The legend that Franz Kafka wanted his friend Max Brod to burn his books has helped present the author of The Metamorphosis as someone who did not want his writing to be anything other than ash in the future. In life, Kafka passionately read his texts, in public and in private, he made his sleepless nights a room for his obsessions as a writer, he behaved with other authors as a classic writer (that is, he despised some, he did not support his successes or considered them disproportionate to his merits), and was so concerned with his editions, the paper, the color of the covers, the print runs, that it is impossible to sympathize with the demand that he expressed to Brod with the reality that accompanied him while he breathed .
He loved his books, he wanted his closest ones to love them and, if he wanted to edit them, and in what way, it was because he wanted to see them in the hands of others, or one, but he wanted to see them on the street, even if he meant they as poor creatures of his spirit. He tormented his own spirit, and even his body, and tormented others with his doubts, but when the doubts, about his writing, were expressed by others, or when there was silence around his manuscripts, or he did not appreciate that the others were worth their creations as essential, their fury crossed the limits of their irony. That it was thin or thick, depending on the mood of the days.
His creative power surpassed, of course, that destructive indication that Brod naturally did not fulfill, and until now has been perhaps the most cited and studied writer of the 20th century, with the exceptions that you now come to mind. That suggestion about his shyness (a major exponent of his nature) and about the low value he attached to his work has lasted to this day, undoubtedly based on what he himself did or said, although his editors (Kurt Wolff, for example) they have taken care to offer another image of Kafka. Kafka as an author who wanted to prolong his work and, also, according to his own demands or tastes, Kafka as a reader of his books, Kafka, then, as a reader of Kafka.
The newspapers and, above all, the letters to Felice, the bride who came and went and who in the end ended up being the greatest character of all those he was building, have helped to see a Kafka different from the one who asked Brod to will erase it from the map. As Ricardo Piglia ( The Last Reader, Anagrama, 2005) remembers , these letters have given rise to much creative controversy, since in the absence of the opposite substance (Felice's responses) each of those who have published about that adventure Epistolary has had to invent the other side of the moon. And the other side of the moon had a lot to say.
Nothing he wrote was wasted, and nothing he lived, even the most banal, can be disdained among the matters that are now memory or legend
They have written of these letters, Piglia recalls, "Canetti, Deleuze, Citati, Wagenbach, Josipovici, Marthe Robert, Unseld, Stach" ... Naturally, Piglia, one of the most intelligent writers of the 20th century in Spain, joins this impressive chorus of readers of that impressive, bittersweet, sad correspondence, in which a literature in itself is built, since nothing that Kafka did, not even the most vulgar or daily thing that he recounted, in his diaries or in that correspondence, was outside the scope from which works such as The Metamorphosis or America were born.
Nothing he wrote was wasted, and nothing he lived through, even the most banal, can be disregarded among the matters that are now written memory or even legend due to his own hand. Piglia makes letters a very valuable instrument for Kafka's understanding as a writer (and, therefore, as a reader). “You can see what Kafka demanded from his texts. Much more than perfection of form. They had to establish, make visible, "says Piglia," the impossible logic of the real (and that was, of course, the perfection of form). "
Piglia does well to cite Elías Canetti as the first of the readers of these letters, since the author of Masa y Poder and Auto de fe took notice of them to look, with the purity of an entomologist or surgeon, on the man who was Kafka , with his maniacal propensity for madness, for sadness, for being at the same time esteemed (too much, although it is seen that with reason) or underestimated himself, obviously for no reason ... That excess of esteem and, at the same time This lack of esteem are the ones that coincide in his personality to give himself the writer that he was. Canetti counts in The Other Process. Kafka's letters to Felice ( Nordic, 2019) how that hapless relationship with Felice, which he sought and wasted to infinity, gave dramatic material to at least two of his most famous and, perhaps, autobiographical books, as they come to be, in one way or another, all his books.
Indeed, Canetti relates the successive darkness of Kafka's relationship with Felice to the most dramatic adventures of his characters in The Metamorphosis and in America. In particular, the trial that he himself brought to end the marriage commitment that he had acquired with his most famous correspondent unleashes scenes that are now an important part of the history of misfortune in the 20th century. In that visit that Canetti made to such essential correspondence there are, above all, highlights that connect life with writing, to explain that of all the Kafka that were Kafka, the most rabidly was the one that he wrote to poor Felice. Poor, by the way, he called her.
They are two fundamental books to understand this literary phenomenon that based his imagination on his life and on the abysmal darkness of his character. One, Piglia's, hears Kafka write (and read); Canetti's hears it, reads it, sees it live. The two of them, as if they were in the next room.