Kafka's Confession

Fragment 10

“What I have played at, will now really take place.” (Was ich gespielt habe, wird wirklich geschehn.”) Thus wrote Kafka in a remarkable letter to Max Brod, dated July 5th, 1922, in which he reflected on his own death. “My whole life I have been dying, and now I will really die.” (Mein leben lang bin ich gestorben und nun werde ich wirklich sterben.”) Kafka knew he was dying, but then writing had always been a way of burying himself alive, choosing literature instead of life. As he put it, “I have remained clay, I have not used my spark to make fire, but to illuminate my own corpse.” (“ich bin Lehm geblieben, den Funken habe ich nicht zum Feuer gemacht, sondern nur zur Illuminierung meines Leichnams benutzt.”) This is the true wager of the writer-cum-philosopher, and yet, as Kafka knew all too well, one which always betrays a hint of vanity, a desire to enter into a Faustian pact. (“Writing is a sweet reward. For What? The Devil’s service”/“Das Schreiben ist ein süßer Lohn. Wofür? (…) Für Teufelsdienst) The writer relinquishes an ordinary life in pursuit of an extraordinary one: a life lived on the margins, belonging to no-one, least of all themselves, and yet with the promise of being more alive, more attuned, to the world than anyone else. As Kafka put it, “my life was sweeter than that of others, my death will be thus the more dreadful” (“Mein Leben war süßer als dass der Andern, mein Tod wird um so schrecklicher sein.”). Kafka’s letter is therefore also a tacit confession, a certain kind of guilt which resembles fear. Had he wasted his life, or had he lived the only life worth living? (Reue/Guilt -Angst/Fear, “jetzt wollen sich mir die Zwei nicht recht sondern”/“Now I cannot distinguish the two”). Kafka’s confession was that he had secretly wrung more pleasure out of his abnegation than any ordinary life could have ever redeemed. This unleashing of his ‘unnatural’ nature (diese Entfesselung von Natur) was therefore Kafka’s true wager: if writing could save him from life, then could it also save him from death? Life as the work of a body which becomes a body of work. In the end, Kafka admitted that this was the only way he had known how to live. “Vielleicht gibt es auch ein anderes Schreiben. Ich kenne nur dieses.”/ “Maybe there is another way to write. But this is the only way I know.”