Companion to the Works of Franz Kafka.pdf - tywls12ela

CRITICAL EDITIONS II: WILL THE REAL KAFKA PLEASE STAND UP u 29
a literary giant of unmatched technical brilliance and intellectual subtlety,
and that his own duty lay in bringing this giant into the full public appreciation
such brilliance deserved. In this endeavor he was stunningly successful.
It is entirely probable that without Brod’s efforts, Kafka’s
reputation would never have spread as far as it did, or as fast.
It was Brod’s Kafka that everyone read, and Brod’s Kafka that became
an international literary phenomenon. So we must, no matter how
reluctantly, accept Brod’s editions as the baseline from which one must
begin. We must do so in spite of the fact that we now know how heavily
Brod intervened in some of this material. Nowhere is this more evident
than in the Brod edition of Der Prozeß (I cite the title here as he published
it), one of the clearest examples of Brod’s willingness to recast the
materials he found in his friend’s legacy. An examination of the materials
Kafka actually wrote shows that the projected novel had never reached
a form even remotely ready for publication; that Kafka had not yet
formed a clearly discernible conception of the narrative as a whole; and
that much of what he had been working on had been produced as disjointed
fragments, each having only the sketchiest relation to the others.
The only clear elements were the beginning and the end, which Kafka
had evidently produced in the first hot enthusiasm of his inspiration.
Brod took this unwieldy and often obscure pile of papers and turned
it into one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. It was
in reality a collaboration between a living novelist and a dead one, with
Brod supplying the narrative line missing in the manuscript by a quite
intelligent paste-up job. All the words, all the sentences were Kafka’s, but
the actual story those sentences told was largely created by Brod’s arrangement.
So what are we to do with this distinctly impure text? The
first impulse of the literary scholar is to reject the enterprise as an impermissible
intervention by Brod, since it is Kafka’s work we want to read,
Kafka’s work we thought we were reading before we realized how far
Brod’s hand had reached into the text.
Let me suggest, however, that this would be an unfortunate and ultimately
pointless rejection. The Brod version of Der Prozeß is the one
that was translated and read around the world, the one that influenced
several generations of writers and readers, and indeed the one that
changed the course of modern literary history. It is now an indisputable
part of that history that no scholarly denunciation, no matter how loud
and no matter how well documented, can expect to dislodge. It is possible
that future generations of readers will come to know this text in the
form Kafka left it — though it remains uncertain that such readers will
really wish to do so — but the past will not be changed. Literary histori-