Gutiérrez, Kafka reader – Caretas Cultura

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Franz Kafka is the author of the twentieth century who has provoked and continues to impress extra numerous and contradictory readings. In accordance with this, in the present day as yesterday, he’s the one that almost all disconcerts the reader, inflicting an astonishment that takes him out of his normal packing containers, splendidly uncommon and distressingly hypnotic like a recurring nightmare.

Therefore the relevance of a reliable introduction to his artistic universe, which is each didactic and profound. Aim fulfilled exemplarily by the good Peruvian narrator and essayist Miguel Gutiérrez, within the research and anthology (selects texts by and about Kafka) Kafka: disturbing beings (Lima, JM Marthans, 131 pp.). A contribution first revealed in 1999, in a set of essays that Gutiérrez devoted to Peruvian and common figures (Faulkner, Borges, Ribeyro, and so forth.); and which, now, is appropriately republished inside the framework of the centenary of the Czech writer’s dying.

Gutiérrez doesn’t hesitate to raise Kafka as the best genius of twentieth century narrative, above Proust (though he considers that In Search of Misplaced Time It’s the “grasp novel of this century.” [el XX]”, p. 63) and Joyce (recognizing that he’s the one who has modified the language of the novel essentially the most in our time). He additionally doesn’t hesitate to imagine his legacy when composing his uncommon novel. Babel, paradise (1993), masterful Kafkaesque fiction, the place the Babelian seems to be surprisingly paradisiacal.

And, like Mariátegui, Gutiérrez was an open and heterodox Marxist, able to valuing aesthetics with out ideological blinders. It is sufficient to discover how he disagrees with the Marxist thinker (“revisionist” and all) Georg Lukács, when he chooses Thomas Mann (continuer of “essential realism”) and discards Kafka. Wielding a “nice sophistical energy” (Gutiérrez maintains), he locations Kafka within the “anti-realist tendencies” of the “age of imperialism,” and doesn’t understand that it was Kafka “who penetrated deeper into the construction of the present world” (p. 61). Thus Gutiérrez coincides with Brecht, one other open and heterodox Marxist.