Such opinions—mostly vague or generalised—are often linked to the events that followed Kafka’s death, primarily the Holocaust. Of course, it’s inevitable that what happened during the last century should have conditioned our reading of him, conferring on him the status of a prophet. But we need to be especially cautious here: we should avoid projecting too much onto Kafka, and the only way to do so is to focus on the texts without extracting individual phrases to be used as keys to unlock the entire oeuvre—without falling into the error that the priest in The Trial ascribes to Josef K.: “You don’t respect the written word enough, and you change the story.”
Unfortunately, here, too, a problem arises: it’s impossible to read Kafka and ignore pre-existing interpretations or biases, precisely because of his fame and the excessive number of texts and conversations in which he is mentioned. Michelle Woods observes that we read him in translation, and not only in the linguistic sense of the term: Kafka is at the centre of a web of transformations of himself into an icon, an object for literary criticism, a source of philosophical reflections, even merchandise. He is an ideal quarry for anyone wanting to find a prepackaged message or backing for his own certainties: thus, we have a Kafka for every ideology, every occasion. But even the most stimulating ideas run the risk of calcifying into clichés and, worse still, they rob us of a sense of surprise.
Because if we read him carefully, we realise that any unambiguous exegesis is doomed to failure: there’s always a further path that opens, a further bend in the maze: any attempt to make Kafka say only what we would like him to immediately becomes arrogant, even ridiculous: the page immediately says Return to sender.
Vast generalisations are attractive and comfortable, therefore dangerous; for example, it’s said that guilt is the engine of the whole Kafkaesque machine, and only a part of his work—which is actually much more varied—is elevated into an exegetical principle. Or else we throw out random words—Yiddish father spiritual angst bureaucracy—but such concepts distance us irreparably from the text: they create images of Kafka that correspond only minimally to what he wrote and dilute his phenomenal expressive richness.
Or—why not?—his obscurity. Reading him, it’s natural, indeed salutary, to ask oneself: What on earth does he mean? In 1917, a certain Dr Siegfried Wolff wrote to Kafka asking for an explanation of The Metamorphosis, since neither he nor his family had been able to understand the story; and although we now have an abundance of available commentaries, we may still feel as if we are in his shoes. To claim we have decoded everything means we have read Kafka badly, because there’s an impenetrable enigma stitched deep into his lines. And perhaps by dint of digging with every kind of tool (philological, psychological, theological) in search of buried treasure, with a tenacity occasionally verging on the self-destructive, we have forgotten the gifts lying on the surface: the terse beauty of the prose, the inexhaustible creative fertility.
Besides, I’m neither a Germanist nor a philologist, and have almost always worked in translation: I have generally relied on what the experts have written, but my lack of specialisation also guarantees a greater degree of freedom. In other words, I intend to take advantage of my own field of competence: being a writer, I will argue primarily as a writer. That entails, for example, being suspicious of all-embracing theories and preferring to study the ways in which Kafka relates to the page: practical, apparently modest but actually crucial matters such as the choice of a name, the introduction of a character, the timing of a narrative twist. I won’t limit myself to these, but they will be the basis of my work.
To start with, let us consider the effect Kafka’s stories have on us: we are almost forced to experience the rupture described and fall headlong into a vortex of uncertainty. Adorno spoke of a subversion of our typical passive relationship with texts: in Kafka, they “attack the reader’s affective dimension to such a point that he fears that what is being told might attack him.”
That’s quite true. Of course, the sensation of being run through by the words is no excuse for reading hastily, almost as if the book were working by magic, without our contribution; on the contrary, such a strange, intense emotion should encourage us to be more scrupulous. But there are moments when Kafka’s pages genuinely seem to be looking at us, seeing deeply into us, and not vice versa: the images control us, we perceive their urgency, their radical necessity; we sense that the stakes are unusually high.
Because Kafka’s art is difficult, but never pretentious or dishonest. It doesn’t cheat, it doesn’t deliberately set out to deceive us: if we approach it with an open mind, even today the truth he sought so fervently bursts from his pages.
I have always believed this, from the first time I opened The Trial. I was seventeen and didn’t understand much of what I read, but I was overwhelmed. Could literature really go that far? Was it really possible to ask readers for such a willing suspension of disbelief? So, for decades, I’ve been repeating that Franz Kafka is my favourite writer, but whenever I do, I feel a touch of bitterness on my tongue, the unmistakable taste of inaccuracy. Whenever I talk about him, I search for a word that has never been coined, but which ought to exist. There are writers I reread more frequently, but there are none about whom I could assert what Franz himself asserted about Strindberg:
I don’t read him for the sake of reading him, but to place my head on his breast. He holds me like a child on his left arm. I sit there like a man on a statue. Ten times I’m in danger of slipping off, at the eleventh attempt I sit there solidly, feel secure, and have a view of the horizon.
That says it all, in my opinion: the danger of slipping, of not understanding, of letting go; and at the umpteenth attempt, at last, a sense of solidity. A horizon suddenly opening up.
It’s pointless to deny that such a feeling has to do with Kafka’s own life, which has been as much an object of investigation and morbid curiosity as his work, if not more so. It’s very simple to conflate them, finding correspondences everywhere, as has indeed been done; but it’s an automatic reflex that doesn’t do justice to a writer of his quality and integrity. This explains everything, we think with relief, analysing the relationship between Kafka and his father. Actually, it explains nothing: neither his stylistic flair, nor his symbolic power, nor the cleverness of his plots; it deludes us into thinking we’ve understood, giving rise to a heap of clichés. And above all it renders Kafka inoffensive; to use an expression of Sartre, “it guarantees risk-free use.”
To this is added a moral dilemma: it is necessary for us, however reluctantly, to look into Kafka’s private writings, which, if his wishes had been followed, should not have been published. Canetti’s argument that Franz himself, “whose greatest characteristic was respect, did not shy away from constantly reading the letters of Kleist, Flaubert and Hebbel” doesn’t hold: someone’s possible shortcoming does not justify ours towards him.
And yet it’s indispensable to read them: they are extremely valuable documents that illuminate the passion for writing “like a kind of forbidden vocation” (as Genette says of Flaubert’s correspondence, adding that the only possible comparison is in fact Kafka’s Diaries). So we will use them, just as we will use the literary texts unpublished in his lifetime, but aware of invading the privacy of a dead man; and here the plural applies, like a pact: we are all guilty, we readers.
Too many have shamelessly exploited every personal line of Franz, building careers on what, if his own wishes had been respected, should have been consigned to the flames; Auden speculated slyly that perhaps, “when he wished his writings to be destroyed, Kafka foresaw the nature of too many of his admirers.”
The very fascination emanating from Kafka’s biography should not be distorted or used as an excuse; rather, it should encourage us to exercise a greater sense of discretion. As Adriano Sofri puts it so well: “We love Kafka in two opposite and complementary ways: with the devout awe aroused by the recognition of an unprecedented gift of intelligence in written form; and with a sense of protective anxiety towards an offended and humorous existence.”
I want to preserve this love—perhaps there really is no other word—and combine it with the greatest possible care and attention: to repay Kafka for the cultural debt we have incurred towards him and for the personal debt I have felt for decades, reading him with as clear a mind as possible.
