We’re quite familiar with all the great writers of literature. William Shakespeare, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, John Keats, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, George Bernard Shaw, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and JD Salinger are just a few names that come to mind. All of these wordsmiths helped shape literature in various ways with their verse, style, prose, and memorable characters. Yet there is one writer who stands out amongst the rest with his mixture of realism, the fantastic, the absurd, and satire.
It is none other than Franz Kafka. His writings explore themes of guilt, social alienation, anxiety, existential angst, bizarreness, paranoia, and the power of bureaucracies. Throughout his works, he injects an interesting blend of surrealism and ridiculousness, which is meant to acknowledge the absurdity of life. Perhaps most chilling is how Kafka predicted the rise of totalitarianism and dictatorial regimes in the twentieth century.
Kafka was born into a Jewish family in 1883 when Prague (in what is now the Czech Republic) was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Initially, he trained to be a lawyer and ended up working at an insurance company where he had to confine his writing to the side. Kafka tragically died of tuberculosis at the age of 40 in 1924, and he felt his life and career were sadly misspent. Ironically, his work survives to this day because his friend and editor Max Brod defied his last wishes to burn the material and chose to publish it instead. Thankfully, the material that is read today was not destroyed in the end, but there are still a number of works that remain lost, unfinished or unpublished to this day.
Kafka’s stories excel in depicting absurd, surreal situations in which the protagonists have no understanding or control over. The Metamorphosis famously opens with traveling salesman Gregor Samsa awakening in his bed to discover that he has turned into a giant insect. In typical Kafka fashion, there is no explanation or reason as to why the transformation has taken place; Gregor is merely changed. Nor is there any definite name for the type of insect he has become; the original German text says “monstrous vermin”, while other interpretations vary from cockroach to dung beetle. Rather than brood about the situation, he merely accepts his new condition and tries, albeit unsuccessfully, to go about his life as usual. He quickly comes to realize that he can no longer go to work and support his parents and younger sister. What follows is a reversal of roles, in which his previously-idle family have to step up and provide for themselves as the transformed Gregor confines himself to the bedroom. Several people who don’t get Kafka tend to ask what the whole point of The Metamorphosis is; they dismiss the story as banal, tedious and without drama. However, they fail to see the themes of alienation and degeneration. There are some authors such as Charles Neider who attempt to portray the story with a psychological approach, because Kafka had a strained relationship with his overbearing, authoritarian father. Others like Vladimir Nabokov (author of Lolita) argue Kafka’s novella is about the individual trying to survive in a world where materialistic, shallow-minded people are self-absorbed and cruelly indifferent to deep thinkers. Also, there are social and psychoanalytic interpretations of the text, because the family grows and evolves as individuals over the course of the narrative.
The Trial (or the original German title “Die Process”) is where Kafka really shines as a writer. It is regarded by many critics and scholars as his Magnus opus. The novel begins on the morning of associate bank manager Josef K’s thirtieth birthday where he finds two men claiming that he is under arrest. Strangely, he is not handcuffed, booked or processed, and the nature of the charges are not disclosed to them. Josef is told that he is free to go about his daily business until the trial begins. At first, he thinks this is someone’s idea of a practical joke or a birthday prank, but when the men show up at his office to inform him of the court date, he realizes there is indeed something fishy going on. Josef thus embarks on a campaign to clear his name and track down his accusers. In spite of his efforts, Josef never succeeds in finding out what he’s being charged with, let alone who made the initial accusation against him. He does discover the shadowy High Court make decisions that are not released to the public, and not many people have seen the officials in person. The narrative includes a parable titled “Before the Law”, in which a man from the country futilely waits outside a gate for years in order to obtain access to the law. Before he dies, the man asks the guard why nobody else has come seeking the law, only to be told the door was went for him. It is a bleak, grim parable that sums up Josef’s hopeless quest. Upon hearing the story, a cynical Josef more or less abandons seeking justice and resigns himself to a grim fate.
The Castle is another of Kafka’s best works, and it is the last novel he ever worked on. A man only known as “K” (perhaps a reference to The Trial) arrives in a village and attempts to gain entry to the authorities. K claims to be a land surveyor summoned by an official, and he learns the bureaucracy runs the town from an ancient castle. However, he is told there was a mix-up in summoning him and is instead giving the position of schoolteacher for the town. As the story progresses, K tries to learn more about the officials and the castle, which is seen as unusual and forbidden by the villagers. Furthermore, there is a dissonance between the bureaucracy’s guidelines and their actual actions, and K sees contradictions among the two. He also notices there are distinct flaws in the seemingly “flawless” system, such as a bureaucrat worker shredding documents when nobody can determine who the intended recipient is.
Kafka’s narrative succeeds in warning against the dangers of dictators, totalitarian governments and mass surveillance. Oddly enough, the author died a few years after World War One, and it makes this writer wonder how he would have felt about the subsequent decades. At the time of Kafka’s passing, inflation was rising in the 1920s, Europe was undergoing a lot of political and social changes, the Great Depression was on the way, and dictators like Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini were starting to make their presence known. Presumably, he might have become depressed and cynical about how the dangers he’d written about had come to pass. A chilling epilogue of the Kafka family reveals that his three sisters perished during World War Two as victims of the Holocaust; perhaps the author would have become even more unhappy about the world he lived in.
Overall, Kafka’s work still holds up one hundred years after his passing. The author is unique for his blend of wittiness, satire and absurdity. Indeed, it also makes readers and critics wish Kafka had more time living on this Earth. Who knows what he could have accomplished in his forties and fifties? Maybe he would have gotten even better as a writer and created even more great works that foreshadowed future works. Or perhaps not. The jury’s still out on that one
