Shame: Kafka and Brod

 

By now, there is a quite a literature about Brod and Kafka. It is, to say the least, interesting. On the one hand, what Brod reports about Kafka from direct experience is often quoted as a sort of oral testament of Kafka’s, a Gnostic gospel. On the other hand, Brod’s editing of Kafka’s manuscripts has been attacked, his heavily religious interpretations of Kafka’s work has been ridiculed as something like kitsch by people like Walter Benjamin, his attempts to make Kafka seem like a saint by, for instance, censoring evidence of Kafka going to a brothel has been exposed – and then there is the case of the letter. The contract, the curious pact. Milan Kundera used it as an archetypal symbol of the invasion of the individual’s privacy in Testaments Betrayed. In Rolf Tiedman’s essay on Kafka and shame, he summarizes Kundera’s case like this:

“Because Brod had published "everything, indiscriminately," Kundera charges him with unforgivable indiscretions, with treason against Kafka, for having published "even that long, painful letter found in a drawer, the letter Kafka never decided to send to his father and that, thanks to Brod, anyone but its addressee could eventually read.... He betrayed his friend. He acted against his friend's wishes, against the meaning and the spirit of his wishes, against the sense of shame he knew in the man."6 It goes without saying that Kundera cannot sustain this accusation; he has to resort to the supporting construction of a divi- sion between autobiographical material including diaries and letters, on the one hand, and novels and stories, on the other, a construc- tion that seems almost Jesuitical in comparison with the rest of his argument and that is useless for Kafka's work: "With regard to the unfinished prose, I readily concede that it would put any executor in a very uncomfortable situation. For among these writings of varying significance are the three novels; and Kafka wrote nothing greater than these."' Kundera would not want to do without Kafka's novels, since he wished to have written them himself; rather-although he never says so directly-he would forego the publication of incom- plete writings of "varying significance" like the texts of the volumes Brod titled Preparations for a Country Wedding and Description of a Struggle." The publication of Kafka's diaries and letters, as Kundera charges vehemently, demonstrated a lack of shame and, in Kun- dera's view, is a capital crime.”

Although Tiedman modifies Kundera’s case, generally, he takes it that, in this contract, this pact, Kafka was the one so easily shamed, Kafka is like the Josef K at the end of the Trial, who felt, under the executioner’s knife, as if ‘the shame would outlive him” – which Tiedman, taking his clue from Adorno, interprets, literally, as a shame that is ingested by the bystanders, in them, transmitted by them. That they allowed Josef K to be executed…

This story has, however, a funny twist, in that it makes Kafka into a sort of gull. A victim. Devil’s pacts, however, are more… ambivalent than that. I’m interested in what Kafka was doing.

If we take Brod at his word, Kafka left that letter already knowing that Brod would refuse to do as instructed. Brod had told Kafka this two years before, when Kafka first showed him the letter. And what funny instructions! If Kafka thought so badly of his botched work, why would he want it hunted down so ardently? It is as if it had a burning importance – an importance to be burnt. Brod was to find letters Kafka wrote – no mean task – and have them burnt. He was to go through everything, a regular anti-treasure hunt. The letter is written in the obsessive rhythm of the animal in the burrow, inventorying his endless defenses against his enemies.

But that’s not all. To my mind the letter’s logical form is closest to the parable, Before the Law, which the sacristan tells Joseph K. in The Trial. In that story, the man outside the law is compelled in a law-like way to wait for being permitted entrance into the law. It is as if he has somehow wandered out of any recognizable social space. Every reader of the novel remembers the chilling end of that parable, the conversation between the man who guards the door to the law and the man who is waiting, and is dying there after all those years:

'What is it you want to know now?' asks the doorkeeper, 'You're insatiable.' 'Everyone wants
access to the law,' says the man, 'how come, over all these years, noone but me has asked to be let in?' The doorkeeper can see the man's come to his end, his hearing has faded, and so, so that he can be heard, he shouts to him: 'Nobody else could have got in this way, as this
entrance was meant only for you. Now I'll go and close it'."

Such unutterable cruelty!

Kafka’s testament put Brod in the position of the man who sits before the door to the law, and sits there forever. Brod, the man among all men who, Kafka knew, understood the greatness of his writing. Understood, at least, that it was great, although not understanding why, however much he would like to. Why select this person, of all people, as one’s executioner/executor? What kind of trick is that to play?

Perhaps, in the end, you are tired of the one who admires you most. Who loves you for the work. That love like a debt that you owe.