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"The Limited Circle Is Pure"
Franz Kafka versus the novel by Zadie Smith

Kafka is the novel's bad conscience. His work demonstrates a purity of intention, a precision of language, and a level of metaphysical commitment that the novel partially comprehends but is unable to replicate without, in the process, ceasing to be a novel at all. Consequently, Kafka makes novelists nervous. He doesn't seem to write like the rest of us. Either he is too good for the novel or the novel is not quite good enough for him–whichever it is, his imitators are very few.

Now, why is that? Where are Kafka's descendants? Only a handful–Borges, W.G. Sebald, Thomas Bernhard–have successfully "channeled" the Kafkaesque in any meaningful way. The result has been queer. His influence seems to cause a mutation in the recipient, metamorphosing the novel into something closer to a meditation, a fantastical historiography, an essay, a parable. What is it about Kafka's lessons for the novel that cannot be contained within the novel in the form as we have come to know it? How does Kafka lead novelists away from the novel?

Clearly, the intentions of most novels are not Kafka's intentions. The American writer Wallace Stegner tells us that "if fiction isn't people it is nothing," and this is a usefully succinct version of the novel's story about itself, as a form. By this account, the novel's achievement is to offer us so many "splinters" of consciousness, so many intimate portraits of people. The complexity and the psychological depth of these portraits–Anna Karenina, David Copperfield, Madame Bovary, Herzog, Holden Caulfield, and on and on–perform a service of variousness. Singularly, they are that interior communication with human otherness that Aristotle thought essential to our ethical development. Collectively, as "Literature," they are the description of a struggle against those more dogmatic and therefore deceitful versions of self generated by church, by state, by ourselves at our weakest, and now by our rapacious televisions.

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