Adapting Kafka

• Published in: Word & image (London. 1985) Vol. 40; no. 1; pp. 15 - 24
• Main Author: Strathausen, Carsten
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Abingdon Routledge 02.01.2024; Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subjects: adaptation; Adaptations; Brod, Max; Czech literature; Franz Kafka; Jewish literature; Kafka, Franz (1883-1924); Literary history; Max Brod; Metaphor; metaphoric nature; The Castle; Writing
• ISSN: 0266-6286; 1943-2178
• DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2023.2278124

This essay examines the metamorphic nature of Franz Kafka's writing. I focus in particular on the unpublished manuscripts Kafka left behind, which reveal the structural instability of his texts and the stories they tell. These stories were malleable and adaptive, meaning they changed depending on the writing environment and the materials Kafka used to compose his texts. Max Brod's influential edition of Kafka's manuscripts, however, literally erased Kafka's metamorphic writing style and replaced it with a canonical body of work authorized by "Kafka." This "Kafka," I demonstrate in this essay, is a chimera invented by Brod. Instead of a stable origin or final authority, "Kafka" is better understood, I argue, as shorthand for the long adaptation history, started by Brod himself, of the unpublished metamorphic texts Kafka left behind. In order to illustrate that Kafka's texts are always already a product of their own adaptation history, the essay studies the opening paragraph of The Castle (1926) through the lens of a dozen visual adaptations of this text. The essay is dedicated to a close reading of Olivier Deprez's magnificent adaptation Le Château. D'après Franz Kafka (1999). Overall, I make three interconnected arguments. First, that adaptations are essential to "Kafka," not derivative or secondary in any sense. Second, that visual adaptations in particular echo and expose the metamorphic nature of Kafka's own writings. Finally, that Kafka adaptations are highly media specific, and that the study of medium-specificity must remain an integral part of Adaptation Studies as an academic field.