Or rather, vivisected it, given that he operated on bodies, not on abstractions.Īmerika (The Missing Person), Kafka’s first and unfinished novel (1911-1914), is not only a masterful vivisection of perplexity as a criminal enterprise. I am told their books fill an immense room in Borges’ Library of Babel, where Kafka’s own writings fit into a tiny corner of a top shelf. The latter were crudely deduced after his death by scholars and interpreters hell-bent on conjuring a general theory of Kafka. Or rather, vivisected it, given that he operated on bodies, not on abstractions.
His tin pot wannabes seem to be legion today, here and elsewhere. Stalin was its most gifted twentieth-century practitioner, a master at creating mass perplexity to exercise unfettered power. The kind that wipes out people and nations in a generation or two. Some leave dead souls killed by enduring, relentless, soul-killing metaphysical perplexity, the kind that reason cannot fight. Not all crimes spawn corpses or murderers.
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