selfdivider

There is a reason why Koreans have not won the Nobel in literature yet - the Korean literary language translates rather poorly into English. Some of my favorite Korean stories and poems become pale and lifeless in their translated form. Even the beautifully spare poems by Ko Un, a poet who is perennially mentioned as one of the favorites to win the Nobel, become hollow, even a bit corny, when translated into English. A few months ago, I had a chance to talk to Mark Strand about Ko Un, whom he had met in Frankfurt, I believe. “Every word that comes out of the man’s mouth is poetry,” Strand said, “but I find his poems to be a bit slight.” After saying so, he immediately questioned the quality of the translation he’d read.

Anyways, I’m going away to my friend’s lake house in Woodstock until Sunday; the following is my own translation of one of Ko Un’s shorter poems. (See you next week.)

…

A Forest

It was left there.
Inside my mother’s wardrobe.
The old scent of blue naphthalin
Permeating her cherished mulberry silk;
It was borne with the wind headed there
And it was borne with the wind headed here.

I’d never stepped into or come out of that forest.

(Image: “Paradise 24″ by Thomas Struth)

Oh, the notion of Gesamtkunstwerk! Has it vanished by the way of extinct animals and New Coke Of course people would think of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. Maybe Mahler’s symphonies for still others. In literature Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine or Proust or Tolstoy. What about the Gesamtkunstwerk of our own heroic century, you ask? Does it still exist? Yes. The R&B crooner-cum-sex criminal R Kelly’s multi-part Trapped in the Closet music videos represent a work of art so total and complex, that it merits a map according to the New York Times:

Readers keen on serendipities and coincidences might note that the name of the girl who cheats on the R Kelly narrator in Chapter 9 of Trapped In the Closet is Bridget; Bridget was Charles Lamb’s guise for his real sister Mary, as noted in my previous post. Not that this convergence means anything. It seems that the only reason R Kelly chose the name Bridget is that it rhymes with the man who’s hiding in the closet, who is a midget… midget… midget… midget. Anyhow, it seems that Andrew Kuo, who mapped out R Kelly’s saga, is a blogger who loves to chart and graph all kinds of trivial pop phenomena in eye-popping, cute colors. Thank you, Andrew, thanks a lot.

This Sunday’s NY Times looks really good. It has a profile of Ang Lee’s upcoming Lust, Caution, based on Eileen Chang’s short story with interesting observations from James Schamus, who adapted the story into film script. James Schamus will most likely appear in our Blue Notebooks interviews in the upcoming year, discussing Lust, Caution and other works he collaborated on with Ang Lee. It should be a great interview, considering Schamus is equally at home talking about Kant’s late philosophy in Critique of Judgement or John Ashbery’s poetry as he is in talking about the more pragmatic craft of filmmaking. Anyways, in the NY Times article, it almost sounds as if Ang Lee and James Schamus are pining for the NC-17 rating for their steamy picture. I’ll keep you posted.

Also, Mary Gordon, the subject of our interview a few months ago, has written a memoir of her mother called Circling My Mother, which receives a reverential review here. Oh, and the long profile of Saramago in the Sunday Mag. And Michael Lewis on New Orleans and the odds of calculating disasters.

Charles Lamb was a writer who wrote highly idiosyncratic personal essays in the early 19th century as “Elia,” an adopted guise. He was a close friend of Coleridge, Wordsworth and Hazlitt, among others. The fact that he wrote about himself as a created persona might have been clinically natural for Lamb; in December of 1795, despondent over the end of a love affair with Ann Simmons, Lamb became convinced that he was a hero of a popular stage tragedy and ended up spending six weeks in a private madhouse in northern London. More infamously, his sister Mary suffered a much graver psychotic breakdown. While Charles was in the madhouse, Mary picked up a carving knife from the family dinner table and stabbed her mother in the heart.

Charles Lamb was a distinctive prose stylist who looked to the writers of previous centuries to model his sentence writing. As Elia, he wrote beautifully layered, long airborne sentences which owed a clear debt to the English essayists of the 17th century, namely, Robert Burton and Sir Thomas Browne. Yet it is a clear testament to the originality of Charles Lamb as a writer, that such a prose style seemed so uniquely suited to lending a voice to Elia, a character who is very much a light-hearted and often-cantankerous London bourgeois intellectual of the 19th century. Dickens professed Lamb’s deep influence on his own writing. Virginia Woolf wrote letters in which she fretted forlornly of not being able to write as well as Lamb. (For a deeper appraisal of Lamb’s life and work, everyone should read Lorin Stein’s perspicacious essay that was published in NYRB a few years ago.)

Lamb’s Essays of Elia might as well be one of the first autobiographical works that took on “modern subjectivity,” as Walter Pater suggested once. The following sentence is from Lamb’s essay, “Dream Children: A Reverie,” which is as dark and grief-stricken as it is lovely. The essay eulogizes Lamb’s real brother, John, who is referred to as James Elia in Essays of Elia. (His sister Mary appears as Bridget.) In “Dream Children,” Lamb - as Elia - daydreams about the imaginary children begotten from an imaginary marriage with Alice W (in real life, Ann Simmons). But this reverie turns ominous as the imaginary children keep receding until they are only “two mournful features seen in the uttermost distance.” And they pull off the shroud of authorial guises to reveal the real grief of the real person, Charles Lamb, mourning the death of his brother John (and not James Elias). I know of no other passages in literature where real life confronts fiction so starkly, with such a sudden, breathtaking force of melancholy.

and while I stood gazing, both the children gradually grew fainter to my view, receding, and still receding till nothing at last but two mournful features were seen in the uttermost distance, which, without speech, strangely impressed upon me the effects of speech; “We are not of Alice, nor of thee, nor are we children at all… We are nothing; less than nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have been, and must wait upon the tedious shores of Lethe millions of ages before we have existence, and a name” - and immediately awaking, I found myself quietly seated in my bachelor arm-chair, where I had fallen asleep, with the faithful Bridget unchanged by my side - but John L. (or James Elia) was gone for ever.

Last month, I walked into a Korean bookstore on 32nd Street to kill some time with my wife and my daughter. In the translated literature section, I found a lot of books written by Haruki Murakami, both fiction and essay, that are not yet translated into English. I found out from a blurb from one of those books, that Murakami has published 80 books in Japan, 50 of them translated into Korean. There was a short story collection called The Ghosts of Lexington. I didn’t have a chance to read the book, but on a skim, I recognized some stories that were collected or published otherwise in different U.S. magazines. But my favorite was a book called Haruki Murakami’s Whiskey Pilgrimage of Europe. Yes. The book is nothing more than Murakami going around Europe, drinking whiskey, talking about jazz, dispensing petite morsels of Murakami aphorisms. Give the man a Nobel, damn it. How can you not love an author whose literary instincts sometimes mimic, of all things, those of the Barefoot Contessa

(Once again, below: my translation of the interview conducted by Jin Young Lee, for GQ Korea)

…

Lee: After writing Norwegian Wood, which sold 6 million copies worldwide, what did you gain and what did you lose

Murakami: Well, I’m certain that Norwegian Wood is a well-written novel, since it’s a beautiful thing that so many people continue to love that story. Everybody likes love stories. I do, too. But Norwegian Wood doesn’t really reflect my literary style. That’s why I started to worry, since who knows when, whether people would think if Norwegian Wood is my best, representative work. Because that’s not true. Norwegian Wood is a traditional realist novel, but I don’t consider myself a realist writer. Norwegian Wood was a type of a challenge for me. I wanted to prove to myself that I can also write a realist novel.

L: Then which novels might we call “Haruki-style” novels?

M: Books like Kafka On the Shore and The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, which are progressively post-modern.

L: What do you wish to gain from writing novels that stand in direct opposition to realism

M: I want to guide the readers to the surreal world of imagination. As they read such a world conjured by me, I’d like them to feel that such a world is a part of their reality. I truly believe that within everyone’s heart, such a surreal world exists. I’d like people to look upon that surreal world and enjoy themselves.

L: Let’s say someone would like to get to know you and your work given a strict time constraint. Which books would you recommend

M: Mm. That’s a difficult question. As you know, I’ve been writing for 27 years. It’s a long time to be writing. The characteristics of my work vary according to each period - the first ten years, the next ten… in such blocks of time. If I must choose a few among my work, I’d say Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Norwegian Wood, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, and Kafka On the Shore. Because they are the works I’ve invested most energy into. I’ve never re-read those books, but I remember them down to every nook and cranny; I worked very hard on them. On average, I usually finish a short story in five to seven days, so I can’t retain my stories in my memory for too long.

L: I don’t know if you remember, but is Hear the Wind Sing really your first novel? How was your apprentice-writing before that book?

M: Yes. It was really my first novel.

L: Who was your first reader?

M: My wife. Even though she says she doesn’t remember (laughs). Then and now, I only seek the opinion of one person - my wife - before sending my manuscript to the publisher. She is an incredibly sharp critic, a person who knows how to really read. She gives me many great advices.

L: What novels of yours are her favorites?

M: After Dark and South of the Border, West of the Sun.

L: Even though South of the Border, West of the Sun treats sexual infidelity as one of the themes

M: That’s what I mean. I don’t understand why but she REALLY liked the novel. She treated me very kindly for a few days after reading the book, too, making delicious things for me every day.

Anne Carson’s latest book, Decreation, is obsessed with the notion of the Sublime, Antonioni and Monica Vitti, among other topics. Many of the essays and poems are not so good. Actually, at the prospect of being pilloried by Carson fanatics, I must say I found much of the book to be pretty bad. Maybe it’s the ambition of her project Carson uses terms like “sublimity” and “the sublime” pretty indiscriminately. The inherent problem lies in that she writes about Longinus’ notion of the sublime and Kant’s notion of it, and she doesn’t make much of a distinction between the two. In turn, a few of the pieces in Decreation are intriguing but fuzzy disasters that read like pensées written by some brilliant grad student from a humanity department in a college near you.

I don’t know why I’m being so caustic on this post! Because there are some delicious moments in Carson’s book. “Gnosticism VI” is perhaps one of my favorite poems I’ve read in the recent years (I’ll post on this poem later, maybe.) And her encapsulation of Antonioni’s L’Avventura seems to me to be a perfect evocation of the film:

L’Avventura: caught in the time of the island, scraping themselves back and forth over the rocks, men slant against the wind and her golden hair going horizontal in whips on the ecstatic sea, boats roar up, roar off, men stand gazing - and as for the scandal of our abandonment in a universe of “sudden trembling love”…

So on and so forth. Fantastic, no A universe of “sudden trembling love”… (I apologize for not keeping Carson’s line breaks, but I don’t know how to format line breaks on Wordpress!) I just thought to put the passage up since I’ve been reading too many mind-numbingly clerical summaries of L’Avventura, La Notte & L’Eclisse in the Antonioni obituaries everywhere. Carson’s description of certain moments and scenes from Antonioni’s films should be a good antidote for all of us.

And I realize I put up pictures of Monica Vitti when I should have posted Antonioni’s. It’s because I also know that I can never have space enough to write about my old Monica Vitti obsession. Besides, this statistical fact: although Antonioni is a beautiful man, seven out of ten people of reasonable level of sanity prefer looking at Monica Vitti to Antonioni, no matter their sexual orientation. I totally made that stat up because I’m insane.

Schumann’s lied “In der Nacht” from Spanische Liederbuch has been on Incessant Repeat in my stereo, especially while writing. The luminous version I listen to is sung by De Gaetani & Guinn, accompanied by pianist Gilbert Kalish, from their Schumann Duets album, which I think is out of print. (Stay away from the live Schwartzkopf version, accompanied by Gerald Moore, as great as the performers are: yuck.) It was written in 1849, which was a phenomenally productive year for Schumann (I think he finished forty works). In five years, as most of you know already, he’d throw himself into the Rhine, only to be rescued by some fishermen. In 1856, he died in an asylum near Bonn, the voices in his head telling him that he’s sailing on the arctic seas, commanding him to make lists of towns and rivers. All of this would be irrelevant to Schumann’s music, of course, if a lot of his music didn’t sound as if it was channeled by a composer hearing voices in his head.

But “In der Nacht” is different. Its melancholy is lucid despite its nocturnal dreaminess. The words are based on an anonymous Spanish poem translated by the lyric poet Emanuel von Geibel, a slight material for a song, if you ask me. All of its thirty words:

Alle gingen, Herz, zur Ruh, alle schlafen, nur nicht du. Denn der hoffnungslose Kummer scheucht von deinem Bett den Schlummer, und dein Sinnen schweift in stummer Sorge seiner Liebe zu seiner Liebe zu.

(All have gone to their rest, heart, all are sleeping except you. Because hopeless care frightens away slumber from your bed, and your thoughts wander in silent sorrow to their love.)

It is breathtaking what Schumann does with those few words; the song’s a wonder of emotional compression and economy. It begins with a simple, seemingly aimless piano prelude that suggests - in its somnolent brevity - a sleepless night of walking, maybe in a garden or a path. Then a woman’s voice enters, singing the words. And what can I say It’s the music of insomniac longing of the best kind, its sorrow gently plaintive, but always clear-eyed.

Then comes a moment in the song which is purely Schumann at his genius best. Just when you think the woman’s song is about to end, her lover’s voice enters, echoing the exact same words she has said. Two voices twine, singing about the same longing separately, together. Just as you think that you are hearing the woman’s soliloquy, the song opens up a different perspective, and lets you know that it’s actually a dialogue between two lovers, or, at least, their consonant thoughts reverberating in darkness. It has a similar effect as a long passage in W.G. Sebald’s work might - when in the midst of reading a monologue by a character, say, Max Ferber in The Emigrants, a reader realizes that the monologue is actually nested within a dialogue between Ferber and the Sebald narrator.

Every time I finish listening to Schumann’s “In der Nacht,” my mind hearkens back to the first half of the song, when the woman is singing alone. I think about her lover’s patient silence as he watches her speak, his gaze across the night’s darkness, its narcotic span. How could I have missed him I think to myself, and let the song repeat yet again.

(Image: Jeff Wall’s adaptation of a scene from Yukio Mishima’s Spring Snow)

I thought that occasional free lunches I got at some Columbia University functions were great. Better still were those sadly infrequent events which featured open bars (meaning cheap reds and whites, a few Miller Lites… Heinekens or Coronas when the stars are aligned). But hey, mama said knock you out: The Miller Theater is hosting a series of 18 concerts, FREE, held at the Philosophy Hall, through which the youthful Pacifica Quartet will be performing all of Beethoven’s quartets. Best of all, each concert is an hour-long affair held during lunchtime (12:30-1:30). Which means a Grosse Fuge before your Microecon exam! I will be going to all of them, and probably will be writing up each performance, despite my earlier pledge not to do any more concert reviews (because I am a liar). So see you there (bring a bottle).

The Pacifica will be performing one quartet per concert, from September to October, and from February to March. I like the concept, even the leisurely span of it. And one can’t really expect to squeeze more than one quartet into a lunch hour in an echo-y lounge of the Philosophy Hall which is sure to reek of greasy pizza and coffee, right It’s perfect. My only gripe is that the performances of the late quartets will be spread out over those long months. I don’t know about you, but I like to experience the last quartets as a suite. But did I mention the concerts were free

The rest of the Miller Theater Season looks really solid, too, even if they are not free. They are highlighting Esa Pekka Salonen (October 5) in their frequently great “Composer Portraits” series, although I don’t see that Salonen is making an appearance. But the exceptional Peter Lieberson will be present for an on-stage discussion following the February program; let’s just hope that Columbia won’t find a way to involve Robert Thurman into the discussion. (Those of you who are unfamiliar with Lieberson’s music, you can read a brief profile of him written by the always excellent Alex Ross here, and of his wife, the phenomenal - and much missed - Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, and Peter Lieberson’s Neruda Songs which were dedicated to her, here.) I’m sure I’ll also be going to the 10/27 Matthew Shipp concert and the 12/1 Christian McBride show.

Kudos to the Miller Theater staff for putting this season together.

I’ve never spent $17 on a magazine except once: the January 2007 issue of GQ Korea. I was in a Korean bookstore in Los Angeles, looking for Yi Sang’s fiction (I’ll talk about Yi Sang in detail later, such a weird, beautiful writer) when I saw the magazine, with Matt Damon on the cover. Anyways, I bought the magazine because it had a 10-pp interview with the elusive Haruki Murakami, who shuns interviews in general. Perhaps the fact that the interviewer was not a professional literary critic, but a journalism student at University of Hawaii, made Murakami warm up to her - I’ve never read any other Murakami interview in which he is as relaxed as he is in the GQ Korea interview. The interviewer’s name is Jin Young Lee, and I have no idea how she tracked Murakami down in Hawaii. I’ll be posting segments from her interview in three parts or so, in my hasty and imperfect translation. Lee interviewed him twice, once on 10/10/06, and on another occasion on 11/30/06, when Murakami was tired and grumpy, having returned from receiving the prestigious Franz Kafka Prize for Literature in Prague. According to her brief intro to the interview, Murakami is into watching Lost and listening to Billie Holiday.

…

Lee: It’s not your first time in Hawaii, right I’ve imagined that you’ve certainly been here before, from reading your sensitive and accurate description of Hawaii in Dance Dance Dance.

Murakami: The first time I came here was 20 years ago, and I even have a few friends here now, as I’ve visited quite often. Among the Hawaiian Islands, my favorite is Kauai. I like Kauai so much that I’ve bought a house here. It’s quiet and peaceful in Kauai; here, I can concentrate well on any writing project. Three or four years ago, I wrote half of Kafka On the Shore while I stayed here for three months. The other half, I wrote in Tokyo, in another three months.

L: Do you have a specific plan for your stay in Hawaii this time around Perhaps another novel

M: I’d like to rest a little bit before beginning on a novel in December but I don’t have a specific plan for it yet. I always start a novel from a state of tabula rasa. If I think to myself, “I have to write something in such a way,” it becomes burdensome. All I need is the first scene. But such a scene has to be incredibly concrete, alive, and definite. I don’t plan ahead for characters or story, but I become confident once I have that first indelible scene, that I can finish the novel to its conclusion.

L: Every character from your novels has a distinctive individuality. How can you create such unique characters without thinking of the story’s plot or its conclusion?

M: I don’t create my characters. Instead, I like to observe people. In my head, I have what you might call a “Character Drawer,” where I keep the essential images of the people I’ve observed. A person is a mystery. If I could, I’d like to follow a person to his or her house, to observe. What kinds of books would she read, what does she wear, with whom does she converse? In such a way, when one character becomes complete, I keep such a character in the “Character Drawer” in my head, and I take the character out whenever I need to. So when I need a character for my novel, I know exactly which drawer to open.

L: You wrote in an essay once that you thought the age 40 might be a critical juncture in anyone’s life. That such a belief was why you wanted to write a work that you knew you couldn’t attempt after the age of 40.

M: I remember that. I think Norwegian Wood was such a book, as I wrote it when I was 38.

L: Given that it was a novel that was most widely read even among your books, critical discussion of Norwegian Wood still hasn’t abated in Japan. I’m thinking, especially, of the many criticisms that were levied against you for peculiar kinds of sex scenes which could not be commonly found in mainstream Japanese literature. Critics accuse you of writing such sex scenes with a calculated intent to be sensationalistic on your part, to pique the readers’ interests.

M: The funny thing is, before I wrote Norwegian Wood, the same critics attacked me for not depicting sex or death in my work. It was one of the reasons why I took it as a challenge to treat sex and mortality as themes in Norwegian Wood.

L: Do you always set such challenges or goals for yourself when beginning a novel

M: It’s the same way with any novel. After I described a skinning of a character in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I received numerous phone calls from my readers. They all asked in complaint - “Why! Why! Why! For what reason did you write such a repulsive thing, Haruki-san” The reason was the same for me: it was a challenge to write something violent and cruel in lively detail. Call it a responsibility one throws upon oneself. I guess it’s like exercising. This month, it’s the right biceps, next month, the thighs, the next come the shoulders. Like so.

L: When I think of the sex scenes in South of the Border, West of the Sun or in After Dark, it seems to me as though you’ve completely mastered depicting sex with words. No doubt about it.

M: Ha-ha. Is that so Many readers assume that I enjoy writing such sexual scenes, but that’s not true at all. When I’m writing such a scene, I’m so embarrassed and ashamed that I don’t know what to do with myself. But each time, I say to myself: Haruki, this is your duty! You must not stop!

I’d say most of the phenomena in life require some explanation in order for their mysterious impacts to be fully understood or felt. Like why Baltimoreans pour a bushel of Old Bay on already-salty steamed crabs. Or how Britney without K-Fed became even creepier than Britney circa the Federline era. But there are still a blessed, few things left in our experiential world whose powers we just get, bada-bing, a priori. For instance: orgasm. Or: this following sentence from Distant Star by the incomparable Roberto Bolano -

He moved to France where he scraped together a living teaching Spanish and English, and translating for small presses, mainly books by eccentric, early twentieth-century Latin American writers with a bent for fantasy or pornography, or both, as in the case of Pedro Pereda, an obscure novelist from Valparaiso, the author of a startling story in which a woman finds vaginas and anuses growing, or rather opening, all over her anatomy, to the understandable horror of her friends and family (the story is set in the ’20s, but I don’t suppose it would have been any less shocking in the ’70s or the ’90s), and who ends up confined to a brothel for miners in northern Chile, where she remains, shut up in a room without windows, until in the end she becomes a great amorphous, uncontrollable in-and-out, finishes off the old pimp who runs the brothel along with the rest of the whores and the terrified clients, goes out onto the patio, and sets off into the desert (walking or flying, Pereda doesn’t say), finally disappearing into thin air.

Robert Walser’s novel, The Assistant, translated by Susan Bernofsky, has been recently published after decades of neglect by the good people at New Directions. The unlikely amount of press he’s been getting should be at least one more heartening sign for the state of literature. For those who have not read him yet, he is a Swiss writer best known for his slim novel, Jakob von Gunten, and beguiling short-shorts that are elegantly simple and maddeningly elliptical at once.

Walser was perhaps one of the only great writers to truly disdain literary “greatness.” Many of the recent essays concerning Walser begin with a quote from Jakob von Gunten - “To be small and to stay small” - to sum up the writer’s personal and aesthetic credo. Yet the quote is misleading, as it conjures up a sense of pastoral contentedness rather than the sense of the negative kind of “smallness” that Walser’s art conveyed. There is a disruptive element in his writing which comes from a force that is more disturbing and radical: the self-destructive desire to vanish completely from society. From “Helbling’s Story” -

I ought really to be quite alone in the world, me, Helbling, and not a single living being besides me. No sun, no culture, me, naked on a high rock, no storms, not even a wave, no water, no wind, no streets, no banks, no money, no time, and no breath. Then, at least, I should not be afraid any more.

It is a well-known fact that Robert Walser spent the last decades of his life in a mental institution. And that, on the Christmas of 1956, some kids in a town called Herisau found his frozen body in a field thickly crusted with snow.

Benjamin Kunkel, in a recent New Yorker essay, makes a tantalizing connection between Walser and Kafka. He notes that in Walser’s epistolary story, “Job Application” (which reads like a wry progenitor of George Saunders’ send-ups of bureaucratic systems), the applicant Wenzel, who is a proxy for Walser, claims that he is, “to put it frankly, a Chinese.” Kunkel points out that Kafka, in one of his letters, had also made the same curious declaration in one of his letters: “Indeed I am a Chinese.” Kunkel claims that both Kafka and Walser were attracted to the notion of being “infinitely small” (Kafka) in a “human traffic… like an ocean” (Walser). “For both writers,” writes Kunkel, “smallness implied a drastic aversion to power, the exercise of it as well as submission to it.”

Kunkel makes an inspired point, but his point starts to track subtly (but crucially) off-target. He correctly notes that both Kafka and Walser admired the Chinese for their appreciation of modesty and smallness. But in interpreting this Chinese metaphor, Kunkel takes Wenzel’s statement from the story “Job Application” - everything small and modest is pleasing - at a crudely simplistic face value. Kunkel himself mentions that in “Job Application,” Walser adroitly switches back and forth from sweetness to sarcasm, and vice versa, but even after mentioning this, Kunkel completely fails to register the ambiguity and sarcasm inherent in Wenzel’s voice. Without hesitation, Kunkel literally concludes that Walser’s credo (and in extension, Kafka’s) is also: everything small and modest is pleasing. Through this critical misreading, the more subversive and consequential implication in Kafka and Walser’s Chinese metaphor is wholly lost - that being infinitely small provides a means by which one can achieve a state of restive invisibility. This subtext is, perhaps, the direct opposite of Kunkel’s literal interpretation of “everything small is pleasing,” and closer in principle to Kafka and Walser’s aesthetic concerns.

In the story “The Great Wall of China,” Kafka retells a Chinese legend to an unnamed “you.” He says that the dying Emperor has sent “you” a message via a messenger. In a gesture that mirrors K.’s oral recitation of a message to Barnabas that is to be relayed to the Castle (in fact, the short legend seems like The Castle condensed, reincarnated into an enigmatic parable), the dying king whispers his message into his messenger’s ear. Being a Kafka tale, of course, the messenger is mired in the infinite folds of the palace’s chambers and courtyards; he will never deliver the message. Thousands of years would pass. “But,” Kafka writes, “you sit at your window and dream [the message] to yourself when evening comes.”

Walter Benjamin tells us that it is not difficult to intuit that the unnamed “you” in the story is Kafka himself. And that Kafka has done everything in his power to make himself unknowable by making himself small. But unlike Kunkel, Benjamin recognizes that Kafka’s smallness is not a contented smallness of a pleasing kind, but a reductive maneuver by which a writer can vanish, become invisible:

It is impossible to overlook the fact that [Kafka] stands at the center of his novels, but what happens to him there is designed to reduce to insignificance the person who experiences it, to render him invisible by concealing him at the heart of banality. And the cipher K., which designates the protagonist of his novel The Castle… is certainly not enough to enable us to recognize the person who has disappeared. The most we can do is weave a legend around this man Kafka.

In an essay discussing Adorno’s book about Kierkegaard’s aesthetic philosophy, Benjamin crystallizes the “Chinese” metaphor even further:

[Adorno] discerns the ultimate statement of [Kierkegaard’s] philosophy in the image of (a painter’s) vanishing in a picture (painted by himself) - an image borrowed from the tradition of Chinese folktales. The self is “something vanishing that is rescued by a process of reduction.” This entry into and dissolution in the image is not redemption but consolation - the consolation whose source is the imagination.

Such an aesthetic sensibility belongs to Kafka, also; after all, the original title of the novel Amerika is Der Verschollene - The Man Who Disappeared. It is well-documented that Kafka made his fondness for Walser’s The Assistant known to Max Brod, and often read aloud Walser’s shorter pieces to him. He must have sensed a kindred spirit in the older writer, who was quixotically persistent about striving toward the “infinite smallness” so that he might notice the natural world unmediated, with more plenitude of feeling. Walser writes near the end of Jakob von Gunten:

And if I am smashed to pieces and go to ruin, what is being smashed and ruined A zero. The individual me is only a zero. But now I’ll throw away my pen! Away with the life of thought!… I just want to see if one can live and breathe and be in the wilderness too, willing good things and doing them, and sleeping and dreaming at night.

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