In Noah Baumbach’s autobiographical film, The squid and the whale the teenage character played by Jesse Eisenberg keeps using the term “Kafkaesque.” When a girl asks him what she thinks of the story The metamorphosis, he replies: «It’s very Kafkaesque». And she: «Of course, Franz Kafka wrote it», and she realizes that he has never read Kafka. The transformation not so much into an insect as into an adjective is a condemnation for the Prague writer, who died exactly a century ago. Just look at some recent headlines in Italian newspapers: “After the Kafkaesque flood in Emilia: only 2,514 compensation requests presented out of 60 thousand”, “Cucchi, the indictment of the Prosecutor Musarò: ‘The first Kafkaesque trial, it was a scientific misdirection’ (Daily fact). “Quarantined by mistake in the Cara of Crotone, the Kafkaesque case of Abbas” (The print), “«Detained awaiting trial» a Kafkaesque Deaf faces the drama of bad justice” (Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno), “Selahattin Demirtas, Kafkaesque hostage” (The poster), “The Kafkaesque reversal of reality” (again The posteron Mimmo Lucano), “Arrivabene-Juve, absurd implication: a Kafkaesque case that could end up in the TAR” (Tuttosport), “That Marta Russo case like a Kafkaesque horror” (Il Resto del Carlino)… The kafkaesque adapts to everything from football to natural disasters.
The other condemnation for Kafka was having been the unaware victim of a hagiographic trial. In death, when he could not deny anyone, he was portrayed as pure, as asexual, as an alien, a defenseless animal, an enlightened mystic. This process was initially carried out by his friend Max Brod, a mediocre if not downright terrible novelist, to whom Kafka had left the manuscripts and told him to burn them. With a marketing trick, after the initial cold reception of his posthumous works, Brod invented the character Kafka, and then it got out of hand. But he worked to sell him as a freak, a being, before being a writer, unattainable. Alessandro Piperno already said it a few years ago in a TV program: «When today we think of Kafka we have the temptation to deal excessively with this pure autobiography of his and not to deal enough with the work», creating a «canonization, a hagiography, the people are moved by Kafka.” And in fact, his most popular work, the story where the protagonist wakes up transformed into an insect, as well as in school classrooms, it survives in memes and magazine cartoons (il New Yorker with all the cartoons with the cockroach he could make a volume like he does with cats, dogs and golf).
There is not only the exceptional nature of this almost non-human, or superhuman image, Kafka has also become the holy card in the inside pocket of the jacket of “misunderstood” writers. He has become the one “ahead of his time”, the one “underestimated” by his time. But it is enough to read Reiner Stach’s monumental and detailed biography to understand that Kafka was well understood, at least by those who wanted to be understood. Il Saggiatore – translation by Mauro Nervi, who also translated The metamorphosis in Esperanto – has just published in three volumes the lifelong research of Stach, already author of the splendid Is this Kafka? adelphian. The almost two thousand pages are a very detailed immersion in the Bohemian’s daily life, where entire days can be reconstructed, also thanks to the diaries he left. Kafka, in fact, was already highly appreciated as a writer when he was alive. Giorgio Fontana also writes it in the book Kafka, a world of truth (Sellerio), also released for the centenary. «Representing Kafka as a solitary ascetic inclined to flog himself in order to create», writes Fontana, «means giving in to the rhetoric accumulated over the years». The postcards, the photographs hanging in selfie bookshops, in Shakespeare & Co., continue to convey this message of a Saint Kafka, of a messiah of the twentieth-century novel, and not of a boy who, among other things, went to whores.
Of course, his father would have preferred him to be a lawyer or a good businessman (a condemnation of every writer), but his Prague clique, and even elegant German publishers, understood that he was a good writer. We also see it in the correspondence – published by Neri Pozza with the title Another write – how much Brod appreciated his friend’s talents and tried in every way to help him. At one point Brod writes in his diary that his friend’s prose is “divine”. His friends say to him: «Franz, when do you write a novel?». Kafka, as it turns out when reading these books, was a true perfectionist; after all he adored Flaubert, the greatest surgeon of the phrase. He has already published in magazines, he is already known in Yiddish theater circles, but after one night he started writing The missing onewhich it will later become America, at the dawn of thirty years old he realizes that everything he has written in the previous fifteen years is not up to par. A new personal standard is created. The first pages written with this new awareness constitute, writes Stach, “a turning point with no return on a formal, stylistic and thematic level”. Everything he did before is no longer valid.
For the young Kafka, the fear of being published does not come from a lack of desire to be read, although he was certainly not in an explicit search for literary glory, but from the fact that «what is printed remains forever removed from the possibility of improvement , beyond any will.” As Thomas Mann said: “resting in perfection is the dream of those who strive for the sublime, and isn’t nothingness a form of perfection?”. And then, at the same time, isn’t giving the works to burn to a friend who adores your writings a way of preventing them from actually burning?
