One may well marvel at the audacity of Pierre Senges. In writing Studies of Silhouettes, which completes the fragments of one of the greatest and most arcane of writers, he has dared to defy Kafka’s explicit command, written on a scrap of paper on his deathbed and passed to his closest friend, Max Brod:
Dearest Max,
My last request: Everything I leave behind me…in the way of notebooks, manuscripts, letters, my own and other people’s, sketches and so on, is to be burned unread and to the last page, as well as all writings of mine or notes which either you may have or other people, from whom you are to beg them in my name. […]
Yours, Franz Kafka[1]
As the existence of this note indicates, Brod himself defied Kafka, choosing instead to collect, edit, and publish several (but not all) of these fragments, leaving us with incomplete novels and a legal battle that has lasted nearly a century—a battle that has, time and again, been compared to Kafka’s The Trial. Flipping through the 120 pages of Studies of Silhouettes, we see that Senges has trespassed a step or two further than Brod. He has not only picked up those unfinished manuscripts and sketches but has raised a pen and whispered to himself: I can finish this.
There are 92 short texts: in bold, 
Kafka’s fragments, which frequently trail off mid-sentence and are never longer than a few lines, followed by Senges’s additions. These too are short, varying between a single sentence and a couple pages. Each text is hermetic: there is no overarching narrative, no clearly defined characters, no distinguishable narrator. They are no longer fragments, but they are not quite parables or stories, nor any other word we typically use. Perhaps only the German word Fortschreibungen, which means “updates” or “continuations” but contains the words “away” and “writings” and thus the idea of “further-writings” or “rewritings,” can capture the nature of these texts, which are at once palimpsests and afterlives of Kafka’s fragments. They are rewritings in the sense that they are simultaneously copies and originals, and in the sense that they initiate a process that never really ends. Kafka’s texts, in Senges’s words, are “not quite drafts, but the opening lines of drafts, the germs of something larger (to borrow a phrase of Henry James). They were supposed to inaugurate vast novels, but they took a wrong turn at the end of the first sentence […].”[2]
Senges’s borrowed term, “germ,” invokes another of Kafka’s commentators. “[Kafka’s] starting point,” wrote Walter Benjamin in a letter to Bertolt Brecht in 1934, “is really the parable […]. But this parable is then subject to artistic elaboration. It grows into a novel. And, strictly speaking, it carried the germ of one from the start.”[3] But Senges’s stories never grow into novels. They seem to delay their endings, stuck in a cyclical, endless Fortschreibung. We follow them “for three, for thirty, or a hundred more lines,” but all that we discover is the “beguiling impossibility of ever reaching the end.”[4] This task, as Senges seems to realize, could have been drawn from the pages of Kafka’s stories. Peering with a craned neck over a haphazard pile of documents found in some distant archive or in one’s own attic, a writer finds enigmatic messages, inexplicable fragments that end as abruptly as they begin. Bound by some intangible force, the writer cannot leave these dusty sheets—they demand to be read, interpreted, finished—and begins to suffer the Sisyphean task of completing the incompletable.
Senges is clearly a careful reader of Kafka. His rewritings draw themes not only from The Castle and The Metamorphosis, not only from “The Cares of a Family Man” and “A Report to an Academy,” but even from the aphorisms and drafts found only in Kafka’s Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente (posthumous writings and fragments), not all of which have survived the journey into English.[5] Senges’s rewritings—which fall into roughly two categories, mimicry and metafiction—are not merely “Kafkaesque” in the quotidian sense; rather, they are steeped in the themes Kafka hid deeper in his texts. We are accosted by bizarre creatures, Greek mythology, bureaucracy, exile, Scripture, colonialism, the Law, and Biblical commentary; we are thrust into the middle of petty squabbles between friends, impossible conundrums, and hermeneutic musings on tradition and ancient history.
Senges’s less-successful rewritings tend to be purely metafictional. Here, Senges’s self-reflexive narrators circle like jackdaws around the structure and language of Kafka’s fragments. “Someone came up to me and tugged on my clothing, but I shrugged them off,” writes Kafka, with deliberate and delicious ambiguity. Senges (in one version) critiques this “incongruous” beginning: “I reread that sentence over for the hundredth time, to know whether it was my clothing or the stranger I shrugged off.”[6] Although this approach is fascinating up to a certain point in its questioning of the authority of Kafka’s text, Senges applies it far too often, and half the collection threatens to slip into a monotonously metafictional abyss. More successful are Senges’s attempts at mimicry. In one of the better rewritings, Senges takes a fragment about an ancient penal system and creates something of which Kafka would have been proud:
In the old days (these are rumors—in the absence of documents, rumors are the first and final version of our ancient history), one had to subject suspects to torture […] and since pain was accepted as the shortest path to truth, after the turn of the guilty men and the simple suspects, then it was the witnesses’ turn to be welcomed under the vaults and to emerge, one would have said, purged of their lies and their sins, or thoroughly bled, and grateful for it.[7]
We see here Kafka’s marriage of form and content. The strange syntax of lengthy sentences (in which the most profound revelations occur parenthetically), exhaled as if in a single breath, parallels an incomprehensible relationship between modernity and prehistory, between documentary evidence and hearsay, between the arcane legal system of The Trial and the sadistically pleasing ritualistic torture device of “In the Penal Colony.” But the longer one stares, the more one gets the uncanny feeling that Senges is imposing this paradoxical ancient law on the reader. The presence of the rewriting defies the “absence of documents,” as if suggesting that the text is itself a witness’s grateful testimony. By reading on, we continue the ritual, but it is unclear whether on the side of the suspects or the torturers. We are no longer certain of the truth, nor that truth can ever be attained: “Each sentence says ‘interpret me,’ and none will permit it.”[8]
There are several rewritings which, in their imitation of Kafka’s attention to hermeneutical tradition, achieve something like exegesis—they are creation and critique in a single stroke, and one is reminded of Benjamin’s reading of Kafka’s stories as aggadot.[9] This is the case in Senges’s rewriting of a fragment about the Thamühl synagogue. Although the Thamühl synagogue fragment remained incomplete, Kafka did finish a version of a related story.[10] Among the Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente, we find four fragments about a synagogue. Two of these are short and rather unfruitful, but one is the fragment Senges uses—“In the Thamühl synagogue, there lives an animal something of the size and shape of a marten,”—which ends there, on a comma, as if pleading to be finished.[11] The final fragment begins with a complete sentence, reading: “In our synagogue, there lives an animal something of the size of a marten.”[12] In changing “Thamühl” to “our,” Kafka strips the synagogue of its concrete index and creates a personal association; meanwhile, the animal grows vaguer, no longer allowed the form or appearance of a marten, but only its size. Kafka’s text continues for several pages: “It is often very easy to see; it allows people to approach it up to a distance of two meters.”[13] Senges’s creature takes a more prominent position: “in Thamühl, once you have crossed over the threshold, it’s not to God or to the rabbi that you must pay your respects, but to that marten, or that animal which is almost marten.” If Senges’s martenesque creature is more confident than Kafka’s, so is its creator. Just as “Thamühl” is kept instead of “our,” Senges adds that the animal appears before the “temple-less Jews.”[14] This is a consequential addition, given Kafka’s complicated relationship to his father’s Judaism and the absence of the word Jew in any of his fiction, an absence which led Robert Alter to write that Kafka “rigorously excludes from his fiction all references to anything Jewish.”[15] Senges seems to be playing with this theme, taunting the reader with the possibility of hidden meanings in each word.
Studies of Silhouettes often feels like an inside joke between Senges and Kafka. This is an erudite book, one that will primarily appeal to those who have reverently read and reread Kafka’s collected stories and hunger for more. An unhappy and mysophobic critic might say that Senges’s “germs of something larger” shrivel and die before they become novels. I would say that Kafka’s best work occurred between parentheses, commas, and em-dashes—and that this is Senges’s strongest suit as well. Senges, like one of Kafka’s creatures, survives in liminal spaces: between mimicry and metafiction, between the cracks of Kafka’s fragments, between hopeful beginnings and beguilingly impossible endings. Authors from I. B. Singer to Lydia Davis, and from Ilse Aichinger to Philip Roth, (and many far less esteemed) have written “Kafkaesque” tales with varying degrees of success, and it is to Senges’s credit that he may, at times, be able to fool even an initiated reader of Kafka. It’s ironic (in the Kafkaesque sense, of course) that Senges’s book first appeared just months before a “cache of [Kafka’s] unpublished manuscripts,” prime material for a continuation (or Fortschreibung) of this book, was opened in 2010.[16] Kafka’s legacy, like tradition, is thus circular rather than linear, and Senges’s book is not even the latest manifestation of a ritual, dating back to Brod, of dealing with unburned fragments.
Notes:
[1] Quoted in Benjamin Balint, Kafka’s Last Trial: The Case of a Literary Legacy (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), 124. In a second note, Kafka specified six stories that he “can stand,” while telling Brod that “everything else” is “to be burned.” Balint, Kafka’s Last Trial, 125.
[2] Pierre Senges, Studies of Silhouettes, trans. Jacob Siefring (Seattle: Sublunary Editions, 2020), 3.
[3] Walter Benjamin, “Conversations with Brecht,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1986), 205. Benjamin may have also been borrowing from James, but I do not know if there is a way to prove this.
[4] Senges, Studies of Silhouettes, 3.
[5] See Franz Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente, vol. 1, ed. Malcolm Pasley, vol. 2, ed. Jost Schillemeit (Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer Verlag, 1992-93). This is part of the S. Fischer Verlag’s attempt to record every word written by Kafka. Volume 1 has been translated into English by Ida Pfitzner as Abandoned Fragments: The Unedited Works of Franz Kafka, 1897-1917 (London: Sun Vision Press, 2012). Reiner Stach and Michael Hofmann (Kafka’s foremost biographer and translator respectively) have recently published the first English edition of a small selection of the fragments from the much longer second volume. See Franz Kafka, The Lost Writings, ed. Reiner Stach, trans. Michael Hofmann (New York: New Directions, 2020). In the afterword, Stach writes that “Franz Kafka is the master of the literary fragment. In no other European author does the proportion of completed and published works loom quite so…small in the overall mass of his papers, which consist largely of broken-off beginnings” (131). For more on this recent publication, see Deborah Treisman, “On Finding and Translating Kafka’s Fragmented, Claustrophobic Gems,” New Yorker, June 22, 2020: https://www.newyorker.com/books/this-week-in-fiction/franz-kafka-06-29-20
[6] Senges, Studies of Silhouettes, 52.
[7] Senges, Studies of Silhouettes, 75.
[8] Theodor W. Adorno, “Notes on Kafka,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel & Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 245-71, here 246.
[9] See Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death,” trans. Harry Zohn, in Selected Writings: Volume 2, Part 2, 1931-1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 794-818.
[10] In German, “In unserer Synagoge…,” in Die Erzählungen und andere ausgewählte Prosa, ed. Roger Hermes (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1996), 405-409. In English, “Das Tier in der Synagoge / The Animal in the Synagogue,” in Parables and Paradoxes in German and English (New York: Schocken, 1958), 48-59. This story does not appear in The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken, 1995).
[11] I am using my own translation of the German original, rather than Siefring’s English translation of the French translation of the German original. The original reads: “In der Thamühler Synagoge lebt ein Tier von der Größe und Gestalt etwa eines Marders.” Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente, 2:405.
[12] My translation. The original reads: “In unserer Synagoge lebt ein Tier in der Größe etwa eines Marders.” Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente, 2:405-411, here 405. In addition to the change from “Thamühl” to “unserer” and the removal of “und Gestalt,” Kafka also changes the preposition “of” [von] to “in” [in], which does not strike me as particularly important.
[13] Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente, 2:405-406. My translation.
[14] Senges, Studies of Silhouettes, 74.
[15] Robert Alter, Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 53.
[16] See: Mark Tran, “Lawyers open cache of unpublished Kafka manuscripts,” The Guardian, July 19, 2010: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jul/19/lawyers-open-unpublished-kafka-manuscripts and David Rising, “Germany hands Israel thousands of Kafka confidant’s papers,” The Times of Israel, May 22, 2019: https://www.timesofisrael.com/germany-hands-israel-thousands-of-kafka-confidants-papers/.