Kafka’s Axe: An Exchange

I sent this to my friend Yael yesterday.

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.
–Franz Kafka, letter to a friend, circa 1904

Imagine, if Kafka were able to have absolute authority in a society like ours to proscribe the inessential books! The great Jewish moralistic totalitarian, forbidding those facile self-help books, predictable trash novels, lawn care manuals, celebrity memoirs, ephemeral best-sellers.

I am not a disciple of Kafka, yet. My reading is sloppy, half-hearted, here and there, I am a pathological dilettante, thinking I can touch and taste a little of everything, though my sense of “everything” is still so infinitesimal. I try to get my satisfaction via smatterings.

How seriously to take Kafka? If I took him seriously, it would mean a steady diet of books like… Chomsky’s. Yes, Chomsky, with his urgent, stern admonition from Turning the Tide, which I read twenty years ago: “The real victims of ‘America’s agony’ are millions of suffering people throughout much of the Third World. Our highly refined ideological institutions protect us from seeing their plight and our role in maintaining it, except sporadically. If we had the honesty and the moral courage, we would not let a day pass without hearing the cries of the victims. We would turn on the radio in the morning and listen to the voices of the people who escaped the massacres in Quiche’ province and the Guazapa mountains, and the daily press would carry front-page pictures of children dying of malnutrition and disease in the countries where order reigns and crops and beef and exported to the American market, with an explanation of why this is so. We would listen to the extensive and detailed record of terror and torture in our dependencies compiled by Amnesty International, Americas Watch, Survival International, and other human rights organizations. But we successfully insulate ourselves from the grim reality. By so doing, we sink to a level of moral depravity that has few counterparts in the modern world….”

Not a day pass, Noam? Must we listen to the victims every single day of the year, no vacation break from misery, rape, mass murder (Darfur), the grinding gears of globalization making mincemeat out of the flesh of those poor farmers in India? (Geez, these Jews won’t let up [Jeremiah, Jesus, Marx, Levinas, Chomsky...])

Then I think about the Germans, circa 1937, and even 1943. What were they doing? What were they reading? Did they meditate on any images (were there any in the German press?) of what was happening to the untermenschen? I remember erstwhile Catholic priest Philip Berrigan once sarcastically saying that the German Christians prided themselves during the Nazi years of having great liturgical reform. While the Holocaust was being envisioned and implemented, those Christians were having meaningful Masses. Dorothee Soelle has written: “In the end, all who did not put up resistance were implicated, entangled in the belief systems of ‘these’ Germans, lending them a hand and sharing in the profits. Among those who ‘went along,’ in the broadest sense of the words, were all who practiced the art of looking away, turning a deaf ear, and keeping silent. There has been much quarreling about collective guilt and responsibility, but my basic feeling is, rather, one of ineradicable shame – the shame of belonging to this people, speaking the language of the concentration camp guards, singing the songs that were also sung in the Hitler Youth and the Company of German Girls. That shame does not become superannuated; it must stay alive.”

It seems to me that Kafka’s normative sense of reading is similar to the liberation theologians’ insistence (shrill, urgent, unwilling to admit of excuse) that the life of the church has to be organized on responding to the death cries of the poor who are exploited by the world capitalist system (and all the variations of such exploitation that result in the dehumanization of women, non-whites, sexual minorities). Reading has to be in the service of this option, against death, on behalf of life. In liberation theology terms, Kafka’s maxim on reading could be seen this way, our reading should be a preferential option for those who are suffering oppression and should serve to kick us in the mud of reality, like a Zen Master does with his slacker students.

The First World retort to such summonses is often dismissal or derision: “There’s more to life than the poor. How can you reduce all of life to this one thing alone? What a kill-joy!” But perhaps such responses are attempts to get oneself off an ethical hook. Soelle did not want to get off the hook.

Of course, in the face of even the Holocaust, one should not be reading, should one? One should be spending one’s time and energy resisting and aiding the victims.

Doesn’t reading (of any texts) help us to “insulate ourselves from the grim reality” of the world?

Kafka would disagree, evidently. The truth is we are all sleep-walkers at one time or another in the course of our week. We are here, but not really, we are drifting off into the past or the future. And perhaps we read certain novels and poems, because they remind us of past loves that are no more or future affairs that we truly believe will make us happy. Buddhists emphasize staying in the present moment; America would be a gold mine for those teachers. We have made a national pastime out of distraction.

Yes, there are some texts, poems, plays, books that can wound, stab, hammer our skulls (as another translation of the above quotation from Kafka’s letter reads). So, we read in Kafka’s sense to wake up to our stature as moral beings, to face the truth of our reality. And act accordingly.

Who do I know who lives, i.e., reads, in a serious way like Kafka? I think A must, if only because he reads the international press and keeps abreast of all the horrors of torture and butchery and malfeasance in Iraq, Guantanamo, Afghanistan, and the threat against Iran currently. Perhaps A is a Kafkaesque figure, as I sometimes feel, ENOUGH ALREADY. Like, please, can’t you relax a little?

Kafka is A’s soul brother: They can’t relax (I have the same feeling about Chomsky). Why can’t they relax, or seem not to? Because they are willing to look at the harsh truth of life and our American responsibility for it.

You may remember, Yael, that I used the above Kafka quotation in the piece I dedicated to you two years ago (almost), that review of Shabtai’s poetry, J’Accuse. That Kafka quotation has been bothering me at least that long.

So the book I have in mind I am calling Kafka’s Axe. But, actually, the book will be Shimmel’s Axe.

***

Yael responded:

My dear Shimmelstoy,

Thank you for this offering. It carries a great and dangerous promise.

But are you really that blind and deaf, that you have not noticed yet that you have already wrote a Chmiel’s Axe book? Or have you not been listening? Hell, your existence on its own is an Axe. Have you not realized it yet? Did you not hear students tell you that you have ruin their lives in so many ways? Did you not hear me damn you so many times?

I am not trying to discourage. I just want you to be careful, be aware of your powers.

And, you know, I understand that Kafka’s paragraph differently. Anything can be an Axe. I read poetry and novels. Yes. I turn my back on the misery of the world, I ignore it. I rather read about a Jewish farmer girl and her three lovers in a Meir Shalev novel than read about the genocide of the world. But simple, little words about love, and memory and life and death can wound us plenty. In The Book of Mev, it was your (not Mev’s) personal story that left the greatest scar in me. I don’t really remember much of anything else. Truth wounds us. It does not need to be big, Teacher. It can be simple, and prosaic, and personal, and infinitesimal. As long as it makes us reexamine, re-understand, re-consider, and re-construct. As long as it makes us bleed…

Forgive me. I am more a sleep walker than I should be.
Forgive me. I must argue even when I agree.
Forgive me. I do not read well between lines.
Forgive me. I live in the moment.

Please keep writing.

Yael