THE RETURN OF THE NARRATOR? REFLECTIONS ON THE BENJAMINIAN READING OF KAFKA

Walter Benjamin sees in the figure of Franz Kafka the possibility of the return of the Storyteller, even in times in which he announces the end of the storytelling. We intend to clarify this apparent paradox, analyzing Kafka's "little tricks". These tricks put their stories in relation with the fairy tales tradition and at the same time enable the survival of the storytelling under the modern conditions of life. The guile is present in the fairy tales and in Kafka's stories, but in Kafka it does not seem to reside in his characters plunged into the postponement and impotence before arbitrariness. We propose to reveal the peculiarity of Kafka's guile, examining the relationship with Ulysses' guile - in the story "The silence of the sirens" - as one of Kafka's ancestors in antiquity, according Benjamin. In these pages, maybe Kafka can appear to us like a great storyteller, whose prose glows just at the moment of storytelling's culmination.