Late in the evening of September 22, 1912, while his parents and sister were asleep in their own rooms, Franz Kafka, a 29-year-old insurance officer and writer, sat down, as he had done so many nights before, to write. This night would be different, however. When Kafka next got up from his small desk, after an all-night stint of writing, he had completed the story ‘The Judgment’, the story that would be Kafka’s watershed moment, the event of his life as a writer, or of his life tout court. Kafka himself recognized the significance of the event. Two days later, after reading the story aloud to friends (among whom were Max Brod), Kafka wrote in his diary that ‘The indubitability of the story was confirmed.’ Driving this point home, Reiner Stach, in his biography of Kafka, argues that the Kafka we associate with literature, the Kafkaesque world we have come to know, was born that night:
"Suddenly – without guide or precedent, it seemed – the Kafka cosmos was at hand, fully equipped with the ‘Kafkaesque’ inventory that now gives his work its distinctive character: the father figure who is both overpowering and dirty, the hollow rationality of the narrator, the juridical structures imposed on life, the dream logic of the plot, and last but not least, the flow of the story perpetually at odds with the hopes and expectations of the hero."
The case of Kafka’s watershed moment as a writer is important for it seems to me to shed light on an important debate in contemporary continental thought regarding the status and nature of events, which has become the subject of increased commentary in recent years in the wake of the English translation of Alain Badiou’s Being and Event (although the lineage of the terms of this debate can be traced back to Heidegger and Nietzsche). A blog post is no place to rehearse the vast literature on this subject, but there is a sharp contrast between Badiou’s understanding of the event and Kafka’s experience of his event-full September night that offers I think an important window upon the debate.
For Badiou events come out of the blue, or they mark breaks with the current context such that they cannot be placed. In his discussion of Haydn, for example, Badiou argues that while Haydn’s music has come to be historicized as integral to the development of the classical style of music, a development that began from within the Baroque tradition of the time, the Truth of the matter for Badiou (and he does mean Truth with a capital, Platonic ‘T’) is that this music could not be placed or situated within the Baroque tradition. As an event, Haydn’s music was the void of the Baroque situation, the Truth to which Haydn remained faithful and only later was it then historicized and reduced to being a natural and continuous development from the Baroque tradition. In itself the Truth is for Badiou the unnamable void that prompts the efforts to be faithful to it in one’s work, efforts that then come to be named within the situations where these efforts occur – named the classical style or Kafkaesque for example.
As for Kafka’s experience of the night he wrote ‘The Judgment’, there certainly was a sense of truth—the ‘indubitability of the story’ or what I would call, developing an earlier post, the haecceity or Idea of the story—that Kafka attempted to remain faithful to, and the efforts of which are the bulk of Kafka’s corpus. However, Kafka did not experience the efforts of that night as the futile attempt to name the unnamable void within the situation, the absence forever withdrawn from every effort to write the Truth; to the contrary, and as Kafka again put it in his diaries in the days after writing the story, he claimed that he discovered, as he put it, ‘How everything can be said, how for everything, for the strangest fancies, there waits a great fire in which they perish and rise up again.’ Kafka’s intuition, it seems to me, is that what was difficult for him as a writer was not the difficulty of saying what cannot be said, of naming the unnamable, but rather of actually saying, in a single telling of a story, everything. This is difficult for it is all too easy to slip into cliché, into well-worn tropes and turns of phrase, predictable plot lines, habits, etc.; and equally one risks slipping into the great fire of chaos by attempting to say everything, and thereby one ends up saying nothing. The line between saying everything and saying nothing is very thin, and the closer one gets to saying everything the closer they get to chaos.
I think David Foster Wallace is an excellent contemporary example of a writer who sought, as did Kafka (and as perhaps all great writers do), to say everything. In both Infinite Jest and in his posthumously published Pale King, Wallace’s writing verges on the chaotic but he manages, if only barely, to come as close as almost any writer ever has to acting on Kafka’s dictum to say everything, to write knowing that ‘everything can be said,’ and he did so without succumbing to the great fire. Sadly, perhaps, Wallace may have felt (wrongly if so in my opinion) that with the Pale King he was saying nothing rather than everything.
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