The Indian Express (Delhi Edition)
The continuing relevance of Franz Kafka
FRANZ KAFKA shone a light through the smokescreen of bureaucracy to lay bare a disillusioned political class, clueless authorities, and spiteful officers.
Born in 1883 in Prague, then part of the Austro-hungarian Empire, Kafka started out working in an insurance company, but spent his nights and weekends writing — his stories reflected what he saw glimpsed in the offices and overheard in the corridors.
The outcome was ‘Kafkaesque’, a nightmarish world of labyrinthine bureaucracy, full of forms, permits, signatures, and contracts, that existed only to protect the procedure, not to serve the people.
Wednesday marked a century of Kafka’s death. But Kafka lives on, through the modest body of his own work that has survived, and in the works of the writers he inspired in various ways — such as Paul Auster, Ismael Kadare, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, Margaret Atwood.
Critic of modernist rationalism
Kafka’s great contemporaries, Virginia Woolf and T S Eliot, described the misery of post World War I Europe — of a continent ravaged and a generation destroyed, of a world in which science had failed in its promise of a better life for mankind. The pervasive distrust of authority placed at its centre the intellectual elite of Europe, the erstwhile champions of its post-enlightenment rationality.
Kafka’s work was shot through with this despondency, and added to the critique of the modernist project. His Trial (published posthumously in 1925), was about a man who’s accused of a crime but is never told what it was, and The Metamorphosis (1915) was the story of a man who wakes up on a Monday morning to discover he has turned into a giant insect, but continues to worry about being late for work.
Among Kafka’s short stories and novellas were The Castle (1926), and In the Penal Colony (1919). Kafka destroyed a lot of his work during his lifetime, and some were published by his friend Max Brod after his death, in defiance of Kafka’s wishes. These works, as Brod wrote in a postscript to The Trial’s first edition, were among Kafka’s best, of the highest “literary and ethical value”.
Kafka, a hundred years on
A century after Kafka’s death, the world that he was tormented by continues to survive in many respects. In today’s historic socio-economic inequality, continuing injustices, and even the looming climate catastrophe, Kafka’s tragicomic criticism of modernism remains relevant.
The Internet has rediscovered him through memes and videos about his characters who remain helpless in the face of larger forces, and react with confusion and fear.
As the critic George Steiner wrote in his introduction to a translation of The Trial by Willa Muir and Edwin Muir, Kafka’s works have diffused into “so many recesses of our private and public existence” that they have illuminated the absurd nature of living in the modern age — with all the knowledge of history and science but without any of the wisdom it should have entailed.