What if Franz Kafka was right and Max Brod should have heeded his deathbed request:
“Dearest Max, my last request: Everything I leave behind me … in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches, and so on, [is] to be burned unread.”
In fact, we should have respected his wish, and these are some of the reasons:
First Reason: His major works are about meaninglessness, despair, apathy and non-life affirming characters; as such his works do nothing to help us overcome the problems they wallow in. The drug addict does not improve after seeing himself in a mirror, especially not when the mirror portrays him as a helpless victim in an absurd world.
Second Reason: His characters have no redeeming human qualities and are generally subhuman, even literally, not only metaphorically.
Third Reason: In no way was Franz’s writing intended to be public. It is a deeply personal and private writing, almost an extension of his diary and letter writing.
Fourth Reason: Much of his work testifies to a mind that knows the onerous, impersonal and labyrinthine German bureaucratic and legal system. Moreover, while Franz’s writing may testify to one man’s ability to keep his imagination alive, it is hardly a celebration of the imagination, nor does it provide useful advise or even the beggar’s consolation of hope.
Fifth Reason: For Franz, writing was as much a torment as a pleasure. Bouts of creativity kept him up late at night, alienated him from his wife, weakened his already delicate constitution and were no help in his struggle against tuberculosis. Why would he wish it on others?
Sixth Reason: His major works were left unfinished on account of his professional life, his domestic duties and his poor health. Possibly, he felt that even his finished works were not truly finished works, that is, perhaps he sensed that they did not fulfill his creative potential.
Harold Bloom not only ignores deathbed Franz’s wish (as I have done) but ignores much more by claiming the following: “Despite all his denials and beautiful evasions, [Kafka's writing] quite simply is Jewish writing”? How bold and reductive! As if Franz’s German education and his professional work as a German bureaucrat and lawyer. The long sentences, the absence of metaphor, the attention to mundane details and the nameless characters and placeless places in Franz’s works hardly attest to a Judaic influence; these qualities echo the impersonal world of bureaucracy.
Hasn’t the time come to honour Franz’s brave self-assessment and respect his noble wish?
