But the spirit of our time is firmly focused on a present that is so expansive and profuse that it shoves the past off our horizon and reduces time to the present moment only. Within this system the novel is no longer a work (a thing made to last, to connect the past with the future) but one current event among many, a gesture with no tomorrow.

I don’t know. I merely believe I know that the novel cannot live in peace with the spirit of our time: if it is to go on discovering the undiscovered, to go on “progressing” as novel, it can do so only against the progress of the world.

A novel examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man can become, everything he’s capable of. Novelists draw up the map of existence by discovering this or that human possibility. But again, to exist means: “being-in-the-world.” Thus both the character and his world must be understood as possibilities. In Kafka, all that is clear: the Kafkan world does not resemble any known reality, it is an extreme and unrealized possibility of the human world.

M.K.: First, one thing is certain: the moment it becomes part of a novel, reflection changes its essence. Outside the novel, we’re in the realm of affirmation: everyone is sure of his statements: the politician, the philosopher, the concierge, within the universe of the novel, however, no one affirms: it is the realm of play and of hypotheses. In the novel, then, reflection is essentially inquiring, hypothetical.

But in that case, what does history (the mutable) represent for the poet?

In the eyes of the poet, strange as it may seem, history is in a position similar to the poet’s own: History does not invent, it discovers. Through new situations, history reveals what man is, what has been in him “for a long time,” what his possibilities are.

If “the poem” is already there, then it would be illogical to impute to the poet the gift of foresight; no, he “only discovers” a human possibility (“the poem” that has been there “a long long time”) that History will in its turn discover one day.

Kafka made no prophecies. All he did was see what was “behind.” He did not know that his seeing was also a fore-seeing.