Schuwalkin and us

In a remarkable essay on Kafka, written in 1934 on the tenth anniversary of his death, Walter Benjamin introduces Potemkin, Catherine the Great's partner and chancellor. Potemkin is a drunk afflicted by severe and regular fits of depression. In one unusually long low, he retreats to his room, barring everybody entry. But nothing can be done without Potemkin's signature. So official business piles up, policies can't be enacted and grave irregularities result; Russian ministries come to a standstill. Catherine and top civil servants are at their wits’ end. Then, one day, in struts a young, headstrong minor clerk called Schuwalkin. ‘What's up?’ Schuwalkin wonders. The ministers explain. Schuwalkin isn't impressed. Such inactivity and passivity. He's zealous and wants action, now. ‘If that's all it is, gentlemen,’ he replies, ‘give me those files, I beg you’ (Benjamin 2009: 193). The ministers have nothing to lose. So Schuwalkin grabs the bundles of papers and sets off through the galleries, along the corridors, to Potemkin's gloomy bedchamber. In he marches, without knocking, without even saying a word, foisting the documents under the nose of the bedridden chancellor. Dipping his plume in ink, he hands it to the startled Potemkin. Absent-mindedly, sleepily, the latter executes the first signature, then a second, then a third, and eventually all of them. Schuwalkin bolts back to the ministers who bend over the documents.

This vignette, says Benjamin, strikes us like a messenger, heralding Kafka's work two centuries in advance. The zealous and lighthearted Schuwalkin, like Kafka's K. in The Castle, has a brush with authority, is partly assuaged, yet ultimately comes away frustrated and empty-handed. Those authorities, mysterious and secluded in their bedchambers, in their dark attics within attics, along corridors off corridors, are there, sometimes glimpsed, sometimes even challenged, yet always – or seemingly always – elude us and deflect us: their full panoply of power remains intact come what may.