| Sumario: | The article focuses on the literary work of Austrian-Czech writer Franz Kafka. Kafka's art is undeniably close to the man's own ravaging, indeed pathological, uncertainties. This invites the invocation of that modish and simplistic article of faith which asserts that pathology is somehow more true, more 'authentic', than sanity. view. Yet it is remarkable how often Kafka criticism pursues, from one form to another, a heavily biographical approach. The author would argue that in literary criticism--as in any form of linguistic communication--an unremitting interest in the personality behind the utterance suggests that utterance has in some way broken down, that when a listener (or reader) elects not to explicate an utterance but to account for it, he is demonstrating the failure of that utterance to work as public communication. It is because the story is so clearly embedded in Kafka's 'private' agony that virtually all discussion of it has centred in one form or another on the experiences from which it derives. This brings to the heart of Kafka's vision in his story, for it suggests the degree to which the interpreting of Kafka is part of his very theme. Reality is, in other words, more than a list of objects present, it is a human category, it is fact interpreted, invested with meaning, with metaphorical significance.
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