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

Comparative Literature, Fall 2004 by Cesaretti, Enrico

Being progressively "lighter" to the point where a status of "nothingness" is achieved is the paradoxical condition required both to survive aesthetically and to do one's job: to produce art. Once the artist has lost his auréole (halo), s/he can only continue in a metaphorical stripping that becomes also the necessary prerequisite to continue "heroically" to make art possible. S/he needs to be appropriately "reduced" to allow a much larger reality to take shape. The allusions to a body that constantly mutates and shifts in the direction of immateriality and transparency are clearly connected to the crisis of subjectivity, with which I initially framed my argument, because they challenge the validity of rational perceptions and certainties traditionally associated with the idea of body and subject. As Brunella Eruli summarizes, such a crisis derives from the perceived gap between the world of history and the one of absolute values, and from the illusion that one could idealistically reconcile those two universes (269-70).

The passages discussed above deal precisely with such an illusion, as they remind us that a fixed identity is impossible in the cultural and historical universe the two writers inhabit and that disappearing may be just one of the many "masks" one must wear. In this light, Palazzeschi's reference to clothing and stripping is an allegorical critique of the superimposed "vestments" of history (and, implicitly, of Western bourgeois reason) and an implicit proclamation of the necessity of shedding them in order that the same subject may achieve a new creative status.

Both Kafka and Palazzeschi thus affirm some of the crucial "paradoxes of Literary Modernity" (Guglielmi, "Paradoxes" 217): that the "degree-zero" (but also the origin, the center, and the fulcrum) of subjectivity is a presence-absence, a full-void; that the state of absolute originality, the truest form of identity, is the result of a performance, and thus an "act" or a kind of "true-fiction"; and, finally, that only an "absent" artist can eventually produce a "presence," even though this presence is constantly undermined by the ephemeral, by the contradictory, by the mutable.18

Self-extinction and self-preservation are therefore only apparently antipodal in the logic we have delineated, as the former is actually a prerequisite for the latter. The possibilities of a presence, of aesthetically surviving and, as a consequence, of being remembered seem intimately linked to a situation that, either directly or indirectly, is close or conducive to an absence. The fact that the idea of burning their books appears both in Kafka and in Palazzeschi seems only to reinforce this argument, as a material object is eliminated only so that its ideal and eternal part may actually continue to live.

To speculate on the reasons that "A Hunger Artist" is one of the few stories Kafka wanted to save from the pyre he commanded his friend Max Brod to assemble and incinerate after his death is likely to be more frustrating than illuminating. In the context of Kafka's desire to burn his works and his quest to "become literature" ("I . . . am made of literature, I am nothing else, and cannot be anything else," qtd. in Heywood 76), however, Palazzeschi's arsonist's claim that he will burn all exemplars of the first edition of his own poetry for a blessing, to make it truly incendiary, may offer some extra "food for thought" as well as reinforce the links between the two writers: "Là sopra il mio banco ove nacque,/il mio libro, come per benedizione/io brucio il primo esemplare,/e guardo avido quella fiamma, e godo, e mi ravvivo,/e sento salirmi il calore alla testa/come se bruciasse il mio cervello" ("There on my desk where it was born,/my book, as if for ablessing/I burn the first copy,/and I eagerly look at that flame, and I enjoy, and I revive,/and I feel the heat climb up to my head/as if my brain were on fire"). What is worth noting in these verses of "L'incendiario" is the implied identification of Palazzeschi's poetic self with the book he has produced, as he meant to "become literature" himself. The effects of burning his volume, in fact, are physically experienced by the poet's persona, the one who seems to actually be "on fire," as he feels the heat first in his head and then the burning of his brain ("la testa," "il cervello"), in an anticipation of what shall soon be the fundamental quality of the "man of smoke."