The written-body and the read-body of (and by) Franz Kafka

Abstract

From the reading of the papers that Franz Kafka left an instigating body is revealed. Driven by what he understood to be his literary destiny, he created for himself, through writing, a poetic existence, by transforming his internal and external worlds into a written body. Like others who dedicated their lives to art, Kafka also maintained his rhetoric of isolation, but there is no doubt that he used the external world to nourish his internal one and chose writing to register the constitution of these two worlds that, graphically fixed, make up a scriptural body that is given to circulate through reading. His written-body and his read-body integrate his very intimate desire to give an ideal feature to his own “I”, to give voice to an existence that felt coerced to silence and to perform, by means not so obvious, a communication that lasts over time. It is with special reference to his private writings, such as his letters and his diaries, that this article aims to demonstrate that confinement, writing, reading and communication integrate the same strategy to make his scriptural body circulate and, consequently, his existence, (re)integrating him into a world from which he felt separated from a very early age.

Keywords: Franz Kafka; body; writing; voice; communication; (re)integration.