place in everyday life. And, on the other, Blanchot contends that Kafka’s journaling reveals much more than a desire to write as if he weren’t writing (to write without risking disappearance). Kafka writes about his job, his family, and his plans for marriage, often with a marked sense of despair over his inability to find contentment or fulfillment in any of these things. But, perhaps more importantly, it seems that writing both creates and responds to that despair and lack of fulfillment in the world. When discussing the demand of the work, Blanchot writes:
[ . . . ] [T]he artist who willingly exposes himself to the risks of the experience which is his does not feel free of the world, but, rather, deprived of it; he does not feel that he is master of himself, but rather that he is absent from himself and exposed to demands which, casting him out of life and of living, open him to that moment at which he cannot do anything and is no longer himself. (53)
Blanchot seems to respond here to the idea that art liberates the artist or writer from the concerns of the world and takes him or her to some higher realm of ideas and truth. Rather, Blanchot suggests, the writer experiences his or her exclusion from the world and from life, at the same time that the space of the work offers no solace and no sense of place that would counter such a profound exclusion. The writer begins to disappear from the world, perhaps coming back to it from time to time in order to try to re-establish a connection, a sense of existence. But these moments of “coming back” point to the demand of the work, which threatens to expose the writer to the loss and disappearance of himself or herself in both the world and the work.
Readers of Kafka necessarily note the difficulty he had in finishing his works. Max Brod and some of Kafka’s translators sometimes addressed this “problem” by making editorial decisions about what to include, what not to include, and how to piece the fragments together. Kafka himself discusses this issue in his Diaries, as he laments, “I can’t write any more. I’ve come up against the last boundary, before which I shall in all likelihood again sit down for years, and then in all likelihood begin another story all over again that will again remain unfinished. This fate pursues me.”28 And, indeed, we actually see this take place in the Diaries, with several lines here and there that appear to be pieces of narrative, beginnings of stories. In Jorge Luis Borges’s preface to his translation of The Metamorphosis, he suggests that Kafka’s unfinished texts reflect the subject matter of the work: “The pathos of these inconclusive novels arises precisely from the infinite number of obstacles that detain and detain again his identical heroes. Franz Kafka didn’t finish them because the primordial issue was that they were unending” (11).29 This makes sense, perhaps especially when reading works such as The Castle and The Trial, and the question becomes how to construe what appears to be a relationship between the task of writing and the heroes who inhabit the texts. Blanchot would certainly hesitate to solidify or affirm this relationship by reading the heroes as a definitive representation of Kafka himself, or the writer in general. But he does not deny the relationship; rather, he poses it as a question:
To what extent was Kafka aware of the analogy between this move outside truth [of both Josef K. and K.] and the movement by which the work tends toward its origin—toward that center which in the only place the work can be achieved, in the search for which it is realized and which, once reached, makes the work impossible? To what extent did he connect the ordeal of his heroes with the way in which he himself, through art, was trying to make his way toward the work and, through the work, toward something true? (SL 81)
Blanchot presents the relationship between the plight of the heroes and the experience of writing as a question that remains open. Whether Kafka was “aware” or not is perhaps beside the point. We do get the sense, though, that Kafka tells (and enacts) a similar story in a variety of ways over the course of his life, whether in his narratives or his Diaries, and that it is possible to see parallels and repetitions without imposing a definitive allegorical reading upon the text.30 Blanchot continues:
This much at least is strikingly evident: the fault which he punished in K. is also the one with which the artist reproaches himself. Impatience is this fault. It wants to hurry the story toward its dénouement before the story has developed in all its directions, exhausted the measure of time which is in it, lifted the indefinite to a true totality where every inauthentic movement, every partially false image can be transformed into an unshakable certitude. (81)
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