Franz Kafka (1883-1924) is regarded as one of the greatest literary figures in recent history, even if none much cared for his production while he was alive (this is one of the reasons why he always considered himself unworthy, in addition to his father's disappointment). He is known for his uniquely dark, disorienting and surreal writing style and philosophy, which has come to be known and referred to as Kafkaesque.
In his works, he deals with tragic themes such as the absurd, success, bureaucracy, expectations from society and from our own family and the sense of life. Even though he seems to have a pessimistic view of existence, his thought ends up inspiring an active nihilistic spirit, similar to Friedrich Nietzsche's approach to life. Let’s see how and why.
Life
Kafka was born in Prague in 1883 to a man named Hermann and a woman named Julie.
Relation with his strict father
His father was a highly successful self-made business man who through sheer force of will and a brash aggressive personality managed to rise from the working-class, build a successful business and become a member of higher-middle society.
As parents tend to do, Hermann hoped for a child that would measure up to his ideal stature of a person. On the contrary, Franz Kafka was the opposite of his father’s desire: he was small, anxious and sickly, becoming a great source of disappointment for Hermann. Throughout his adolescence Franz developed an urge to write as a means of dealing with his increasing sense of anxiety, guilt and self-hatred. But of course his father did not allow him to pursue writing and ultimately define the borders around Kafka's life, forcing him to pursue law as a profession. Anyway, during his time studying law in college Kafka continued writing.
Career
After college Kafka would go on to work in a law office and then for an insurance company, where he would become subject to long hours of unpaid overtime, massive amounts of paperwork and absurd, complex bureaucratic systems. This part of his life became essential to develop his pessimistic view of existence, which is constantly present in his works.
He died of tuberculosis in 1924 at the age of 41.
Letter to his father
It should not sound reductive to suggest that one of the major keys to understanding Kafka is to analyse the nature of his relationship with his father. Kafka never wrote directly about him in any of his works but the psychology of the novels is related to the dynamics he endured. (the strange relation between father and son is described in the work The judgement). This is one of the reasons Kafka and the Italian writer Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) can be linked: the latter considers both family and society a trap for the individual being.
His struggle is witnessed by a forty-seven page letter Franz wrote to his father at the age of 36:
"Dearest father, you asked me recently why I maintain that I'm so afraid of you. As usual I was unable to think of any answer to your question partly for the very reason that I am afraid of you and partly because an explanation of the grounds for this fear would mean going into far more details than I could ever keep in mind while talking. [...] What I would have needed was a little encouragement, a little friendliness but I wasn't fit for that. What was always incomprehensible to me was your total lack of feeling for the suffering and shame you could inflict on me with your words and judgments. It was as though you had no notion of your power". Kafka complained of one particularly traumatic incident when as a young boy he called out for a glass of water and his irritable father pulled the boy out of his bed, carried him out onto the balcony and left him there to freeze in nothing but his nightshirt. Kafka writes:
"I was quite obedient after that period but it did me so much incalculable inner harm. Even years afterwards I suffered from the tormenting fantasy that the huge man, my father, the ultimate authority, would come almost for no reason at all and take me out of bed at night and carry me out onto the balcony and that meant I was a mere nothing for him".Franz's sense of inadequacy was total, not only on a psychological level but also physical:
"At a very early stage you forbade me to speak. Your threat: - not a word of contradiction - and the raised hand that accompanied it have been with me ever since. [...] I was weighed down by your mere physical presence, I remember for instance how often we undressed in the same bathing hut. There I was: skinny, weekly, slight. You: strong, tall, broad. I felt a miserable specimen. When we stepped out, you holding me by my hand, a little skeleton, unsteady, frightened of the water incapable of copying your swimming strokes; I was frantic with desperation."Kafka’s world: KAFKAESQUE
Kafka's world is not pleasant. It feels in many ways like a nightmare and yet it is a place where many of us will, even if only for a time, in the dark periods of our lives, end up. We are in the world defined by Kafka when we feel powerless in front of authority (judges, aristocrats, industrialists, politicians, fathers). When we feel that our destiny is out of our control and it is just lead by the absurd, when we are bullied, humiliated and mocked by society and by our own families. We are in Kafka's orbit when we are ashamed of our bodies and our desires.
Generally, the term KAFKAESQUE tends to refer to the bureaucratic nature of capitalistic, judiciary and government systems. The sort of complex, unclear processes in which no one individual ever really has a comprehensive grasp on what is going on and the system doesn't really care. Kafkaesque describes unnecessarily complicated and frustrating experiences, like being forced to navigate labyrinths of bureaucracy (Source: TED-Ed "What makes something kafkaesque").
But Kafkaesque is also related to the reaction of the individuals subjected to these systems and what it might represent. It is not the absurdity of bureaucracy alone, but the irony of the character's circular reasoning in reaction to it that is emblematic of Kafka's writing. It is as like society became a jail for human minds, which struggle to exit this tangled web that caused their alienation (as Karl Marx would say, not only psychological but also physical). The author's tragicomic stories explore the relationships between systems of arbitrary power and the individuals caught up in them.
e.g. Poseidon
In the short story Poseidon, the Ancient Greek god Poseidon is an executive so overworked with paperwork that he is never had time to explore his underwater empire. The joke is that not even a god can handle the amount of paperwork demanded by the modern workplace. The reason is the following; he is unwilling to delegate any of the work because he considers everyone else unworthy of the task. Kafka's Poseidon is a prisoner of his own ego.
e.g. Metamorphosis
Kafka's most famous story is Metamorphosis. The protagonist Gregor Samsa awakes into having suddenly been turned into an insect with no clear explanation. Nevertheless, he maintains his human intellectual faculties, exactly as Lucio in Apuleio's Metamorphosis when he turns into a donkey after drinking a magic potion. The first and recurring issues Gregor faces throughout the novel are the problems of getting to work, dealing with his boss and providing money for his needy family.
In addition to that, Kafkaesque deals with the nonsense. Living in this type of reality seams to be trapped in one of Samuel Beckett's plays, too. This is a system that doesn't serve justice, but whose sole function is to perpetuate itself. There is a great deal of humour rooted in the nonsensical logic of the situations described. The protagonist is faced with sudden absurd circumstances. There are no explanations. He is outmatched by the arbitrary senseless obstacles he faces. In part because he cannot understand or control any of what is happening. A conflict in which a character's efforts, reasoning and sense of the world are met with inescapable parameters of senselessness. Where success is both impossible and in the end ultimately pointless.
e.g. The Trial
In The Trial, the protagonist Joseph K. is arrested at his home one morning. The officers do not inform Joseph K. why is being arrested, though. He is then forced through a long absurd trial in which nothing is ever really explained or makes much sense. The trial is riddled with corruption and disorderliness and, by the end of the novel, K. is never told why he was arrested and yet he remains guilty of his final conviction.
Nevertheless, the protagonists of each of Kafka's novels try to overcome the irrational absurd.
We cannot stop the nonsense and we are compelled as human beings to try to solve it, even if while doing it we perpetuate the struggle more and more. As conscious rational beings, we fight against absurdity, trying to resolve the discrepancy between us and the universe. But ironically we only serve to self-perpetuate the very struggle we are trying to resolve by trying to resolve the unsolvable. And in this sense on some level we almost want the struggle.
Answers
Perhaps the idea is that we cannot know what the idea is.
Perhaps the idea is that we should accept our absurd condition and not take it so seriously.
Perhaps the idea is that we should and must struggle against it.
Kafka's work embodies and reminds us not that we wish to give up but that, despite all the absurdities and problems, we wish to continue. We wish to struggle against the universe and forge our own way. We wish to find and connect over honesty, however hard it may be.
On the other hand, by fine-tuning our attention to the absurd, Kafka also reflects our shortcomings back at ourselves. In doing so, he reminds us that the world we live in is one we create, and we have the power to change for the better (Source: "Why kafkaesque is more relevant than ever?").
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