Triad 15 of 32 · 2026-10-08 · Difficulty 3 · Shared figure or motif, Genealogy/influence, Shared form or method, Conflict
The thread
One symptom, two diagnoses. Kafka’s diary entry for 7 June 1912 (‘7 June. Bad. Wrote nothing today. Tomorrow no time.’) is the epigraph to Flaherty’s chapter on writer’s block (The Midnight Disease, ch. 3), where block means not writing while able to AND suffering for it. Vila-Matas’s narrator in Bartleby & Co. (note 24) quotes another empty diary day, the rainy Sunday of 7 Jan 1912 (‘staring at my fingers’, Goethe), as proof that Kafka had ‘Bartleby’s syndrome’: not-writing as a vocation of the demanding conscience, a ‘disease’ with the suffering clause left out. Both later books are first-person diaries or case histories of a writing disorder, and both quote Kafka through a channel that shows: Flaherty’s Kafka is a composite (Diaries; Felice letters via Leader; a line that matches Janouch more closely than the Diaries), and Vila-Matas’s reaches English via Spanish. Machine counts of the Diaries show writing discussed most in 1911–12 (44/86, 32/73 entries) and almost never in 1922, the year of The Castle (5/73).
The three books
- Diaries, 1910-1923, Franz Kafka, Max Brod (editor), Joseph Kresh (translator), Martin Greenberg (translator), Hannah Arendt (translator); 1910–23 (pub. 1948–49). Primary source: the blank days both later books diagnose
- The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain, Alice W. Flaherty; 2004. Clinical diagnosis: block as disease, defined by the suffering clause
- Bartleby & Co., Enrique Vila-Matas, Jonathan Dunne (translator); 2000 (Eng. 2004). Counter-diagnosis: not-writing as vocation and canon
Notebook
- Apply Flaherty’s two-trait definition of block (ch. 3) to Vila-Matas’s roster (Rimbaud, Salinger, Walser, Tolstoy in note 86, the narrator’s ‘Apart from that, I am happy’): blocked, Bartleby, or neither? Then your own longest silence.
- Using the Kafka year counts and the two nights (Jan 1911 ‘I SHOULD write the whole night through’; 22–23 Sept 1912 ‘The Judgement’), ask whether the diary is mainly an instrument for recording not-writing, and how the commonplace book differs.
- Translation drift as evidence: ‘keeps me from all writing’ / ‘prevents me from doing any writing’; ‘if none observes me’ / ‘if none observe me’; ‘I write in order to shut my eyes’ / ‘My stories are a kind of closing one’s eyes.‘
Rabbit holes
Links as checked on the day of the reading.
- Melville, Bartleby, the Scrivener (Gutenberg): https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11231
- Agamben, ‘Bartleby, or On Contingency’ (PhilPapers): https://philpapers.org/rec/AGABOO
- Frances Wilson, ‘Descriptions of a Struggle’, NYRB 2023 (Ross Benjamin’s Diaries): https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/04/06/descriptions-of-a-struggle-the-diaries-franz-kafka/
- Hofmannsthal, ‘A Letter’, trans. Michael Hofmann, PN Review 43: https://www.pnreview.co.uk/archive/a-letter-translated-by-michael-hofmann/5898
- Juvenal, Satire VII (Latin Library): https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/juvenal/7.shtml
- Sachdev & Waxman, hypergraphia in TLE, JNNP 1981: https://jnnp.bmj.com/content/44/4/358
To carry
“The strange, mysterious, perhaps dangerous, perhaps saving comfort that there is in writing: it is a leap out of murderers’ row; it is a seeing of what is really taking place.” — Kafka, Diaries, 27 January 1922
Themes
Bartleby’s syndrome · diary form · Geschwind syndrome · Goethe · hypergraphia · Janouch · Kafka’s Diaries · literature of the No · Melville · night writing · Salinger · suffering clause · The Judgement · Tolstoy’s last diary sentence · translation drift · writer’s block
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