Note on Kafka

 

Jorge Etcheverry

This is a rather abrupt beginning, but it is interesting to note that this famous author’s lack of experience is becoming more and more evident to the student or amateur of literature. One of the mistakes he made in his life, like so many young geniuses of the past, was to keep up a prolific and detailed private correspondence.

For a writer in contemporary times this need for communication seems awkward. In modern cities, families break up sooner and more often than in previous generations, and children leave home at an earlier age to become independent. Without parental shelter and support, they are forced to enter the labour market. Telephone communication is not suitable for detailed, lengthy conversations if you don’t have the means to pay for a conference call. Writers resort to letters or e-mail, but for professional reasons. At first, they send their work to magazines and publishers despite having only abstract, general information at hand. If they’re market oriented, they go through agents. But it’s quite another matter to keep private correspondence, private. All the writer’s human weakness, disillusionment and frailness can be made public one day if the writer becomes famous or even just well known. The generations to come will know those aspects of the human psyche that all of us try to hide and which we only talk about with close friends and family. 

The obvious lack of experience makes The Process seem naïve to the modern writer who’s accustomed to the role of the police in society and to a legal process in which accused and defendants receive written notices of trial dates, arrive at courthouses and wait in reception areas to be called before judges in typically public proceedings where they’re given an opportunity to be heard and unmask the essentially repressive nature of social institutions.  We know that somewhere decisions concerning us are being taken. We also know those decisions will never have the effect of  final decisions or verdicts and are but a matter of chance or fate, plotted behind doors we’ll never enter and taken by individuals or associations we’ll never come face-to-face with and can only try, with difficulty, to imagine. But never will the modern man or woman have to stand in front of a Door of Law and negotiate with a doorkeeper to gain entry. Those are vestiges of bygone days. Kafka has left us his legacy of innocence and candour, his pure ingenuity. That justifies fully the place he holds in literary history.