Kafkaesque

How many people have a whole new adjective created in their name?

And for many of those who do, it’s often just a way of expressing old ideas with a new word.

But you can’t say that about Franz Kafka.

Google the word ‘Kafkaesque’ to see what it means.

The first result:

Kafkaesque: ‘characteristic or reminiscent of the oppressive or nightmarish qualities of Franz Kafka’s fictional world’.

That doesn’t tell you much, beyond the fact that it’s derived from Kafka’s fiction, and it’s oppressive or nightmarish.

The second result:

Kafkaesque is used to describe situations that are disorientingly and illogically complex in a surreal or nightmarish way.

This is much better, and I don’t think I could improve upon it.

Complex is probably the best starting point.

But ‘illogical’ does injustice to Kafka because throughout his illogicality you’ll find the most beautiful logic at every step.

Kafkaesque is also surreal and nightmarish.

But it’s not the forced surreality or nightmarishness of a horror story; this is drawn out slowly and evolves, stage by stage, from complexity rather than from terror.

Kafka

I don’t write essays about people, and this one isn’t about a person either.

It’s about the word ‘Kafkaesque’, and not the person Kafka.

But it’s worth asking – why did Kafka merit an entirely new word?

It might be because he’s incomparable; the vocabulary that already existed couldn’t describe his writings.

You can’t find anyone who writes like Kafka; those who come somewhat near are those who try to seem like Kafka.

Perhaps that’s because you can see that Kafka wrote only for himself; his writings aren’t tainted by the thought of what his audience would think about them. And maybe that’s why he wanted them burnt after he died.

Rarely will you read a book and sense that the author isn’t trying to sell a plot or weave a tale. With Kafka it is as though someone simply sat down to write whatever came to his mind; whether it makes sense to you or fits into a story is besides the point.

More than this, you won’t find anyone who could think like Kafka.

Originality is rare, and originality is new, and probably that’s why old words can’t do justice to it.

When I first wrote this essay, it started looking like a list of some of Kafka’s stories and shorter essays, with a short description of each.

But that’s just like describing a human being by describing each organ; it’s correct, but it doesn’t tell you anything about the creature as a whole, and ends up taking ages both to write and to read.

Instead, it’s easier to describe the word Kafkaesque without going into its individual manifestations, even at the risk of compromising on specifics.

Illogical Logic

Every single time I deal with a large organization I remember Kafka.

Kafkaesque is in many ways about bureaucracy.

Bureaucracy is not ‘government’; you could use it to describe any large, impersonal anonymous organization.

More than even that, Kafkaesque brings to mind a labyrinth of arcane rules, unknown to those on the outside, rules that make and will make no sense to those who are outside ‘the system’ because they defy all logic, and yet rules that are perfectly intelligible to people on the inside.

It is a world where you can be arrested, yet not be behind bars, you can be tried before a system of courts you may not know existed, by judges you can never meet and lawyers you cannot choose. For what crime you may never discover, and thus you must provide an account of your entire life.

Your guilt is presumed because the court does not try those innocent, and because guilt is always beyond doubt, but guilt of what you will never know.

Kafkaesque epitomizes the labyrinth of bureaucracy, of the overwhelming strength of a giant apparatus brought to bear on a single, isolated individual.

‘In the struggle between yourself and the world, back the world’

Franz Kafka

It’s a more unequal version of David vs Goliath, akin to using a machine gun to destroy a small toy – excessive, disproportionate force against a heavily outmatched victim.

You can see a micro, almost trivial example of Kafka’s world anytime you deal with big organizations.

Any person, an almost voiceless individual, who tries in vain to contact a huge corporation for a grievance, will understand the struggle needed to make himself heard.

You can never connect to a real living individual; it’s always one customer service agent, who will fend you off with a smooth platitude.

Call again and you are invariably connected to another agent, this one unaware of your story, and so you begin again from scratch.

The asymmetry is self-evident, in power and in emotion.

You can do nothing to shake this behemoth from its stupor; with little effort, however, it can make your life miserable.

For you it may be a big deal, a huge amount, to the agent it is usually just another complaint to be dealt with.

If luck is on your side your issue is resolved (or you just give up if it’s not worth it) and you can move on, forgetting everything.

But if ever you are not so fortunate, you will might remember Kafka as you struggle to make this vast, impersonal organization take notice of you, a voiceless human.

Every attempt to change things seems to meet the same end. In Kafka’s words, ‘every revolution evaporates, leaving only the slime of bureaucracy’.

Complexity and Indifference

Kafkaesque is Kafkaesque because of Kafka’s description and analysis.

It is only Kafka who can take a single story, one simple narration of facts about something as simple as a man waiting outside a door being denied entry by a gatekeeper, and bring out multiple different competing and wonderful interpretations, each putting forth its argument convincingly.

A simple essay about searching in vain for lawyers in a court. Here, in their natural habitat, more than anywhere, you would expect to find them. And yet, it is precisely here where you should not find them, because it is in the court, one expects, where justice will be done, so perhaps they are needed least of all here.

It is only Kafka who can salvage something from the harshest of judgments, and who can make the most lavish praise seem a scathing rebuke.

A son, whose father tells him he is the last person he would trust himself to, can gratefully request him to ‘at least let me be the last’.

Even as Kafka’s characters overthink and over-analyze every little facet of their existence, bringing forth a barrage of speculations, they remain aware of the utter indifference of the world they inhabit.

You can’t rely on anyone else as you seek to untangle yourself from the labyrinth.

You can’t expect people to understand you, let alone believe you. It’s not that they wouldn’t believe you; they simply wouldn’t be interested enough to get as far as belief.

‘If you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being’

Franz Kafka

It’s perhaps surprising, and a little ironic, that a person who crafts the most convoluted sentences and complicated essays would say this.

But maybe this is also because the world appears so complex; if it’s impossible to untangle all these knots, perhaps the best strategy is simply to solve what’s right in front of you, only what’s absolutely essential for existence.

An Alien World

You can read Kafka again and again and find a different way of looking at things, and you can also read some of his works several times and fail to understand anything.

Take the following essay, The Next Village, which you’re free to interpret any way you choose to, I won’t.

“My grandfather used to say: “Life is astoundingly short”. To me, looking back over it, life seems so foreshortened that I scarcely understand, for instance, how a young man can decide to ride over to the next village without being afraid that – not to mention accidents – even the span of a normal happy life may fall far short of the time needed for such a journey.”

Franz Kafka, The Next Village (Translation Willa and Edwin Muir)

It takes a special mind to conceive such a thought; something original, something not an imitation of what you’ve read.

Maybe that’s why you can’t define Kafkaesque so easily, because you can draw out different meanings every time you read.

Perhaps that’s because Kafkaesque is about a world where the rules are hidden from you, a world you think you know well but which with every moment you find yourself knowing less and less about and becoming more and more a stranger to; all these years, it seems this world was something completely different from what you had thought it.

The rules themselves are absolute and dominating, imposed on you without your consent and knowledge, rules that seem to apply to no one else but you, rules that encompass your entire life yet make no sense to you, rules that you cannot live up to even if you chose to.

Moreover, you find yourself a stranger not just to these rules but also to those around you, who seem to know the rules well, and you can never get close to anyone for too long because you invariably discover they were always part of this world that is to you completely strange.

Optimistic Pessimism

‘In the struggle between yourself and the world, back the world’

Franz Kafka

This is in some ways quintessential Kafka, the feeling that pervades throughout his words and that the word ‘Kafkaesque’ brings to mind.

And yet, there’s more to it than that.

Kafka’s writings simultaneously and paradoxically straddle two opposing extremes.

While clearly and deeply laced with gloom, there is lurking an indomitable optimism, not a weak shadow but a powerful under-current that never fades entirely.

Which is why you still go on.

‘So if you find nothing in the corridors open the doors, and if you find nothing behind these doors there are more floors, and if you find nothing up there, don’t worry, just leap up another flight of stairs. As long as you don’t stop climbing, the stairs won’t end, under your climbing feet they will go on growing upwards’

Franz Kafka

Kafkaesque is not nihilism or simple pessimism. His characters don’t abandon themselves to fate; there are things to strive toward.

‘I am a cage in search of a bird’

Franz Kafka

There’s a beautiful essay by Kafka, The Imperial Message about a message from a dead man that I think illustrates this paradox.

‘I can love only what I can place so high above me that I cannot reach it.’

Franz Kafka

With typical tortuous Kafkaesque logic, you never stop because there is something above you that you want.

And if ever you were to reach it, which you never will, nothing would have been achieved because you could no longer want it.

The very act of reaching it would forever tarnish it.

Yet you sit at your window and dream of it.

(This brilliant deconstruction of Kafka’s letter to his father will help anyone who’s read him understand what underpins his stories)