After Kafka’s death, Max Brod sees to the publication of everything – not only the unfinished novels and stories, but also letters, including the letter Kafka wrote to his father. What indiscretion! And then there are his dramatisations of Kafka’s books, his three critical studies of Kafka, the prefaces he appends to the volumes which collect Kafka’s work, and even the novels where Kafka appears barely disguised as Garta. Brod’s admiration of his friend’s genius leads him to promote Kafka’s work but also to interpret it, to fill in the void which opens so marvellously in Kafka’s writings the better, Brod thinks, to preserve their greatness. So – don’t laugh – K. in The Trial is guilty, for Brod, because he cannot love.
This reminds me of Bruckner’s eager friends, promoting his work even as they demanded that he makes cuts and changes. We might say Brod is Kafka’s ape, a ludicrous, capering figure and, insisting that the various interpretations of The Castle are ridiculous, secure our own good conscience; we are not apes. But then if The Castle inscribes an experience bound up with the experience of writing … if the void in question is linked to the movement of writing itself, if it is something like the secret heart of the work itself such that it can only be covered over and lends itself happily to its own dissimulation, then Kafka is already his own ape, and The Castle is a buffoon’s book.
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