100 Years On, We Still Live in Kafka's World

This article is based on a talk given to this week's Literary Society by James Burkinshaw to mark the 100th anniversary of the death of Franz Kafka.

Kafkaesque (adjective): having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre or illogical quality. 

Franz Kafka and George Orwell are often linked together as two writers who share the rare distinction of having their name turned into an adjective. Both terms, Orwellian and Kafkaesque, are very much linked to an idea of modernity as a fundamentally dystopian experience: a vast, complex and often faceless corporate bureaucracy that extend from the government to the workplace: mechanisation and technologies that seem to disempower or disorientate rather than liberate; mass communication that often seems a channel for misinformation. 

There are differences between these two terms which suggest stylistic and thematic differences between the two writers. 'Orwellian' suggests control and coercion - by governmental or other institution. 'Kafkaesque' emphasises that disorientation which comes from feeling out of place in a mechanised, bureaucratic, impersonal world; the Kafkaesque is a surreal experience, an absurd experience: tragic, certainly, but also darkly comic. And it perhaps explains the range of Kafka's cultural influence, from existential philosophy to magical realism, theatre of the absurd to post-modern satire, concerns about surveillance capitalism to the widespread embrace of conspiracy theories. Kafka's work, in turn, reflects a range of influences: from the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky and the existentialist philosopher Soren Kierkegaard to ancient Jewish scripture. 

Surreal statue of Kafka,
in his home town of Prague

Both Orwell and Kafka died relatively young, in their 40s, of tuberculosis. At the time of his death, 100 years ago, on 3rd June 1924, Kafka was still working on a novel, The Castle. The Castle symbolises an impersonal bureaucracy, an administrative system that argues that because it is rational and logical it must be flawless. To acknowledge error would be to invalidate the authority of the whole system. So, when the protagonist simply referred to as K, is the victim of a mistake in official paperwork, the system refuses to accept this is possible. "The Chairman said, "The control agencies cannot find errors, in the vulgar sense of that term, since no errors occur. And even if an error does occur, as in your case, who can finally say that it is an error?" The paradox of absolute systemic certainty ("We don't make mistakes") combined with absolute metaphysical uncertainty ("What is truth?") seems to anticipate not only the totalitarianism of the 1930s but our own world of post-modern authoritarians, from Trump to Milei. And Kafka is alive to the darkly comic, or absurd, aspects of such ironies. 

Kafka himself worked for a highly bureaucratic institution; he was a lawyer for a large insurance company in Prague. He would get home from work mid afternoon, take a brief nap and then write stories, novels and letters late into the night. The protagonist of his most well known novel, The Trial, Joseph K, is the employee of a large bank. One day, he is arrested and prosecuted by a remote and unapproachable authority without the alleged crime being revealed to him or to the reader. A social and political system that seems mundane, ordered and secure is revealed to be brutal and arbitrary. Kafka suggests that law is not about justice but about coercion and control. Part of the prophetic force of his novels and short stories is that they seem to anticipate the horrors of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, the fear of a knock on the door in the middle of the night by secret police. But Kafka's continuing popularity over the past century reflects our unshakeable sense that there is something fragile about our own political, social and cultural freedoms (this scene, from Terry Gilliam's superb 1985 film, Brazil, captures Kafka's themes and style in an English context, with a Kafkaesque mix of horror and dark comedy):

  

In Kafka, this sense of disempowerment extends to the institution of the family. He had a domineering, sometimes violent father, Hermann, who had risen above his own working class roots and now had middle class, bourgeois ambitions for his son. Franz's short story, 'Metamorphosis', opens with the famous sentence, "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed into his bed into a gigantic vermin." There is a dark comedy in the fact that no-one seems unduly shocked that he has turned into a strange creature. His employer is irate that Gregor can't come to work, and his family is increasingly irritated about having to look after him. It ends with the death of Gregor and his family's relief that they can now just focus on finding a respectable husband for Gregor's sister, Greta, who, unlike her brother, won't embarrass them socially.

One of the challenges for translators of Kafka is how to deal with German vocabulary packed with multiple meanings. "Vermin" is the most common translation of "ungeziefer" and the description within the text has suggested to some a cockroach or a beetle. However, the original meaning of "ungeziefer" was an "animal unclean for sacrifice". In light of Kafka's Jewish cultural and religious background, this is significant. The symbolism of sacrifice lay at the heart of Jewish faith and identity. But there was also a social and political dimension: the sense of a scapegoat. To be Jewish in Central Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century was to be constantly aware of being viewed as an "outsider". Many Jewish families had immigrated from Russia and Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century, many as a result of violent pogroms. The disorientation at the heart of Kafka's work, the surreal imagery of 'Metamorphosis' in particular, captures a sense of being foreign, of being extraneous. To be chosen, to be elect, in Jewish tradition, is simultaneously to be exposed and therefore potentially judged and condemned. A bourgeois family like the Kafkas would be particularly aware of the fragility of their social status: one day insiders, then suddenly and abruptly outsiders. Kafka died nine years before Hitler took power in Germany; all three of his sisters died in the Holocaust. 

Persistence of memory by Salvador Dali, 1931

For Kafka, that sense of alienation extends beyond the political, social, cultural and religious to the psychological; he is fascinated with the untranslatability of our own psychic experience. Kafka perceives an absurdity at the heart of human experience: the conflict between an apparently rational external world and our interior consciousness, reminiscent of another Jewish novelist writing in the same period, Marcel Proust, as well as Sigmund Freud and Surrealist artists, all grappling, like their contemporary, Albert Einstein, with space and time that are relative not absolute: "The clocks don't agree, the internal one chases along in a diabolical or demoniacal . . . fashion, the external one limps along at its usual pace . . the two different worlds divide or keep dividing or at least tear themselves horribly . . . We each have our own way of climbing back out of the subterranean world. I do it by writing."

In a letter to his friend, Max Brod, Kafka refers to "this descent toward the dark powers, this unchaining of spirits that are naturally kept bound, the dubious embraces and everything else that can happen down below and of which you don't recall anything when you're up above, writing stories in the light of day". W H Auden described Kafka as "the Dante of the twentieth century", descending into the psychological and spiritual inferno. Kafka continues, "(The writer), if they want to avoid madness, can never really stray from their desk so must hold fast to it with their teeth . . . I am nothing but literature, and can want to be nothing else." Writing, for Kafka, brings coherence and it brings sanity. 

Sanity, in turn, brings pain. Kafka possessed a heightened perceptiveness, a sensitivity that was almost unbearable, as both a writer and a reader: "I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books."