I will argue) an unexpected sentimentality, that it will be important to register in the bare but intensely charged figures that Beckett obsessively stages.

I have stressed what might be considered the more embarrassing side of the writer’s position, as translated, revised and minimized in Blanchot’s and Beckett’s public statements. But just as Blanchot does, after all, assert a kind of steadfast propensity, a constant holding and maintaining ("je me tiens là), however unsteady (écrivant, n’écrivant pas), and therefore a persistence that is and must be affirmed, so does Beckett’s bon qu’à ça imply some slim margin of good" that still attaches itself to that. We are very much within the joke-logic of Kafka’s hunger artist, who devotes himself so fanatically to fasting only because (here’s the punch line) he couldn’t find the food he liked, leaving only this poor starving performance to live on. Is Beckett likewise suggesting that if only he had found something better he would have plunged in without hesitation? Yes, certainly, but like that of the hunger artist, his downgrading gesture is comic precisely because we know what extraordinarily high stakes have been invested in the thing called literature (art), and in particular what Beckett himself invested in it, which was virtually everything he had (though here again he was a bit less absolutist, if one can put it thus, than Kafka or Blanchot). If he is good for nothing but writing, it may also be that nothing is quite so good as writing, that writing is the last holdout against the good’s corrosion and dispersion, the one thing that has managed, after all, to resist elimination in the all-devouring process of rejecting everything on offer (and in that sense it is analogous with the very hunger of the hunger artist, the last thing left of all, and the most irreducible, as we will see in a reading of that story in Chapter 4).¹⁷ In other words, the minimal and minimized vindication of writing actually harbors an extreme and hyperbolic affirmation, or even a receding and residual version of transcendence, that holds out the hope (and the persistent demand) of unparalleled satisfactions, not to say ecstasy, even in the midst of the extreme attenuations already noted. We can think of this as the rather more exalted side of the impoverished remainder in question here, for it does seem to remain, and insistently so—indeed, all the more insistently in that the satisfactions in question have become radically impossible, deeply incompatible with the experience of a subject, and this is perhaps what gives the search for them its sharpest ethical edge. In this vein, Kafka wrote in his diary: Nothing else will ever satisfy me (D 302). Blanchot, for his part, would write of the call of [an] all-powerful affirmation (AM 126). It is this sort of language that justifies speaking here in terms of the sublime.

As is already evident, the notion of the sublime can be introduced into this context only with the recognition that it is definitively subject to translation—and indeed, the specific inevitability of such an attenuating translation is one of the central concerns of this book. The Kantian version of the sublime (and of the moral law to which it would give access), whose residual movements and structures are of crucial importance in the chapters that follow, still does clearly resonate in these authors’ works, but only across a number of irreversible displacements. Blanchot’s modest translation of Luther already illustrates this, in a way that is not as anachronistic as it might seem. For if we grant that Kant (the Pietist) has in some sense already translated Luther, primarily by dislodging divine authority from the moral law that governs the categorical ethical subject and replacing it with pure reason as a self-grounding and universalizing structure—and as the ultimate treasure revealed in the sublime’s violently downgrading uplift—then Blanchot’s version of the imperative merely takes this reconfiguration of the law a step further. This is a step withdrawn from the beyond, both in its divine and in its empty and purely rational form, and a step down, one that may well open another more problematic beyond that is not beyond (an other world called fiction, in its essential relation to the ancient schema of the Odyssean nekuia—but for the moment this is a digression).¹⁸ The important point is that this downward arching inflection of the writer’s task specifically translates the sublime insofar as it reconfigures the writer’s relation to a law that would command, authorize and help this activity—or, in Kantian terms, that would drive it, with an incentive (a "Triebfeder) making it possible for transcendence to touch the flesh, and to move it.¹⁹ Whatever powers may intervene, or not, they have little to do with pure reason, or if they do, it is only insofar as the latter is itself driven by forces that cannot be extricated from sensibility (and so is no longer pure).²⁰ And yet somehow the task itself remains categorical, irreducible," and strangely singular, without any grounding instance or structure that could be cited, invoked or called upon, whether as an authority or as a founding text—as Luther cites God, as Kant cites pure reason. Thus it appears that we have to do with something like a categorical movement of sensibility at work in the writer’s task. But the name of such a movement is precisely compulsion—only a compulsion stripped of its objects and ends.

Indeed, Kant already spoke of a paradoxical drive of reason, a cruel compulsion moving beyond all that is given in mere sensibility, a drive toward totality and the ideal that would outstrip the senses and all their objects. This drive has an important role to play in the experience of the sublime, for it is what torments the imagination, faculty of images and representation, to strain beyond its limits and to strive, in impossibility and failure, toward the totality that reason necessarily demands. The ruination of imagination, and by implication of the entirety of experience, of the very world itself as the field of all sensible objects, is thus the triumph of reason and of the moral law in its power that is thus revealed to the rational ethical subject.²¹ This is the only true object of the sublime experience, as Kant repeatedly emphasizes, and its confusion with the very large or very powerful thing in the world that provides the overwhelming occasion for this experience occurs only by way of a subreption—the illegitimate substitution of an image for what necessarily outstrips all images.²² Thus, at the end of the painful trajectory in which the subject is stripped of its world and is cast into the objectless void opened by sublimity, this subject, as a rational being, is granted an extraordinary compensation for all these losses, an incommensurable and inexhaustible treasure that Kant calls, using a term that speaks directly to our concerns, a vocation. This Bestimmung (a word that can also be translated as determination) is the ultimate reward and destination waiting at the far end of what would otherwise be an extremely melancholy affair—or even a kind of hell.

Kant does not speak much, in the Critique of Judgment, of the melancholic aspect of the sublime’s hyperbolic losses; he is too energized by the task of conveying its boundless and eternal returns.²³ But such a melancholy is the most important link between the aesthetics of the sublime—and by extension the transcendentalizing tendencies of romanticism found well into the nineteenth century and beyond—and a more skeptical literary modernity that is nonetheless also driven, as a matter of aesthetic principle, to leave the world behind, but whose returns (in every sense) are much more equivocal.²⁴ In other words, we have to do with a vocation (as calling: Beruf) that has been stripped of its vocation (as destination: Bestimmung)—and no doubt even of its call (Ruf)—and that, in leaving behind all objects and occasions—in becoming categorical—finds itself bereft of the sort of treasure promised by critical metaphysics and its translation (by Kant and all that followed him) into the sphere of sensibility, into the dwindling chances of art. It is in this sense that I speak of a destitution of the sublime in the radical leave-taking that constitutes literary space: if writing has persisted in a movement that would strip bare or strip away—that would despoil and disfigure—the worldly conditions of its production, and if there is after all something of a sublime law, a categorical imperative haunting this movement, it is a sublime that has been destituted of its treasure, and that threatens a loss without return.

Kafka, Blanchot, and Beckett are exemplary figures in this respect, not only for the insistent imperative I have already indicated, emblematically, in their hyperbolic rhetoric, but also because the drive behind the imperative is one that leads, strangely, into spaces that explicitly constitute an other world. Let me summarize this major point with three more emblematic image-phrases (among a number of possible ones): Kafka’s wooden bridge, which leaves behind the past almost entirely and leads into the uncanny world of the castle village; Beckett’s timeless void, the infernal Dante-inspired spaces toward (and in) which every possible figure endlessly dwindles; and of course Blanchot’s literary space, a notion that was derived in part from surveying, as it were, Kafka’s landscapes of error and wandering, and whose otherness to the world is a point so insistently made as to raise questions concerning the urgency, and completeness, of this supposedly absolute departure (questions that will be addressed in some detail in Part II). The term I use for this strange literary alterworld is radical fiction. This is a fiction that in a sense would root out the world, extricate all past experience, and sever literary language from lived reality, leaving only a barren but powerfully fascinating landscape of images (including language’s image of itself, as Blanchot puts it [EL 31–32]), a place with laws of its own, laws that unfold only as it does. What is real in this radically fictive space has nothing to do with representational realism, but emerges rather from the sort of insistent and irreducible drive that I have been attempting to locate, and that stubbornly inhabits literary speech, one might say, as the leftover of a voice: a voice still left and leaving still as it speaks. The ambiguity of such a voice’s leavings—its departures, farewells (Adieu), residues and remnants—opens the space for the interrogations pursued here.

Is this voice a treasure of its own? In other words, does the reduction and destitution of language’s insistent drive render up its own rewards? This question threads throughout the studies that follow, and there are many occasions when one might well suspect such a recuperative compensation, particularly when the rhetoric and staging of extreme destitution reaches a hyperbolic pitch (however deep the tones of irony may be at times). Blanchot’s all-powerful affirmation at the end of Death Sentence, an indestructible affirmation emanating from the recesses of a living death to the world, stands out as one such moment; likewise the very beauty of Beckett’s lyricism, undercut with irony and yet indulged all the same, strikes one as the richness of a lost world and life returned in the passions of a dying voice. A similar ambiguity can be read (as we will see in Chapter 8) in the sarcastic-ecstatic exit weeping from the evocation of life’s and art’s redolent riches, in Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit. But this is also the text in which Beckett warns against taking art’s destitution as simply another occasion for a more or less jubilant renewal. This is a warning that ought to be heeded, difficult as that may be, and it is unclear to what extent any of the writers discussed here is really able to do so, even if their lucidity is what makes us aware of this dilemma. For that very reason, I propose to take this fake weeping seriously and to wonder whether the passionate and lyrical tones that so often sound in these works, in the wake of the extreme reductions and absolute departures that constitute their most intimate imperative, do not in fact belie a disavowed affective attachment, perhaps an attachment to loss itself—a condition otherwise known as melancholy. The question will be, in part, whether that attachment seeks underhandedly (subreptitiously) to restore a properly sublime (supersensible) dimension to what is left, to what returns as having been left (behind), or whether these remnants can bear their emptinesses, if one can put it thus, into the texts that open them. When Kafka, in an early letter, narrates a parable in which a man clings ostentatiously to a locked box—patent allegory of a young writer holding onto his inner treasure—whose precious contents turn out to be nothing but two milk teeth, we might be tempted to gauge his entire accomplishment by the systematic sobriety with which, over many years of writing, he empties that box, giving it over from even this meager sign to a nothingness which, however, may still never completely efface every sign of the stuff that used to be there. Likewise—to mention another emblem that will be of great importance in Part II, on Blanchot—at the beginning of Death Sentence, when Blanchot’s narrator evokes the necessity of telling a retrospective story of which virtually nothing remains but this necessity, he writes of the shell of an enigma, an empty castoff thing that both calls for, and is, the work it will have contained, en creux. This hard and hollow core is also a crux, a complex knot or buckle in which the destituted sublime vacillates between a newly projected promise to stay eternally there (éternellement, elle est là, as Blanchot lyrically writes), and a groundless drive to nothing that bears its emptiness openly, having only that and nothing more to give.

But this nothing, as I will emphasize more than once, is never simply and entirely nothing. It continually takes the form of the thing that gives it a contour and makes it visible. In the context of what I have called radical fiction, this means that it continually wends its way, in tiny fissures or massive cavernous voids, through the figural material that populates the space of fiction. Even Blanchot’s extremely attenuated récits, even Beckett’s abstracted algebras and impersonal geometries, are populated by such figures. All the more clearly is this the case with Kafka, whose closer proximity to (and strong identification with) the great novelistic traditions of the preceding century meant that his fiction, particularly in the signal works of his first maturity, became a struggle with the weight of a certain programmatic figural density, a striving for gapless continuity that would overwhelm, not to say overcome, the schematic fault in which it originated (the name of that weight and struggle, as we will see throughout that section, is judgment). All this is to suggest that the figural moment, in these subtly allegorical fictive worlds, is precisely the moment of subreption and treachery, an inevitable translation in which both the void and its biographical impossibility are betrayed. In other words, the demand of figuration (as compulsion or imperative), a demand that is never fully repudiated by these writers, draws these extreme fictions back around from their absolutely other worlds into the autobiographical dimension from which they work so fiercely to sever themselves. Radical fiction is thus, at the same time, radical autobiography, a writing so intimate that it cannot help but mark the self whose possibility it scatters into the alienating forms that constitute it. Breaking down the word autobiography, one could say that the auto continually haunts any graphism carried out in the midst of a life that finds itself driven panicked into language, compelled into speech—life as narrative’s compulsive return—and so a life placed at stake in the severance thus opened within it. And one must add, conversely, that any self placed at stake in the gap between language and life is necessarily haunted and disrupted by the dispersion of writing’s formal and machine-like processes (in that sense, the ghost is the machine). Following Heidegger’s paradoxical notion of Ent-fernung—an extreme distancing that cancels and collapses distance, a suffocating intimacy that opens a gaping and unclosable space—Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe calls this logic a hyperbologic, which he defines in these simple terms: the farther it is, the closer it is; the more proper it is, the more inappropriable it must be (and with this must the formula introduces an element of necessity that is also an ambiguous and exigent demand). It is in this sense as well that the hyperbolic rhetoric I have mentioned marks the extremity, but also the intimate and singular scale, of the destituted space continually at issue in the readings of the texts that play out this paradox.²⁵

The problem of reluctant self-exposure mentioned before—in close connection with guilt, shame, bad conscience and other self-looping auto-affective structures—inserts itself precisely here, in the fault that opens this space in its compulsive figurative attachments, and in the repetitions of its primal scenes. I should stress that there will be no attempt here to traumatize these writers, in the sense of locating the pressing origin of their writing in a biographical trauma attached to an autobiographical scene striving dully to be recounted through all this fiction—no biographical or autobiographical readings in that sense. The autobiographical moment that obtrudes into these texts does so in a way that, in its extremity and ungraspability, demands fiction, that finds itself forced and torqued into scenes and figures, despite the impossibility of such a narrative localization. Blanchot’s own use of the phrase a primal scene in The Writing of the Disaster is perhaps the best indication of this (as we will see in Chapter 5)—a use that is hedged with parentheses and a question mark (he writes: (A primal scene?)), but that nonetheless compulsively turns and tropes through the contours of a scene cast simultaneously as an eternal and irresistible autobiographical return and as mere fictive supposition (ED 117; WD 72). Fictive figuration, then, as a necessary compromise formation, under duress of extreme strangeness and radical depersonalization. However, this strangeness, as an uncanny haunting and revenance (a mode that is especially prominent in Blanchot), also delineates the material that in each case gives the writer away, so to speak, as being in part the remaindered voice of a singular time that has not been fully dissolved in the corrosions of fictive language. Time as temps, but also as one time, une fois—a time whose structure (to move very quickly) can be condensed into something like a logic of having-been, which also means having once been born. Born into language, one might say, if this did not ring as the oxymoron Beckett shows it to be when he writes: Birth was the death of him.²⁶ Or as he writes in the very autobiographical text Company, in which the day of the protagonist’s birth is also described as the moment when it was over at last. Over! (C 14). In speaking of life, then, and in showing its odd material and figural intrusions into fictions that strain to sever themselves from any previous existence on earth, I mean nothing more than that: a narrative structure dogged and haunted by the unfortunate fact of having once been singularized as someone’s. If anywhere, the trauma of these texts is located in the tiny tunneling hole of that once, and thus the painful passage from infancy to language, and conversely (but not symmetrically) from language as a pregiven formal structure (langue) to the speech that is its singularly appropriated and assumed mobilization (parole).²⁷ Such a life will never have been anything but the residue of language, but to emphasize the odd singularity of this residue in each case—the peculiar shape of its compulsive figures—will involve tracing a movement that struggles first to lose them, whether by casting them off or, one might say, by devouring them unto eternity. And it is in the struggle to transform, escape, throw off, or surreptitiously keep the leavings of an abrupt and impoverishing entry into literary space that much of the tension is generated in these texts.²⁸ If this resembles a traumatic structure, it is not because there is a barred or repressed narrative, but because the breach or fault to which telling returns, eternally and again, continually defies the figural compulsion that commands it. As such, it is a mere disappearing point, and a necessarily empty one—but this is the very structure of the imperative in its defaulting force.

The situation can thus be summarized in the following terms: the only story that can be told is one that has been invented, but every invented story—and the more radically invented, the more abyssally will this be demonstrated—betrays the contingency, the temporal, topographical and idiomatic embeddedness, of its imperative’s imprint, the initial impact of its unaccountable preinscription. (Such an imprint could also be considered in terms of style—another term for autobiography as displaced remnant.)

The complexity of this figural material and of its intertwined patterns requires an attention to textual detail that is borne out in the textured readings I endeavor to present in each case. But the overall shape of these readings can be indicated here in a schematic and preliminary fashion. With respect to Kafka, the figural schema that traverses all of his first mature fiction is played out in what can be called a scenography of judgment, the staging of an interiority’s obstructed externalization and of a failed self-defense in language that (as I show in Chapter 1) already found its first elaborations in letters and diaries that precede the judgment stories in which it culminates (from The Judgment, The Metamorphosis and The Stoker and on through The Trial and In the Penal Colony). But this is a problematic culmination that mitigates the telic and progressive narrative of the writer’s emergence to which Kafka himself often had recourse, for from the beginning these stories also seek to undo the constraining conditions of a burdensome courtroom paradigm, and, in the end, to exit the theater of the Law—as we see Josef K. doing, at least partially, in The Trial. Blanchot too finds himself facing an instantiation of the law, in the feminine figures that serve both to open the path out of the world—in strange allegorical steps—but that, especially in Death Sentence, leave behind a troubling specter, projective and concrete remainders, ghostly corpse-images, and above all an enigmatic death mask that takes on an unexpected transcendental force. This death mask will be crucial in the reading of Blanchot presented here (in Chapters 6 and 7), not only because it may well be the shell of a treasure the writer clings to despite everything; for it also allows us to interrogate (by way of Jean-Luc Nancy’s comments on Heidegger’s strange references to a death mask in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics) the basis of the image and its look in the ground of which Blanchot appears to situate the fundamental paradox of his fiction: a relation that ruptures all relation.²⁹ It is surely no coincidence that the figure through which this operation takes place is a feminine figure, and even at some level that of a beloved woman, and these chapters will be centrally concerned with her place in the rather dubious movement that turns back to efface her, as such and in her time, from the encounter she makes possible.

In Beckett we find a similarly passionate turn to time past, to a life now reduced to dust and numbers, for the sake of a voided present trafficking in sheer absence and dispersion. But with Beckett’s expelled and expulsive moribunds and tramps we also find a much more overt, if constantly ironized, attachment to the world left behind, and a greater willingness to play explicitly on nostalgia and sentimentality—in order to corrode them, certainly, but also with a view to the strange rights they seem to claim in the infernal and totalizing losses that call them up. Even the unnamable voice of The Unnamable will be unable not to mark, express, or expectorate the signs of a past on which its very existence structurally depends, however indeterminate, unspeakable, and inappropriable this past has become. All the more, then, will the inevitability of the return of a past in a flattened narrative voice be demonstrated in a text like Company, which loops around on itself (lapped as it were in its meaninglessness [C 61]) as though this were the very structure of the fictive flight into a formalization that is both grammatical and, even, algebraic and mathematical. In that light one can say that Company shows the formal inevitability of a material return—the return of narrative material charged with an affect generated no less by the torture of grammar than by the heavy (C 38) or sick heart (C 26) bent on breaking, which in that text thumps toward its last countable thump. The fact that this return does nothing to reduce the alienating otherness of its enabling conditions, or to make it more assimilable as mine, is nothing but the fundamental poetic and vocal given of Beckett’s afterlife fiction. But I read Beckett’s overt melancholy as the sign of an at least partial nonabsorption into this hell, a strange resistance that cannot be resolved into the kind of affirmative eternities one finds voiced, no less lyrically, in the Blanchot who proclaims: To her I say ‘come,’ and eternally she is there (AM 127). Beckett’s affirming angels are less ubiquitous, more intermittent (as in the late television play Nacht und Träume, where she or he arrives for the passing moment of a consoling gesture; or in . . . but the clouds . . . where she appears only long enough to whisper the words of the title and the final phrases of The Tower, a poem by Beckett’s fellow Irishman, William Butler Yeats). On another related level, in all three of these writers, one of the strict conditions of entry into the destituted sublimity of literary space is a turn from—if not a repudiation of—love, and of women, a move that is completely explicit and fundamental in each case. Blanchot’s Orphic schema is the most paradigmatic version of this turn—a turn that begins by turning back toward . . . but that ends with fleeting and receding phantoms, taking us once again into an underworld of mere images. The apparent necessity of a woman’s appearance/disappearance—a necessity required precisely for disappearance to appear, as Blanchot puts it³⁰—is a troubling element in the melancholy economies that govern writing’s destituted but insistent figural extortions.

In sum, then, we will see that fiction in extremis is intimately bound up with an autobiographical dimension of writing that pursues the writer into the far reaches of radical depersonalization: writing’s curved trajectory leads back, eternally and again, to the obtrusive stuff of a life that, in the logic of these leavings, really ought to have been left behind. Faute de quoi—failing this—and in default of such a permanent and absolute leave-taking, what is left is in fact a dense residue that bears witness to a compulsion arising from the breach that writing opens in a life, which it leaves there. The vacillation of this fault between abjectifying failure and imperious command makes up all the ambiguity of the mundane but untenable positions taken up by these writers.

This vacillation was indicated by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe in the essay mentioned above, whose title succinctly names its unsteady movement: "Il faut" (one must; it is necessary) is the expression used in French for an imperative that, while simply stating a necessity, also expresses an empty, impersonal and categorical obligation.³¹ The pertinence of this idiomatic phrase and its forceful but faltering rhetoric to the writers addressed in this study is also indicated in the first words of Lacoue-Labarthe’s essay, which quote Blanchot: "Ecrire, l’exigence d’écrire (To write, the exigency to write), a phrase that can be seen, once again, as a translation of the essay’s title phrase. It is also no coincidence that Lacoue-Labarthe ends the opening paragraph by recalling Beckett’s Bon qu’à ça, which he places in a register quite close" to that of Blanchot’s exigency. This register is one that finds itself doubled in the phrase’s etymological ambiguity: falloir (to be necessary), as Lacoue-Labarthe points out, derives from the same Latin verb as faillir, which means rather to fall short, to fail, to have almost done something (often accidentally) that did not in fact occur. Thus the most forceful expression of an imperative is also, and already, a marker of the command’s breach and failure, a default, deficiency, and collapse that are both presupposed and demanded by the imperative, as though its very force depended on its weakness, as though failure were the essence of necessity—and particularly the necessity to write (which is the central concern of Lacoue-Labarthe’s essay, devoted to Hölderlin and the task of poetry). In this sense, the imperative "il faut" also says, simultaneously and necessarily, as the very form of its command: it faults, or it fails (or perhaps: it falls (short)). Lacoue-Labarthe could also have quoted Beckett’s strange injunction in Worstward Ho to: Fail again. Fail better—a gesture linking failure with a good whose slim and singular chances lie, here too, only in the tiny irreducible margin between the least bad and nothing at all. It is in this sense that the readings presented in this study attempt to locate an insistent imperative in a fault of writing that fissures a life and renders it over, across greater and lesser distances, to language’s faltering but imperious demands. If this fault seems to implicate the writer in an ethical lapse that would call up all the dubious powers of guilt, bad conscience, diabolical trickery, even violence and graver trespasses, we would do well to recall once again the writer whose Adieu Lacoue-Labarthe also mentions in his essay’s opening paragraph—namely Rimbaud, the young poet who recognized his vocation with an apt and straightforward personal disclaimer: I have discovered that I’m a poet, writes the poet, and adds, disarmingly: It’s really not my fault.³² I underscore this statement, lest the critical remarks offered in this study appear at times to be aimed at the person of the writer, whereas their aim is rather to delineate the treacherous conditions of the task in question, and to point to the slim margin of freedom it may open.

PART ONE

Kafka

CHAPTER 1

Kafka’s Teeth

The Literary GEWISSENSBISS

OVERVIEW: FROM THE COURT TO THE REPORT

God does not want me to write, but I, I must. Thus writes a twenty-year-old Franz Kafka in a letter to a friend. This is one of many astonishing pronouncements threaded through the Kafkan corpus, and it provides a striking formulation of the imperative to write, in the image of the overpowered writer struggling with the forces arrayed against him. It is well known that Kafka frequently evoked the extremity of his calling, in numerous emphatic statements whose terms are unmistakable, not to say strident and melodramatic. The letters and diaries are punctuated with extraordinary proclamations on his task as a writer and on his devotion to an exclusive and all-absorbing literary vocation, proclamations that have done their work well, if the frequency of their isolated repetition is any indication. I have just bowed to the weight of this critical tradition, by citing (again) one of the first and most astonishing, from an early letter that Kafka wrote to a schoolmate. Years later, he proclaimed the following, in a letter to his fiancée Felice Bauer: I am made of literature, I am nothing else and cannot be anything else (LFe 304)—this by way of indicating, not to say dismissing, his suitability to be something called a husband. Such statements read like the lapidary gnomes of a man in the throes of an impossible mission, forced to strike home his uncompromising point for the dull and uncomprehending ears around him. At times, this insistence places the writing within (even if also against) a dubious transcendental dimension, as when he claims that his writing is the earthly reflection of a higher necessity (LFe 313). But more often than not, they place him at fault, whether in relation to the demands of the social world (marriage, etc.), with which writing is considered to be incompatible, or under the weight of the absolute demands of the tremendous task of writing, a task that must be coextensive with life itself. But the gap between life and writing, between writing and the law, will mark out a fault, a generative breach, out of which Kafka will work out the terms of a singular imperative to write, elaborating from it the very shape of his first mature fiction.

When Kafka writes, with apparent thunder in his voice, This is how it is with me: God does not want me to write, but I, I must, he is addressing his gymnasium and university friend Oskar Pollak in a letter dated November 9, 1903.¹ Bracketing this important context for the moment, we can ask what this statement says, in the form of the gnomic self-assertion that it clearly strives to take. It brings us immediately into the sphere of guilt and prohibition, in the mode of a stubborn and persistent defiance. Already prone to extreme and hyperbolic rhetoric when speaking of his writing, Kafka claims a necessity to write as a kind of counter-absolute, a categorical necessity borne by a doubly affirmed I, I . . . posited in conflict with the Absolute itself, and caught up in a transgression of the most powerful Law there is, the very will of God, personally directed at him and his pernicious writing. Against this incontrovertible force, the young writer asserts another lesser but still more imperious law, driven by its own irrevocable I must. The complex guilt already projected by such a scheme will take many forms in Kafka’s writing, becoming not only a fundamental matrix of his first decisive fictions, but also a primary notion through which the entire corpus and figure of Kafka continue to be understood. Indeed, one of my tasks here will be to follow the elaboration of this scheme of guilt and transgression as the young writer works his way into the anxious fictional worlds of judgment and punishment for which he is well known. But I will also suggest that in the later fictions he leaves behind the schema of guilt and punishment and develops other forms of presentation, in a shift from a more familiar Oedipal structure into a different and more diffuse anxiety centered in the voice and, in the novels, scattered into rumor.

My focus, however, will not be these gnomic proclamations as such, in all their metaphysical, theological, and cosmic drama, however compelling these may be. And they certainly are compelling. At the very least they convey the fact that, to put it very simply, something tremendous is at stake in the writer’s vocation—indeed, nothing less than everything. Such is the tenor and scale of their hyperbolic rhetoric, here as elsewhere. But I am not sure that these dramatic proclamations are the most fruitful place to look for a substantive rendering of the imperative to write driving and structuring Kafka’s work. More relevant to my purposes is a much broader structural-figural accretion that is to be read in the relationship between such proclamations and their larger context, both in the texts where they appear, and in Kafka’s project as a whole: a project that involves an explicit effort at self-fashioning and transformation into a writer, a strange being that maintains a vexed and impossible relationship with the empirical existence of the author. This being-a-writer or writer-being (Schriftstellersein), of which so much has been made, serves here as the cipher for Kafka’s self-conscious striving for a certain literary transcendence—but it will also be a signpost on the way to the failure of these strivings, about which Kafka had a perfectly sober awareness, expressed very clearly in later writings. This striving follows a trajectory that passes through the consolidation of the writer-being who ecstatically wrote The Judgment and the texts that quickly followed, and then, further and downward, into a mode of writing at pains to burrow into its own earthbound conditions, closely tied to the conditions of a speaking voice. It is the trajectory of this movement that I will begin to trace in this first chapter. As in subsequent chapters, it will be a question of tracking the destitution of a sublime vocation—that is, its most authentic self-recognition in impoverishment, anxiety, and diminishment, along with the stubborn assertion of an inextinguishable insistence.

I can illustrate this trajectory more concretely by returning to the quote from the 1903 letter—which already contains in nuce its entire movement, and its comically lopsided structure—but this time placing it within the grain of its context, a figurally rich (if somewhat mixed and arbitrary) metaphorical context that wraps the gnomic utterance in various layers of figural and rhetorical complexity. Here is the entire paragraph in which it appears:

By the way, no writing’s been done for some time. It’s this way with me: God does not want me to write, but I, I must. So there’s an everlasting up and down; after all God is the stronger, and there’s more anguish in it than you can imagine. So many powers [Kräfte] within me are tied [gebunden] to a stake, which might possibly grow into a green tree. Released [freigemacht], they could be useful to me and the country. But nobody ever shook a millstone from around his neck by complaining, especially when he was fond of it [wenn man sie Lieb hat]. (LFr 10; Br, 21)²

It is important to foreground the fact that Kafka is addressing a peer with whom he has discussed the ongoing travails of writing and literary ambition, as well as the heroes they both share (more concrete avatars of the forbidding God evoked here), in relation to whom they of course fall woefully short. In this paragraph, taken as a whole, the gnomic utterance suddenly becomes much less thunderous; it even takes on a playful and self-belittling irony that renders derisive its theological pretentions: the obstacles preventing me from writing are so tremendous they may as well be likened to God Himself—hence the futile but endless up and down struggle. This sort of wishful grandiosity, defensively ironized, pervades these letters. Further, what looks like a cosmically defiant gesture appears also as mere self-beratement: the lament over not writing (whereas I must, categorically and despite all obstacles), a lament that will resound especially in the early diaries, gives a clear sense of the disciplinary nature of the guilt mentioned above, the fact of not measuring up or adhering to something like a regular schedule. I will here precipitously state a gnome of my own, which may serve as a rough principle of reading (and which will be drastically complicated when we return to it later): guilt in Kafka is derived—only in part but at a fundamental level—from a faulty and faltering relation to the banal everyday discipline required by writing in its highest aspirations. No less than the Law of God, it is the mundane law of writing as (a) practice that has been violated (no writing for some time), and in being violated, gives rise to this hyperbolic figure of divine struggle in the first place, a figure that then proliferates into a rapid series of disjointed images evoking up and down movement, bound captivity, release, and punishment (even a liking for punishment)—terms which, not incidentally, name the fundamental topographic and dramatic categories of Kafka’s first mature fiction. Thus from a breach in the counter-law of writing—I must!—emerges a dramatic fictive figure which, in distorted and exaggerated form, stages the assertion of this counter-law as inviolable (endless struggle with God). Put another way: I have broken the law (my law, that of writing’s must), but in fictively projecting this breach in writing, I may thereby remedy it. It is surely not indifferent to this dynamic that the figure itself (a struggle) suggests both punishment and defiance, and I will return to this important question below. For the moment, the essential point is this: Kafka’s fiction is generated in part from the elaboration of an autobiographically registered conflict concerning the necessity of writing itself.³ This conflict, with its eternal ups and downs, will put into play in Kafka’s work a powerful motif of elevation and descent, in close proximity with a guilt that has to do directly with forces within as they demand to be bodied forth, liberated (freigemacht) and externalized. As here, the imperative to write for Kafka will long be understood in terms of being bound (to a stake, by a millstone), and of finding release. In this welter of images, a strange ambiguity appears between the bonds of discipline, which make possible the writing that defies God, and the bonds (and burdens) of captivity, which is already figured as a kind of punishment, but also as the very condition for the work that is required.⁴ This dilemma will be crucial to Kafka: writing demands liberation, but of what and from what? Does the liberation of writing exonerate or inculpate? Does guilt arise from not writing (disciplinary breach) or rather from a writing that releases forces waged against the might and will of the Righteous Powers?⁵ Finally: is writing itself a crime or a punishment? A tightening of binds or a dangerous loosening? Or is it somehow simultaneously all of these together, the barely habitable place where they merge? One might note that elsewhere in the letters to Pollak, the space of writing is also figured instrumentally as a desk that physically tortures the writer as he writes, and depending on his writing.⁶ The disciplinary demands of writing are inflected with a juridical dimension that is already and immediately a form of punishment. And the sublime law of writing’s striving is directly inscribed on the suffering body without which it cannot be practiced.

This single example, then, has already sent us a considerable way down the interpretive path I would like to follow through Kafka’s work: by bringing the transcendent statement (God doesn’t want it, but I must) down into its textured elaboration, and by linking this statement with the precise figures through which it is further articulated, we can see Kafka performing the very operation that will open the way to his first mature fiction: a figural world born of an intensely anxious thinking about the extreme demands of writing, about not writing enough or well enough. By the same token, we see taking shape the schematic figures that will give graphic form to this fiction, especially with regard to the well-known structural features of judgment, guilt, punishment, and the perverse scenes of their enactment, which largely shape the theatrical narratives of the stories I will focus on.

The first major aim of the present chapter will be to demonstrate the ways in which Kafka undertook in his personal writings, especially these letters to Pollak and the early Diaries, to elaborate the metaphorical and narrative structures that would issue into his first mature successful fictions, beginning with The Judgment and including The Stoker, The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and The Trial, all written in succession within roughly a two-year period.⁷ Put another way, I will show how Kafka explicitly and deliberately undertook the former biographical writings in such a way as to derive and elaborate from them the narrative motifs, configurations, and even the driving impetus, of a fictional writing that did strive, after all, for a standalone perfection (and thus, at least in that sense, a kind of absoluteness). The first of these fictions, The Judgment, bears in its title the name of their central matrix and dominant mode. This story, which was written in the pages of notebooks that we now read under the title Diaries, culminates a movement that is already roughly sketched in the above example—with its emphasis on guilt and shortcoming, the externalization of intense but invisible inner forces, and a losing but determined up and down struggle with sublime powers—but with a crucial addition that is common to all of the stories Kafka wrote in the subsequent highly productive period (1912 to 1914), namely, a judgment scene. All of the major narratives written during this decisive period⁸ hinge around a parajudicial judgment in which the protagonist fails to defend himself because he is unable to manifest an inner conviction or reality, an a priori or categorical innocence, that is overwhelmed by the powerful social theatricality before and within which it must appear, and thus by the narrative’s absorption into outward appearances as such. The protagonists of these stories must plead a case for innocence before a hostile, aggressive, or at the very least highly skeptical judge; and the failure of their self-defense casts into doubt the very medium in which Kafka himself struggled to conjure them: language as the persuasive presentation of an otherwise occluded interiority. It also ends invariably in their condemnation and punishment, if not outright destruction; the inevitability of such a fate in these stories will be interrogated in its proper place.⁹ It is