Understanding the Kafkaesque
Understanding Kafka is no easy task. A reader of Kafka’s work in many ways becomes like one of Kafka’s own protagonists – an isolated, confused being, struggling to understand a world that in some way constantly defies understanding. This is probably why so much of criticism on this early 20th century German-speaking author from Prague clings so desperately to the raft of Kafka’s life, through his letters and diaries. Considering the number of these he left behind, a biographical reading of Kafka is a popular approach: easy, straightforward, and really quite inevitable, given the circumstances through which much of his writing is available to us today. Kafka felt a deep personal connection with his work, and asked his friend and literary executor, Max Brod, to destroy all his unpublished writings upon his death: last wishes that Brod disobeyed after Kafka died in 1924, changing the face of 20th century literature. It is impossible to deny the strong presence of Franz Kafka in his writings. His protagonists’ names, for example: K. from The Castle, Josef K. from The Trial, Gregor Samsa from The Metamorphosis, are all encapsulations of Kafka’s own name. The domineering, authoritarian father figure – most notably in The Judgement, seems to be a reflection of Kafka’s own father, underlined by Kafka’s own Letter to His Father.
However, reading Kafka’s works through his life is a bit like flipping ahead to the solutions pages in a puzzle book. Not only is it a bit like cheating, it leaves the reader cheated as well, whether or not they are aware of it. For one thing is sure about Kafka’s works: they defy any sort of essentialist reading. Turning to the solutions pages in this case helps us only to place the body of Kafka’s writing in context; more than anything, along with Kafka’s fiction, it helps us understand the author Kafka better, but his fiction itself remains as puzzling as ever. Like Kafka’s unfortunate protagonists, we are not meant to fully understand the absurd reality of Kafka’s fiction, or find any solution for it. Like Josef K. and Gregor Samsa, we struggle against this breakdown of sense and meaning, only to fail at the end. It is this inexplicability that lies at the core of Kafka’s fiction.
Nowhere is this made as clear to us as it is in Kafka’s metafictional short story, The Cares of a Family Man. The narrative begins in a manner suggestive of an analytical reading: “Some say the word Odradek is of Slavonic origin, and try to account for it on that basis. Others again believe it to be of German origin, only influenced by Slavonic. The uncertainty of both interpretations allows one to assume with justice that neither is accurate, especially as neither of them provides an intelligent meaning of the word.”
We go on to learn that Odradek is “a flat star-shaped spool for thread” that “looks senseless enough, but in its own way perfectly finished”. Odradek can be seen as a metaphor for Kafka’s own works: senseless, but in its own way perfectly finished. The narrator of this story, the family man, struggles to grapple with the meaning of this object, but by the end of this 500-word story we realise, along with the narrator, that Odradek is what it is: meaningless, but permanent. In the final line of the story, the narrator admits: “He does no harm to anyone that one can see; but the idea that he is likely to survive me I find almost painful”. These words are prophetic in the way Kafka’s own “meaningless” work would survive him. What is more important to consider, however, is the way Kafka plays with meaning and meaninglessness in the story. The narrator knows Odradek to be meaningless, but we also observe, along with the narrator, the slow implicit dawning of the realisation that in his impermanence, he too is rendered meaningless. Odradek is the family man’s shadow, his guilt, a manifestation of his own meaninglessness. The narrator is only defined for us as the “family man” – a label apparently filled with meaning, but in a way no more meaningful than Odradek’s description of being a flat, star-shaped spool for thread. The narrator will only be survived by his legacy as a family man – his children and his children’s children – and Odradek.
The story is a wonderful comment of the worldview of Kafka’s fiction, which we may call the Kafkaesque. It embodies a certain nervous laughter that is so characteristic of the Kafkaesque. Consider the opening passage of The Metamorphosis, in which Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a giant insect, and Samsa’s first thoughts are about how he will get to work that morning. It is this nervous laughter, this humour of disbelief, that is the only form of escape in the Kafkaesque world, that is otherwise menacing and claustrophobic. Jean Collignon explains the source of this humour in Kafka’s fiction:
When confronted with an absurd situation, we burst out laughing, but we do so only because we believe that, due to this very characteristic, it cannot last. Pretty soon, we argue, the absurdity will be exploded and reason reestablished. If not, we go on laughing because we feel superior to the absurd, unaffected by it, while those responsible for it are discarded as fools. But if the absurdity affects us deeply, we either sink into despair or revolt. Now Kafka's heroes, without growing despondent or rebellious, seem to wallow in absurdity with a surprising amount of delight. (Collignon 59)
The Kafkaesque perspective is the perspective of the bug, the pest, the Ungeziefer. Although we see the bug only in The Metamorphosis, a similar perspective is retained in Kafka’s other stories.
(click to see larger)
(Watterson, 22)
Kafka’s protagonists all have that dim perception of being the victim of some cruel prank or joke. When Josef K. is arrested at the very beginning of The Trial, he harbours for a long time the suspicion that it is merely a practical joke that his colleagues are playing on him. As a result of this perspective, Kafka’s protagonists seem to go about their increasingly absurd lives with a sense of flippancy. The Kafkaesque has often been described as being nightmarish, with perhaps too much emphasis on the nightmare as being horrific. It is nightmarish in the sense that there is a constantly present hope that the protagonist will wake up.
In Adam Thirlwell’s description of the Kafkaesque, he describes and refutes the common perceptions of the Kafkaesque: of expressing the alienation of the modern man, of prophesying the totalitarian police state and the Nazi Holocaust, of expressing a Jewish mysticism, of an anguish of man without God, of being very serious, of his stories all being autobiographical. He says of these notions of the Kafkaesque: “All of these truths, all of them are wrong. It is not a very accurate word, this ‘Kafkaesque’” (Thirlwell xi).
Thirlwell does not go on to define the Kafkaesque. He defines it only negatively, by stating the things it is not, which are, ironically, the very things it is popularly perceived to be. The Kafkaesque can never be an accurate word. Defining it would be to essentialise it, which would go against its very essence. Which is not to say the Kafkaesque is not characterized by a very distinct, constant style. No one-line definition of the Kafkaesque could capture its complexity, except if it is defined as being reminiscent of the works of Kafka. Such a definition begs the question and leaves us no wiser.
Perhaps it is true that the “Kafkaesque” can no longer be seen only in light of Kafka’s own work. The adjective has transcended its original relation to Kafka’s fiction, and attempting to redefine the Kafkaesque so it better represents the work of Kafka might not be a worthwhile exercise. It would be interesting to understand, however, why the Kafkaesque describes a certain kind of literature that cannot be described by any other word. The Kafkaesque of Kafka’s fiction, at the very least, fails to attach itself to or group itself under any other labels of genre.
The difficulty of pinning down Kafka and the Kafkaesque is reflected in Kafka’s uncertain position in the literary canon. Kafka cannot comfortably be grouped under any literary movement, for while his style shares elements with several of them, it also lies outside the boundaries of every one of them. “Kafka turns out to be as much an Expressionist as a Zionist as a mystic as a pre- and post-Communist Czech as an Existentialist as a post-modernist as a post-colonialist as a (whatever he will be next month). Kafka's work and his life seem to lend themselves to infinite readings and finite exploitations” (Gilman 9). Kafka is often categorised as an expressionist: his surreal narrative seems to occupy a more mental and emotional realm than a purely physical one.
One important aspect of the Kafkaesque is claustrophobia. It is not the surroundings that are claustrophobic (although occasionally they are), but a claustrophobia of the mind, the frustrating confines of the character’s thoughts and their inability to comprehend baffling surroundings. When Josef K. of The Trial is arrested, it is primarily his own mind that shackles him. The Kafkaesque claustrophobia is perhaps illustrated best by his story The Burrow. The narrative is the frenetic thoughts of a burrowing creature, constantly worried about its burrow. One could say the claustrophobia of the narrative is reflective of the physical confines of the burrow, but interestingly the narrative squeezes the reader into an even tighter box within the creature’s thoughts when the creature leaves the burrow. The mind seems to be the primary dimension in which this aspect of the Kafkaesque operates. Yet to call the Kafkaesque only expressionistic would be to completely miss the point: the Kafkaesque explores the entanglement between the dimensions of the mental and emotional with those of the physical and real. The uneasy relationship between the two is what creates the nightmarish quality of the Kafkaesque. It is an unreality imposed upon a very familiar reality. Ritchie Robertson, in his introduction to Kafka, explains this with the example of The Judgement. “In The Judgement, Kafka defies the expectations of readers that a text will have a stable relation to reality - that it will stay in the same literary mode throughout. Instead, Kafka begins in the realist mode and moves to the Expressionist mode, with hints of a further reality that neither can accommodate” (31). He goes on to explain that while The Judgement employs a shift from the realist to the expressionist mode, The Metamorphosis employs both modes simultaneously.
Expressionism was a turn-of-the-century movement, relating more to developments in painting than in literature. It is a movement clubbed under the larger cultural epoch of modernism. Kafka’s work, containing elements of the expressionistic, undoubtedly contained elements of modernism. His stories did reflect a certain mundanity of modern urban life: Gregor Samsa’s constant worrying about his job as a travelling salesman is evidence of this. Kafka’s heroes’ struggle to make meaning for themselves in a chaotic world is a modernist quest, and a strongly existentialist one.
Yet at the same time the Kafkaesque mocks and parodies the familiar (although perhaps not quite so familiar in Kafka’s time) modernist narrative. Samsa is an insect when he worries about his job as a travelling salesman. The modernist quest for meaning always fails, and Kafka distorts the very concept of meaning, as we saw in The Cares of a Family Man. The existentialist aim to define oneself is always thwarted.
The inevitability of the hero's reduction to powerlessness culminates in his death and dramatizes the superiority of the victorious forces which render all attempts at self-determination futile. Rather than providing the reader with that privileged moment of insight into the reasons which bring about the protagonist's downfall, Kafka's obsessional quest for completeness and absolute truthfulness is frustrated by the maze of minute detail. This deconstruction of totality ultimately leads to the fragmentation of truth. The failure to establish a totalizing view restrains Kafka from restoring to the narrative any familiar sense of omniscience. He renders the world unintelligible and truth inaccessible. (Beicken 401)
In its parody of modernist narratives, the Kafkaesque is also postmodernist, despite its arrival prior to postmodernism. Kafka’s use of metafiction is an indicator of his postmodernist tendencies. The refusal of the Kafkaesque to maintain a stable relationship with reality could be read as a sort of pastiche of genres, a favourite tool of the postmodernists. The Kafkaesque belongs to no single genre, but borrows from several, mixing them together in what continues even today to be a confusing narrative, despite the arrival and growth of postmodernism. James Whitlark says of Kafka’s prose that it is “reminiscent of literary realism, except in its dreamlike minimalism […] If Kafka had merely presented a ‘figure… or system’ and its deconstruction, he would still be working within a fairly traditional logic. Instead, he jostles one system and its deconstruction against another, creating an ungovernable world where any struggle for control becomes nightmarish – the Kafkaesque” (13).
Kafka’s fiction also manages to fall into the magical realist mode, even though the very term magic realism was coined one year after Kafka’s death. Yet the dynamism of the Kafkaesque’s relationship between the real and the unreal, in retrospect, finds itself a place in the magical realist tradition. Milan Kundera cites Kafka’s surrealist humour as being the predecessor of magical realist artists like Federico Fellini, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Salman Rushdie. Like magical realists, Kafka distorts the dimensions of space and time – Kafka’s characters are often running for their lives to stay in the same place – they are unable to move. Time, too is hugely problematised, and turned into a mental dimension rather than a physical one, as we see in Kafka’s A Common Confusion. In the story, A accomplishes a journey to H in ten minutes on the first day, but the same journey takes him ten hours to complete on the next day. Magical realist narratives are seen as postmodernist narratives, being concerned with questions of being rather than questions of knowledge (McHale 83). But if we are to consider this definition as accurate we know that Kafka once again steps out of the magical realist framework by concerning himself with questions of knowledge as well as those of being. The Kafkaesque is plagued with these questions – in Kafka’s The Great Wall of China, we are told of the Chinese emperor who is known only through bits of knowledge, fragmented, like the Great Wall itself, and wholly unreliable because they have passed through the distorted filters of Kafkaesque space and time.
The Kafkaesque, Kafka’s Kafkaesque at the very least, therefore, creates a category of its own, a new genre that manipulates other genres, with the effect of bewildering the reader, who, like K. or Samsa, becomes a victim, a bug, with a dim perception that it is at the butt of some cruel trick, but lacks the intelligence to really comprehend the magnitude of it.
Understanding the Kafkaesque then becomes oxymoronic – we cannot understand that which is not meant to be understood. The only understanding this essay, or any elucidation of the Kafkaesque can offer, is that the Kafkaesque will puzzle us, there is no way around it. All we can do is laugh disbelievingly until the very end.
WORKS CITED
Beicken, Peter U. “Kafka’s Narrative Rhetoric.” Journal of Modern Literature. Vol. 6 No. 3 (Sep 1997): 398-409. Web.
Collignon, Jean. “Kafka’s Humor.” Yale French Studies. No. 16 (1955): 53-62. Web.
McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. New York and London: Methuen (1987)
Gilman, Sander L. Franz Kafka. London: Reaktion Books, 2005. Web.
Kafka, Franz. The Trial. Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. Great Britain: Penguin, 1977. Print.
--- “The Metamorphosis.” Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. Thirlwell 3-54. Print.
---“The Burrow.” Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. Thirlwell 113-149. Print.
---“Cares of a Family Man.” Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. Web.
---“The Judgement.” Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. Web.
---“The Great Wall of China.” Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. Thirlwell 55-69. Print.
---“Letter to his Father.” Web.
Robertson, Ritchie. Kafka: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Web.
Thirlwell, Adam, ed. Metamorphosis. London: Vintage, 1999. Print.
---“The Last Flippant Writer.” Thirlwell ix-xxviii. Print.
Watterson, Bill. Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat.
Whitlark, James. Behind the Great Wall: a Post-Jungian Approach to Kafkaesque Literature. Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 1991. Web.
