Consuming Texts: Creation and Self-effacement in Kafka and Palazzeschi

Comparative Literature, Fall 2004 by Cesaretti, Enrico

What is most surprising is rather the body; one never ceases to be amazed at the idea that the human body has become possible.

-Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

Non è la fame, tutto il dolore del mondo diventato fame? Non è, l'uomo della fame, più uomo? Non è più genere umano?

-Elio Vittorini, Conversazione in Sicilia

WITHIN THE EUROPEAN CULTURAL TRADITION, the questions of artistic identity and subjectivity, the role of the artist, and the function of art in society have rarely been addressed more rigorously than during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth.1 During this period a common denominator for otherwise disparate works was an engagement with an epistemological crisis of subjectivity and representation in a context that we may define as "modernist" (Moroni 7). As Anthony Tamburri succinctly writes:

The notion of art, in general, at the turn of the century, was questioned by many... it was a critical moment in art during which time the writer, and artist in general, in questioning the status of art, expressed such a temperament formalistically in the artwork by privileging dissonance and nonsense, and thereby refuting a definitive image of the individual and the artist. (A Reconsideration 125)

In other words: as the classic idea of form central to the mimetic-realistic artwork tended to dissipate over time and was replaced by the more visibly interdisciplinary, formalistic features of modernism (among which, perhaps, the most influential was a new way of interpreting the category of time [see Kern]), so likewise was the "standard" figure of the author and the artist eroded. The latter, as Mallarmé perceived in his anticipatory essay "Crise de vers" (1886), had somehow to "vanish" in order to "cede[r] l'initiative aux mots" ("leave the initiative to the words"). In the new social and cultural context, the artist was well aware that real communication had to be of a comoletelv different sort (Moroni 23-24).

To deal fully with the theoretical implications of this situation and with the radical gesture described by Mallarmé is well beyond the scope of this essay. Such an undertaking would require an extensive volume or series of volumes investigating the perception and aesthetic-philosophical notion of the subject-artist over the past two centuries and engaging most of the important thinkers of "modernity," from Hegel and Marx through Nietzsche and Heidegger, to Foucault, Barthes, and Derrida-just to mention the most notorious. The present essay, therefore, while keeping in mind the weight and implications of the issues at stake, aims to insinuate itself "lightly" into this complex discourse from a much more empirical and necessarily modest perspective. My objective in the following pages is to discuss a few emblematic instances of self-effacement as they manifest themselves in the texts of two modernists belonging to different national literary traditions: Franz Kafka (Prague, 1883-1924) and Aldo Palazzeschi (Florence, 1885-1974). In doing so, I will concentrate on the question of the "disappearing subject."2

My hope is that a comparative analysis of a few representative texts-Kafka's "A Hunger Artist" ("Hungerkünstler," 1922), several of Palazzeschi's earliest poems in the collection L'incendiario (1910), his poem "Boccanera" (1915), and his novel Il codice di Perelà (1910)-will not only confirm these authors' original solutions to the question of the representation of the artist and the poetic self in a European modernist milieu, but also will highlight some connections between two figures who, at first glance, could not appear more dissimilar. I am not trying to establish an actual relationship between these well-known figures; rather, I hope to identify those common aesthetic principles which may have led them to understand, interpret, and resolve some fundamental artistic and poetic questions in a similar manner.3 What surfaces in their works when read side by side is a series of peculiar resonances and analogies that, in some cases, demonstrate "adjacent" (to use Deleuze and Guattari's term) cultural attitudes or inclinations and, in others, perhaps reveal only similar flights of imagination. Once again, a statement by Tamburri supports my point:

discussing Palazzeschi and other Italian and Western [and, by the same logic, also Eastern] European artists does not necessarily imply a direct, and conscious, inter-textual relationship. Instead, the premise here is one of an epistemological and, perhaps also, ideological commonality-namely, they were all artists coming into their own during an aesthetically turbulent time. (A Reconsideration 5)

It may be useful to linger for a moment on this "time" and its possible interpretations. The situation of the artist in this turbulent period may best be defined, in aesthetic as well as sociological terms, by the paradoxically similar conditions of either marginality or privilege. Marginality occurred either when the artistic product was a commodity, dependent on the market, on the whims of the masses, or when it remained confined to limited, private circles of connoisseurs. Privilege, conversely, may have depended on the popular belief that art was the ultimate repository of meaning or truth, and that the artist was therefore the only one able to oppose effectively the spreading reification and vulgarization of society. Within this context the act of "disappearing" or "withdrawing" from the text becomes a gesture that is at once a reaction to a negatively perceived status quo and a signal of the crisis of the ontological and cognitive function of language.