The (Final) Trial of Franz Kafka

The tradition of posthumous publication and ensuing ethical debate on the matter stretches from Virgil to, most recently, Joan Didion. Amongst those at the heart of the discussion is Franz Kafka, whose first posthumous novel was published a century ago in 1925. Kafka had written explicitly to his friend Max Brod prior to his death that he wanted everything “in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches and so on, to be burned unread”. Somehow misunderstanding the request, Brod began contacting publishing houses, and within two months had signed an agreement to publish all of Kafka’s unfinished novels. Within three years of his death in 1924, three of Kafka’s major works, The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926), and Amerika (1927) had been published consecutively.

These works, though at times fragmentary and incomplete, became fundamental texts in the school of modernist literature. Kafka’s fictional worlds ran on absurd bureaucracy, existentialism, and inexplicable alienation that struck a chord with many readers in their non-fictional lives, establishing him as one of the great literary minds of the twentieth century. The term ‘Kafkaesque’ entered the colloquial language, becoming interchangeable with ‘bureaucratic’ or ‘nightmarish’. In this eponymous word alone, Kafka’s lasting impact found itself pervading the modern world of language and literature long after his death.

The texts themselves found influence beyond literary schools of thought and started to emerge in philosophical and political studies. Traces of Kafka’s work can be found in the existentialist writings of Albert Camus and achieved cult status in Cold War America as more people began to resonate with his images of isolation and oppression under a looming, bureaucratic political system. His exploration of absurdism and the individual struggle for meaning will not be constricted by any one period or place, and thus maintains relevance to readers globally. When his writings, though published without his consent, have had such an expansive and positive impact, it is difficult to accept the ethical dilemmas that accompany them.

According to Roland Barthes’ theory of the ‘Death of the Author’, authorial intentions limit the reception and interpretations of the author’s works and should not be paid attention to, making this dilemma a lot easier to navigate. Though if Barthes were to find out his Mourning Diary had been published nearly two decades after his death, he too might have requested that it be burnt. It is evident that the greatness of a posthumous text cannot be discussed in the same breath as morality. Though with these works having been published and scrutinised for just under a century now, a modern boycott would be simply, well, absurd. The ironic truth is that the greatest respect we can pay to Kafka now is to read his works and honour the profound contribution they have made to the literary sphere whilst also offering a more cautious approach to the posthumous publications of contemporary authors.

If Kafka could have seen into the future, his greatest novel might have been one discussing the absurd ethics of posthumous fame — but perhaps that too would have been a project he abandoned and left to be published later without his consent.

Image from Wikimedia Commons