By Jeff Bursey
“In those months Kafka came to understand that you cannot articulate or grasp final truths, only dramatize the burning need to do so and the impossibility of so doing…”
—A Winter in Zürau
Introduction
What I never know on first picking up a new book by English author Gabriel Josipovici (b. 1940) is what it will contain beyond that it’s always primarily going to be about his ordering of language and show his scrupulous attention to structure. In the past, he’s had two novels come out under the same cover, After & Making Mistakes (2009), where one fiction work follows another. His latest is a flip book, where you rotate the object once you’re done reading one of its two portions: Partita, a novel that spans a few countries, and A Winter in Zürau, a non-fictional yet creative construction of Kafka’s life over a roughly eight-month period based on his diary entries, notebooks, and correspondence from then, before, and after. What links the two could be, as Stephen Mitchelmore says, both the “threat of death and the promise of escape” and Josipovici’s radicalism when it comes to fiction and conservatism when it comes to criticism. Mitchelmore is one of the most sensitive readers Josipovici has (he’s thanked in the opening of Winter), so his opinion matters.
To my mind, both works seek, in their own ways, truths that are not quite reachable, not quite visible, truths that must be figuratively imagined existing so that there is reason given to Josipovici’s ceaseless imaginative striving. Or perhaps a reason has already appeared in his controversial non-fiction work, What Ever Happened to Modernism? (2010), where, in talking about Borges, he says that “for him, as for Proust and Kafka and Virginia Woolf, writing is a way of surviving in such a world…” Are we reading a summing up by Josipovici of longstanding concerns, aesthetic and philosophical, a final setting down of his thoughts on certain matters?
Partita
“Partita” means many musical things, among them a composition of two or more movements in different styles. Partita is a novel of about one hundred pages composed of these parts: Praeambulum, Allemande, Corrente, Sarabande, Tempo di Minuetto, Passepied, and Gigue. “Praeambulum” means preface while Allemande through “Gigue” are types of dance or tempos. What Josipovici fills those movements with is a lively mix of infidelity, threatened murder, international travel, interrogations, and the stock figures of a mysterious woman named Charlie and her romantic pursuer, Michael Penderecki. (Perhaps named after the Polish composer and conductor Krzysztof Penderecki.) From these terms, readers might expect that what they’ll read will contain motion alternating with stasis. The comedy in this work is reminiscent of earlier novels like “Making Mistakes” and Only Joking (2010), where wit and playfulness about identity and truthfulness in a contingent world predominate over the way the same weighty concerns are approached and brooded over in a more “serious” manner in, for instance, The Big Glass (1991) and Everything Passes (2006).
The lead character’s name does a lot of work in addition to recalling a musician. Michael Penderecki flees England because he’s been caught sleeping with another man’s wife and that man has said he’ll kill him if he sees him again. He goes first to the South Coast of England before being pushed off to Paris and then to Nice. Throughout his travels on the Continent, he has to pronounce his name as “Penderetzky” when people say it as it’s spelled. He does this first with two policemen looking into the appearance of a corpse found at a party by himself and Mia, a woman he meets briefly in Paris. The Polish name’s duality—how it’s spelled and how it’s said—makes Michael a creature with two natures: what’s written down and its shadow. In the eyes of the French policemen looking at his passport he’s only Penderecki but this dual identity raises their suspicions. Michael has the understandable habit of correcting people about his name, reminiscent of naïve protagonists sometimes used in a certain strain of novels and movies of intrigue, where someone insists on the facticity of things that aren’t obvious or important to others. His first name also carries a lot of weight. Michael is an archangel (in this way, too, like Gabriel’s), and one of the books of the Bible declares, “But when the archangel Michael contended with the devil and disputed about the body of Moses, he did not dare bring to bring a condemnation of slander against him, but said, ‘The Lord rebuke you!’” (Jude 9-10). This is not making too much out of a common name. A woman named Sandy, who has a brief morning of passion with Michael, on hearing his name responds “—My angel! she says.” Michael, the chief angel, seems to be irresistible to women and leads anything but an angelic life. Confusion around his name is foreshadowed when he meets “the boys” of Sandy and Gerry, the friend of a friend in England:
Three young men in black jeans and white shirts file into the room, mugs in hand.
She introduces them:
—Edward. Edmund. Edgar. And this is Michael….
—Doesn’t it get confusing when people call you Ed? Mike asks.
—Nobody calls us Ed, Edward says.
Their identity in the world is secure, for now, but his is not. “Polish name, British passport” doesn’t help Mike navigate officialdom, which is a given in any novel that rests, or perches, more to the point, on a branch of literature where noir, thriller, and comedy meet. (There’s the possibility this pronunciation matter is an extra-literary comment, for it’s likely that Josipovici has had to clarify his name to more people than he would want.)
What follows from Sandy is a trail of women and places. The mysterious woman met in Nice is Charlie, a chanteuse, who he hears sing in a bar, and a kind of romance develops within Michael and possibly, certainly intermittently, in Charlie. They have a set of exchanges before she declares: “—Look, she says abruptly. I don’t feel so good. Will you take me home?” He escorts her to her home, not, in her mind, for sex, but so that she can get him to make her hot chocolate and then leave. Charlie displays signs of mental imbalance, and of course Michael falls in love, ignoring her vanishing acts and the fact she has a boyfriend currently elsewhere. In this, he recalls Ben from Josipovici’s In a Hotel Garden (1993) who pines after Lily, a woman he met in the Dolomite Alps when vacationing there with Sandra, his soon-to-be ex-girlfriend. Ben doesn’t know his own mind and constantly asks friends, specifically a married couple, if he should call Lily. They give advice and he goes forth and back on the idea. She, too, lives with her boyfriend, though she tells Ben she’s trying to get out of it. (In Partita, there’s a reference to a hotel with a garden, so Josipovici is alluding openly to this novel.) Charlie, if she does have a boyfriend at all, is content to meet Michel now and then before she starts her disappearing act. Prior to her first disappearance their exchanges are, at times, amusing:
She puts his mug of coffee down on the bedside table, then sits on the bed, cradling her own mug in both hands.
—You know what I would like to do?
—What?
—I would like to go bicycling with you.
—I don’t have a bicycle.
—We could rent one.
—Where would we go?
—Just around. I want to freewheel down a hill with you in front of me.
—Why not behind?
—That’s just how I see it, you in front and me behind.
—To go down a hill, he says, you first have to get up it.
—Why do you always look on the dark side of things??
Later in their short relationship there’s this compact summary of their relationship:
She brings him coffee in bed. Sits on the bed while he drinks.
—You know what I’d like to do one day? she says.
—Get rid of me.
Most of Partita is occupied by Charlie leaving one place or another with Michael often one step behind. Occasionally, he finds her. At times, when they could speak to each other but don’t, as in the section titled “Sarabande,” I thought of Antonioni films. Michael is placed in a room with Charlie but there’s little dialogue, though there is a soundtrack (the ever-present singing of Yves Montand, whose recordings recur in this novella) and strangers who seem to have come in from another kind of novel, a bleakly existential one that intersects with the light comedy of Partita. Other readers may find different resonances. It’s one of Josipovici’s strengths that he leaves his writing open-ended enough to get across certain things while simultaneously not closing down other potential interpretations and to allow the dance of his lead characters to change and fit the tempo of their tempers until the inevitable ambiguous end.
A Winter in Zürau
Franz Kafka and his works have occupied legions of translators, philosophers, biographers, and critics. He is as near an ideal model of the artist as is possible for Josipovici, who in the Preface calls him “a setter of standards of integrity and a constant source of nourishment, as well as one of the acutest diagnosticians of the difficulties and paradoxes involved in writing in our times.” A Winter in Zürau, the longer part of this flip book, is a close look at a period of roughly eight consecutive months, from August 1917 to April 1918, in Kafka’s life as he composes what look to be aphorisms, though that word, as Josipovici makes clear, isn’t entirely accurate, but is the closest word in English to describe “the ‘Zürau Aphorisms.’” Using Kafka’s aphorisms, diaries, and correspondence to his sister Ottla, his friend Max Brod, his publisher Kurt Wolff, his sometime fiancée Felice Bauer, and others, and bringing in critical commentary from Elias Canetti and Kafka biographer Rainer Stach, Josipovici presents a careful, judicious, and thoughtful examination of what his subject may have been thinking and feeling, and at times was thinking and feeling, during the months spent in the farm setting owned by Ottla as he tried to allow relaxation and climate to repair the damage done by tuberculosis.
In many previous works by Josipovici, we see his debt to and fascination with Kafka. A novel from 1991, The Big Glass, has the painter Harsnet mention him several times, asking “Where does an artist like Kafka come from?…Where are the rules that can legislate for someone like that?” and complimenting him on his modesty: “Because nothing in his work stands up and says: Look at me, look how true, beautiful, profound, etc.” In Winter, the time frame is preceded by a prologue, and in one section, “The Author,” he writes that Kafka “was a driven writer who, like most writers, desperately wanted his work to be published and recognized.” Then Josipovici makes an almost unnoticeable distinction: “He was, however, a stern, many would say an absurdly stern, critic of his own work…” The implication is that not every writer is a critic of his, her, or their own work; and that is a failing of theirs. We will be looking with Josipovici at Kafka as he tries to write things that contain essential truths. Along with his determination to rest, the desire to be given early retirement from his job, and to write, he must break things off with Felice. “As we will see, this nexus of emotions and attempts at analysis remains central to what Kafka writes and thinks about for the next few months—and is in fact merely an intensification of feelings that had always been with him.”
“On 15 September 1917 Kafka made his first diary entry in a new notebook,” a notebook dedicated to the aphorisms. It would be rewriting Winter to go through every aphorism, so I’ll focus on one that leapt out even before Josipovici treated it at length. It comes from mid-September (even though the text has it, erroneously, as “Four days later, on 19 December”). Josipovici considers it “central to an understanding of everything [Kafka] writes during his winter in Zürau”:
Always incomprehensible to me that it is possible for almost anyone who can write, suffering pain, to objectify the pain, so that I, for example, suffering unhappiness, my head perhaps still burning with unhappiness, can sit down and communicate to someone in writing: I am unhappy. Indeed, I can even go beyond that and in various flourishes, depending on my talent, which seems to have nothing to do with the unhappiness, improvise on it simply or antithetically or with a whole orchestra of associations. And it is not at all a lie and does not still the pain, is simply a merciful surplus of powers at the moment when the pain has actually visibly used up all my powers to the bottom of my being, which it scrapes. But then what sort of surplus is it?
Generally, what person who has ever set things down in the heat or despair of the moment doesn’t recognize that the requirement for any distance from the pain is to put some portion of it outside the mind, spirit, and body? Or to recognize Kafka’s reflex of writing an entry that captures the emotions as they occur? We draw energy from a reserve or maybe “surplus,” so the pain isn’t debilitating, or more precisely, not debilitating to our writing, however else we may be feeling. (Of course, this may be little different from a study that showed when people were subject to intense cold and swore that swearing increased the subjects’ pain threshold and pain tolerance.)
In his memoir of the first part of the pandemic, Josipovici says that “even the most ‘pessimistic’ artist, a Bernhard, a Shabtai [sic] a Kafka, finds a powerful joy even in the expression of pessimism. The pleasure of creation trumps even bodily pain and relentless gloom about human motives and possibilities.” (100 Days [2021]) He offers here a small taste of what he finds in Kafka in that mid-September entry and in another from 12 November: “To write ‘I am in despair’ does something strange to that feeling of despair, brings into play an unexpected aspect of the self, one which finds energy in the writing, makes of it something other than a simple description. Is the same true of thinking?” The second passage from Winter may make a reader think that catharsis is work, and perhaps it is sometimes. Readers will likely be able to call to mind a poem or play or work of fiction that, however grim, sparks with a vitality underneath the surface, the energy of the person who set down those words that from under the text makes a silent rebuttal for the reader not becoming as grim as the work read, but for feeling moved somewhere else from where we were when we started reading. It’s an energy that militates against the despair of the story that is the outer shell, for example, of Philip Roth’s Letting Go, which, when I read it years ago, lifted my low spirits immediately. The vitality of the author is not a device like foreshadowing, but a felt intellectual and spiritual energy permeating each line. The source of the “surplus” that Kafka looks for will remain, for each writer, a mystery, but by broaching the question Josipovici has pointed to a truth we would like to possess but likely never can. His attention to each aphorism he discusses at length is the kind any author would welcome.
I offer this somewhat tentatively, that Josipovici’s extended treatment of a particular writing project of Kafka’s speaks not only of fascination or, possibly, obsession, but to something he sees in Kafka and his writings that indicates there’s a personal identification lying just beyond full explication. We can see a history of this engagement first articulated in one of Josipovici’s earliest publications, The World and the Book (1971). The subjects of that critical book, among others, are Chaucer, Rabelais, Lolita, and William Golding, but he makes a point of saying that “I have not dealt with any writer who, though close to my heart like Kafka or Claude Simon, has already been commented upon so well that I would not be able to add anything of real interest.” In The Mirror of Criticism (1983), Josipovici voices an opinion that “we particularly relish the letters and diaries of artists who give little away in their work, like Flaubert or Kafka…” Throughout Winter, he is keen to tease out as much as possible of Kafka’s life, feelings, and thoughts using the aphorisms as primary texts and working, via letters and diary entries, to unveil their meanings. Maybe, as the years have gone by, Josipovici decided to see if he could find more of Kafka’s life in his work and add something useful to the commentary.
One aspect of Winter that deserves highlighting is a reminder that Kafka, even situated in a country setting, read as much as he could of contemporary and older writers. He reads Martin Buber’s “new journal,” where one of his own stories appeared and mentions “that he began Herzen’s memoirs but was distracted by the arrival of several newspapers and journals” and, for a final example, reading Kierkegaard. Josipovici says in “Kafka’s Children,” an essay in The Singer on the Shore (2006), that “though Kafka, unlike Proust, Eliot or Virginia Woolf, wrote no critical essays, he was anything but a naïve untutored genius. Like them he had obviously thought long and hard about his craft, and his comments in literature, like theirs, carry an authority denied most critics because it clearly matters so profoundly to him.” Josipovici shares a similar authority on a variety of topics. His immersion in Kafka and works written by him is as evident here as it has been throughout his writing life.
Conclusion
What if a reader is cold to Kafka, or sees him not as a pinnacle in world literature, but as another Western storyteller, born in a long-dead empire, with an illness, attitudes, easy and uneasy family relationships, and heartache? What does the writing of a Jewish male in the early 20th century say to, for example, a BIPOC facing police discrimination or for a LGBTQI2S+ individual nervous about choosing a new pronoun in school? I first read Kafka in my late teens. The Trial left me wondering what the hype was about. Certainly, at age eighteen I was at an appropriate time in my life, theoretically speaking, to pick up on his themes of oppression and isolation, and the dreariness of life in that place and that time. Dreariness was part of my growing up, however, so what I needed then was not more misery but tools for becoming optimistic or at least hopeful and not a shovel to dig myself further into the pit of fatalism that threatened to bury me. “When Kafka is at his best is when…he catches both the loss and a sense of what has been lost.” I was aware of loss and what was missing in my life, but, for me, that awareness wasn’t enough, and never will be enough, to get by in this world. You equally need to catch every instance of the good in the world that you can. The Trial was a weight when I needed wings. As well, who can read Josipovici’s claims about the standard Kafka represents without thinking of Eurocentric bias? What does Kafka’s writing do that the writing of every other author from every other part of the world fails to do? It’s a mistake to tout one author as the best example for everyone in the world, forever.
Some of these reservations about Kafka and arguments for his specialness only became clearer to me while thinking about Winter and what to say about it. It helped me realize how a life lived differently can make his work, or any writer’s work, appear less than essential. Thankfully, a reader can pick up A Winter in Zürau without having to accept Josipovici’s claims. His work is a personal statement, and worth spending time with to consider why he believes what he does and to demur occasionally.
At some stage in a life of reading, books that are only good become missed opportunities, occasions for regrets that they don’t offer more, at least to that particular reader. Despite the known rarity of the experience, readers always want what’s almost impossible, which is to be as enthralled today as we were when books were still new and, perhaps, hard to get. We hope for a treasury rather than a bare cupboard. This doesn’t mean that reading the newest work by a known or unknown author will only be a melancholy process, but it does mean that expectations are likely modest. The difficulty in finding the best books as one reads more and more likely sounds despairing, but it’s not what’s meant. What I want to underline is that while it’s harder to be impressed the more one reads, it can happen. It’s always worth reading authors who are older or our age, and those who are (much) younger. With Gabriel Josipovici, it’s been my experience that only a relatively few readers in North America are familiar with his body of work. This dual book is a fine introduction to his fiction and his intelligence, as well as his style of engagement in non-fiction.
