Franz Kafka
Il Processo

Franz Kafka was a person with a capacity to read things that unsettle both simple readers and literature enthusiasts in the broad and high sense.

It's almost chilling to see a rare photo of him, to examine the somber aspect of his persona, the face sharp as a blade, corresponding to a writing that slashes us like a razor, and to remember how his surname, chosen by his ancestors after an emperor's edict forced Jews to take one, derived from the Greek "kavka", meaning raven or crow.

Black as the crow, which in certain rural cultures echoes the devastation of crops and poverty.

"The Trial", written around 1915, left incomplete and destined, like the majority of the writer's works, to remain unpublished after his death, if it weren't for the courageous initiative of his friend Max Brod (certainly a benefactor for literature, but ultimately a traitor; a Judas in the true sense of the term, to remain in the Jewish context and the heterogenesis of ends), is one of his most intense and significant writings.

The story is known to all, and everyone can nonetheless recover it by browsing some online page if they lack the desire to read the book directly (mine, in the excellent Germanizing translation by Giorgio Zampa), or if they prefer to waste their time reading trashy novels or popular literature, the kind that fills the shelves of bookstores frequented by most: in any case, I point out for completeness how it deals with a certain Josef K. (K. like the author, but I like to observe how "k" is in mathematics one of the symbols of constants, and therefore of a universal condition) who is suddenly subjected to a trial for which he is unaware of the reasons, the meaning of the charge against him, and in which he is unable to see, as long as we follow him in the writing, neither the explanation nor the conclusion.

The whole book follows K. during the indefinite period in which he undergoes the trial, following him in various life experiences, centered around his home, his workplace, and his lawyer's home, where he embarks on a strange relationship with the maid Leni.

The narration is fragmentary, reflects the provisional nature of the text, at some points improvised and, in the notes, interpolated with fragments and passages removed from the published version but present in the writer's notes. The whole thing seems to give an idea of the unfinished, of being left halfway, perhaps even broken by the premature death of the author who becomes one with the written page and the narrated story: increasing the tension and discomfort that strikes us from the first lines.

This is an aspect of Kafka that I like to focus your attention on: there are many writers in the history of literature capable of creating tension, fear, and discomfort in the reader, I would say as many as there are intimate and personal reasons for our individual discomforts, which in turn influence the way through which we read any kind of writing (including my reviews, in your case): Kafka's situation is, however, entirely peculiar, given that it is not what is written that creates tension, thus not just the story or the theme chosen by the author; tension, discomfort, and ultimately intimidation are created by the work considered in its materiality, it is the book itself, it is the experience of life and writing that Kafka transmits to us directly, and which comes alive every time we approach his pages.

I believe that for this author, the otherwise vague expression of "reading Kafka" is appropriate: as we approach this and his other works, we enter into direct contact with the writer, with his discomforts, his life, and his death which have themselves become a novel and experience. We come into direct contact with the author, not with the abstract and distant depiction of his thought.

Something similar happens with Leopardi, while I challenge you to verify if it happens with other, albeit celebrated, writers, such as Dante, Petrarch, descending to Montale, Buzzati or Moravia, or even—jumping from one thing to another—for the still talented Calvino of "The Baron in the Trees" or the like, without arriving in German territory with Mann, Musil, or a writer who is close to Kafka, like Dürrenmatt. There, the Word prevails over the author, who remains hidden, distant, and probably human. In Kafka, the fusion is complete, we approach something that surpasses the human, or the humanly comprehensible, to touch the ineffable.

Much has been said about the novel I am writing about, and it would be presumptuous even to think of adding something new, intelligent, or different compared to what others have written before and, probably, better than me: Max Brod himself, if we can speak of an authentic interpretation of Kafka's thought by proxy, cleverly emphasized how "The Trial" implicitly addressed the problem of Divine Justice, incomprehensible, hypothetical, and unattainable, opening the way to the subsequent Gnostic reading that Harold Bloom attempts to offer concerning the entire work of the Prague writer.

This is not too surprising if we consider Kafka's Jewish roots and the hypothesis of a perpetual consciousness of the exile of the Jewish people (and, with them, of the human race, if we scale everything to the immensity of space and time), the remoteness from any hypothesis—and hypostasis?—of Good, Justice, and Divine.

If God existed, Kafka seems to warn us, he probably distanced himself, and with him, his values, as distant is the Judge who will decide (perhaps? When? Never?) on his fate, leaving everything in suspension. Or he probably failed in his work, does not even know where right and wrong are, can no longer separate light from darkness, as at the beginning of Creation.

I do not hide that reading this book haunted me and still haunts me, nor can I forget the immanence, the looming of the trial, which spreads, like the court's structures, present in labyrinthine attics that extend like a network throughout the city, in every space or interstice (as if to say: in every space or interstice of our mind and our soul) in all of us: subtly, K.—the prosecuted one—often assumes, towards those who are other to him, whether it be Leni, his lawyer, a merchant, a client, the same inquisitorial tones of those who prosecute, a tangible sign of the ambivalence of human nature, and the fusion of the victim in the same role of executioner, without continuity and without the possibility to frequenter distinguere (as typical of jurists), to rationalize and dissect reality in search of a system and order, a pale reflection of the hypothesis of an intelligent God, which also ties back to the recent admonitions of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI.

Is all this enough? Does Kafka lead us, with him, into the irrational gnosis and pain? I think not, and the intuition struck me in the very act of writing these modest lines.

Kafka is the proven evidence of the existence of the God whose infinite Good and infinite Justice he denies, precisely at the moment when he himself, in the drafting of his stories, letters, and novels, embodies the Creative Spirit and becomes, at the same time, part of the Created and Creating.

He embodies the perfection of the Divine at the moment he positions Man as a sentient and self-reflective individual, self-reflective to the point of denying That from which he comes, of denying the ultimate perfection of a Creation that has contemplated him, foresaw him, and cast him into the world so that he himself would become the Word and show us one of the possible ways through which the Divine manifests: the otherness from itself, the contradiction of opposites, even the prefiguration of an Apocalypse entrusted to a raven, to a kavka.

A computer, an animal cannot turn against its Creator, as immutable laws governing the movement of planets cannot do: Man can, an elected creature who, in this, affirms God at the very moment he denies him, showing yet another face of the Possible.

Denying Kafka's nihilism, bringing it back—in the absolute dimension of the Masterpiece—to the denial of a denial, we can emerge from reading this novel reconciled with the Divine, not by virtue of a credo quia absurdum, but more intimately and profoundly.

I hope you will reread Kafka in light of my observations and rediscover the sacredness of things as a good auspice for the beginning of this cold but promising 2011.

A peaceful embrace!