Approaching Disappearance. Anne McConnell

tells us that “what answers the call of literary reading is not a door falling open or becoming transparent or even getting a bit thinner. It is, rather, a ruder stone, better sealed, a crushing weight, an immense avalanche that causes earth and sky to shudder” (195). Even though the reader calls forth the work, Blanchot shifts our attention from what seems to be resurrected to the “ruder stone” that refuses the reader’s call and power to make appear. The apocalyptic language of Blanchot’s description suggests that the stone marks an extreme limit—the end of everything—and that the dead Lazarus lies beyond, and in excess of, this end. In this way, the reader’s relation to the work does not differ from that of the writer; both confront the refusal of the work, even if the reader’s interpretive efforts might give the appearance of bringing the mysteries of the book to life. John Gregg explains, “Thus the noli me legere which Blanchot consistently invokes to describe writers’ incapability of authoritatively reading their own works, actually applies to all readers. No one can read the work. It is the book that lends itself to understanding, and it can be read by both author and reader.”²¹ Like the writer, the reader does not have the power to make the work appear; both can approach the book, but the work always escapes the grasp of this approach. For this reason, the lightness, carelessness, and anonymity of the reader’s process become the essential aspect of his or her relation to the work, in the sense that these characteristics contrast a sort of reading that would seek to impose an authoritative interpretation. It must be added, though, that the interpretive efforts of a reader confront the refusal of the work, and therefore affirm the disappearance of the work and constitute the reader’s only relation to the work. Again, Blanchot keeps us from being able absolutely to distinguish “good” reading from “bad” reading, ability from inability, calling forth from letting be. In this particular case, the calling forth of the book into the light of day, although it makes of reading an act of power, also affirms the disappearance of the work. Blanchot writes, “Disappearance, even when it is disguised as useful presence, belongs to the work’s essence” (206). Reading thus parallels the gaze of Orpheus, which paradoxically remains faithful to the work by betraying it.

      Toward the end of The Space of Literature, Blanchot returns to a reflection on ends, on the final moment where the world’s truth appears through the labor of man and the process of history:

      When all has been said, when the world comes into its own as the truth of the whole, when history wants to culminate in the conclusion of discourse—when the work has nothing more to say and disappears—it is then that it tends to become the language of the work. In the work that has disappeared the work wants to speak, and the experience of the work becomes the search for its essence, the affirmation of art, concern for the origin. (232)

      In the chapters that follow, I will explore the way that several short fictions reflect the language of the disappeared work—a language that doesn’t have the ability to begin, or appear, or speak. Writer and reader communicate with this unspeakable language and face the threat of their own disappearance at the point that they turn over the power to bring their work forward into the light of day. All of the fictions address a space where, in one way or another, nothing can be done and nothing can be made to appear. In this way, they explore the dynamics of disappearance and the way that this movement of infinite recession characterizes the literary work.

       Chapter 2: Franz Kafka and the Disappearance of the Writer

      One of the tricky questions that confronts us when reading the narratives of Franz Kafka concerns the difficulty of making any sort of assertion about meanings, allegorical implications, or the act of interpretation in general. It seems too easy to find oneself in the trap of suggesting an underlying truth or transcendent principle to guide our reading; critics such as Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze have famously and correctly exposed the limitations of such readings. And yet a limited approach feels difficult to escape. Perhaps the temptation to “read for meaning”—insofar as that act threatens to be dangerously reductive, if unavoidable—begins with the sense that Kafka often tells stories about the search for meaning and the process of navigating the branching possibilities of our experience in and understanding of the world. Moreover, perhaps our arrival at interpretive conclusions participates in that process and affirms the inescapability of attempting to read the world in an empowered way, even if we are always missing the point. That issue marks a critical intersection of the writing of Kafka, the writing about Kafka, and, connecting back to the framework of this particular study, the writing of Blanchot. Kafka emerges as one of the central figures in Blanchot’s critical texts, and the way that Blanchot deals with Kafka’s writing reflects the various difficulties that arise when responding to his work. In The Space of Literature, Blanchot largely focuses on Kafka’s Diaries as a means of discussing the experience of writing and the disappearance of the writer in this solitary experience. Before exploring the question of the writer’s disappearance, and in particular the way that this disappearance takes shape in Kafka’s story “The Burrow,” it is necessary to address issues of reading and interpretation that arise when suggesting metaliterary connections between Kafka’s narrator and the figure of the writer.

      In Benjamin’s essay “Some Reflections on Kafka,” he notes the way critics have heavily focused on Kafka’s personal writings as a means for interpreting his fictions—“to the neglect of his real works.”²² Benjamin’s comments point to the tendency to search for and supposedly locate the “key” to Kafka’s narratives, thereby reducing the labyrinthine nature of the texts to a single, navigable path. He tells us that “both the psychoanalytical and theological interpretations equally miss the central points [of Kafka’s works]” and goes on to explore the way that those works evoke a “prehistoric world” that lies underneath, before, and beyond their simultaneously familiar and foreign textual environments (23, 27). In effect, Benjamin argues that efforts to illuminate the meaning of Kafka’s narratives through, for example, the Freudian lens of his troubled relationship with his father, defy the relation to the dark and the unknown—a relation that remains central and must be maintained in the experience of Kafka’s work. In Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Deleuze and Guattari proceed in a similar vein, rejecting uniquely content-oriented analyses that drastically miss the proliferating character of the narrative and linguistic processes at play in Kafka’s work. They begin their study:

      How can we enter into Kafka’s work? This work is a rhizome, a burrow. The castle has multiple entrances whose rules of usage and whose locations aren’t very well known. The hotel in Amerika has innumerable main doors and side doors that innumerable main guards watch over; it even has entrances and exits without doors. Yet it might seem that the burrow in the story of that name has only one entrance; the most the animal can do is dream of a second entrance that would serve only as surveillance. But this a trap arranged by the animal and by Kafka himself; the whole description of the burrow functions to trick the enemy. We will enter, then, by any point whatsoever; none matters more than another, and no entrance is more privileged even if it seems an impasse, a tight passage, a siphon.²³

      Interestingly, Deleuze and Guattari’s anti-interpretive study of Kafka begins with what seems to be a series of metaphors.²⁴ Kafka’s work resembles a burrow, a castle with multiple hidden entrances, a well-guarded hotel with countless doors—comparisons that suggest a metaliterary relationship between the structures found within Kafka’s texts and the texts themselves. Yet the comparison undermines the relationship at the same time that it establishes it. If we accept that Kafka’s work is a sort of burrow (or castle, or hotel), then we also must accept that we have entered at a single point, no more or less important than any other number of points where we may choose to enter. Kafka’s work is indeed a burrow, and in being so, resists our efforts to read it as any one thing in particular, including a burrow. Regardless, Deleuze and Guattari seem to want the reader to experience the work as an animal getting lost in the proliferating passages of an underground world, or as a land surveyor wandering at the margins of the castle.

      Benjamin