Reading group: what if Kafka's books had been burned?
Kafkaesque would have a very different definition if Max Brod had consigned his friends unpublished manuscripts to the flames as requested
Has Kafkaesque metamorphosed beyond all meaning?
Catch up on all posts from Octobers Reading group
The Penguin edition of Metamorphosis and Other Stories contains all of Kafkas writing that he approved for publication during his lifetime, including In the Penal Colony, The Stoker, Judgement, the four stories of The Hunger Artist, mini-collections of short pieces, entitled Contemplation and A Country Doctor: Short Prose for My Father, and of course, Metamorphosis. As the only selection Kafka wanted to see the light of day, you could argue that this book constitutes his bid for immortality.
Well never really know Kafkas true intentions. He is famously said to have asked his friend, and later biographer, Max Brod to burn his unpublished manuscripts. Instead, Brod published them all. Was he therefore disobeying his friends last wishes? Or did Kafka give the manuscripts to Brod because he knew he would curate them? (Brod later claimed to have told Kafka he wouldnt burn them.) And what are we to make of the story that Kafka gave other manuscripts to a lover, who did consign them to the flames? Entire books have been written about such questions. Its impossible to read these selected stories without thinking about such issues as Kafkas legacy and his place in the future.
Kafkas reputation has been immeasurably enhanced by his seeming prophecy, in works so private and eccentric, of the atrocious regimes of Hitler and Stalin, with their mad assignments of guilt and farcical trials and institutionalised paranoia Out of his experience of paternal tyranny and decadent bureaucracy he projected nightmares that proved prophetic.
A Kafka acquaintance, Gustav Janouch, once recorded that the writer had said of Picasso: He merely records the deformations which have not yet manifested themselves in our consciousness. Art is a mirror which leads the way as regularly as clockwork some of the time.
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