I want to tell you about a mishap I had while teaching Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial a few years ago. The basics are quickly summarized: after reading out loud a passage that I had chosen because it seemed especially rich, I found I had nothing to say about it. Nothing. I tried finessing things by reading it a second time: still nothing. Panic rising, I skipped to another passage I had marked and read it to the class, and
then another—always with the same outcome.
 
This was unnerving. I had set off on one path—the path of analysis and interpretation, the path I knew, or thought I knew—only to find myself repeatedly led back to my starting point, to Kafka’s words themselves. It was a bit like walking into a Luis Buñuel movie, The Exterminating Angel, for example, or The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, where every attempt at achieving a simple task—crossing a threshold or sitting down to a meal—is mysteriously foiled.
 
Or like wandering into a story by Kafka himself, a story like “An Imperial Message.” It’s a simple story: a messenger rushes to get a message from the dying emperor to you—yes, you—yet despite his swiftness, despite his resolve, he never manages to leave the palace, much less cross the vast expanse of the empire to reach you. Like The Trial and so much of Kafka’s writing, the story is pervaded by the feeling that a character’s efforts to move forward, vigorous though they may be, result in nothing but futility and exhaustion. It’s a feeling we know from bad dreams and one I came to know in front of my class. Try as I might, I found no way to deliver the message.
 
I have often returned to that moment, and not without dread, since the burn of humiliation never quite heals. One reason to revisit it may be that I soon felt, or perhaps hoped, that the scene betrayed something more than my own shortcoming, that being tongue-tied spoke to a shared condition, the condition of criticism, which we encounter in reviews and monographs but whose roots reach deeper and wider. I felt and hoped that my failure to speak was mute testimony to a general difficulty in saying something that could stand up to the experience of reading the passages from The Trial—the difficulty of criticism. This book is a wager that there is something to that feeling and that hope.
 
Most things I encounter in the world do not impel me to speak about them. When I hold a spoon without saying something about it, I do not feel an absence, a void aching to be filled, a stutter pounding against an invisible barrier, and not because there is nothing to say about it. An inquiry into the spoon need not be less demanding than examining a work by Kafka. When I take the spoon for granted and credit it with indifferent silence, as I do every day, I do lose something: I deprive myself of the knowledge of its place in history and miss out on the pleasure of noticing just how elegant a device this piece of flatware is. But that is not essential to the relationship we have, the spoon and I. Telling its story, singing its praises, or enumerating its flaws, is something I do for my own sake or for the sake of others, not something the spoon asks of me. If it can be said to ask anything of me, it is to use it—to stir the broth or tap the soft-boiled egg; so, I use it. As a rule, the spoon does not call on me to grapple with its significance, which is why as a rule I do not feel the urge to put it down and tell you about it.
 
Yet when holding a book that speaks to me, that is just what I feel: the urge to put it down and tell you. And when I then fail, my silence feels different from the one with which I greet the spoon. Now my silence consists not in the mere absence of words but has a volume and mass all its own. I feel the pressure of words I am not uttering. These are not words I know and have chosen to hold back, the way I decide to keep a secret. They are words whose surging force I feel yet whose shape and character elude me. Because I require them to give shape to my experience, their remaining out of reach means that my own experience fails me: What just happened to me? Did anything happen? Nor must I remain silent to hear the absence of words: often (in the classroom, for instance, or the scholarly study) it is the very
abundance of discourse, its polish and erudition, that bears witness to what remains unspoken.
 
It comes down to this:
 
Something speaks to me.
I must tell you about it.
But I don’t know how.
 
That is the heart of it—the heart of criticism and its difficulty, no matter its form, no matter its refinement: I read something, and next there is an upsurge of desire to tell you about it. “Desire” is not quite right, since what makes itself felt is something closer to a need, a need so obscure that it remains nameless.