Os “diários” ou cadernos in-quarto de Franz Kafka: rascunhos de um mundo em ruínas

Abstract

This essay/thesis seeks to reflect on how Franz Kafka's in-quarto notebooks, known as diaries, are configured as part of his aesthetic whole, in other words, as literature. When I compared these notebooks with other narratives by the author, I found many different writing procedures, both in terms of form and content, which are repeated and dialogued. Kafka's writing seems to blur the boundaries between observation and glimpse, description and invention, experience and creation, life and literature. By challenging the status quo and revealing the ruin of a world, this literature also ruins the literary-textual tradition by calling into question genres, characteristics, classifications and categories of literary texts. So, realizing how many ruins Kafka's writing allows us to see, social, and therefore familial, personal, literary, I focused mainly on what the writing in the in-quarto notebooks repeated the most: work, women, the discussion of minor languages and literatures, patriarchy, family, Judaism, the literature of other writers, illness, the relationship with writing and the impotence of the subject in the face of the world. Kafka manipulates these themes through various fragments in his notebooks and also in his other works, realizing that something that happens to him on a daily basis is not something extraordinary or merely particular, but the result of a range of situations that are tied together by the same totality. Kafka writes against writing, undoing hierarchies and systems by writing texts that don't fit into terms, manipulating a language that is both prose and poetry, report and essay, in short, literature in any form. Writing is called into question because the writer keeps drafts and, despite tearing out pages, most of the time he keeps them, even if he has crossed out almost everything that was there. It's as if keeping the draft and writing as a draft left more possibilities for writing, just as there are so many possibilities for interpreting Kafka. As if he was reluctant to put the end point, with all his dictatorship. Perhaps that's also why it's so difficult to finish narratives. The lack of an ending leaves room for several possible endings, which are then left up to the readers, to whom Kafka seems to attach so much importance.