In this blog post, we’ll explore the characteristics of the Kafkaesque world through some of his key works.

 

The search for a world beyond rationality

Kafka was born in Prague in 1883 to a Jewish-German family. At the time of his birth, Prague was the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia (today’s Czech Republic) within the Austro-Hungarian Dual Empire and one of the major cities in the empire. However, after the defeat of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in World War I (1918), the Kingdom of Bohemia became history, and Prague became the capital of the newly founded Czechoslovak Republic.
Prague produced many prominent German-language writers. Perhaps the most famous of Kafka’s contemporaries from Prague was Rainer Maria Rilke (born in Prague in 1875). By the time Kafka first attempted to publish his work in the early 1910s, Rilke had long since left Prague and was gaining an international reputation as a poet. Whereas Rilke had left Prague early on and traveled to major European cities, interacting with prominent artists and writers of his time and relying on numerous patrons, Kafka led a very different life. He was introverted, lived in near isolation, rarely left Prague, earned his living working for the Workers’ Compensation Insurance Bureau until he was forced to retire due to illness, and was only able to write at night after his shift ended. Kafka was also very hesitant to publish his work and make himself known, so his worldwide fame came only posthumously. As is well known, a crucial role in this process was played by his friend Max Brot, who published Kafka’s manuscripts without burning them, despite his wishes.
Nevertheless, Kafka shares with Rilke the reputation of being a pioneer of modernist literature, and not just in his homeland. If Rilke had a broad and profound influence on 20th-century poetry, Kafka changed modern fiction so profoundly that it is impossible to conceive of a history of 20th-century fiction without him. Camus, Sartre, Beckett, Ionesco, Robespierre, Borges, and Marquez are just a few of the world’s greatest writers known to have been clearly influenced by Kafka, and as the names suggest, Kafka’s influence extends beyond fiction to theater and even philosophy. In addition to Camus and Sartre, Kafka has been discussed with great interest by many contemporary philosophers and thinkers, including Adorno, Benjamin, Blanchot, Derrida, and Deleuze.
Kafka challenged traditional notions of fiction, experimented with new ways of writing, and created new worlds that people didn’t think could exist. The fact that the adjective “kafkaesk” (German)/kafkaesque (English) exists to describe the absurd, fantastic, and grotesque is a testament to the individuality and originality of Kafka’s fictional worlds and how deeply they have influenced the modern consciousness.

 

The Judgment

Published in 1912, this novel contains a significant amount of autobiographical elements from the author’s own life. Kafka dedicates the work to “Miss Felice B.”, which of course refers to Kafka’s future fiancée Felice Bauer. The novel’s protagonist, Georg Bendemann, is about to marry Frieda Brandenfeld. Kafka used his future fiancée’s initials (F. B.) for his own fiancée in the novel. But that’s not all. Kafka famously had a difficult relationship with his father, and in the novel, the protagonist is sentenced to drown by his father and throws himself into the river after a conflict with him. In other words, the difficult relationship with his father is exaggerated in the novel to resemble real life.
What is very characteristic about this novel is that it is relatively easy to understand and reasonable. The first half of the novel is realistic (Georg visits his father’s room with a letter from a friend) and the second half is absurd and contradictory, reminiscent of an absurd nightmare. It’s a stark contrast to the unrealistic second half (where Georg is baffled by his father’s unexpected backlash and eventually throws himself into the river to fulfill his father’s sentence). Dominating the first half is the image of Georg Bendemann as a young businessman who has taken control of his life and is on his way to independence (marriage) and success. But underneath this seemingly smooth ride, there is an element of unrest. His independence and success means that his father and a childhood friend who emigrated to Russia are being pushed further and further out of his life. This fact plagues Georg’s mind, and it eventually leads him to write a marriage proposal letter to his friend, which he then carries to his father’s room. At that moment, his father fights back. Claiming that he is in solidarity with his friend and his deceased mother, who is falling apart in Russia, he condemns Georg and his fiancée in their name and sentences him to drowning. Georg helplessly succumbs to his father’s incoherent and at times incomprehensible accusations, and carries out his father’s punishment himself. In the first half of the novel, Georg worries about his father and friends, who are excluded from his success and falling apart, but in the second half, he is destroyed by them.
“The Judgment reveals Kafka’s underlying anxiety and fear about life, a pessimistic notion that he will never be able to settle into a happy and successful life as a normal citizen. The excessive fear and guilt of his father that the novel expresses, the anxiety that he would nevertheless be ruined if he left home, and the fear of marriage and independence, are all part of Kafka’s internal story. In this sense, Kafka’s dedication of the novel to Felice Bauer is significant. It seems to foreshadow his breakup with her.
However, it is also possible to interpret the novel on a more general level. If the first half of the novel represents the conscious world of the civically rational subject, the second half can be understood as an expression of the irrational unconscious world that it seeks to conceal and repress. What we see as the novel unfolds is the process by which the absurd, maniacal, and fantastic world of the unconscious emerges from the weak links of rational consciousness. If the discovery of a new realm of the irrational and impulsive unconscious, so vast as to make the world of rational consciousness seem like the tip of an iceberg, is one of the most important events that characterized 20th-century psychological history, then Kafka was the first writer to provide a perfect fictional representation of this new world.

 

The Metamorphosis

“If the downfall of the subject in The Judgment is the event that comes at the end of the novel, The Metamorphosis begins with the downfall of the subject. The protagonist, Gregor, is suddenly transformed into a giant insect while sleeping one morning. It’s unclear what causes Gregor’s downfall or what sin he’s paying for. Despite their many differences, there are basic similarities between The Metamorphosis and The Judgment. Gregor is not as successful a businessman as Georg, and is little more than a temple of the outer court, but he has nonetheless risen to a position of near-head of the family financially, and is on the verge of consolidating that position. If Georg’s marriage to Frieda Brandenfeld marks the culmination of his civic agency, Gregor’s plan to declare in front of the family on Christmas Eve that he will send his sister Grete to music school under his own power is also symbolic of his arrival at full head of the household status. However, both protagonists fall short of that point. Georg is killed by his father’s wall, and Gregor loses all his dreams by transforming into a worm.
“What is important in The Metamorphosis is the confrontation between the real world, which is dominated by civil rationality, and the irrational and surreal world. The novel begins with the sudden appearance of the irrational and surreal world (Gregor’s transformation), and the strange coexistence of the two worlds continues until Gregor’s death. Gregor’s family continues their real life after his transformation, trying to maintain as much of a façade of normalcy as possible by keeping the bug-turned-Gregor (the surreal world) strictly confined to his room. This same attitude is reflected in Gregor himself, who is preoccupied with worrying about his family’s financial situation and gives little thought to his existence as a bug. His consciousness also represses the surreal world. However, the repressed surreal world periodically erupts beyond the boundaries and threatens civilized everyday life. Gregor often stumbles out of his room in a half-dazed state, alarming his family. “The surreal world in which the protagonist inhabits as a bug in The Metamorphosis corresponds to the absurd, maniacal, and irrational world of the unconscious in The Judgment. Just as dark as Georg’s father’s room, Gregor’s room, an aberration from the real world, triggers anxiety and fear. However, Gregor’s room can also be thought of as an escape, an escape that allows us to transcend the inhuman, silly, and boring world of everyday reality, if only for a short time. For example, when Gregor feels the need to bring his sister into his room to play the violin in front of three disinterested boarders, he conceives of his surreal space as such an escape. In short, the irrational and surreal world of Gregor Zaman is both a source of anxiety and fear that threatens the civil and real world, and a possibility of redemption that can transcend the shackles of this world.

 

In the Penal Colony

The opposition between the rational and irrational worlds also plays an important role in the medium-length novel In the Penal Colony. The novel tells the story of the execution of a prisoner’s sentence in an asylum. There is a tradition of bizarre and brutal executions in the penal colony. Without the opportunity to defend himself, and without knowing what punishment has been handed down to him, the prisoner is forced to climb into an elaborate execution machine. The machine is designed to stamp the prisoner to death after long hours of horrific torture with a needle that carves the guilty into his back. The Exile’s brutal trial and sentencing practices are threatened by the arrival of a new commander, and an officer who claims to be the last guardian of the tradition tries to convince Traveler to defy him. The traveler, however, speaks out against the barbaric custom with the firmness of a rational, modern European. This causes the officer to realize that his time is up, so he stops the execution of the prisoner’s sentence and climbs aboard the execution machine himself to meet a horrific end. The traveler boards a ship and leaves the nightmarish exile.
In reading this novel, we can easily set up an opposition between the traveler’s rational, enlightened, and humanistic consciousness and the officer’s fanatical, deluded, and inhuman consciousness. But can we interpret the plot of the novel, in which the traveler refuses to cooperate with the officer based on his rational and humanistic spirit, and the officer commits suicide as a triumph of enlightenment over barbarism? “Can we equate In the Penal Colony with Goethe’s humanistic and enlightened drama (Iphigenia of Tauris), the story of Iphigenia’s defiance of King Thoth’s order to kill the Gentiles? Probably not, because in Kafka’s novel the cessation of barbaric customs is only very ambiguously described. This ambiguity can be seen in the following points.
First, the death of the officers is realized in the most barbaric form of execution. Paradoxically, the execution machine executes the officer who loved and cared for him the most. It is no coincidence that the officer’s self-execution soon leads to the machine’s own collapse.
Second, under the table of the teahouse that the traveler visits with the prisoner and the soldier after the officer’s death is the tombstone of the previous commander (he is the officer’s idol and the inventor of the execution machine), whose tombstone is inscribed with a prophecy of his return. When the other patrons of the teahouse laugh at the absurd anachronistic claims on the tombstone, the traveler feels distanced from them. This suggests that irrationality and barbarism cannot simply disappear or become a thing of the past with the advent of rationality and enlightenment. The irrational world can always return. Modern rationality seems to eliminate irrationality and gain control of the world, but irrationality is only suppressed, never eliminated.
Third, there is the ambiguity of the execution machine itself. The machine tortures the prisoner with needles, but its action is more than just inflicting physical pain on the prisoner. The machine carves the prisoner’s name into his back with a needle, creating a consciousness of guilt in the prisoner. Only when the prisoner reads his name on his back does he know what he is guilty of. The execution machine pronounces judgment through execution. Sin does not call for execution, but execution produces sin. In this bizarre reversal, we find a world of inscrutable irrationality that cannot be understood simply in the context of barbarism and cruelty. It connects to the world of absurdity in Kafka’s unfinished novel The Trial.

 

A Country Doctor

One of Kafka”s shorter novels, A Country Doctor is considered one of his most esoteric and most fantastic works. In this novel, the real and the surreal, the mundane and the bizarre, the rational and the irrational, the sane and the mad are intertwined in an even more confusing way than in the works we’ve discussed so far.
The country doctor is in a “great perplexity” from the beginning of the novel. He has to travel far, but bad weather and the death of his horse are blocking his path. Up until this point, however, we can see the character of a subject who tries to rationally solve the practical difficulties he faces. He sends his maid to try to borrow a horse to pull the carriage. But no one will lend him a horse. In his distraught state, he kicks open the door of the pigsty and out of the pigsty comes a strange coachman and two horses, and from this point on at least, a surreal and absurd dream world opens up, and the country doctor is helplessly swept along by the arbitrary flow of this world. In the face of this world, all of the country doctor’s rational calculations are thwarted because the essential conditions for rational subjectivity to function-the continuity, stability, and predictability of the world-have disappeared. Like a man who has lost the solid ground beneath his feet, the country doctor flounders aimlessly in the capricious currents of a strange world. The great bewilderment he feels in the midst of it is similar to the anxiety that an absurd nightmare can cause us.
What kind of dream world is the country doctor immersed in? It is a dizzying mix of violent sexuality and death impulses, gaping wounds, magical words, and ancient sacrificial rituals, in which the doctor’s professional medical knowledge and skills as a modern, civic subject are rendered useless. The protagonist, who is tightly wrapped in a fur coat and carrying a wangjin bag at the beginning of the novel, is naked at the end, an eternal wanderer on the back of an uncontrollable horse. Now he has no home to return to; he laments that he was fooled by the sound of the night bell and followed it out, and that everything has become irreversible.
Clearly, the country doctor is feeling negative and distant from the surreal world that has left him powerless. However, many passages in the novel suggest that this world itself is the product of the country doctor’s own unconscious fantasies, and that the characters he antagonizes or distances himself from are his alter ego. The animalistic coachman who terrorizes his maid Rosa stands in stark contrast to the doctor, who has lived with her for years and has never shown any interest in her, but this extreme contrast is what makes the two characters so compatible. The deep connection between the two characters is strongly implied by the fact that the doctor-narrator refers to the maid with the neuter pronoun es (it), and only when her name first comes out of the strange coachman’s mouth does he begin to use the feminine pronoun sie (she) with her name. In a similar sense, the old doctor who cures the sick and the boy who longs for death with surrealistic scars are also paired with each other. The boy carries a surrealistic pink (Rosa) scar on his back, which connects the doctor’s erotic longing for Rosa with the boy’s Thanatos impulse. It can be said, then, that the irrational, surreal, and dreamlike world depicted in “A Country Doctor” expresses not only the irrational anxieties and fears that the rational subject tries to suppress and overcome, but also the instinctive impulses hidden behind the subject, and even the subject’s desire for self-dissolution. The ambivalence between the irrational and the surreal world that we have identified in The Metamorphosis is even more pronounced here.

 

Before the Law

Kafka included this short story in his short story collection A Country Doctor and inserted it into his unfinished full-length novel The Trial. There are only two characters in the story. A man from the country and a law-abiding gatekeeper. The man from the countryside spends his life trying to gain entry into the law. But the gatekeeper repeatedly refuses to let him in, telling him that he can enter later, but not now. When the man is about to die, the gatekeeper reveals that the gate is only for men. With the man’s death, the gatekeeper is relieved of his duties and the gate is closed.
The gatekeeper, guarding the law and its entrance, poses an unsolvable riddle. Why did the gatekeeper not allow the man to enter until the end? Why did he not send him away outright, but tempt him with the promise that he could enter later? If the gatekeeper was not going to let the man in until the end, and if, as he said, the gate was set aside for the man and no one else was going to enter, why did he not close the gate from the beginning? Why did he keep the gate open all these years, unable to leave for the man and unwilling to take the trouble to prevent his entry? Why did the gatekeeper adopt such a contradictory attitude, neither definitively rejecting the man nor definitively accepting him, rejecting him while accepting him, or accepting him while rejecting him? Didn’t this contradictory attitude ultimately waste the man’s life as well as the gatekeeper’s own? For what purpose did the gatekeeper choose to spend all those years, without rest, toiling over the man and his endless petitions?
Equally enigmatic is the man from the countryside. The man appears before the law without end, asking for admission: what was the world he came from, what brought him to the law, what did he intend to do once inside, why did he wait his whole life to question the absurdity of the gatekeeper’s attitude, and why did he wait his whole life to obey the gatekeeper’s words rather than question the gatekeeper’s absurdity, and the narrator of the novel offers no explanation for any of these questions.
The absurdity of the man from the countryside and the doorkeeper shows that Kafka sees the human existential situation beyond the principle of rationality. The principle of rationality understands human behavior and life in the framework of rationality, and seeks to find the direction and meaning of human behavior and life in reaching some set goal. However, the limitation of the principle of rationality and rationality is that it does not know the answer to the life beyond the goal after the goal is achieved. A life that has achieved its goal, a life that has achieved its meaning, is paradoxically no longer meaningful. This is why fairy tales, in which the prince and princess rush toward the goal of marriage, always say, “And they lived happily ever after,” after the marriage is consummated. There is nothing to talk about after marriage. Life after goals is meaningless. The paradox is that the meaning of life is dependent on goals, but as soon as they are achieved, they cease to be meaningful, so ultimately it is the unattainable goals that make life meaningful. But if something is completely unattainable, it can’t be a goal at all, so humans need contradictory goals that are both attainable and unattainable. The gatekeeper provides the man from the countryside with just such a contradictory goal by neither completely closing the door to the law nor allowing him to enter. The man breathes his last in the belief that he has dedicated his life to the pursuit of the law. But isn’t a life that ends without achieving its goal also a life in vain? Even if the man saw some meaning in his life, wasn’t it only a virtuality of meaning? Or did the man realize that the fiction of meaning was enough to keep him going, that he couldn’t hope for more from life?

 

A Hunger Artist

In Kafka’s novels, the motif of circus performers and acrobats often appears. These works are often interpreted as an exploration of the artist’s form of existence. “In The Report from the Academy, Red Peter, a monkey captured from the Golden Coast, adapts to the human world and becomes an actor in a vaudeville theater. As he struggles to escape his cage, Red Peter succeeds in imitating humans and almost becomes one himself. However, in Kafka’s later work, A Hunger Artist, things go in the opposite direction. The performance takes place while the fasting artist is locked in an iron cage. As the popularity of the practice declines, the fasting artist is eventually left in a cage and reduced to the status of an animal, or worse.
The practice was actually quite popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the United States and Europe, but after several fraudulent fasting attempts were uncovered, the practice was discredited and gradually fell out of favor. Kafka’s narrator’s description of fasting in this novel is at least partially based on historical fact. So why was Kafka interested in fasting and wrote a kind of artist’s novel about it?
What is art? Art is recognized as art when an artist actively accomplishes something that ordinary people cannot do and presents the results to the world. In the case of fasting, not doing something that most people do becomes the content of the art. This has been the source of many suspicions and scandals surrounding the authenticity of fasting in the history of actual fasting performances. It’s not a simple thing to show what you’re not doing. Fasting could only be proven through constant surveillance.
This is also an important issue in Kafka’s novel. The key to performing fasting is how to show what the artist is not doing. Unless everyone can observe the performer 24 hours a day, it’s impossible to fully demonstrate fasting. For this reason, fasting performers focus their performances solely on creating the illusion of fasting. The observers are just a means to create that illusion. The 40-day fasting period is also based on the level of interest in the fiction. It doesn’t matter how long the fasters can actually go without eating. The fasters are forced to break their fast in order to create a meaningful fiction. The fasters’ real skills and accomplishments remain something that no one but the fasters themselves can verify, due to the negative nature of fasting, which is both involuntary and invisible.
Paradoxically, it was only after the popularity of fasting waned, after the demand for the fiction of fasting disappeared, that the fasters were able to truly pursue their art without interference from anyone. But art that no one cares about, that no one knows about, is no longer art, because being exhibited and recognized by people is the minimum requirement for art.
The monk is completely isolated in a world of art that only he can see, recognize, and evaluate. As a result of this isolation, he is eventually pushed outside of the human world and starves to death in his own closed space, like Gregor Zaza. The fasting man’s last words, that he fasted because he could not find anything palatable, also strongly reminds us of Gregor Zamza, who died without eating anything because he had no appetite. The fasting man’s will contains an ideology of beauty that is an extreme negation of the real world. If the artist strictly adheres to this ideology of beauty, he will be completely forgotten and disappear from the world. But he can only be an artist if he is recognized by the world. When Kafka asked Max Brot to burn his jugos, he was perhaps feeling the dilemma of modern art’s pursuit of the negation of the real world at its most acute. Did he feel that he had to disappear as it were? A Hunger Artist, written in 1922, when he was already deeply ill, can be read in this sense as Kafka’s literary testament.