Into the White lays bare a hidden overall logic in Kafka’s work. Instead of restoring an initial but perturbed balance – the standard pattern for a piece of fiction -, Kafka’s characters always do the opposite: they do everything they can to maintain the imbalance. The book shows how this should be linked to Kafka’s own attitude as a writer. Writing, for Kafka, always gave birth to promises that could not be kept. It opens up gates that the writer is not allowed to enter.

In the stories that deal with this, Kafka invariably points to the intricate and even impossible relationship between the artist and his or her public. By drawing on contemporary research into the constitution of human self-consciousness (and the intricate relationship between nature and culture), Into the White brings us surprising but also perfectly recognizable insights into the nature of fiction and narrativity, and more broadly, into the very process of generating meaning. The book also sheds new light on many aspects of popular culture.

Prologue

Art is not a riddle that we have to solve in order to find the hidden 'right meaning'. Its meaning, that is, is not something we can appropriate. Paraphrasing a poem, or drawing a sketch of a painting or describing it, are clearly not the same thing as reciting the verses or seeing the painting in real time. Art in one way or another always withdraws itself from the colonial power of our understanding. It points to something, it evokes something - but what is evoked precisely will never itself be 'captured' by, say, a book about the artist.

But with our colonialist minds we might reach out for something else, namely, we might try to understand why that is the case. How is it possible, we might wonder, that art indeed has this strange power of evocation? How does that work? And where does that power find its roots? And do these underlying roots maybe also show up elsewhere - in philosophy for example, or more in general, in the dynamic evolution of our languages, or even in ourselves? - because are we not ourselves also evocations that keep on escaping definite comprehension?

Apart from a study of Kafka, this book, in trying to understand something of the deeper coherence in Kafka's oeuvre, necessarily also tries to make sense of how art (and narrativity in particular) fits into the bigger picture of the 'human revolution'. The human animal is the only animal that brings forth art. On top of that, all humans do it. Art is universal: we love art, we are drawn towards it. By using texts and insights from Kafka, I will show that this calls for an approach that sees art not as something that humans discovered by coincidence (a discovery that then sustained itself because it allegedly brought us evolutionary advantages, as many academics nowadays suggest), but rather as something we always, and already, tend towards, which I will link up with the way our human self-consciousness works. For this I will draw on my doctoral research into personal identity, and also on much contemporary cross-disciplinary research (drawing from diverse fields such as the philosophy of mind, phenomenology, cognitive psychology, development psychology and neuroscience). By doing this, I hope to shed new light on what Kafka considered to be crucial to art, namely its intrinsically social aspect - which it inherits from our 'hybrid' and social human self-consciousness.

Art evokes. An important stress in these pages is laid on the fact that this also goes for the artist himself: he too does not fully master or 'possess' what he has after all evoked himself. But I will also show that a part of the seductive attraction of art lies precisely in the beguiling promise that such an appropriating possession is possible. The artist is drawn to art by a promise of clarity. But this longed-for clarity will never be fully achieved - as is perfectly satisfactory for most artists. With Kafka I will not only show that the social aspect of art lies at the very origin of the arts, but also that this same social aspect is the very reason why art cannot keep its promises and why indeed evoking is the only thing it can do. Its power of evocation and its impotence go hand in hand.

But if that is the case, it might also teach us other things. Since the social aspect of art is an 'inheritance' from our 'hybrid' self-consciousness, the impossibility of full clarity and total intellectual transparency is true of more than art. Or as Wittgenstein's famous dictum goes: 'Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.' One of the main things I want to show here is why human beings cannot remain silent. Or to put it differently, I want to show that it may not be unfruitful to think of art - and even more broadly, of our whole culture, understood as the collection of our shared representations - as ever-resumed but failed attempts to remain silent (or to reach the ultimate).

Although the word 'failed' might suggest a dim view on culture, failing to reach the ultimate - and we will see what that means - does not leave us with necessarily bad outcomes. Kafka's own wonderful works can testify to that, as do so many other works of art and cultural manifestations. Moreover, the fact that outcomes of some sort are reached is a great deal better than nothing: the promise that the ultimate might be achieved is one of the most powerful drives behind our culture, and explains why culture keeps on evolving instead of coming to a standstill. Whether its outcomes are good or bad, is, I think, an open question. It depends on ourselves: it depends on our past, present and future achievements and, along with that, on our ever-shifting interpretations of what those achievements amount to.    

I have been reading Kafka for quite a while now - as a reader, but also as a writer. I am aware of the fact that a lot of what I have described probably echoes some of my own struggles with writing. Some will doubtless think that this is a bad thing, but I myself firmly believe the opposite. This book does not set out to be a textbook model of academic research. For example, the reader will not find too many secondary references on Kafka listed (nothing of the German Kafka-Forschung is included, for instance). That is not because of any lack of interest, but rather because, as it happened, the insights that blossomed led down another path. I wanted to pursue that path, for it was my path: it held a certain promise for me. To insert a lot of secondary literature on Kafka just for the sake of a seeming academic adequacy would have been artificial if not fraudulent. It also might have muddled things, not only for myself, but also for the reader. We might have lost our path. And so I opted not to insert too much secondary literature on Kafka and leave things as clear and straightforward as possible, so that the reader and I could head on in the most convenient way. It is unnecessary to stress that the path has not brought us its promised ultimate enlightenment. Since that impossibility is exactly what the book is about, that seems perfectly legitimate - especially so because following the path was pleasant and interesting enough in itself. I personally have learnt a great deal by writing this book. And I can only hope that the reader at the end of his or her journey can say likewise.

Seen from this viewpoint, I think it is no coincidence that this book deals with Kafka. Whereas it is probably true that a similar book might also have arisen out of the inner dialogue between me and another author's oeuvre, I personally know of no other writer who has put the impossibility of reaching the promise that is the main drive behind the work of art, as central as Kafka puts it. Or as I have often told myself, with a strong ironic undertone: if there existed a God especially for writers, Kafka would be our Jesus.

This study would not have been possible without the inspiring work and thought of at least the following four persons: Franz Kafka (of course), Arnold Burms, Merlin Donald and Maurice Blanchot. I would also like to thank my warm and hospitable colleagues at the Centre for Subjectivity Research in cold Copenhagen (where I wrote a good many of these pages), my colleagues at the HIW of the K.U.Leuven, professor Vivian Liska, professor Arnold Burms, my parents, my sister, and, of course, all my friends. Special thanks go to Johan Eckart Hansen, a noble devil's advocate, to the two blind reviewers who have so carefully commented on the work, and to the FWO Vlaanderen, for their financial support. Last but far from least, I would like to thank David Seton, for his wonderful linguistic assistance and his insightful help and suggestions: this book owes him a lot.