The basement artist (notes about Kafka and the bachelor)

Abstract

Whether we are talking about established or marginal authors, the future perception of a literary work often remains subject to the ideological circumstances of its production. In the discursive framework of any historical moment, if the traffic of ideas is stabilized, meaning runs the risk of becoming a guideline that makes it impossible for other perspectives to emerge. Numerous studies praise the work of Franz Kafka (1883-1924) as one of those that best delves into the nightmares and contradictions that diagram our social conscience. However, there are elements of his literature that, due to value restrictions of the time, have remained unstudied or have been worked on without the deserved attention. The figure of the bachelor, in contradiction with the reproductive chain of bourgeois values in Prague at the beginning of the 20th century, was relegated to a mere biographical circumstance. To this day, the bachelor remains neglected and is based on exclusively biographical perspectives that subordinate bachelorhood to the author's hemoptysis or his complicated paternal bond. Our work aims to reconstruct the importance of the bachelor beyond Kafka's intimate circumstance, or rather it aims to resituate the artistic fact of language as a practice capable of excavating and transforming the vital trajectory of the one who exercises it.