Kafka’s work explores the nature of human existence amidst absurdity and solitude. His symbols and metaphors offer a way of reading reality and the inner self.
Franz Kafka was born on July 3, 1883, the son of a Jewish merchant in Prague, where he was educated in German and received a doctorate in law from the Charles Ferdinand University in Prague. From 1908, he worked in the legal department of the Workers’ Compensation Insurance Corporation in Prague, writing at night. In 1917, he took a leave of absence due to pulmonary tuberculosis and traveled around the world. He returned to work in 1920, but his condition worsened and he died at the age of forty on June 3, 1924, in a sanatorium near Vienna. It was an outwardly normal life, but inwardly it was four decades filled with anguish.
He was born Jewish, but not Jewish and not Christian; German-speaking, but not German; born in Prague, but not Czech; he held a government job, but was not a pure official; and he was never a full-time writer. Neither citizen nor working class, Kafka was an outsider who belonged to neither world. His novels are all about the world and humanity as seen through the eyes of this stranger. We can see the struggle of how to belong to the world in his novels.
Kafka believed that to exist is not enough to ‘be there’, but that true existence must ‘gehören’. All of Kafka’s protagonists who pursued how to belong within the borders of the world have jobs. Kafka, who believed that he belonged to the world and social life through his job, did not live a literary life, but a civil service life that utilized his legal knowledge.
Belonging to a society is made possible through understanding and recognizing its laws and morals. However, a stranger like Kafka does not know these laws and morals. Laws and morals are self-evident commitments as long as you live in the world. But in the eyes of the stranger, they appear only as an incomprehensible system of rules. The stranger is thus forced to belong to a world whose laws and morals he does not understand, and is typified as a zone of loss of existence. The stranger begins to suspect that he is guilty of sin, and so he begins to search for it. As we see in “A Country Doctor,” the Jewish sense of original sin arises: “I came into this world with a beautiful wound, and that’s all I prepared for before I was born. This sense of original sin is not only found in “A Country Doctor” but also in “In the Penal Colony”. In his famous book Anatomy of Criticism, literary critic Northrup Fry writes that the officer’s statement in “In the Penal Colony” that “the sin is plain and unquestionable” captures the human sense of original sin. This overwhelming sense of guilt can also be seen in “The Judgment.”
Unlike many contemporary novelists, Kafka depicts a human figure who is bound and subjugated to a definite job. This is because work is the only form of existence for modern humans. All the characters in his works are described only in terms of their professional functions.
For example, the protagonist of “The Metamorphosis,” Gregor Zamzar, is an accomplished salesman and the economic pillar of his family. He wakes up one day to find himself transformed into a bug. He is a good son and a model citizen. Even after his transformation into a bug, he is troubled by his sense of duty and nostalgia for freedom, saying, “I don’t care about work as long as I have a family……”. His existence was for the sake of his family and for the sake of society, not for his own sake but for the sake of others. He has been corrupted from his original self to a human being bound by social institutions and customs. Having given up his own nature, Gregor was a model citizen of the world.
The laws, morals, and lifestyles of modern society do not tolerate the existence of his original nature. As Kafka’s other works repeatedly demonstrate, modern society, as an inevitable consequence of its economic apparatus, forces humans into a state of “self-alienation”: they become nothing more than cogs in the great machine of society, functionalized, abstracted, and dehumanized. Human beings are nothing more than a materialized function that sustains life in the form of a job.
For example, Gregor’s father, who goes back to work after his son’s transformation, never takes off his banker’s uniform, even at home, and sleeps on the couch in it. This unsightly body, which is better described as being trapped in a uniform rather than wearing a forbidding uniform, is the epitome of modern man’s self-alienation. He is not allowed to be human; he is not allowed to be anything other than a bank teller. Realizing the absurdity that a job is the only form of existence for a modern man, Gregor is turned into a bug and eventually destroyed.
It is only the professional that exists. Kafka does not seek an answer to the question of what human nature is. All they have to do is do what the machine of society tells them to do. The officer in “In the Penal Colony” is an example of a careerist. His job is to control the execution machine that carries out the death penalty. He fears the loss of this job and can’t imagine his existence without the machine. The officer’s attachment to his job makes him a madman without conscience or humanity. The attachment to the machine is more sad and sympathetic than abominable.
This attachment to a job is also seen in “A Hunger Artist”. A clown’s only talent is starvation. He waits for an audience while starving in a cage. His only goal is to amaze the audience by starving himself in record time. But the audience is gone, and he is now alone in a cage at the end of a circus animal pen, starving innocently with no one watching. People watch the animals, but they don’t care about the fasting clown. The clown continues to fast until he has no idea how long he’s been starving, and he becomes a martyr to the art of fasting. It’s one of Kafka’s masterpieces that proves that work is more important than life.
“A Hunger Artist” has a lot to say, especially when we look at our own lives. How many hunger clowns are there around us? Theatrical artists who stage plays with no audience at a loss and are driven by passion alone, poets who have more readers than they have writers who can’t live without another job, and the innocent scholars who are few in number but sometimes stand out. Will they be applauded or will they fade away and disintegrate like the hunger clown?
In Conversations with Kafka, Gustav Janoch describes Kafka’s appearance, hobbies, and literary attitude in detail. He first met Kafka in the office of the Workers’ Compensation Insurance Corporation in Prague. Kafka was described as having a lanky build, slicked-back black hair, a prominent nose, a strikingly narrow forehead, and strangely ashen green eyes with a bittersweet smile beneath them.
“The sunlight, the factory, the house, the windows across the street, all these distract me. Worst of all is the sunlight. The sunlight robs me of my attention. The light seems to come from the darkness of the mind. It is good that the light overwhelms mankind. Without those tormenting sleepless nights, I would never be able to write. In such moments, I perceive myself as a prisoner in a dark cell.”
Kafka confessed to the young Czech poet Janůk. In this lonely room, Kafka wrote as a kind of struggle for self-preservation.
Kafka was never satisfied with his civil service job. Unusually, in his spare time, Kafka learned to make furniture. The smell of planed wood, the sound of saws and hammers mesmerized him. That’s how he always spent his afternoons, and when night came, he dreaded it.
“There is nothing more beautiful than pure, clear, and universally beneficial craftsmanship. Aside from making furniture, I have also tried farming and gardening. These activities were far more beautiful and rewarding than forced labor in an office. People working in offices may appear admirable, but that is merely a facade. In reality, they are lonelier and unhappier than they seem. Intellectual labor alienates a person from human society. In contrast, craftsmanship brings a person back to humanity. It is regrettable that I can no longer work in a workshop or garden.”
Kafka longed for the freedom of physical labor. He once expressed envy for a wandering poet who had no job.
“He had no profession, but he did have a calling. He wandered from one friend’s house to another with his wife and children. A free man and a free poet. Whenever I was in his company, I always felt the pangs of conscience, realizing that office life was drowning my own existence.”
Kafka longed for a life of his own, but he had to be filial to his stern father: outwardly filial, but inwardly conscious that he was a stranger even in his own family. He was a solitary poet, both out and in, but always at home.
“I am a crow. Indeed, I am a Kavka (Kafka, a crow). A coal merchant in Deinhoff owns one. That Kavka is living better than I am. Of course, its wings have been clipped… but in my case, there is no need to clip my wings. My wings have already degenerated. For me, there is neither height nor distance. I simply flounder among humans, unsure of what to do. Humans gaze at me with suspicion. After all, I am a dangerous bird, a thief, a crow. Yet I have never had shiny black wings.”
When Kafka says this, he is likely talking about himself in “The Metamorphosis”. These are also the words of Gregor, who is viewed with fear, disgust, and suspicion by his family.
Kafka once said to a friend during his lifetime
“Yes, humanity is in despair. Amidst the ever-growing crowds, humans become increasingly lonelier with each passing moment.”
Kafka, a Jew born to be lonely, spent 40 years of his life struggling with solitude.
“Are you truly that lonely?” Janouch asked, to which he nodded.
“Like Kaspar Hauser?”
“Far more so than Kaspar Hauser. I am lonely-like Franz Kafka.”
Kafka is saying that his loneliness is unique to him, not something he copied from others.Kafka never loved a woman, except for a brief cohabitation with a woman named Dora Diamant shortly before his death. He believed that love always wounds, a wound that never heals, because love always appears with impurity. Even in his relationships, Kafka, like the protagonist of A Hunger Artist, seems to have been a hypochondriac, so the loneliness of his life was unrelieved.
Kafka is difficult. He’s a writer you can read a few lines and put down. His short stories are almost inscrutable. Where does this difficulty come from? A difficulty that draws the reader into a labyrinth of contemplation and leaves the reader with a sense of incomprehension and inadequacy.
Its difficulty stems from its unique symbolic language, dense satire, and seemingly pointless characterizations. However, it is clear that these symbols and satire have hidden meanings. In explaining his short story “The Judgment,” Kafka implicitly suggests that we can understand unique symbolic expressions that are far from universal.
To understand his symbolism, we need to have the author’s measurable proof of the events or characters, and there is none. This is what creates the gap between Kafka and the reader. In this respect, the translator has attempted a somewhat daring paraphrase. Kafka was such an extreme marginalizer that he tried to burn his manuscripts, but in this book, he shouldn’t be marginalized.
Kafka’s art is a mirror of his troubled soul. Fanciful and real events intermingle on the page, and the mixture of the fanciful and the real gives off a haze of darkness and a miasma of mystery. Horrific fantasies, enigmatic nightmares, and ghosts populate his works. The works are also an outlet for the artist’s own wishes. Even in this form, he has not learned to express his creative drive. His works, whether long, medium, or short, are colored by his own resistance and human resistance. His entire body of work is nothing more than a deconstruction and exposure of his internal chaos and bustle in form.
Kafka’s themes can be compared to those of French novelist Proust. They both have in common a rush into the abyss of the human soul. Whereas Proust analyzes the inner life of a human being with extreme details and delicate elements, Kafka plunges into the depths of the soul, symbolically depicting the secret faults of the human soul. This symbolic representation is as powerful as Proust’s lucid analysis, as it speaks to the abysses and absurdities of the human subconscious. Kafka describes his own experience of being angered by unknown forces through ordinary accidents. His fantasy world is not a daydream or a refuge.
The horror of Georg Bendemann (the protagonist of “The Judgment”), who confesses his non-existence to his father and is sentenced to death by his own flesh and blood, sends shivers down the spine of the reader. Kafka himself once confessed that the short story is a terrifying novel. In the same way, we can’t help but feel a shudder at Gregor’s anger at a single insect.
In the same way, the dense forest of life that Kafka’s protagonists are swept into gives us a chill. It is Kafka’s self-conscious fear of being abandoned and marginalized by humans and gods with their backs to eternity.
Kafka relied on symbols to give form to the objects of his longing. With the help of symbols, he tried to solve the predicament facing his creative activity and transplanted his inner experience in the form of fantasy and poetic images. Most of these images are vague and indistinct. They disappear on closer inspection. Their connection to behavior is sometimes ambiguous. As a result, the reader gets the impression of something unreal and strange. On the other hand, a clear poetic image recurs with many variations. These images suggest important situations in many of his works. The fasting clown in the cage, the officer in the death chamber of the exile, the beast in the lair, Gregor sitting in his cave-like room. They are all prisoners in some sense.
Kafka’s work remains in fragmentary, unfinished form. Most of them were interrupted in the middle, so there are no complete works. Only “The Metamorphosis,” “In the Penal Colony,” “The Judgment,” and “A Hunger Artist,” translated here, have closure. His props are ideas and magical images that are purely invented but depicted in a unique way. “A Country Doctor” is a prime example of this, and it most readily corresponds to the image of a perfectly harmonized work of art.
After reading “A Country Doctor,” you feel like you’re looking at a lush photograph. The images are precise. But it’s dreamlike. Kafka doesn’t forget realism even when he’s painting a dream. The reader is even more bewildered. Perhaps Kafka is a good photographer, but he does not present the developed photographs, but the original prints. No customer has the eye to recognize objects and human figures from the original. Perhaps only a skilled photographer himself can recognize a good or bad photograph before it is developed.
