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    The Event of Postcolonial Shame
    The Event of Postcolonial Shame
    The Event of Postcolonial Shame
    Ebook402 pages5 hours

    The Event of Postcolonial Shame

    By Timothy Bewes

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    In a postcolonial world, where structures of power, hierarchy, and domination operate on a global scale, writers face an ethical and aesthetic dilemma: How to write without contributing to the inscription of inequality? How to process the colonial past without reverting to a pathology of self-disgust? Can literature ever be free of the shame of the postcolonial epoch--ever be truly postcolonial? As disparities of power seem only to be increasing, such questions are more urgent than ever. In this book, Timothy Bewes argues that shame is a dominant temperament in twentieth-century literature, and the key to understanding the ethics and aesthetics of the contemporary world.


    Drawing on thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Theodor Adorno, and Gilles Deleuze, Bewes argues that in literature there is an "event" of shame that brings together these ethical and aesthetic tensions. Reading works by J. M. Coetzee, Joseph Conrad, Nadine Gordimer, V. S. Naipaul, Caryl Phillips, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and Zoë Wicomb, Bewes presents a startling theory: the practices of postcolonial literature depend upon and repeat the same structures of thought and perception that made colonialism possible in the first place. As long as those structures remain in place, literature and critical thinking will remain steeped in shame.


    Offering a new mode of postcolonial reading, The Event of Postcolonial Shame demands a literature and a criticism that acknowledge their own ethical deficiency without seeking absolution from it.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateNov 22, 2010
    ISBN9781400836499
    The Event of Postcolonial Shame
    Author

    Timothy Bewes

    Timothy Bewes is Associate Professor of English at Brown University. He is an editor of New Formations and a contributor to New Left Review, New Literary History and Parallax.

    Read more from Timothy Bewes

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      The Event of Postcolonial Shame - Timothy Bewes

      memory.

      Prologue

      I HAVE JUST REACHED the age of forty, life's midpoint. Physically I am of average height and build. I have a growing paunch and an incipient stoop, the effect of many hours spent each day at a desk, reading literature or working on a computer. My hair is reddish brown, its color faded from the rich auburn of my childhood, and its quality has grown thin and wispy. My nose is long and narrow, inherited from my father, and my features in general rather pointed, denoting, I am sure, an underlying selfishness and belligerence in my character. My eyes are slightly sunken and my skin increasingly pasty as I get older. These signs of physical deterioration have been expedited by my single-minded pursuit of an academic career and by my resentment of physical exercise, which I undertake periodically in an attitude of furious self-improvement. I have small, rather feminine hands; a barely noticeable deformity interrupts the join of my middle finger with the palm of my right hand, an indication, perhaps, of the presence of other amphibious qualities in my constitution. I often berate myself for having a coldblooded approach to human relationships and for a morbid, facetious sense of humor. I suspect that, by nature, I am not really cut out for academic work; indeed, I have gone against all the career advice I received as a youth, which uniformly recommended that I take up a practical vocation, preferably one pursued outdoors. This lack of suitability for intellectual work has the effect of aggravating my sense of lifelessness and isolation the more of it I undertake, a state of misery that is sometimes apparent to others as an air of superiority.

      What better reason to write, asks Gilles Deleuze, than the shame of being a man? What better reason, one might add, than the shame of being born a European, of having been raised at the chilly hearth of an empire in decline by a family whose ancestry includes, within living memory, a history of Christian mission in the Third World? What better reason to write than the shame of living and working within the bounds of the largest political, economic, and military power in the world?

      This book examines shame as an event of writing, a complex, in which the tension between the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of literature is brought into sensuous existence, made manifest in all its irreconcilability. Shame, I will argue, is the material embodiment of that tension, a moment at which the formal possibilities open to the work are incommensurable with, or simply inadequate to, its ethical responsibilities. For obvious reasons, shame has frequently been a motif of biographical literary criticism; insofar as we detect the presence of shame in a literary text, we attribute an autobiographical quality to it. As numerous commentators in the fields of social psychology and sociology have noted, when we are ashamed it is not merely for something we have done, but for who or what we are. His heart is old, it is dark and hard, a heart of stone. That is his contemptible secret, we read in a late twentieth-century text so suffused with shame that the autobiographical I is transposed to the third person, apparently in order to make the shame writable.¹ Even narrative fiction, the principal concern of this study, is inserted into an economy of revelation and confession, symptom and pathology, interpretation and symbolism, once our reading becomes organized by the category of authorship. Shame functions, within such an organization, as an index of the text's origins: of the writer and the writer's life that doubtless inform and explain every word.

      The argument put forward in these pages, however, will seek to interrupt this economy. Shame will be considered here as an experience so closely connected to the activity of writing that writing is all but disabled from saying anything about it. This argument, in other words, will involve the nature of shame itself as a form; or, more accurately, it will be an argument constructed on the ruins of the categorical distinction between literature's formal and representational qualities, ruins that the event of shame leaves behind. Shame is not containable within either of two supposedly discrete domains of the writer's experience, domains separated most starkly in the genre of narrative fiction: on one hand, that which precedes writing, which informs it, the sphere of life that provides the writer with the material for writing; on the other, the imaginative realm that is represented, presented for our engagement, within the writing itself. Furthermore, among what are called the emotions or affects, shame is distinctive in this regard. Insofar as it appears in the text, shame is a gap, an absence, an experience that is incongruous with its own acknowledgment. As a phenomenon of life, meanwhile, what shame signals, more than anything, is condemnation to, or imprisonment within, the inadequacy of forms. The attempt to comprehend shame, to find a conceptualization adequate to it, is inevitably to grapple with specters, illusions. Insofar as such explanations or conceptualizations fail to convince, they can also emerge as further sources of shame.

      Joseph Conrad understood this structure well: shame is the experience of a prolonged incommensurability between a form and a substance, erupting, retrospectively, into shame as the manifestation of a great bewilderment. For the betrayed husband in an early story, The Return, what is truly shameful in a wife's betrayal is less the betrayal itself than its unfathomability, the abyss it lays bare.² The passionate act of the wife—a shameless and forlorn thing that tramples on the smiling promises, that tears off the placid mask, that strips the body of life (16)—is incommensurable with every social form: the respectability of marriage, the tragic pathos of an early death, or even the brutal commonplace of an abusive husband. What is so shameful is not that the husband has lived in a delusion exposed by the betrayal, but that he has been thrust, thereby, into a world of desolate unintelligibility. If she had only died! Certain words would have been said to him in a sad tone, and he, with proper fortitude, would have made appropriate answers (14). So excruciating is the experience that the idea of disseminating a rumor that he had been in the habit of beating his wife appears to him, momentarily, as a means of regaining some lost dignity (17–18). Shame does not have an object that may be isolated from the subject—and shame is not an orientation of the subject towards an object. It would be more accurate to say that, in shame, subject and object coincide—but even this formulation is not quite adequate. Shame is an event of incommensurability: a profound disorientation of the subject by the confrontation with an object it cannot comprehend, an object that renders incoherent every form available to the subject.

      This book sets out, then, from an acknowledgment of the impossibility of any literary-critical study of shame as such. No study of shame can deal easily with the paradox that to make shame comprehensible would be to dissolve the feeling, and hence our possibility of grasping it, altogether—and yet shame appears to survive all such attempts at comprehension. This structure of impossibility is constitutive of the object of study: shame resists interpretation, since to speak of it boldly, adequately, is to counteract it, to produce its opposite—or itself as its own opposite (shame as absence of shame).³ When it comes to literature, a practice that, in the modern period, involves the transfiguration of individual experience into an aesthetic form, the very presence of shame raises questions concerning the ethical, political, or representational adequacy of the text—questions that remain, therefore, unanswerable. In literary works, shame does not exist in some buried state, to be unearthed by the penetrating critic; rather, shame appears overtly, as the text's experience of its own inadequacy.

      The body of theory that is most easily identified with the problem of incommensurability is that which has solidified under the name of post-colonial studies. In its most influential incarnation at least, postcolonial theory is founded on the unanswerability of questions such as the following: Is there any position from which to write that is not itself implicated in the history of colonial inequality? One of the lines of inquiry to be pursued in this book concerns the reasons why, in the aftermath of the enterprise known as colonization, and from every perspective upon that enterprise, the literary representation of individual and collective experience repeatedly comes up against a sense of shame as a limit. When Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in Black Orpheus, the preface to Léopold Senghor's 1948 anthology of new Negro and Malagasy poetry, that reading the work of black poets makes us—he and the white men to whom he addresses himself—feel shame, what he is describing is not a communicable emotion but, on the contrary, a mark of something not communicable: If…these poems give us shame, it is not with that conscious purpose; they have not been written for us. All those, colonist and accomplice, who open this book, will have the sensation of reading[,] as though over another's shoulder, words that were not intended for them.⁴ In the postcolonial world, a designation that needs to be further defined and delimited, literature has often functioned as the locus of an incommensurability: between form and substance, expression and appearance, addressee and reader. A block, a residue of unprocessable material accumulates, which is experienced as shame.

      In another preface, his 1961 introduction to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, Sartre returns to the image of a book whose actual readers are not those it was intended for. Arguably, the Fanon preface is composed in a different register from Black Orpheus. In this later text Sartre apparently sets out to shame his European readers precisely by addressing them as the readers of a book that is not meant for them:

      Europeans, open this book, look inside. After taking a short walk in the night you will see strangers gathered around a fire…. They might see you, but they will go on talking among themselves without even lowering their voices. Their indifference strikes home: their fathers, creatures living in the shadows, your creatures, were dead souls; you afforded them light, you were their sole interlocutor, you did not take the trouble to answer the zombies. The sons ignore you. The fire that warms and enlightens them is not yours. You, standing at a respectful distance, you now feel eclipsed, nocturnal, and numbed. It's your turn now. In the darkness that will dawn into another day, you have turned into the zombie.⁵

      The experience of reading Fanon's book, says Sartre, will make you feel ashamed, and shame, as Marx said, is a revolutionary feeling (xlix). Sartre is not theorizing Europe's shame here, nor is he interested in dissolving (or resolving) it. On the contrary, he is attempting, in a highly charged political situation, to produce a sense of shame: to shame his readers. The register of injunction (indeed, of interpellation) is central to the aims of Sartre's text: there is nothing more shame-inducing than the invasive address to the other qua other, as Sartre, the author of Being and Nothingness, knew better than anyone.

      In this light, some of the most fascinating implications of Sartre's Fanon preface are literary ones. By framing The Wretched of the Earth as a book in permanent discontinuity with its readership, Sartre seems to be imagining the possibility of a work predicated upon the absence or the disappearance of the subject, a literature that would escape the shame of interpellation—the individuating gaze of a subject upon an object—by escaping altogether the organizing apparatus of self and other. This literature would have no manifest or nameable readership, no you, only the virtual, undifferentiated community of them, an unproducible, uninstantiable group gathered around a fire. Such a literature would by definition be free of colonial relations of perception—of the structure of looking and being looked at, of subject and object. Clearly Sartre himself is in no position to produce it, or even to conceptualize it directly. And yet, it is in the name of that imagined literature, that imagined relationship between reader and text, that he shames the real readers of Fanon's text. He names Fanon's intended readership, but the name is entirely abstract: Fanon's brothers (xlviii). The abstraction is heightened by the fact that Sartre does not himself address that virtual readership, only the real, no less imagined one that he situates in the shadows of the text, in metropolitan Europe.

      There are, I suggest, two shames operating in this text of Sartre's: a named, instantiated form that he is attempting to offload on his readers (which has very little to do with the object of his philosophical investigation in Being and Nothingness), and an unnamed and unnameable shame, an event that speaks as much to the materiality of Sartre's own work as to the ethical implication of his supposed readership vis-à-vis the colonial enterprise. This second shame is not encompassable by its concept. Shame, unnamed, is an occasion of the suspension, even annihilation of the self in the aftermath of colonialism—a project founded upon the inherent legitimacy of naming, perception, and self-assertion. For us, says Sartre, "a man means an accomplice, for we have all profited from colonial exploitation" (lviii). The event of shame in Sartre's preface is enacted not in the mode of injunction, the mode in which everything is speakable, seeable, and nameable, but as an unspoken, embodied relation to its own actuality as a piece of writing.

      That relation is apparent in the ways in which Sartre imagines Fanon's text as against his own, and vice versa. If Fanon's work is disembodied, subjectless, and lacking an organic reader, Sartre's text is embodied: marked irreducibly by the color and even the frame of its audience. The first stage in the decolonization of Europe, says Sartre, is the strip-tease of our humanism, an operation that makes visible what was once invisible: that which never previously had to endure the look, that which, in the colonial period, only administered it.⁶ Accordingly, Sartre imagines Europe as a fat, white body: This pale, bloated continent ended up by lapsing into what Fanon rightly calls ‘narcissism’ (lviii).

      The mortification of the white body is a frequent motif in the literature of postcolonial shame. It should not be understood in merely subjective or expressive terms, for the explanation for such bodily shame lies not in the body's appearance, but in the mere fact of its coming into visibility in the period of decolonization. European colonialism was predicated upon the invisibility of the white body and the visibility of the dark one. The discrepancy in this relation has nothing to do with pigmentation, and everything to do with what Jacques Rancière has characterized as the distribution of the sensible: "the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience."⁷ The colonial world is the site of a politics revolv[ing] around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time. Colonial power is materialized in the asymmetry of perception itself: in the transparency of the (white) body as the bearer of universal values, and the opacity of the (black) body as a surface for the projection of such values, or an obstacle to their dissemination. When that asymmetry is dislodged or inverted, the temporal discrepancy between the two regimes of perception is manifest as shame.

      Sartre's reference to Karl Marx is to Marx's letter to Arnold Ruge, written in 1843 from a barge in Holland, five years before the composition of the Communist Manifesto. What Marx says about shame is more nuanced than Sartre's paraphrase has it. For Marx, the persistence of German militarism and despotism is shaming, in contrast with the political progress made in France and Holland since the French Revolution—but the shame is more than a mere feeling: Shame is a revolution in itself; it really is the victory of the French Revolution over that German patriotism which defeated it in 1813. Shame is a kind of anger turned in on itself. And if a whole nation were to feel ashamed it would be like a lion recoiling in order to spring.⁸ Marx, writing in a theoretical mode, names the event of shame as such. For Marx too, shame is an event of incommensurability: the simultaneous impossibility of identifying and disidentifying with one's own country. To say that it is a revolution in itself is to say precisely that it has no need of theorization, that it is resistant to appropriation and incompatible with its invocation.

      Such sensuous, revolutionary shame does not coincide with its named or instantiated version. Indeed, the public instantiation of shame often functions to resolve, conveniently and prematurely, the incommensurability of the shame event. In order to become alert to the revolutionary potentiality of shame, it is necessary to attend to the radical distance between shame as a form and as an event. To remain with the first is to conceive of shame as a psychological phenomenon, adjacent to guilt, and arising primarily in relation to some shameful action or association outside—but attributable to—the self. The second is an entity that has no positive existence, no actuality; it registers, rather, a profound disparity. To talk about one's shame, to make shame the subject of one's writing, is to confuse these two dimensions, to pass off one for the other. Taste, writes Theodor Adorno in Minima Moralia, is the most accurate seismograph of historical experience. Unlike almost all other faculties, it is ever able to register its own behaviour. Reacting against itself, it recognizes its own lack of taste.⁹ Almost exactly the same can be said of shame, which registers its own shamefulness the moment it is invoked. Shame, like taste, does not survive its instantiation, meaning that there is no form adequate to the event of shame. The relation between shame and form may be delimited still further; for shame, even as a form, is an experience of the violence and inadequacy of forms.

      wa Thiong'o, J. M. Coetzee, Caryl Phillips, and Zoë Wicomb—that incommensurability is frequently apparent as a chronic anxiety toward writing itself. Thus, the simultaneous impossibility of identifying and disidentifying with one's own country in Marx is transformed into the simultaneous impossibility and necessity of writing, a situation in which the tension between the aesthetic and the ethical claims of literature is experienced subjectively. That tension or discrepancy is obscured by every attempt to instantiate, as the truth of the work, any merely formal manifestation within it.

      The critical and theoretical attention to the event of shame in this book seeks to liberate works of literature from categories of thought that they are otherwise compelled to reproduce, simply on account of their writtenness. What the presence of shame in so many postcolonial works alerts us to, in the first instance, is less the shamefulness of the colonial enterprise than that of the literary one. However, as this book will argue, those two enterprises cannot be separated ontologically; for the novel, the dominant form of the postcolonial as well as of the colonial period, emerges from the same disparity between subject and object as colonialism itself. The same might be said, of course, of literary criticism, particularly in the mode of exegesis and interpretation. The further ambition of this work, then, is to point towards a mode of reading that would be faithful to the discrepancy between subject and object at the heart of the critical enterprise. The aim here is not any merely subjective escape from the shame of the critic, but the evolution of a method that will avoid projecting the shame onto the object of study. The approach of the chapters that follow, accordingly, is the search for critical concepts, specific to the works in question, with which they can be said to move beyond colonial relations of perception to become truly postcolonial. Central to this procedure is the removal of the literary text from the ignominious position in which scholarship has tended to place it, between the conceptualization of freedom and its realization.

      PART ONE

      The Form of Shame

      Every form is the resolution of a fundamental dissonance

      of existence.

      —Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel

      Chapter One

      SHAME AS FORM

      IN A GLOBAL CONJUNCTURE in which the very expression of ethical solidarity displays and enacts unprecedented disparities of power, writers of literature are in an ethical and aesthetic quandary: How to write without thereby contributing to the material inscription of inequality? Even to pose such a question can appear as romanticizing, or worse, of the position of the subaltern or Third World subject, who seems thereby reduced to the status of an object that is merely written about. This quandary is inextricable from literary criticism and from the production of literature whenever the problematic of those formations is articulated in ethical terms. Neil Lazarus has written of Gayatri Spivak's work—too often emblematized, perhaps, by the title of her most famous essay, Can the Subaltern Speak?—as implicated in an austere construction of the subaltern as a discursive figure that is by definition incapable of self-representation.¹ In a certain strain of postcolonial scholarship informed by Spivak's conceptualization of the subaltern—and one can imagine the same charge being leveled at the notion of a constitutive and unresolvable shame underlying the practice of postcolonial literature—the real histories of national liberation in Third World countries disappear into an abyss of epistemological méconnaissance, while political interventions in the West on behalf of such struggles are discountable as so many attempts to ventriloquize the other. For Spivak, in Lazarus's words, the actual contents of the social practice of ‘the people’ are always, indeed definitionally, inaccessible to members of the elite classes (114), a formulation that, for Lazarus, also implies its obverse: a permanently disempowered and silenced subaltern class. Spivak's conceptualization of the subaltern itself, Lazarus suggests further, comes close to fetishizing difference under the rubric of incommensurability (115).

      Nicholas Brown has referred in the same vein to the paradoxically Eurocentric refusal of Eurocentrism.² This phrase, describing a perceived tendency among metropolitan postcolonial critics to disparage the movements towards liberation in Africa on the grounds of their residual empiricism, exhibits the problem at hand. According to Brown and Lazarus, for Western writers and critics to reject narratives of self-determination and nationalism on the grounds of their Western origin, or to turn the relations between West and non-West into a gulf of mutual incomprehensibility, is to remain tied to a Manichean division between East and West that has lost any explanatory power it may once have had (Brown 6–7). For both thinkers, the problem seems to be that such critics confuse dialectical relations of struggle with ontological—and dualistic—relations of selfhood and otherness. For Brown, whose work analyzes the formative rift between British modernism in the interwar period and African writing during the struggles for independence, any simple equation between capitalist modernity and the West risks introducing a moral viewpoint to a situation that is essentially systemic (7): risks, that is, allowing sentiments (such as shame) to take the place of a more robust political understanding.

      The complexity of that systemic situation means that questions predicated upon the cultural origins of non-Western literary texts need to be replaced by a more reflective set of questions about the terms we are using and the specific contexts in which we are expecting those terms to function. Not Can the subaltern speak? but What does it mean to speak in a literary form such as fiction? What ethical and aesthetic assumptions are involved in talking about the possibility or the impossibility of literature as such? What would a literature adequate to the ethical entanglements of modernity look like, in an age in which language has come to be thought of as constitutively untrustworthy? What ethical expectations can be attached to a form such as the novel, once it has been defined, as in Georg Lukács's The Theory of the Novel, by absolute sinfulness, or in Benjamin's The Storyteller, as a form that the reader turns to in the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about?³ Is there, perhaps, a sense in which only a subaltern could speak in such a form?

      Nicholas Brown has his own list of such questions: Is non-Western literature a contradiction in terms? What do we mean when we use words such as literature and West? What agendas do such words conceal? (Utopian Generations 6) My contention is that an uncertainty as to how to ask such questions, let alone how to address them, is a complex arising out of the inherent shamefulness not only of the colonial enterprise, but also, and inseparably, of the literary one. The question that seems most clearly invited, indeed suggested, by the work of Lazarus and of Brown is one that neither addresses explicitly, nor, in fact, has the question yet been posed in the context of postcolonial literature: To what extent is the very acknowledgment of shame at the history of colonialism a shameful act, destined further to expand the circuit of shame? And if shame itself is ensnared in implication, what possibilities exist for a literary form that might be adequate to the ethical complexity of the postcolonial world?

      In an interview in 1990, the South African novelist J. M. Coetzee, one of the most challenging explorers of these questions, made the following entirely parenthetical remark, a confession of a feeling of ethical inadequacy regarding the literary works he had produced: Let me add…that I, as a person, as a personality, am overwhelmed, that my thinking is thrown into confusion and helplessness, by the fact of suffering in the world, and not only human suffering. These fictional constructions of mine are paltry, ludicrous defenses against that being-overwhelmed, and, to me, transparently so.⁴

      The statement is of a kind that is rare in Coetzee's work, not only because it addresses the question of the motivations and intentions behind his own writing—something Coetzee has almost always avoided talking about when invited to do so—but also because it is a self-evidently autobiographical utterance, spoken in the first person, although framed (I, as a person, as a personality) in such a way as to make plain Coetzee's doubts about any privileged status accorded to that discourse. Such autobiographical sentiments relating to the creation of the work, it would seem, have for Coetzee only an incidental bearing upon the significance of the work itself. By implication, the same must be true of attempts to paraphrase or explain the work from outside—for example, in a literary-critical register. In the same interview, Coetzee describes the limitations of criticism and theory as having to do precisely with a normative referential quality that they retain, however much they may strive for precision and specificity: When I write criticism…I am always aware of a responsibility toward a goal that has been set for me not only by the argument, not only by the whole philosophical tradition…but also by the rather tight discourse of criticism itself (246). This normative or ethical quality, he implies (although these are not Coetzee's terms), is absent from works of fiction; or at least, if such works feel a responsibility, it is toward something that has not yet emerged, that lies somewhere at the end of the road. Indeed, Coetzee's recent work, which includes several unconventional volumes of autobiography, has been characterized by the use of fictional form to reframe—and thereby liberate into irresponsibility—what might otherwise appear to be an atypically tendentious, directly referential mode of writing.⁵

      How would it be possible to write about shame, this affective structure that seems to be located in the very interstice between experience and representation? Coetzee's fictional works deal frequently and explicitly with feelings of shame, but the question should be asked: To what extent can such works really be said to be about an experience identifiable as shame, the precise contours of which we can feel confident about? Furthermore, in a writer such as Coetzee (and I shall consider him in more detail in chapter 5), is it truly possible to speak of a shame that precedes the work, a shame that the work takes for its subject, a shame that the work seems to be attempting to process? Is it not the case that shame—if it exists—is incommensurable with its conceptualization as such? In another interview, Coetzee, commenting on the influence of Franz Kafka on his work, suggests that Kafka's distinction is that he hints that it is possible, for snatches, however brief, to think outside one's own language, perhaps to report back on what it is like to think outside language itself (Doubling the Point 198). Kafka is another writer in whom shame is frequently held to be a dominant, self-identical feeling, attributable in the first instance to the individual who precedes, and is responsible for, the work. According to Milan Kundera (in an analysis that is antithetical to my own understanding), it is perfectly possible to separate Kafka's shame, an elementary emotion that is both comprehensible and self-evident, from his activity as a writer.⁶ The personal shame that made Kafka request of Max Brod, his friend and literary executor, that his letters and papers be destroyed after his death, for example, is for Kundera not that of a writer but that of an ordinary individual, the shame of being turned into an object (263). In Kundera's account, this feeling has nothing to do with writing, and everything to do with the public exposure of what is intimate and interior. Thus Brod, in going against Kafka's wishes, is guilty of betraying his friend, of acting against the sense of shame he knew in the man (264).⁷

      For Walter Benjamin, far more interestingly, shame is Kafka's strongest gesture,

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