My reading of Kafka

My reading of Kafka I did not like Kafka's three great unfinished novels – The Trial, Amerika, The Castle. They bored me. Once the tone was set, after thirty pages or so, it went round and round in circles, just as, quite literally, K. went round and round in circles around the castle. Inspired by his very real strangeness in the world, Kafka delivers stories that are beyond comprehension. They can be seen as a form of humor through the absurd. We can try to interpret them, to find autobiographical elements in them. During the period when Kafka was fashionable, prominent authors did not fail to do so. Many readers, however, appreciated this strange literature, certainly because it is strange. The only novel of Kafka's that I liked was the one that, because of its number of pages, is considered to be a short story: The Metamorphosis. I will leave aside Investigations of a Dog, which I consider to be a philosophical essay. It takes up, in another form, less difficult to read, though still peculiar, certain themes of Description of a fight, which I classify in the same category. Aside from his diaries, Kafka is most open about his work in Investigations of a Dog, although still hidden under the guise of a dog. But here, interpretation is essential : canine society represents human society, and the narrating dog is Kafka. This unnecessary transposition facilitates Kafka's expression as an artist, reluctant to play the philosopher or thinker. The thinking that emerges from Investigations of a Dog is close, incredibly close, to that which would appear, a few years later, in the work of Heidegger. We know that Kafka did not like his novels. We know which of his works of fiction he preferred : The Verdict, The Stoker, The Metamorphosis, The Penitentiary Colony, A Country Doctor, An Artist of Hunger. If he preferred them, it was not because they fulfilled his main objective better than the others. He preferred them because they suited his taste as an artist : 1 written in one go, inspired, emerging from the depths of himself, almost from his unconscious. To Felice, on June 2, 1913, he wrote : " Do you find any sense in The Verdict, by which I mean a straight, coherent, easy-to-follow sense ? I don't, and besides, I can't see anything in it that I can explain. " On September 25, 1917, he wrote in his diary : "I can still derive some temporary satisfaction from works like The country doctor, assuming I manage to write any more (highly unlikely). But I can only have happiness if I succeed in lifting the world into the true, the pure, the immutable." That's Kafka's main objective ! His project is to bring the world "into the true, the pure, the unchanging". This should be taken literally. The ambition is enormous. A few days later, on November 10, 1917, he wrote : " So far I haven't taken note of the decisive things, the river that I am still forms two arms. The work ahead of me is enormous. " At the time, he did not even have seven years to live. Basically, there is no change between the Kafka who wrote Description of a fight in 1903, the one who started a diary in 1910, and the one who, towards the end of his short life, in 1922, wrote Investigations of a Dog. Unity of thought, stability of state of mind, that is the observation we can make. The only differences are in the mastery of style and the form of expression. The artist refines and confirms a remarkably sober 2 style1 that he perfects quickly. The background is stable. But what is it ? Is it simply the desire to give his all to literature, to the detriment of family life ? Is it his fear of loneliness, which is the corollary of this choice ? Or was it his strangeness as a German-speaking Czech Jew ? Or, as we've read here and there, his foreknowledge of the catastrophes to come, his prescience of a world of bureaucrats and automatons ? None of this, although the solitude of the man who wants to devote his life to his work, without being distracted by the ordinary world, and in particular by family life, is a recurring and important theme. Kafka hesitated, then chose the work. But what does it say ? Kafka thought he had failed. He had not conducted the enormous work he had planned. If he wished for the entirety of what he had written to disappear, it was because he was aware of his failure relative to his original, excessive ambition. On January 21, 1922, just over two years before his death, he wrote in his diary : " No task, as far as I know, has ever been so difficult for anyone. One could say : it's not a task, not even an impossible task, not even impossibility in itself, it's nothing, it's not even so much a child as the hope of a sterile woman. But it is nevertheless the air I breathe for as long as I have to breathe. " This book is not a biography of Kafka. It focuses on the thinker Kafka, not the artist. It emphasizes that part of the work where 1 In an article included in the collection The Hidden Tradition, Hannah Arendt describes Kafka's style as follows : "In relation to the infinite multiplicity of possible styles, Kafka's German is like water in relation to the infinite multiplicity of drinks. His prose is characterized by nothing in particular ; there is nothing in it to enchant or fascinate ; rather, it is the purest communication, and its only unchanging characteristic - as we can easily see - lies in the fact that what is communicated to us is communicated in a much simpler, clearer and more economical way than it ever could have been." 3 thought is expressed most directly, most in line with the major objective. There are two Kafka. There's Kafka the artist-writer, the man with a passion for literature and writing, the man who, during his lifetime, published a body of work that could be classed as "minor literature", whereas Kafka's project, far from falling into this category - the characteristics of which, on December 25, 1911, in his diary, he tried to establish by thinking of Jewish literature today, in Warsaw and Prague, and certainly not of his own to come - was intended to be universal. And then there's Kafka the seeker, the thinker, the man obsessed with finding the right soil in himself to be born and to live in, the man who considers that he has not yet been born, that he has died in this world, that he is the survivor, that he can be a beginning, that he can be the one who is authentically born. There is a relationship and a tension between the artist and the thinker. In the work he published or planned to publish (his great unfinished novels), the artist did not want this relationship to be clear and direct. On January 22, 1918, Kafka wrote in his diary (third in-octavo notebook) : "The point of view of art and that of life are, even in the artist, different points of view. Art flies around the truth, but with the firm intention of not burning itself. Its talent lies in finding a place in the dark void where, unbeknownst to us beforehand, the rays of light can be powerfully intercepted." The artist, in his published work and in the great unfinished novels, took precedence over the thinker. The thinker remained in the background to obey artistic imperatives, but also because he didn't feel ready to openly declare his pure and simple truth to the world ; he didn't want to burn himself. He will never be ready. Kafka stepped forward masked. The thinker reveals 4 himself in his diaries. Description of a fight (including Contemplation), his early work, and Investigations of a Dog, his mature work, are, from this point of view, to be set apart. In these two works, which have so far received little commentary, the major themes of his struggle and research are clearly present, albeit masked by formal artifice. Kafka's thought is close to that of the future Heidegger. The difference between the two thinkers is one of philosophical and artistic culture. Heidegger is the erudite thinker, the professor of philosophy whose aim is to unveil the truth of being. Kafka is the artistic thinker, whose aim is to live, and to make the world live, according to the same truth of being that he wants to bring to light - it is in his flesh and without concession to the world that he came into contact with Being. Basically, the thinking is the same, the questioning is the same. The meaning that Kafka gives to the word "beginning" or "birth" is the same as that which Heidegger will give to them, a little later and independently. (Excerpt from Franz Kafka Unmasked, Serge Druon, 2024) Contents Forewords Introduction : My reading of Kafka Chapter 1 : A trickster unmasked Chapter 2 : It was time ! Chapter 3 : From one world to another, a translogical dialogue Chapter 4 : The survivor Chapter 5 : Kafka and Heidegger Chapter 6 : Someone is coming 5 6