It is difficult to imagine that there was a moment without the word “Kafkaesque”. However, the term would not have mean anything at all for anyone alive at the same time as Franz Kafka – Including, in all probability, Kafka himself. Born in Prague in 1883, he grew up under a severe father, demanding and perpetually disappointed, then made his way to university and entered the labor market. He ended up at the Institute of Accidental Workers' Insurance, where he was “subject to long hours, unpaid overtime, massive quantities of paperwork and absurd bureaucratic systems”, explains the narrator of THE Continuation of wonder video above. But it was during this same period that he wrote THE Trial,, The castleAnd Amerika.
Of course, Kafka did not publish these books ultimately acclaimed during his lifetime. After his death, this task would fall to Max BrodThe writer's only true friend, and that involved raping the author's explicitly declared wishes. On his deathbed, Kafka “asked Max Brod to burn all her unpublished manuscripts”; Instead, Brod “spent the following year working to organize and publish his notes and manuscripts”. Now that he has left for more than a century, Kafka's reputation as one of the greatest literary figures in the 20th century is more than safe, and it would indeed be a dedicated counter-contract to assert that Brod has done hard not to throw his papers on the fire of joy.
Perhaps Kafka's reputation would have found a way to develop in one way or another, to react as its writing made to psychological discomfort that we all felt in one degree or another, in one frame or another: to make our taxes, wait in the security lines of the airport, call technical support. On such occasions, we reach the term “kafkaesque”, which “tends to refer to the bureaucratic nature of capitalist, judicial and government systems, the kind of complex and unclear processes in which no one has a complete understanding of what is going on, and the system really cares.” Kafka's typical protagonists are “confronted with sudden and absurd circumstances. There is no explanation, and in the end, there is no real chance to overcome them. ”
These characters are “overwhelmed by the arbitrary obstacles and foolish with which they are confronted, in part because they cannot understand or control what is happening”. They feel “the inflexible desire for conquering on the existential problems of anxiety, guilt, absurdity and suffering, associated with an inability to really understand or control the source of problems and effectively overcome them”. However, “even in the face of absurd and desperate circumstances, Kafka's characters do not give up. At least at the beginning, they continue and fight against their situations, trying to reason, understand or make their way out of the fool, but in the end, it is ultimately in vain.” For Kafka, all of this was part of another day in modernity. Here, in the 21st century, it seems that we had to start looking for an even more powerful adjective.
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Based in Seoul, Colin MArshall Written and broadcastTS on cities, language and culture. His projects include the substack newsletter Books on cities And the book The stateless city: a walk through Los Angeles from the 21st century. Follow it on the social network formerly known as Twitter in @ColinmArshall.
