Kafka’s Parable, or, Literature Between Past and Future
Supriya Chaudhuri Suhita Sinha Roy Memorial Lecture, Paschimbanga Bangla Akademi, 9 January 2015. This lecture was delivered in the evening of 9 January, Professor Jasodhara Bagchi having passed away in hospital that morning. It was a long day of great grief and bitterness, ending with this formal, pre-arranged public occasion. For me it was an occasion of profound sadness and double remembrance, a ‘speaking to spirits’, as perhaps all memorial lectures should be. ————————————————————– I was recently asked to lecture on Hannah Arendt, and I found myself re-reading her 1961 book of essays, Between Past and Future, where she quotes this parable from Kafka: He has two antagonists: the first presses him from behind, from the origin. The second blocks the road ahead. He gives battle to both. To be sure, the first supports him in his fight with the second, for he wants to push him forward, and in the same way the second supports him in his fight with the first, since he drives him back. But it is only theoretically so. For it is not only the two antagonists who are there, but he himself as well, and who really knows his intentions? His dream, though, is that some time in an unguarded moment – and this would require a night darker than any night has ever been yet – he will jump out of the fighting line and be promoted, on account of his experience in fighting, to the position of umpire over his antagonists in their fight with each other. Kafka’s parables, says Arendt, ‘unique perhaps in this respect in literature, are real παραβολαί, thrown alongside and around the incident like rays of light which, however, do not illuminate its outward appearance but possess the power of X-rays to lay bare its inner structure that, in our case, consists of the hidden processes of the mind.’ I am not quite sure what Arendt meant by ‘incident’ here, since no actual event is specified: rather, the story itself gives us the structure of an incident which remains partly hypothetical, projected in the parable’s dream-like conclusion. In the tale, an unnamed ‘he’ is pressed forward by an antagonist from behind, and pushed back by an antagonist from the front. He fights both, not unaided, for ‘the first supports him in his fight with the second … and in the same way the second supports him in his fight with the first.’ Yet, as Kafka says, it is not just a fight between the two antagonists, since ‘he’ too is present, and who really knows what his intentions are? But he has a dream, or a hope – that in a dark night, he would be able to jump out of the line of combat and watch, like an umpire, while the two antagonists fight each other. I will return to this parable and what it appears to illuminate. But let us begin with an obscurity, for the dream presents us with a textual difficulty I have not yet been able to resolve. The story Arendt cites is taken from a set of untitled aphorisms entered in Kafka’s diary between the 6th of January and the 29th of February, 1920. All the sheets on which they were written, except the first, were then torn out of the diary, possibly when he sent his diaries to Milena Jesenská (with whom, as is well known, he formed an intense attachment, and who translated his work into Czech). The ‘Notes from the year 1920’ were included in volume 5 of Kafka’s Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Max Brod and published in New York in 1946 by Schocken Verlag, which is the edition Arendt used. It is a revised and expanded version of the first 5 volumes of the Prague edition of Kafka’s Gesammelte Schriften, published in 1935-37 by Heinrich Mercy Sohn. Arendt quotes the German passage in its entirety, and notes that she has slightly modified Willa and Edwin Muir’s English translation, which also appeared in New York in 1946 in a collection named The Great Wall of China (Arendt 227-28): Er hat zwei Gegner: Der erste bedrängt ihn von hinten, vom Ursprung her. Der zweite verwehrt ihm den Weg nach vorn. Er kämpft mit beiden. Eigentlich unterstützt ihn der erste im Kampf mit dem Zweiten, denn er will ihn nach vorn drängen und ebenso unterstützt ihn der zweite im Kampf mit dem Ersten; denn er treibt ihn dock zurück. So ist es aber nur theoretisch. Denn es sind ja nicht nur die zwei Gegner da, sondern auch noch er selbst, und wer kennt eigentlich seine Absichten? Immerhin ist es sein Traum, dass er einmal in einem unbewachten Augenblick – dazu gehört allerdings eine Nacht, so finster wi noch keine war – aus der Kampflinie ausspringt und wegen seiner Kampfeserfahrung zum Richter über seine miteinander kämpfenden Gegner erhoben wird. Max Brod’s edition of his friend’s writings was of course notoriously subjective, even idiosyncratic: moreover, Kafka is every editor and textual critic’s dream – or nightmare. So perhaps appropriately, in the new critical edition of Kafka’s works published by S. Fischer Verlag between 1982 and 1999, based on the all the extant manuscripts and early editions, the dream itself – that is, the conclusion to the parable – is missing. I have checked authoritative transcripts of the 1920 Diary, as well as the new translation of the Shorter Works, Volume I, also published under the title of The Great Wall of China by Malcolm Pasley – whose collection of Kafka manuscripts forms the nucleus of the Kafka archive at the Bodleian Library in Oxford – and not only are there slight variations in language, but the episode itself ends at ‘und wer kennt eigentlich seine Absichten?’ (‘and who really knows his intentions?’) Er hat zwei Gegner, der Erste bedrängt ihn von rückwärts vom Ursprung her, der Zweite verwehrt ihm den Weg nach vorne. Er kämpft mit beiden. Eigentlich unterstützt ihn der Erste im Kampf mit dem Zweiten, denn er will ihn
Two Glistening Wheels, a Bell and a Tiffin-Carrier
Krishna Kalpit Vishwa Hindi Sammelan The language in which we wail And shed tears They ride on it And fly up above those clouds One says I did not go Let me be counted among the tyagis Another says I did manage to Let me be regarded among the bhaagis One was tossing down the list-of-contents from the sky In the parched fields of Hindi-Patti A latest Hindi sheikh Had set up a harem of government committees Exiting one To enter the other Someone was being wrecked at principal The other at interest and the third in etiquette One was screaming: All life insult has been my lot Now let some honour be conferred on me too One was saying: Let me be given all the dough Into dollars shall I transcreate them The other said, no, I am the only one to play The unattainable veena An imperialist Was busy garlanding a communalist A woman, with the blood of the guiltless Went on signing strange advertisements A freakish soiree, this A piffling singer Was singing obscene bhajans An editor was looking for Repose at the shoes Of the foreign minister A reporter, in a Shastri-Bhavan drawer Fixed his permanent address One used to say I shall breathe my last in Italia One wished to be irrelevant in Spanish One would play hide and seek With an almost dead language One was sulking One was being sweet-talked One professor At Jawaharlal Nehru University Harlequin, ludicrous Spewing commentaries on Muktibodh One deadbody Was glued to the wings of the British Airways The other Had already chaired every Literary Circle, every Goshti of the future One soul had entered Next year’s every representative body A perplexing tableaux of globalization this In some strange brothel in Soho Someone was hoisting the Hindi langot And in the distant East In some dry, grainy desert village In a language in which the child stammered That used to be called Hindi Wherefore all righteous opposition? Shall only beggars of the future Barter and transact in this great language? A poet of this language Cuts into two his liver and regrets Chisels on with his poetry Tearing off page after page after page… —————– Tale of the Bicycle More humane than a human Is traipsing travelling hope A possibility, standstill The supple fingers of a flying kite The limber legs, their unwritten tale One can pick-out from the shadow of that kite Ganesh on mooshik Shivji on bayl Durga on sinh Kartik on mayur Indra on hathi Saraswati on hans Lakshmi on ullu Yamraj on bhaisa Mahajan in BMW President in airplane Mullah Nasiruddin on donkey Crowd in a train But on a bicycle, every single time a human being A workman—weary, spent A school going kid Or in the streets of Patna The wife of jankavi Laldhuyan Tied up sewing-machine on the carrier Cycle is the only conveyance in this wide world Which is not a vahan of any God There cannot be any memorial song for the cycle It is the only machine running towards life The oldest friendship between humans and machines Made into poetry by the Punjabi poet Amarjit Chandan And Vittoria De Sica enacted it in his film Through the dank and tortuous alleyways of poverty, pain and humiliation Where human beings live Till that point, only cycles can ply From the site of the event, one cannot come to the conclusion That the cycle was used against humanity When dead-bodies were removed and gunpowder-smoke cleared itself The glistening twin wheels of the cycle lay Right at the centre of the road The bell cast far away, adrift And that tiffin-carrier, in which—bomb not roti, That disappeared mischievously Till the end: the story of a bicycle Is the story of a man ——————– The poems first appeared in tirchhispelling.wordpress.com Translation: HUG adminhumanitiesunderground.org
Under Tiger-striped Skies
Parimal Bhattacharya ‘I don’t know how fear, like an enzyme, triggers a chemical reaction of memory and imagination. Perhaps it plays such tricks: it not only paralyses the present and casts long shadows on the future, but also cuts up the past and exhumes strange phantoms. Fear alters the past in more insidious ways than a battery of lathi-wielding fanatics in a museum…’ [Excerpted and adapted from Dyanchinama.] Thamma, my grandmother, would sometimes talk about Sajid Mian who visited the house every winter to sell gur, date palm jaggery. A landless farm worker, he lived in the village of Bhabagachhi, around eight kilometers from our ancestral home. Sajid Mian took the date palms around his village on lease before the onset of winter, tapped their juices and thickened them in slow wood fire to make gur. He was, according to Thamma, the finest gur maker in the district. Like most members of her tribe, my grandmother too was a great storyteller who could bring to life the quotidian things of a lost world. The way she described it, we could almost taste the sweet, granular, amber-coloured liquid that Sajid Mian supplied to our house in slender terracotta pots. But how could Thamma, an orthodox Brahmin widow, allow in the kitchen, let alone taste, a food item prepared by a Muslim is a mystery. Perhaps the holy edicts that guided all her actions exempted gur from the list of polluted food since it contained no cereal. It never occurred to my mind to ask her. During the Great Bengal Famine of 1943, Sajid Mian visited our house along with his family, his wife and five children. They were skeletons wrapped in skins, Thamma used to say, the skins so dark and wrinkled that they resembled burnt paper that could be blown away. Following that visit, his wife would come to our house every evening, trekking the eight kilometers from their village, carrying a terracotta pot, to collect the watery starch of boiled rice. But after a few weeks, as the famine peaked, her visits ceased. Our family too had stopped eating rice. Bengalis had had their first taste of rooti – flattened bread and a frail cousin of North Indian roti – made of wheat that had begun to arrive in ship-loads from Australia. Did Sajid Mian take his family to the city? One could never know. Every day, endless streams of famished village people were turning up on the streets of Calcutta. Feeble voices begging for runny rice starch buzzed in neighbourhood lanes through the day; as night fell, barking street dogs fighting with humans for scraps of food in garbage dumps rent the air. The city people could catch some sleep early in the morning, when it grew quiet, when the phantom men and women died silently in footpaths and parks. Packs of jackals came from the vast eastern wetlands, their teeth and nails flecked with the first rays of the sun, before the municipal dumper trucks could clear away the bodies. Nobody knew where Sajid Mian had vanished. Grandmother never touched gur for the rest of her life. *** In the year 1943, the joint family of my late grandfather and his brothers split up. They continued to remain in the same large ancestral house, but the running of the household was separated along fraternal lines. Thamma, recently widowed, and her seven children got a separate kitchen. A mysterious incident from that period has since become part of our family lore. It was an unbearably muggy evening in the autumn of that year. Under the dim light of a castor oil lamp (kerosene had vanished from the market due to the war, and electricity was yet to come to our house) my little uncles and aunts were trying to do their homework. A few of them were listless, from hunger and heat, had even turned in on the floor. My father, the eldest of them, was not at home. The dinner was yet to be cooked. Chhotopisi, my youngest aunt, had started to speak a few words that summer. She was toddling around her siblings, prattling to herself, scrawling on the floor with a piece of chalk. The oil lamp flickered and cast big shadows of hunched children on the walls, coils of smoke hung in the still air. Chhotopisi crept up to a window that opened to a tiny, weed-choked garden. There, in pitch-darkness, fireflies danced and crickets chirped in arum bushes around a ditch. Chhotopisi, it has been said, stood there gazing out of the window for a long time, holding the window bars, and intoned softly: ‘Fear!’ The word, that she uttered for the first time in her life, set off a frenzy. My uncles and aunts began to scream hysterically and thrash their limbs on the floor. One of the aunts had a convulsive fit: her jaws were locked and lips turned violet. People gathered in no time carrying sticks and lanterns, and the garden was thoroughly searched. But nothing could be found there. All the uncles and aunts were very young then. Father, the oldest of them, was barely seventeen. War and famine, followed by the split in the joint family, had forced him to give up his studies and enroll as an ARP (Air Raid Precaution) warden. People were fleeing Calcutta fearing Japanese bombs dropping from the skies. As an ARP warden, my father’s job entailed patrolling the streets after the air raid sirens rang in the evenings, carrying a torch and a whistle that he would blow if lights were seen in the windows. In the city and its suburbs, people waited with bated breath in their darkened homes for the sirens to sound all clear. All the government buildings were painted black. During the Indo-Pak war in 1971, pieces of black paper were pasted on the window panes in our house. Streetlights, too, were put out. Swarms of fighter jets scrambled from nearby Palta airbase and flew
No Phallus, No Death
Udayan Ghosh Choudhury Tarpan (i) baba had said: however tall you grow, let your feet be grounded since then i am standing with my two legs on the ground ma, tell me how do i now wear my pants? (ii) in case the son does not earn enough, the father looks for a dark girl and then, tries to explain to others why we call her ‘krishnakoli’ (iii) after a certain age when ma still keeps saying “travel safe,” it feels like a pleasant announcement at the railway station “may you have a safe journey” such mechanical and disciplined telling and hearing is our destiny Truth’s Triad Once humans know, they don’t speak the truth. For instance, at last year’s party in our housing complex, the most sensuous woman’s two-and-a-half-year-old kid announced pop that her mother’s breasts are actually broken, that she is a broken woman. The woman managed with some rolling laughter and we carried on looking for the sherbet-kiosk. Unless one is disgusted, humans don’t ever speak the truth. For instance, in the biology lab, the girl, roll number 11, once told me: “Even dog’s piss is more precious than your trousers.” At that time, I used to have only one pair of trousers; used to wear it six days a week. Humans never deal in truth unless shielded behind glass. As we tried to free Baba’s body from the morgue, Chintu suddenly came up with this: “Poetry and all that jazz is bullshit! The real succour for man comes with Cerelac and saline.” Before flying to Canada, Kobita invited him to the terrace only to slap him hard. Come, let me tell you something about Snakes (i) We do not trust snakes even when they are teetering on the edge oftheir own death. We never think that just like the wing-torn butterfly, the snake too has a sweet heart, which is wailing, holding the last straw so that it can live a few more heartbeats. Rather, we feel joyously relieved that there will be none anymore to run after our sense of sinning—papabodha. No one will inject venom into our conscience. As we put the remnants of the snake’s body into the crepitating fire, we bluster: “You know, it is me who killed this one…” (ii) It’s our smiling face and the style of turning our heads that distinguishes each one of us from the other. Or else, come to think of it, blood-bones-flesh and procreation—whatever is a bird is also a snake. (iii) After trees die, no bird comes to it, no traveller. Only an emaciated snake sometimes comes enquiring after its well being. (iv) Have you heard of a sickly snake ever? Have you read? Nope. Nowhere sir! Because snakes live a very happy and contented life. There is no chapter on violence in the psychology of snakes. Kalipada-Syar On Saturdays, just short of noon, a three-wheeled tin cart would arrive at the school playing-ground. My caricatures and cartoons on the cover of ‘Kisholoy’ would all go haywire. Commotion, leaps, and our rushing, forming a cordon around gari-kaku. Nonchalant, raising the corner of his lungi, he would wipe sweat from his face and Kalipada-syar would not hit us with his talpata-fan; he would just scare us with it. We would stand at a safe distance and with eyes like the reporter’s camera, would catch a glimpse of that magical tin cart opening up its belly and breads, one after another, falling from it. Just like heroines at award functions—thrilling, attractive, proud. Kalipada-syar used to be fond of me and I used to love slightly burnt reddish brown breads. When syar would hand me one, on a thriving day, I would feel that I was holding a bonus, a gift of a dream. One day Kalipada-syar took me to a distance and with a face like a criminal, whispered: “See, you all are now in Class IV. Big boys! You understand things, isn’t it? Today, there is a shortage of breads. So, let us first divide that among the kids. And if there are still some left, you all will get.” We did not get. That day, while returning home, I was fuming at the road, at Kalipada-syar, at gari-kaku too. I could not understand how we had become big boys so soon! Actually syar, these days I comprehend a bit of that. To turn big means to turn yourself a little small every passing day, bit by bit… ——————————————— adminhumanitiesunderground.org