Kundera on Kafka (from Testaments Betrayed)

写Lydia Davis译者导读时想起了昆德拉论卡夫卡的文章，重读了两篇，真是永不磨损的经典。
Brod was a brilliant intellectual with exceptional energy; a generous man willing to do battle for others; his attachment to Kafka was warm and disinterested. The only problem was his artistic orientation: a man of ideas, he knew nothing of the passion for form; his novels (he wrote twenty of them) are sadly conventional; and above all: he understood nothing at all about modern art.
Why, despite all this, was Kafka so fond of him? What about you—do you stop being fond of your best friend because he has a compulsion to write bad verse?
Masterful as they were at analyzing all the strategies of love, nineteenth-century novels left sex and the sexual act itself hidden. In the first decades of our century, sex emerged from the mists of romantic passion. Kafka was one of the first (certainly along with Joyce) to uncover it in his novels. He unveiled sex not as the playing field for a small circle of libertines (in eighteenth-century style) but as a commonplace, fundamental reality in everyone’s life. Kafka unveiled the existential aspects of sex: sex in conflict with love; the strangeness of the other as a condition, a requirement, of sex; the ambiguous nature of sex: those aspects that are exciting and simultaneously repugnant; its terrible triviality, which in no way lessens it frightening power, etc.
The comic side of sex: an idea unacceptable to puritans and neolibertines both. I think of DH Lawrence, that bard of Eros, that evangelist of coition, who, in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, tried to rehabilitate sex by making it lyrical. But lyrical sex is even more ridiculous than the lyrical sentimentality of the last century.
It is very difficult to describe, to define, to give a name to the kind of imagination with which Kafka bewitches us. The “fusion of dream and reality”-that phrase kafka of course never heard-is illuminating. As in another phrase dear to surrealist, Lautreamont’s about the beauty in the chance encounter between an umbrella and a sewing machine: the more alien things are from one another, the more magical the light that springs from their contact. I’d like to call it a poetics of surprise; or beauty as perpetual astonishment. Or to use the notion of density as a criterion of value:
Density of imagination, density of unexpected encounters. The scene I cited, of the coition of K. and Frieda, is an example of that dizzying density: the short passage, scarcely a page long, encompasses three completely distinct existential discoveries (the existential triangle of sex) that are stunning in their swift succession: filth; the intoxicating dark beauty of strangeness; and touching, anxious yearning.
The two assistants from the castle are probably Kafka’s greatest poetic find, the marvel of his fantasy; their existence is not only infinitely astonishing, it is also packed with meanings: they are a couple of pathetic blackmailers and nuisances; but they also stand for the whole threatening “modernity” of the castle’s universe; they are cops, reporters, paparazzi: agents of the total destruction of private life; they are the innocent clowns who wander across the stage as the drama proceeds; but they are also lecherous voyeurs whose presence imbues the whole novel with the sexual scent of a smutty, kafkaesquely comic promiscuity.
But above all: the invention of these two assistants is like a lever that hoists the story into that realm where everything is at once strangely real and unreal, possible and impossible.
The scene with its enormous comic poetry (which should head the list in an anthology of modernism in the novel) would have been unthinkable in the pre-Kafka era. Totally unthinkable. I stress this in order to make clear the full radical nature of Kafka’s aesthetic revolution. I recall a conversation, by now twenty years back, with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who told me: “It was Kafka who showed me that it’s possible to write another way.” “Another way” means: breaking through the plausibility barrier. Not in order to escape the real world (the way the Romantics did) but to apprehend it better.
Because apprehending the real world is part of the definition of the novel: but how to both apprehend it and at the same time engage in an enchanting game of fantasy? How be rigorous in analyzing the world and at the same time be irresponsibly free at playful reveries? How bring these two incompatible purposes together? Kafka managed to solve this enormous puzzle. He cut a breach in the wall of plausibility; the breach through which many others followed him, each in his own way: Fellini, Marquez, Fuentes, Rushdie. And others, others.