This is one in a series of interviews I conducted in 2004 for a now-defunct digital magazine based in Barcelona, where I spoke with around thirty cultural figures.
Jordi Llovet (Barcelona, 1947) was then a professor of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at the University of Barcelona (now retired). The interview was conducted to mark the publication of Kafka’s complete works in Spanish, edited by Llovet.
Nothing will happen in the world that has not been explained in some episode of literary history
On the cover text, it reads: ‘it would be difficult to exaggerate the novelty and allure that this volume offers to Spanish-speaking readers.’ Isn’t that phrase exaggerated?
[Smiles] It’s an editor’s note that, although true, doesn’t align with my style. But the novelty and allure of the volume are not at all an exaggeration: it is the first time in the world outside of Germany—where the original edition comes from—that all of Kafka’s narrative prose, notebooks, and scattered works are published, excluding the novels and books he published during his lifetime. All of this is done with philological rigor, extraordinary verbal care, chronological order, and splendid translations; so one can follow the course of the writer’s production and see how the Kafkaesque style was forged. Now, given that, generally, people in this country are not well-informed about philology, I don’t know if it has been noticed yet, but I am sure this will remain the reference edition of Kafka.
It’s often mentioned that before dying, Kafka asked his friend Max Brod to burn all his work. Not only did Brod not comply, but now readers have access to sketches and other writings not intended for publication. If Kafka raised his head…
But this has been done with all great authors because it is very interesting to have the drafts of a writer. I fully understand that a writer does not want to publish this part of their work while alive, as it doesn’t form part of the literary work proper. A writer wishes to publish finished and complete things. But to study an author and learn to write later, this is extremely useful and offers a real lesson. These were unfinished things, it’s true—the writer considered the seven books of narratives he published during his life as finished—but all of Kafka’s production is so impressive that Brod, very wisely, sought it out everywhere immediately. Kafka died in the summer of 1924, and within three or four weeks, Brod had already gathered everything: all that could be with his girlfriends, his family, his friends… It was later edited as best as possible, and is greatly appreciated; however, what was published back then has little to do with what we have published now following the critical German edition that has been published since 1982 and is still not finished. Our Kafka is enormously reliable; it follows chronologically from a postcard he wrote when he was very young to the writings from the end of his life.
Does the contemporary conception of Kafka stem from this poor edition by Max Brod?
No, the idea people have of Kafka is very accurate. He is one of those authors who have always been understood, although it is very difficult to completely comprehend him. The vague idea people have of Kafka is exactly what he is. This is very curious because, for example, people do not have such an exact idea of Joyce or Proust, not by far, as they have of Kafka. Reading two or three narratives or a piece of one of his novels already gives one the notion of the Kafkaesque universe by definition. This happens thanks to Kafka’s lucidity and the complex yet very unequivocal nature of what he wanted to convey. The editions made so far reflect this idea but were simply full of errors.
And what exactly is this popular idea of Kafka?
The idea is that Kafka made a magnificent diagnosis of the situation in which the contemporary individual finds themselves against the bureaucratic machinery that overwhelms them in every way. Over time, what overwhelms the individual has changed a bit—the bureaucracy, for instance, is much simpler now than it was eighty years ago when Kafka died—but the central idea remains valid because there still exists a whole array of superstructures, some visible and others invisible, which have power over individuals’ free will. That is to say, what can an individual do against the hidden and enormously powerful forces that are the apparatuses of the state? That has not changed at all. What Kafka diagnoses is, in reality, a process of capitalist civilization in the contemporary stage, which remains the same. There has only been one change that would further validate the distance Kafka saw between the individual and society or the state: the information society. That is new but still follows the tradition of adding more and more elements of mediation between people and the large institutions represented by powers—the bureaucracy, the state, the multinationals… It’s worth noting that the situation of, in a way, alienation that Kafka detects is an alienation detected contrary to the Marxist idea that the individual can do something about it, that they can respond in the form of a revolution or otherwise. Kafka’s idea is that these powers are too potent and especially too subtle to fight against. The individual is sold to the powers of the state bureaucracy, and in this sense, the world has not changed at all. The idea people usually have of this, what is Kafkaesque, is still enormously precise, exact, and valid.
Speaking about the internet, you have claimed on occasion that it is a novelty comparable to the printing press.
Yes, but Benjamin already said in that famous phrase: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” The great document of culture or the great cultural advance that the printing press represents inevitably ruins oral literary tradition. Oral literature had extraordinary roots in musicality, orality, and the sonorous registers of verse—even prose was far more euphonic—which ended with the invention of the press. To some extent, it’s the same with the internet. What are the consequences of computer science in literary creation? Well, all initial drafts are lost. Almost everyone writes directly on a computer, and each rewriting version erases the previous one. That is to say, from now on, genetic criticism cannot be done because we will not have the preliminary versions of the drafting of literary works.
Another example of this barbaric side could be the disappearance of minority languages and the whole cultural diversity they represent. Are we heading towards a single global language?
This would be another issue. But Europe has always had languages functioning as a koine. There have essentially been three: Latin, which was a European koine from Roman times up until roughly the 18th century; then, during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, it overlapped with French, which was a universal language throughout Europe, mainly through diplomacy but also culturally; and now, for the past 30–40 years, English. However, English is not acting in the same way Latin and French did. These languages were not just tools; they conveyed something more: civilization, culture, ideas, morals, religion, philosophy… English doesn’t function like this; it is more like the internet: it conveys information and helps people understand each other in a fairly primary sense. It’s clear that it’s not due to the English language’s influence that we have this Americanized culture in Europe today, but rather because of music, fashion, cinema—that is, the products created using the support of the English language, independently of its grammatical rules. For example, a Shakespearean sonnet, although written in English, sounds to any average Westerner, except perhaps some professors in England, like Chinese.
But then, isn’t the internet a useful tool?
Of course, it is useful. I recognize all its advantages because they are obvious, but the drawbacks are varied. Perhaps the most serious issue for me that the internet has produced is the confusion between education and information. The internet informs but does not educate; educators—flesh and blood people—educate. What educates is an intellectual, personal, unique, individual, and transferable experience. Specifically, it is transferable in a specific space: the classroom. And that, at this rate, might disappear. Universities are the first to put computers in the classrooms, which seems to me one of the most insidious perversions in the history of education. Education is transmitted through the professor’s word; in the way they speak, whether they raise or lower their voice, if they start shouting or laughing, if they make a digression or a detour…
Back to Kafka. In the preface, you state: “the abstract nature of the transcendental and the elemental nature of everyday experience merge in Kafka’s work as possibly never before in world prose literature.”
Yes, this is very characteristic of Kafka. He is an author that simultaneously brings together two things. In a way, he inherits the entire realist tradition—everything he explained was something he observed; he did not invent much. In this sense, he is like Dickens or Flaubert—a tradition of writers who explain what they see. But simultaneously, and interwoven with this, there operates a transcendental, metaphysical, religious, prophetic dimension, which is the most mysterious part of Kafka, likely his greatness. There is a single narrative material, but within it, there are two things: one very real and another, a kind of anticipation of a dimension that lies at the opposite end of reality—the supernatural, the transcendent, and the mystery of the beyond.
How do you explain this transcendental and mysterious aspect of Kafka, which is only partly intuitive and is attractive precisely because it is not fully comprehended?
This happens with all mystical and religious writers, like St. John of the Cross, Rilke, Hölderlin… These great authors exist in all literatures and reached a vague perception of the beyond, the eternal, linked to some idea of divinity or death… In this sense, Kafka is no different from the others. What is different is how he articulates this with the specific historical situation of the 20th century.
Does this part match with what you call ‘Kafka’s mythology’? (“Kafka’s work constitutes one of the most faithful and global mythologies of the 20th century.”)
No, this is just one part. When I speak of Kafka as a great mythologist of the 20th century, I am not referring to this dimension. Kafka’s transcendental dimension is properly the religious dimension and is anachronistic, as it consists of a belief, a faith, or at least a glimpse of the eternal. All peoples have known this dimension, which is properly the dimension of the sacred, and many individuals know it. Everyone, as they age, knows this experience because, as they clearly perceive that one day they are going to die, they have this vision of the beyond, which is an enormous mystery. That has always existed. However, when I say that Kafka constructs one of the most general mythologies of the 20th century, I refer to another dimension: he reduces to myths the five or six essential issues of the daily life of an individual in contemporary society—their struggle against power machines, the alienation of the individual before apparatuses that are stronger than them, public opinion, and the difficult communication between people… The truth is that almost everything said about Kafka is of a sociological order. This, I do not explain in the preface, but there is a sociological dimension of Kafka that fully coincides with things also diagnosed by contemporary sociologists, like Simmel or Max Weber. When I refer to a Kafkaesque mythology, I mean that Kafka elevates to a literary category things that are of the strictest everyday reality.
Regarding Kafka’s style, you’ve mentioned that he wrote ‘straight through, rarely corrected.’
Yes, with Kafka, it’s like with Mozart, something unusual. These are people who produce with such perfection that everything they do comes out perfect on the first attempt, unlike Proust, for example, who corrected and corrected many times. But writing straight through, that is to say, without needing to correct, is something that the German language facilitates, as it has such inflexible syntactic rules that when one sets out to express a thought in German, the sentence can only be one way.
What were Franz Kafka’s influences?
Kafka was heavily influenced by Goethe, who was his number one reference in terms of stylistics in the German language. In terms of narrative references, there are a few more: Kleist, Dickens, Flaubert… As with all German writers post-Goethe and pre-Thomas Mann -who is the other great stylist of the German language-, Kafka’s literary style was almost directly inherited from Goethe. Kafka spoke German with his mother but Czech with his father and lived in a city where Czech was spoken. Hence, he had to be cautious, much like a writer from Catalonia who writes in Spanish, because it is not the local language. Kafka’s vocabulary is very rich and his prose magnificent, but it resembles Goethe’s -his clear style and shorter sentences- more than Thomas Mann’s -who had such an extraordinary knowledge of German that he could indulge in stylistic flourishes and sentences running up to twenty lines-.
In Kafka, “everything is sketched writing.” “What is essentially Kafkaesque is not the work itself but its opposite,” what does that mean?
What predominates in Kafka’s work is the idea of the fragment that can be extended somewhat; this far outweighs the idea of a complete and finished work. The parable, the maxim, almost the epigram – this is the quintessential Kafkaesque genre… In the beginning, he started with incredibly brief texts and then gradually extended the length of his writings a bit. His idea wasn’t to create a grand work, neither partially nor globally. But that does not detract from the fact that a story like “The Metamorphosis” is one of the best-constructed and most perfect stories of the 20th century, even though it cannot be considered a “great work” because, by definition, an extended story cannot aspire to be one. A “great work” is, for example, “The Magic Mountain” by Mann, Goethe’s “Wilhelm Meister”, or Dickens’ “Bleak House”…
According to your explanation, the posthumous texts of the Prague writer, even more than the books he published during his lifetime, allow us to speak of this author as someone who was literally obsessed with the activity of writing.
This is true, although Kafka did not have a large adolescent production – perhaps it existed, but he destroyed it – nor much production before the first narrative books he published during his lifetime, around 1913, when he was already over thirty years old. Therefore, all the work that has remained was written practically in the last eleven years of his life. Kafka was a constant writing machine. He would finish the insurance company’s business matters in a couple of hours in the morning and dedicated the rest of the day, given that he had his own office, to writing letters, narratives, and notes on the company’s paper. In other words, he never stopped writing. If he had to write reports for the company, he also wrote them perfectly. Whenever he picked up the pen, he automatically produced literature, whatever the genre. Writing was the justification of his existence. For him, the equation life=writing was exact.
The book contains some literary critiques – although very few. In this sense, and extending the question to other authors, does a good writer also have to be a good critic, in the sense that they must know how to judge their craft?
Kafka wrote only two or three book reviews and some on painting, and it was usually due to friendship with an author. All are included in the volume, but in total, they do not reach half a dozen. In any case, this was not his genre. The same happens with Flaubert; he wrote a single literary critique in his entire life – dedicated to Louis Bouilhet, a very good friend who is unknown today. But there have been great writers who were also great critics: T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Nabokov… There’s a bit of everything, writers who are very capable of critiquing and others who are not. Kafka certainly was not. That does not mean there are no accurate and highly intelligent judgments in his diaries and letters about things he had read.
Have you ever considered writing works of fiction yourself?
No! I have never planned to do any of the things I have done. The only thing I planned was to be a literature professor; I am a university professor, and that’s enough. I don’t know why I’ve done everything else. My duty is to read, study, and teach; I have no other obligation or vocation apart from this. God forbid I write, given all that has already been written! That would trouble people. Those who write today must be completely crazy. If there’s not enough time in a lifetime to read all that’s been written in the world, from Homer to the great authors of the 20th century, why on earth should anyone want to add more to literature? What should be done is to read tradition. The 21st century should be a century where nothing new is produced, but people read everything that has been written throughout history. It would be different if you were born in the 4th century, like Saint Augustine; then you could still grasp everything. But being born in the 21st century, with the vast amount of existing literature… and so extraordinary! Nothing will happen in the world that has not been explained in some episode of previous literary history. The major historical atrocities like the First and Second World War, the Holocaust… the most significant or brutal things we can imagine have already happened, and each has its literature. Now is the time to read what has been written. There is no need for anyone else to write (laughs), and much less a professor like me. From my point of view, what a professor should do is read, study, and teach; nothing else. At least I’m not going to do anything else.
In a review dedicated to the memory of Edward Said, you said: “intelligence always becomes inevitably weak, sometimes even frivolous, when it enters the realm of publicity; and it becomes an even more pitiful thing when it falls into the hands of daily stupidity.” Is this an indirect critique of the Forum of Cultures?
In a way, yes. The Forum consists of two things: the first is a speculative and urbanistic operation. Everyone knows this and it’s as clear as day. In this sense, it’s very criticizable because it has caused young people to have to move 80 or 100 kilometers away from Barcelona. The other criticizable aspect is that people will spend half a year watching shows, and that’s all. Some will beat drums, others will play the bagpipes, and others the gralla; and they’ll all go home happy and content. There will be four forums of discussion and four symposiums, and everything will amount to nothing; less than the Olympic Games, which left behind very useful sports infrastructures for people with back pain and also left some sense of citizenship, which, frankly, I doubt the Forum will generate. In fact, I believe that the protests against the Iraq war are still a consequence of the fraternity that the Olympic Games created among the people of Barcelona. That’s why I am very critical of the Forum. It might be a somewhat reductionist view, and I hope I am wrong, but everything I read about this event sounds like it’s aimed at the audience and the spectators. We live in a society of spectacle where people only want to be entertained. And diversity is not something to jump for joy about; it is a very serious issue that will force a rethinking of the very foundations of European society, its customs, religions, and even its ways of understanding politics.
What is the role of the considered intellectual class – if it has any?
One of the major problems today is that the intelligentsia – a Russian word referring to the social class composed of the most intellectually prepared people – is tired. It has seen that everything it says and does is not transitive, affecting only a very small proportion of students, voters, or public opinion. Authors of the 20th century like Musil, Broch, Valéry, with enormous intellectual rigor and incredible intelligences, were already enormously minoritarian. They were aware of this, and some even committed suicide because they knew their destiny in life – to explain the things they had intuited or understood and which others did not comprehend or did not want to see – was pointless since others neither cared, understood nor wanted to know about it. Therefore, a large part of today’s global intelligentsia has either gone silent because they believe there is nothing to be done and stayed home reading, studying, and leading discreet lives, or they have become frivolous. These are people you’ll find in newspapers, who could have written great books or given great lectures but do not because they want to intervene in everything and opine on all issues with enormous frivolity. But, in a way, it’s a way to escape the impotence that the intellectual class of the whole world feels today. Well, I don’t know what happens with the intellectual class in Japan, China, or Sweden; in some countries, the intellectual class still has prestige. But in Spain, for example, the State’s disregard for its intellectuals is an endemic issue, a long-standing one. Now it’s no longer just a phenomenon of the chronic lack of appreciation of intellectual life by the State – except in Catalonia – but a global phenomenon. Intellectuals can say whatever they want, but things go in another direction. Faced with this, there are two possible attitudes: converse with friends, teach, be with students, and resist – a resistance that has a true political dimension –, or become frivolous and start skating from one place to another, leading demonstrations and being the leader of some platform or another… things that end up killing the intellectual within that person.
So, should intelligence be discreet, stay in the shadows?
It can’t do anything else. I don’t know if I am intelligent or not, but I more or less belong to the intellectual class of this city – a fairly numerous class, thank God. I lead a very discreet life because I don’t believe I have any other role than to study, teach, and be quiet. I dislike banality. I think one should maintain the original spirit of the birth of philosophy in a Socratic sense: an individual who dialogues with others, showing them the possible truth of things, building it together… It’ll be an achievement if we manage to hold on and if someday the intelligence of the country becomes publicly appreciated again. As Steiner says, the problem isn’t intelligence or the lack thereof; the worrying thing is that language itself might ultimately disappear as a privileged vehicle of knowledge. It’s the ability to articulate ideas and language itself that is fragmenting. We do not study or read enough… we do not have an intimate relationship with language as we had in the past. It could end up that everything works through images and set phrases, but language is not made up of set phrases; language consists mostly of phrases yet to be made. It’s an archive from which something unspecified can be derived; it’s an arsenal, a repository from which many potential things can emerge.
In one of your latest reviews, you stated that “it’s not news that almost all the situations in which we find ourselves today are captured and analyzed in the classics.” Do you believe, like Oscar Wilde, that life imitates art, and not the other way around?
These are two different things. When I affirm that many things that happen today can be read in the classics, well, yes, it’s true. If one has read a bit of ancient history, it’s very easy to think, in any current situation: “Thucydides already said that,” or “Herodotus explained that,” Pliny, Cicero, Virgil, Homer… it’s continuous. Humans have constants, especially European civilization. There have been very few real breaks in European history. Everything feels like déjà vu. Authors up until about a century ago – including Kafka – used to cite classical myths in their works, for example, Thomas Mann reconstructed the biblical story of Joseph and his brothers. They were very informed individuals who belonged, to varying degrees, to the great European literary tradition that began with Greek epic poetry. If you take the concept of the classic in a global sense – or even if you only consider Greco-Latin classics – you’ll find that almost everything is already there. The great themes and situations that later literature has delved into are already treated there with enormous excellence: war, homeland, love, fidelity, jealousy, hatred, anger, death… Something else is that today’s writers, having not read the classics, do not produce work that’s connected to the European literary tradition. Nowadays, a writer doesn’t feel obligated to read their predecessors; instead, they tend to read their contemporaries, those who are successful, to see what the formula for success is. There may be a notable exception, the current English and American novel; authors like Paul Auster, McEwan, Swift… these writers have read the 19th and 20th-century English novelistic tradition, which is potent and extends from the classical tradition. But in countries like Spain, this does not happen, as the novelistic tradition of the modern and contemporary centuries is scant. And then there was the second part of the question…
Yes, Oscar Wilde’s idea that life imitates art, not the other way around.
That’s a phrase said by a decadentist, an author very much in the aristocratic artistic tradition of “art for art’s sake,” who believed that art was something hegemonic and somewhat detached from society. Precisely when literary art started having limited prominence in society, these folks thought it didn’t matter as long as the art itself was paramount. “I will create art for art’s sake, and it will be a masterpiece; whether people understand it or follow me, I don’t care,” they thought. Within this context, Oscar Wilde said that nature imitates art. Honestly, I don’t believe that. It’s a very witty phrase, like all of Oscar Wilde’s – he would’ve sold his soul for a brilliant phrase – but I believe it’s still the other way around as Aristotle said: art imitates nature. Art receives stimuli from real life and builds artistic pieces on that life, whether realistic, abstract, or of any type. What still predominates is reality, nature, and history.
*The interview was originally conducted in Catalan (on March 25, 2004) and has been translated into English.