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Source: The Curious Reader |
“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
Dickensian, Shakespearean, Orwellian, Freudian. The influential writers whose works deeply affect us are often turned into adjectives and ‘Kafkaesque’ is one of those authors turned adjectives. These words do not simply mean “something that’s like the author” but encapsulate what they strived to convey through their writings, visions, and convictions.
Before talking about the adjective, I’d like to talk about the author. After all, the creator comes before the creation, and knowing about Franz Kafka’s early life is essential to understanding his writings and the qualities of Kafkaesque.
The Life of Franz Kafka
Source: Wikipedia
Born in Prague on 3rd July 1883 to a higher middle-class family, Franz Kafka was a German-Jewish novelist, short story writer who also worked as an Insurance Officer. From the Czech point of view, he was a German and from the German point of view, he was Jewish. This sense of alienation that he felt since childhood also affected his works.
Hermann Kafka, Franz Kafka's father, was a highly successful and well-to-do businessman who managed to rise from the working class to construct a thriving business, marry a well-educated woman, and become a member of higher middle society through pure force of will and a boisterous, aggressive attitude.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
And as a parent, he too, wished for his child to live up to his image of an ideal person. However, Franz was not like that. He was a timid and sickly child and he stayed that way which resulted in him becoming a source of dissatisfaction and a psychological punching bag for his father as he struggled to develop Franz into the person he hoped he was but could never be.
Franz developed a desire for writing during his adolescence as a way of coping with his growing anxiety and self-hatred. Of course, his father forbade him from pursuing literature and compelled him to seek law as a career. Kafka continued to write during his college years and met one of his only true friends, Max Brod.
Source: Cocosse Journal
Following college, Kafka worked in a legal firm and subsequently an insurance company for the majority of his remaining short life. Long hours, unpaid overtime, loads of paperwork, and absurd, complicated bureaucratic procedures all distressed Kafka deeply. However, he kept on writing and penned some of his most famous works like The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika.
Believing his work wasn’t any good, he didn’t intend to publish any of them and even left a lot of his works incomplete. Kafka never received any kind of success or credit for the little he produced. He died of TB at the age of 41 in 1924 and he died certain that his work was worthless. He even asked Max Brod to burn all his unpublished works after he died, which Brod obviously didn’t.
Max Brod spent the next year or two after Kafka's death, organizing and publishing his notes and writings. Kafka would go on to become one of the most influential literary and intellectual personalities of the decade that followed.
In the eyes of his father, he lived a life of inadequacy and disappointment. Nonetheless, from the perspective of history, he is a monumental figure. Fortunately for everyone except Kafka, his work was salvaged, and a new school of thought and writing was born in his honor- Kafkaesque.
Kafkaesque: A Struggle Against the Surreal and Absurd
Source: Barnes & Noble
The phrase 'Kafkaesque' refers to the bureaucratic nature of the capitalistic, judicial, and government systems in general. The kind of convoluted processes in which no single person has a complete understanding of what's going on and the system doesn't seem to mind.
However, the kafkaesque quality appears to stretch well beyond this. It is not always characterized by the systems themselves, but rather by the attitude of the human who is subjected to them and what that reaction may symbolize. Consider two of his most well-known works: The Trial and Metamorphosis.
In both stories, the protagonists are faced with sudden, absurd events with no explanations and, ultimately, no real chance of overcoming them. They are outclassed by the pointless challenges they face. Partly because they have no idea what is going on or how to control it. This confrontation with the absurd appears to be at the heart of Kafka's style and work.
Source: Bookish Santa
A battle in which a character's efforts, rationality, and understanding of the world are thwarted by unavoidable boundaries of senselessness, making success both unattainable and ultimately pointless. Nonetheless, they keep trying. Kafka's characters do not give up, even in the face of bizarre and hopeless situations.
They persevere and battle against their circumstances, at least at first, seeking to rationalize or work their way out of the absurdity. But, in the end, it's for naught. It's reasonable to say that one interpretation is that these events are representative of Kafka's perspective on humanity.
Specifically, a relentless yearning for answers and triumph over existential concerns like worry, guilt, absurdity, and pain, coupled with an inability to truly comprehend or control the cause of the problems and effectively conquer them.
Source: Medium
Perhaps Kafka is implying that the search for solace and understanding is unavoidable and impossible. As logical, conscious beings, we resist absurdity, attempting to reconcile the gap between us and the cosmos. But, strangely, by attempting to resolve the unresolvable, we merely serve to perpetuate the very battle we're attempting to end.
In Conclusion
Of course, this is only one perspective. Kafka's work, in the end, lends itself to nearly as many interpretations as readers due to its ambiguous, bizarre, and unexplained nature. Perhaps the point is that we shouldn't take our crazy predicaments too seriously. Perhaps the implication is that we should and must fight it.
Maybe the point is that we don't know what the point is. In the end, only Kafka will know exactly what his work meant, and it's reasonable to think that even he may not have known. What is apparent, however, is that Kafka's work has left an indelible mark on literature, philosophy, and mankind in general.
Kafka's own story isn't out of the ordinary. His father, despite his cruelty, and his life, despite its sadness, aren't all that uncommon. Being born into a dysfunctional home, a terrible environment, or a body or mind that is fragile. To live and die without ever realizing one's true worth. Being stuck in a corporate or government system's bureaucratic cog.
To have experienced existential guilt and worry for no apparent reason. We've all encountered the Kafkaesque, at least on occasion. Kafka's writing is regarded as excellent not for describing something profoundly unusual, but for describing something mundanely common profoundly.
An encapsulation of a life experience that touches us all yet is frequently unexplainable. His approach is aimed to relieve the soul via direct contact with the darkest aspects of self, rather than through false optimism or delusion.
Written By - Sanjana Chaudhary
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