Re-reading Kafka's Lost Writings
You can't get ye flask...
The Solenoid Notebooks is a series of letters reporting on the capacious field of literary and bibliographical references within Cărtărescu’s big book, translated by Sean Cotter.
Solenoid is a massive, ambitious novel that, in addition to spinning a long conspiratorial narrative, kind of summarizes the last century of modernist aesthetics and art in Europe and their relationship with scientific and mathematical knowledge. We’ll try to elucidate the many literary and historical threads woven into this meganovel, one book at a time.
The previous letter in this sequence, on De Chirico’s Hebdomeros, stopped short in the postscript section. It merely mentioned the title’s reference in the Cărtărescu.
There were indeed some extenuating circumstances that meant the piece had to run as it was. But yours truly also admits that it was hard to discuss that book’s consonance without also getting a letter on Kafka on the board.
There is a certain atmosphere created by the built environments described by both authors, be it the twilit piazzas of De Chirico, or the hyper-dimensional architecture that we’ll see in the Kafka.
Interiors were important for De Chirico as well. The prosperous bourgeois salons are museum-like in their holdings.
These elements all influence the core structure of Solenoid. As you read this novel, a core cycle emerges where we shift from mundane, everyday experience in the dilapidated Bucharest of the 80s, into almost the opposite: pristine, massive dream interiors. The feeling truly is not unlike an old-school adventure game.
And these cyclopean marble structures also hold strange exhibits, like monsters and giant children. These surreal palaces are extremely tantalizing, but there is also something ossified about this reality. But this prelude’s too long!
On with the book report:
Kafka laid down the blueprints for the modern fiction that came after him (and certainly for the kinds of stories I’ve managed to get published).
The Shocken editions of The Complete Stories and Diaries should have pride of place on every serious reader’s shelf.
The diaries in particular are inspiring as scrapbooks of inner experience, where story drafts and dream transcriptions mingle with more conventional reports about his private life and social commentary.
It has been known (and it’s easy to suspect as you read it) that Max Brod, Kafka’s friend and de facto literary executor, had a liberal editorial hand when it came to presenting Kafka’s notes and drafts. He made Kafka more of a Gloomy Gus and a Zionist than he likely actually was.
And, worse, Brod deleted all of Kafka’s erotica.
Due in part to this controlled presentation, Kafka has been established, at least among the underground corners of the literary world, as a kind of Jewish neomystic, enemy of rational thought, despiser of all things social and political.
But the diaries show that Kafka was attentive to world affairs, especially as WWI got underway, and his most cherished books were biographies of Herzen and Kropotkin. He even drafted what reads like an early scene in a war novel. (The Lost Writings also has a short story about soldiers defending a farmstead for an unknown reason.)
The Lost Writings is a little clothbound selection of fragments that mostly come from the second volume of Kafka’s posthumous writings, from the German publisher S. Fischer Verlag.
It has been a fine read, both the first time and now. Particularly interesting for us are some discreet but extended moments where Kafka employs the second-person. In the following fragment, it’s as if Kafka throws the reader into an oppressively narrow subjectivity; it’s so rainy outside that everything has become invisible.
A rainy day. You are standing over the sheen of a puddle. Not tired, not sad, not reflective, just standing there in all your earthly mass, waiting for someone. You hear a voice whose mere sound, without words, brings a smile to your face.
One passage that had stood out beyond everything else on the first reading was this moment in which a narrator finds himself in some sort of non-Euclidean compound. These lines fully contain that adventure game vibe. (The first-person narrator uses the generic second-person to describe this experience):
You entered the outer courtyard, and from there two arches roughly ten yards apart led into a second courtyard, you passed through an archway, and then, far from being, as expected, in a further large expanse, you found yourself in a dark little space with walls reaching up into the heavens, it was only way up that you same some illuminated balconies. So you thought you had taken a wrong turn and wanted to return to the first courtyard, and chanced not to go back through the arch you had entered but by the one next to it. Only to find that you weren’t in the original courtyard at all, but in a different one, much larger, full of music and noise, and the lowing and bleating of animals. You had made a mistake, so you went back into the dark little courtyard, and you had to ask for directions through a whole series of other courtyards before you were back in the original courtyard, which it had taken you just a few steps to leave.
This kind of literary experience is almost akin to playing a text-based adventure game or dungeon crawler. Beyond the Choose Your Own Adventure books, the only other writer I know of who explored this technical avenue in the 20th century was the science fiction author Fredric Brown—check out his creepy story from 1960 called “The House.”
Some of these pieces feature Kafka’s strange sort of anthropomorphism, with animals who seem to do human activities, as can be seen in the three opening lines below. The third example with the mouse was particularly striking, as if it could have been the beginning of a detective story, and/or an alternate beginning for Kafka’s story “Josephine the Singer” (which Roberto Bolaño riffed on in a story called “Police Rat”).
“Remarkable” said the dog, passing his hand over his brow.
It is Isabella the old dapple-gray horse, I hadn’t recognized her in the crowd, she’s a lady now, the last time we met was in a charity fete in a garden.
When one night the small mouse that in the mouse world was loved as no other came under the blade and with a scream gave up her life for a piece of bacon, all the mice in their holes all around were taken by a trembling and shaking …
These fragments lead into a couple of longer pieces featuring Red Peter, the protagonist of Kafka’s story “Report to an Academy.” Red Peter is an ape (or chimpanzee) in captivity who has cultivated himself into a modern European intellectual. He becomes quite the celebrity.
“Sometimes I feel such an antipathy to humans that I am close to vomiting,” Red Peter says to an interviewer. “And it’s not so much the smell of humans that disgusts me as the human smell I have taken on myself, and that is mingled with the smell of my old homeland. Here, smell it yourself! On my chest! Dig your nose deeper into my pelt! Deeper, I tell you.”
Hopefully it’s not just fortuitous that these fragments were arranged alongside other pieces musing about the mysteries of history, such as why reports of the Seven Wonders of the World come with only a rumor of the Eighth.
Another fragment has an Arab salesman pitching his tourism services: “While these competitors … show their clients the seven wonders of the world, our firm shows the eighth.”
Say, should Kafka be credited as the creator of King Kong?
Obviously Kafka is pretty foundational to the multifaceted intellectual project unfolding within Solenoid.
The book’s second epigraph comes from his Diaries:
A fragment of his eye socket was removed. The sun and everyone could see inside. It angered him and distracted him from his work; he was furious that he in particular could not see this marvel.
The Diaries is “the book I hold dearest,” the narrator says.
But the most substantial reference comes in Chapter 20, where the narrator quotes a brief fragment from the posthumous writings—the Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragments mentioned earlier—which wasn’t included in the New Directions selection:
The master of dreams, the great Issachar, sat in front of the mirror, his spine against its surface, his head hanging far back, sunk deep into the mirror. Then Hermana appeared, master of the twilight, and she melted into Issachar’s chest, until she completely disappeared.
The narrator riffs on this fragment, considering it one of Kafka’s greatest writings precisely due to its obscurity. The narrator of Solenoid is not writing a novel; he views himself as someone who was “kicked out of literature.” (There’s a lot of business about alternate worlds emerging from the quantum wave function, and how these outcomes affected a certain author’s literary career.)
These spare lines by Kafka are like a counterbalance to the oceans of novels that “sink back into the useless void of literature.”
Fueled by the resentment of failure and deprivation, the author of the Solenoid notebooks drives toward “unartistic and unliterary” books, and toward mystical thinking.
After some amusing reflections on literature, the narrator reports that “Last night I read Kafka until one in the morning, stopping at the fragment with Issachar and Hermana.” What follows is one of the seemingly imperceptible pivots into marvelous, surreal phenomena, which the narrator calls “anomalies.”
I couldn’t go any further. I don’t think a truer thing has ever been written in the world. Master of dreams, master of twilight. Issachar losing himself in the mirror, Hermana melting into Issachar’s chest like it was another mirror, flesh and blood that she infests with melancholy. I placed the book face-down on the bed and walked to the mirror. I stared the mirror the rest of night. From the start, I realized I should be naked, like Issachar, like Hermana. I quickly removed my clothes and was shocked to see that in the mirror, I was a woman. I had golden hair that lit up the entire bedroom, I had slightly saggy, pearshaped breasts. In the room I was Issachar, in the mirror I was Hermana, my sister hidden by the all-too powerful light of reality. “That’s why,” I said to myself, looking into the eyes of the woman with my features, wrapped in the spiderweb of her hair, “that’s why the master of dreams sank his head so deeply into the mirror: there he could see Hermana, who had melted into his chest.” Because Hermana is always on the other side of the mirror, she is, in fact, the other side, the parallel world in which Issachar is a woman.