You're Not in Your Own House Here, My Dear Fellow

6

I am alway surprised by people's amazement over Kafka's (alleged) decision to destroy all his work. As if such a decision were a priori absurd. As if an author could not have reasons enough to take his work along with him on his last voyage.

It could in fact happen that on final assessment the author realizes that he dislikes his books. And that he does not want to leave behind him this dismal monument of his failure. I know, I know, you'll object he is mistaken, that he is giving in to an unhealthy depression, but your exhortations are meaningless. He's in his own house with that work, not you, my dear fellow!

Another plausible reason: the author still loves his work but not the world. He can't bear the idea of leaving the work here to the mercy of a future he considers hateful.

And yet another possibility: the author still loves his work and doesn't even think about the future of the world, but having had his own experiences with the public, he understands the vanitas vanitatum of art, the inevitable incomprehension that is his lot, the incomprehension (not underestimation, I'm not talking about personal vanity) he has suffered during his lifetime and that he doesn't want to go on sniffering post mortem. (It may incidentally be only the brevity of life that keeps artists from understanding fully the futility of their labor and making arrangements in time for the obliteration of both their work and themselves.)

Aren't these all valid reasons? Of course. Yet they weren't Kafka's reasons: he was aware of the value of what he was writing, he had no declared repugnance for the world, and--too young and nearly unknown--he had had no bad experiences with the public, having had almost none at all.

7

Kafka's tastament: not a testament in the precise legal sense: actually two private letters; and not even true letters, in that they were never posted. Brod, who was Kafka's legal executor, found them after his friend's death, in 1924, in a drawer among a mass of other papers; one ink, folded and addressed to Brod, the other more detailed and written in pencil. In his "Postcript to the First Edition" of The Trial, Brod explains: 'In 1921...I told my freind that I had made a will in which I asked him to destroyed certain things [dieses und jenes vernichten], to look through some others, and so forth. Kafka thereupon showed me the outside of the note written in ink which was later found in his desk, and said: 'My last testament will be very simple: a request that you burn everything.' I can still remember the exact wording of the answer I gave him: '...I'm telling you right now that I won't carry out your wishes.' " Brod evokes this recollection to justify disobeying his friend's testament wish; Kafka he continues, "knew what fanatical veneration I had for his very word."; so he was well aware that he would not be obeyed and he "should have chosen another executor if his own instructions were unconditionally and finally in earnest." But is that so certain? In his own testament, Brod was asking Kafka "to consider it normal to request the same service of Brod? And if Kafka really knew that he would not be obeyed, why, after their conversation in 1921, did he write his instructions and make them specific? But let's drop it: we'll never know what these two young friends said to each other on a subject that was, by the way, not their most urgent concern, since neither one of them, and Kafka especially, could at the time consider himself in serious danger of immortality.

It's often said: if Kafka really wished to destroy what he had written, he would have destroyed it himself. But how? His letters were in the hands of the recipients. (He himself kept none of the letters he received.) It's true that he could have burned his diaries. But they were working diaries (more notebooks than diaries), they were useful to him for as long as he was writing, and he wrote until his very last days. The same can be said of his unfinished works. Only in the event of death would they be irremediably unfinished; while he was still alive he could always get back to them. Not even a story he considers a failure is useless to a writer, as it can become material for another story. As long as he is not dying, a writer has no reason to destroy something he has written. But when Kafka was dying he was no longer in his home, he was in a sanatorium and unable to destroy anything, he could only count on a friend's help. And not having many friends, having finally but one, he counted on him.

And yet Brod made these letters, public; earlier, in his own will and testament, he had asked Kafka "to destroy certain things"; and here he himself published everything, indiscriminately; even that long, painful letter found in a drawer, the letter that Kafka never decided to send to his father and that, thanks to Brod., anyone but its addressee could eventually read, To me, Brod's indiscretion is inexcusable, 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.

คัดมาจากบางส่วนของบทที่หก You're Not in Your Own House Here, My Dear Fellow ในหนังสือ Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts ของมิลาน คุนเดรา