A Lidless Gaze — The Invisible in Kafka

Lodged within Kafka’s fictional œuvre is something invisible to the naked eye, and yet omnipresent: a word. The word “Jew.” Marthe Robert, in her time, had signaled this contradiction through the image of a thorn bush¹. If one comes too close, it pricks. The word is nowhere, but the idea, and all the furrows that traverse and entangle themselves with it, is everywhere. Judaism is visible, the Jewish name is invisible. How to understand this? Kafka’s interpreters, so numerous over a century, offer us several leads. It could constitute a legacy of the biblical prohibition not to name God. It could also draw its source from a broader impossibility of language: Kafka wrote in his space-time between several languages — German, Czech and Yiddish — and he had theorized the consecutive idea of an “impossibility of writing” for the Jewish writers of his generation. It could just as well be the reflection of a metaphysical or psychic tension: a shame of self as a Jew so powerful that it would render the word unpronounceable for Kafka, and thus invisible for us, his readers, within his work. In this thorn bush, a tension between the visible and the invisible seems to be hiding.

Within the corpus of the “tales” there figures however a short, astonishing text that I would like to read here closely, since it may perhaps allow us to find some answers, to draw out a few splinters. A text whose center of gravity, it seems to me, is precisely the question of the invisible — of gaze, of eye, of what we can and cannot see. As always with Kafka, the mystery becomes clearer at the same time as it thickens.

It is a tale of a few pages, preceded by several fragments in the notebook of the “Hunger Artist” inside which it was found. The fragments that precede present themselves as sketches or drafts, attempts that the text comes to fix with momentum. The narrative is titled “In Our Synagogue,” a title given by Max Brod who, following the usual rule, picks up the first words of the text. It is indeed a synagogue story, and for once (a unique time?) very explicitly so. Kafka speaks of a Jewish community and of its building, of the place where it gathers and “comes alive.” Without detours or metaphors. Marthe Robert, in her hypothesis of an invisible Jewish word, could not ignore this text, which she translated and commented on as early as 1946 — that is, very early in her companionship with Kafka².

“In Our Synagogue” figures among the texts published posthumously by Max Brod, in 1937, in Prague (volumes 5 and 6 of the Œuvres complètes / Complete Works). Kafka most probably wrote it during the summer of 1922. It is an animal story. But we do not know what animal it is, only that it lives in “our synagogue” — which suggests that the narrator belongs to this community — and that it is “approximately the size of a marten.” Marder in German means “marten,” but also “thief,” and is phonetically close to the word Mörder: the murderer³.

The color of this animal surprises us, for it has nothing to do with that of a marten — it is “a luminous blue-green.” Moreover, if one really wanted to qualify this color realistically, one would be quite stumped: “one could almost affirm that the true color of this pelt is unknown.” The animal is sedentary and has taken up residence at the edge of a grille, the “grille of the women’s gallery.” It is regularly chased away, because the women fear it. The men, for their part, have grown accustomed to its presence, have made it “the synagogue’s domestic animal” (and the narrator takes care to question us, a little provocatively: “why should the synagogue not have a quite specific domestic animal, which exists nowhere else?”⁴).

The animal appears more and more bizarre as the text progresses: its eyes are always open, but they are “perhaps without eyelids.” The animal clings to the balcony of the women’s floor, and forms with them a relationship more singular still than with the men. The women are afraid of it, and “no one knows quite why.” The men, for their part, are indifferent to it:

“One generation showed it to the other; it has always been seen there; one no longer grants it a glance.”

The invisible, here, is not tied to an impossibility of seeing — it is a withering of the desire to see, that which is no longer visible because it has been worn down by too much gazing, incrusted in the retina. On one side, for the men, the animal is what is no longer seen by dint of being seen; on the other side, for the women, it is what surprises and frightens the gaze as soon as it appears in their field of vision. What does this kind of split signify, which presents itself at once as a split of gender (the men, the women) and of topography (the women’s balcony, above, the men’s hall, below)? What might there be in the animal that would be both invisible and so visible that it terrifies? Let us keep this question in mind, and try to move forward in the narrative.

The animal, we are told, always gives the same spectacle: it runs from grille to grille, sometimes comes down near the men who, as we know, barely look at it. “It seems to look at the community with its sparkling eyes, always open, perhaps without eyelids, but it certainly sees no one; it does nothing but spy out the dangers by which it feels threatened.”

Here, the text progresses: what is invisible is no longer the animal, but the community. The marten looks at it but sees no one, as if this community were disappearing before its eyes. Kafka here performs one of those semantic reversals of which he is fond: he makes the very idiom disappear that he has been describing to us for several pages.

If the gaze is full of a kind of dread, it is because there is indeed a danger, a threat. A terror that is not only the one aroused by the animal, but a muffled fear that reigns over the synagogue. This synagogue may well become invisible in its turn: disappear. There, the text seems to tumble down as the animal itself leaps from top to bottom inside the building — Kafka makes us plunge toward an extraordinary depth, very troubling. He speaks to us about the dangers hanging over the Jews, in a quasi-literal way. For, he specifies, the animal too is afraid:

“And yet this fear? Is it the memory of times long past or the presentiment of times to come?”

This sentence troubles, to say the least — it troubles our gaze and our spirit. What is this indefinable fear, impossible to situate, the name of?

Different hypotheses unfold, it seems to us, through the text. Firstly, it would be a fear of a historical nature: the animal would be afraid of being hunted down, just as the community would be afraid of being persecuted. Kafka writes this text in 1922, in Prague, in a context where the rise of palpable antisemitic violence cannot leave him indifferent⁵. The idea that a fear (Angst) can be at once a memory and a presentiment echoes, in a rather spontaneous way for the reader, the way in which Judaism is traversed by persecution, in its secular history as in its tradition (Haman in the megillah of Esther during the festival of Purim, or the liberation from Pharaoh’s yoke in those of Pesach, for example).

But this sentence from the text, related to all that the narration has indicated to us above, does not limit itself to this historical echo. The fear, we have seen, would be a fear of becoming invisible, and thus, of disappearing. Beyond the threat of persecution, is Kafka not posing here the question of assimilation? That is to say, precisely, for the Jews — a way of becoming invisible?

Let us try to follow this lead, and let us define what assimilation can represent for Kafka. It is a historical, geographical and sociological phenomenon at once that then affects European Judaism: the process (and the desire) of integration of those who were then called “the Jews of the East,” who came from all over Eastern Europe to emigrate to the great cities of Western Europe (Prague, Vienna, Berlin). This emigration was accompanied by a change of living environment and of social class: from the village to the great city, from agriculture or small artisanal trades to commerce or the liberal professions. On a biographical level, we know that this question greatly preoccupied and interested Franz Kafka. It was a given of his family history and of his mental universe. It aroused both passions and pains, which makes it de facto a probable source of inspiration — a motor of writing. We know notably that his father himself was an immigrant from the pious rural East, who lived in a profound desire for assimilation: to remake his life meant for Hermann Kafka erasing his origins as an Eastern Jew, in order to emancipate himself and to acquire all the signifiers of a visible social ascent. We also know that Franz, notably in the Lettre au père (Letter to the Father) (1919), reproaches his father for this form of voluntary forgetting of his roots. He seems to define assimilation as the transformation of an authentic culture into a false religion, absurd and emptied of its meaning. Kafka speaks of “trifles.”⁶ He also recounts how these ridiculous traces of Judaism led his father to oblige him, as a child, to go to synagogue all the same. The synagogue is thus the site of this assimilation as disappearance of meaning.

There are other occurrences of the site “synagogue” in the Journal, which go in the same direction: it would be the site of a usurpation, the risk of a disappearance. Thus, for example, on December 24, 1911, after the circumcision of his nephew: “Today, hearing the Mohel’s companion say the prayer that ends the meal, while those present (…) spent the time daydreaming and being bored in complete incomprehension of the prayer being recited to them, I saw before me the Judaism of Western Europe at a period of manifest transition whose end is unforeseeable (…) These religious forms arrived at their ultimate end.”⁷

In other words: the community has reason to be “afraid.”

Kafka, around 1910, nourished a powerful attraction for Eastern Judaism, charged with the aura of his “lost origins.” This took the form notably of a passion, certainly ephemeral but intense, for Yiddish theater, the Yiddish language, and the actor Izak Löwy with whom he became very close. To the synagogue, Franz would thus oppose the theater, as a possible site of life for an ancestral but authentic Judaism. Yet this universe is not absent from our tale either. Do the balconies and the fantastic animal not borrow from this imaginary of the grotesque theater and from its kinship with the circus? Is the animal not there also, as the text tells us, to “give itself as a spectacle”?

Interrogating this tension between the visible and the invisible finally allows us to observe that at the heart of this text lodges a mixture quite proper to Kafka’s prose: the strange cohabitation between a profound gravity (the fear of disappearing, because of others or of oneself) and an intangible, impalpable humor — here, the shadow of theater, of the fantastic, a kind of circus; in short, a lightness. Is this not already present through the name of the synagogue in the text? Kafka calls it the synagogue of “Thamühl.” Marthe Robert in her time had sought to find the real synagogue that might have inspired him, in order to try to situate it geographically. But the much more recent note by Jean-Pierre Lefebvre indicates that this name corresponds to no existing toponymy, and that Kafka perhaps simply invented this place by playing on the word “Talmud.” To become invisible: at once a threat, and a game. Did the lidless animal have a mouth to smile?