"Someone must have been telling
lies about Josef K. He knew he had done nothing wrong,
but one morning, he was arrested." Thus begins "The Trial," one of author Franz Kafka's
most well-known novels. K, the protagonist,
is arrested out of nowhere and made to go through
a bewildering process where neither the cause of his arrest, nor the nature
of the judicial proceedings are made clear to him. This sort of scenario is considered
so characteristic of Kafka's work that scholars came up
with a new word for it. Kafkaesque has entered the vernacular
to describe unnecessarily complicated and frustrating experiences, like being forced to navigate labyrinths
of bureaucracy. But does standing in a long line
to fill out confusing paperwork really capture the richness
of Kafka's vision? Beyond the word's casual use,
what makes something Kafkaesque? Franz Kafka's stories do indeed deal
with many mundane and absurd aspects of modern bureaucracy, drawn in part from his experience
of working as an insurance clerk in early 20th century Prague. Many of his protagonists
are office workers compelled to struggle through
a web of obstacles in order to achieve their goals, and often the whole ordeal turns out
to be so disorienting and illogical that success becomes pointless
in the first place. For example, in the short story,
"Poseidon," the Ancient Greek god is an executive
so swamped with paperwork that he's never had time to explore
his underwater domain. The joke here is that not even
a god can handle the amount of paperwork demanded by the modern workplace. But the reason why is telling. He's unwilling to delegate any of the work because he deems everyone else
unworthy of the task. Kafka's Poseidon is a prisoner
of his own ego. This simple story contains
all of the elements that make for a truly Kafkaesque scenario. It's 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. His tragicomic stories act as a form of
mythology for the modern industrial age, employing dream logic to explore
the relationships between systems of arbitrary power
and the individuals caught up in them. Take, for example, Kafka's
most famous story, "Metamorphosis." When Gregor Samsa awaken's one morning
to find himself transformed into a giant insect, his greatest worry
is that he gets to work on time. Of course, this proves impossible. It was not only the authoritarian realm
of the workplace that inspired Kafka. Some of his protagonists' struggles
come from within. The short story, "A Hunger Artist," describes a circus performer whose act
consists of extended fasts. He's upset that the circus master
limits these to 40 days, believing this prevents him from achieving
greatness in his art. But when his act loses popularity, he is left free
to starve himself to death. The twist comes when he lays dying
in anonymity, regretfully admitting that his art
has always been a fraud. He fasted not through strength of will, but simply because he never found
a food he liked. Even in "The Trial," which seems to focus
directly on bureaucracy, the vague laws and bewildering procedures
point to something far more sinister: the terrible momentum of the legal system
proves unstoppable, even by supposedly powerful officials. This is a system
that doesn't serve justice, but whose sole function
is to perpetuate itself. What political theorist Hannah Arendt, writing years after Kafka's death, would call "tyranny without a tyrant." Yet accompanying
the bleakness of Kafka's stories, there's a great deal of humor rooted in the nonsensical logic
of the situations described. So on the one hand, it's easy to recognize
the Kafkaesque in today's world. We rely on increasingly convoluted systems
of administration that have real consequences on
every aspect of our lives. And we find our every word judged
by people we can't see according to rules we don't know. 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 have the power
to change for the better.
Great video until the last line.
Given all this structural and societal oppression through giant bureaucratic systems how exactly can we simply change it for the better? Surely it means precisely the opposite, that we are doomed to let these systems perpetuate under capitalism?
That was great, thanks for posting.
It made me realize that despite knowing who Kafka is, I've never actually read any of his work, but I'm definitely going to after watching this
Loved the artwork. There is so much to be gained from these old masters of writing. Always enjoying these videos.
I always loved David Foster Wallace's remarks on Kafka, Laughing with Kafka:
"One reason for my willingness to speak publicly on a subject for which I am sort of underqualified is that it affords me a chance to declaim for you a short story of Kafka's that I have given up teaching in literature classes and miss getting to read aloud. Its English title is "A Little Fable":
For me, a signal frustration in trying to read Kafka with college students is that it is next to impossible to get them to see that Kafka is funny... Nor to appreciate the way funniness is bound up with the extraordinary power of his stories. Because, of course, great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common. Both depend on what communication-theorists sometimes call "exformation," which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient. This is probably why the effect of both short stories and jokes often feels sudden and percussive, like the venting of a long-stuck valve. It's not for nothing that Kafka spoke of literature as "a hatchet with which we chop at the frozen seas inside us." Nor is it an accident that the technical achievement of great short stories is often called "compression" -- for both the pressure and the release are already inside the reader. What Kafka seems able to do better than just about anyone else is to orchestrate the pressure's increase in such a way that it becomes intolerable at the precise instant it is released.
The psychology of jokes helps account for part of the problem in teaching Kafka. We all know that there is no quicker way to empty a joke of its peculiar magic than to try to explain it -- to point out, for example, that Lou Costello is mistaking the proper name "Who" for the interrogative pronoun "who," etc. We all know the weird antipathy such explanations arouse in us, a feeling not so much of boredom as offense, like something has been blasphemed. This is a lot like the teacher's feeling at running a Kafka story through the gears of your standard undergrad-course literary analysis-plot to chart, symbols to decode, etc. Kafka, of course, would be in a unique position to appreciate the irony of submitting his short stories to this kind of high-efficiency critical machine, the literary equivalent of tearing the petals off and grinding them up and running the goo through a spectrometer to explain why a rose smells so pretty! Franz Kafka, after all, is the writer whose story "Poseidon" imagines a sea-god so overwhelmed with administrative paperwork that he never gets to sailor swim, and whose "In the Penal Colony" conceives description as punishment and torture as edification and the ultimate critic as a needled harrow whose coup de grftce is a spike through the forehead.
Another handicap, even for gifted students, is that -- unlike, say, Joyce's or Pound's -- the exformative associations Kafka's work creates are not intertextual or even historical. Kafka's evocations are, rather, unconscious and almost sub-archetypal, the little-kid stuff from which myths derive; this is why we tend to call even his weirdest stories nightmarish rather than surreal. Not to mention that the particular sort of funniness Kafka deploys is deeply alien to kids whose neural resonances are American. The fact is that Kafka's humor has almost none of the particular forms and codes of contemporary U.S. amusement. There's no recursive wordplay or verbal stunt-pilotry, little in the way of wisecracks or mordant lampoon. There is no body-function humor in Kafka, nor sexual entendre, nor stylized attempts to rebel by offending convention. No Pynchonian slapstick with banana peels or rapacious adenoids. No Rothish satyriasis or Barthish meta parody or arch Woody-Allen ish kvetching. There are none of the ba-bing ba-bang reversals of modern sitcoms; nor are there precocious children or profane grandparents or cynically insurgent coworkers. Perhaps most alien of all, Kafka's authority figures are never just hollow buffoons to be ridiculed, but are always absurd and scary and sad all at once, like "In the Penal Colony'''s Lieutenant.
My point is not that his wit is too subtle for U.S. students. In fact, the only halfway effective strategy I've come up with for exploring Kafka's funniness in class involves suggesting to students that much of his humor is actually sort of unsubtle, or rather anti-subtle. The claim is that Kafka's funniness depends on some kind of radical literalization of truths we tend to treat as metaphorical. I opine to them that some of our deepest and most profound collective intuitions seem to be expressible only as figures of speech, that that's why we call these figures of speech "expressions." With respect to The Metamorphosis, then, I might invite students to consider what is really being expressed when we refer to someone as "creepy" or "gross" or say that somebody was forced to "eat shit" in his job. Or to reread "In the Penal Colony" in light of expressions like "tonguelashing" or "She sure tore me a new asshole" or the gnomic "By a certain age, everybody has the face he deserves." Or to approach "A Hunger Artist" in terms of tropes like "starved for attention" or "love-starved" or the double entendre in the term "self-denial," or even as innocent a factoid as that the etymological root of "anorexia" happens to be the Greek word for longing.
The students usually end up engaged here, which is great, but the teacher still sort of writhes with guilt, because the comedy-as-literalization-of-metaphor tactic doesn't begin to countenance the deeper alchemy by which Kafka's comedy is always also tragedy, and this tragedy always also an immense and reverent joy. This usually leads to an excruciating hour during which I backpedal and hedge and warn students that, for all their wit and exformative voltage, Kafka's stories are not fundamentally jokes, and that the rather simple and lugubrious gallows humor which marks so many of Kafka's personal statements -- stuff like his "There is hope, but not for us" -- is not what his stories have got going on.
What Kafka's stories have, rather, is a grotesque and gorgeous and thoroughly modem complexity. Kafka's humor-not only not neurotic but anti-neurotic, heroically sane-is, finally, a religious humor, but religious in the manner of Kierkegaard and Rilke and the Psalms, a harrowing spirituality against which even Ms. O'Connor's bloody grace seems a little bit easy, the souls at stake pre-made.
And it is this, I think, that makes Kafka's wit inaccessible to children whom our culture has trained to see jokes as entertainment and entertainment as reassurance) It's not that students don't "get" Kafka's humor but that we've taught them to see humor as something you get -- the same way we've taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke -- that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. It's hard to put into words up at the blackboard, believe me. You can tell them that maybe it's good they don't "get" Kafka. You can ask them to imagine his art as a kind of door. To envision us readers coming up and pounding on this door, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it, we don't know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and pushing and kicking, etc. That, finally, the door opens ... and it opens outward: we've been inside what we wanted all along. Das ist komisch."
Interesting... But I have to disagree that we create our own worlds... There are too many things out there that deflect our paths... Like a pinball’s path only to be deflected like a bumper sending us off in another direction...