EXPERIENCE AND REFLECTED EXPERIENCE IN KAFKIAN LITERATURE:

KAFKA'S REALISM IN THE LIGHT OF ADORNO AND BENJAMIN

Abstract

In this paper, I make some interpretations of Franz Kafka's realism from two of the novelist's readers, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin. From the reading of Before the Law and A report to an academy, I develop a reflection on how the author's realism, apparently absurd, paradoxical and fragmentary, corresponds to a scriptural exercise of learning reality by converting lived experiences (Erlebnis) into reflected experiences (Erfahrung). Through the estrangement that his narratives produce, Kafka metaphorizes human experiences of displacement, homelessness, impotence and despair in an early 20th century that foreshadowed barbarities to come. Despite this, I emphasize that, far from being a pessimist and fatalist, if your characters are "Kafkaesque" - often entangled in a scenario of lack of freedom -, your writing reveals a positive attitude of demystifying ideologies and finding possible solutions through literary writing. However, this writing can no longer reproduce a highly descriptive realism of transparency, but a kaleidoscopic realism, which enters into the intricacies of subjectivities operating in a bureaucratized and administered world. This is a lesson that both Adorno, with his notion of mimesis in art, and Benjamin, with the relationships between experience and narrative, teach us through Kafka.