Freud in his generous prologue to the book by August Aichorn that was published in Spanish with the title helpless youth, designated the three impossible trades: educate, govern, analyze. There, in its impossibility of being done, of being completed, of being evaluated, of knowing its results, resides the truth of those trades.
Kafka inaugurates with his poetics –and his ethics– the fourth impossible profession: writing.
It would be more or less easy to believe that writing was impossible for Kafka in the sense that life seemed to be impossible for him. It must be the most widespread archetype of a tormenting, strange, confused, dark writer. However, it is not there that Kafka founds the profession of writing from a new perspective, but from the point of view in which his contemporary Sigmund Freud thought the impossible: there will always be a nucleus, an irreducible center, of access denied to knowledge already domestication. What we can register, transmit, propose, is the genuine, honest, true movement that tries to get closer to the untouchable. The true movement to find the truth. “Truth is indivisible; therefore it cannot know itself; Whoever claims to know it is necessarily fallacious”. This is how Kafka makes it clear that the task will be hopelessly impossible. However, he gave his life to that endeavor. Why do something that from the start you know that it will not be possible to do? the castleor, one of his three novels, is about insisting on getting to an impossible place, and about stubbornness in wanting to get there anyway. And about defending a vocation even at the cost of one’s own existence. Because if K. had tolerated the other trades that were offered to him, he could have had a tolerable life. But he only wanted–and could–insist on his identity as a surveyor. That was literature for him. Never being the writer he wanted to be, but in no way being able to stop insisting on becoming one. So, in this painful paradox, he decided to record all those attempts. The ferocious attempt to leave this brutal knowledge as a legacy: no one who propagates that they are telling the truth is really telling the truth. To leave us that encrypted message, he used several strategies. The happiest (as Borges would say) is to use the discursive genres that our society uses to transmit the truth and tell a lie or fiction with them, to speak in literary terms. Thus, he, as the good lawyer that he was, amassed the judicial language until he trafficked it in his works. The process is the most obvious book, but not the only one, also in El fogonero, Sentence, the castle and in so many other works, we can find the cadence of the speech of the Tribunals. The syntax of the academy, another genre socially associated with the transmission of the truth, serves Kafka to demonstrate his thesis: they lie to our faces and we buy rotten fish because of the way it is wrapped. In a profession in which many are dedicated to the pursuit of beauty — art — he dedicated his life to the search for truth. Truth is the only criterion with which Kafka measures the value of his writings. And the truth, as we said above, is incommunicable, does not know itself and cannot be offered to art or to the artist. However, what he can do is bear it, he can keep the marks of the dazzling that he suffers when he sees her, he can transcribe the movement of the “grotesque face” that recedes before the light of truth. “Everyone can’t see the truth, but everyone can be true.” That is the fundamental distinction. Art cannot claim to know the truth, but it can deliver its message, not by enunciating it but by turning itself into the visible form of the true. But how does the true become visible if the truth is elusive? This is how, with the help of all the procedures that his objective obliges him to invent, Kafka embraces the false, gives the lie a body and a voice, invests the imposture with bourgeois decency and executes at all times, without warning the spectator, the game of sleight of hand by which illusion claims the credibility of the true. In a fallacious world, Kafka does not aim to destroy or even partially refute the lie. But he uses her, patiently exploits her inexhaustible resources and, forcing her to show herself, unmasks her in a grandiose demonstration, by which the truth is affirmed in the antonym of him.
I could not in any way compare myself with Kafka as a writer in terms of results, but I can say that I feel close in one aspect: I know, at this point in my life, that I am not going to be the writer that I would like to be. I see, what dreams look like sometime in the next day, in a lightning bolt that goes out before we can see what it illuminates, what I would like to produce, but I know I don’t have the tools. As we could tell from the message of Metamorphosis from Kafka: projects the man, executes the bug. In my case, it projects the woman and executes the writer that I can be. Why write then? Why keep trying, if the writers I want to be already exist?
A few months ago, in a very brief conversation, one of the possible candidates in the next elections told me “this country is impossible to govern.” We could apply the same question to him. Why keep trying, then? Why blow yourself up in a task that is not going to be what we expect? There is something about impossible trades that, for those of us who are clear that there will never be a way to do it well, to do it the way we want, have a paradoxical appeal. Knowing that we are going to fail, we cannot avoid getting there. Writing does not entail a vital sacrifice, like governing, or educating if done as it should. Yes, he could take our last breath, as happened to Kafka, who corrected his final text in bed, with his throat torn out and asking his doctor friend to be compassionate and help him die (“if you don’t kill me, you’re a murderer” ). But it will never be as brutal as the office of governing. To me, who had to govern a tiny republic of broken kids, I can also say that writing will never be as exciting an adventure as governing.
One would like to say to the important people in their history, to the people who are part of their affective map: “don’t blow yourself up in an impossible task, we’ve already sacrificed enough”, but we know not to go into the fire of truth, not to disfigure ourselves face with the horror of that illumination, it would be an even greater sacrifice. The only thing that we, those of us who practice any of the impossible trades, can do is expect love and solidarity from those around us and walk towards the unattainable, passionately embracing irremediable failure.
Walking towards the true, although the truth slips away forever. Walk with patience, with pain, with hopelessness and with faith.
