Franz and me
Dominique Millette
You look at me with that academic face of yours, over the top of your glasses. My mentor. I should listen to you if I want the secret of success. Everyone respects you. You’ve won so many prizes. You get invited to all these conferences. You want to believe in me. I care about you and I want your approval. You tell me I have to write every day. If I don’t have the time, I should sleep less. As I listen, I feel guilty, like a kid skipping chemistry class.
To you, literature is a discipline. You just sit down and the words come pouring out of you, whatever they are. There’s always something to write about and it always matters. Nothingness doesn’t exist. The anguish of insignificance is as mendacious a fictional construct as a fairy tale. The call of a bird out the window, a few notes of jazz on a saxophone, steam coming out of a kettle, the footstep of a loved one, the mewing of kittens upstairs, the flute-like voice of the landlord’s daughter, the sniggering voice of the general manager in your office… everything has its place. You have to take your place in life. Life itself is what calls out to us with all its details. It matters, this life and the details that come one after the other just like in a list poem from Jacques Prévert.
I feel much more like a writer in the mold of Kafka. In a lot of ways, he was almost pathetic. Were he alive today, he would never be on Leno or Letterman. Few would notice his genius, buried in the dusty indifference of a few sparsely-attended university lectures. He only wrote a very few novels and hardly a dozen short stories and snippets of prose. He wanted to make sure all his manuscripts were incinerated after his death. He worked in an insurance company. He messed up all his romantic relationships. He had major issues with his dad. He never cut his ear off and he never wrote fashionably impassioned fifty-page parentheses in one of his novels on the noble nature of street slang as a legitimate form of jargon.
Yet, the nightmarish twists and turns of his work resonate deeply within me. The plot of his novel The Castle is an exact reflection of those dreams I have almost every night, where I take the subway and find myself in the middle of an unknown landscape, or the bus never lets me out where I wanted to go, but changes destination halfway there and takes me to a neighbourhood I’ve never even heard of before. The short story Metamorphosis takes my breath away with its searing emotional truth. The idea of turning into a giant insect is a perfect metaphor when it comes to feeling repulsive and unlovable. The humour in the story is unbearably moving: the protagonist Grigor worries mostly because he doesn’t know how he’s going to get his pants on, and because he’ll be late for work. It’s the classic description of our reactions when disaster hits us and we don’t quite grasp its full impact, making feeble and doomed attempts at retaining normalcy. The family is merciless. Everyone is upset. They’re ashamed of him. Grigor has become useless. For the family, this is the real tragedy. The story conveys a devastating impression of never being loved for oneself, but only for what one can bring to others.
For me, Kafka was a genius because he said something beautiful and true, even if it was only a few times, and not because he wrote every day, like clockwork, for the sake of discipline.
I wonder if Kafka felt overwhelmed by the crumbling of all that constituted certainties within the Austrio-Hungarian Empire and for which his family and education had prepared him. The old order disappeared, just like that, without leaving the author any alternative place to be, since he was a German-speaking Jew and would not logically feel all that welcome in the new order of the country where he was born, if the antisemitic writings of the nationalist Czech poet Jan Neruda are any indication. I wonder to what point Kafka’s feelings toward his father, and vice versa, were influenced or even determined by this socio-political reality. I don’t know.
What I do know is that Kafka’s writings are those of someone feeling out of place, an outsider looking in at the life around him. Someone who felt impotent, or illegitimate, or not quite good enough, with or without reason – it doesn’t matter. Someone who felt like I do.
I’m sure plenty of people could analyze me as well. I feel this way because I am French-speaking in an English-language province of Canada and I don’t know what it’s supposed to mean anymore. I’m a woman and I was too often sexually assaulted in my youth because I tried to be free. I’ve suffered too many losses in life, for all sorts of reasons. I had a difficult childhood. Und so on und sweiter. I don’t know. However, I do know that when I write, I try to be candid and at times this absolute candor wounds me. I feel so naked it’s as if I had no skin to cover me.
What is writing to me? Two hundred watts of intensity. Not being able to do anything else at all. It isn’t just a page I have to fill: I have no schedule, I won’t put away my pen and paper at two o’clock because I have to vacuum the carpet, the carpet will wait and may wait a long time. Ideas come a thousand at once, all connected together, where do I place them, there’s no particular order I want them in. Euphoric triumph of the perfect image, the out of the ordinary, the play on words, the ludicrous. Illumination of a deeper truth previously bathed in shadow. Hundreds of narrative threads exploding and leading to more. You have to place your ideas in order! Your thoughts are too disorganized! Anguish. Not being able to put the brakes on, to round up ideas like obedient little lambs, so they can be logical, well-behaved and especially, clear. Impatience. Rebellion. Degeneration. Impetuosity of a meteor with ineluctable momentum that only collision can stop. Crash. Breakdown. The wall. The meteor smashes into a thousand splinters. Paranoia. Full stop. Isolation. Goodbye. Months, even years, spent picking up the pieces.
I don’t write every day, like clockwork. Luckily for me.
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