What does it mean to be Kafkaesque? by Ellie Sheeran

What does it mean to be Kafkaesque?

Franz Kafka’s The Trial, written in 1925, begins with:  “Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K...He knew he had done nothing wrong…” One morning, the protagonist K is arrested suddenly for reasons he does not know, and against his will, he is seized. Throughout the novel, K is forced through a bizarre process without any explanation regarding either the circumstances of his arrest or the nature of the judicial proceedings in which he is unwillingly participating. 

This kind of convoluted process was so prominent in Kafka’s writing that it has earned itself a label: Kafkaesque. The term has been integrated into our vernacular as an adjective describing unnecessarily lengthy and frustrating proceedings- for example, in the case of Josef K, attempting to obliviously navigate networks of labyrinthine bureaucracy. However, I think that we have begun to fall short of recognizing the real depth of Kafka’s ideas in our use of the word. By using it to describe, say, waiting in a long line to fill out arbitrary paperwork, do we truly define the word? I think not, quite honestly. But in that case, what does make something Kafkaesque? 

 Franz Kafka’s works, written between 1913 and 1957, often draw bits and pieces from his everyday life, where he worked as an insurance clerk in Prague. Many of his stories were built on the foundation he experienced in his day-to-day life, albeit with a little more flair...I doubt he woke up one day as an insect(But who knows?). Amalgamating both realistic and fantastic elements into his stories, he typically features isolated protagonists facing surrealistic quandaries and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers- such is the case of Josef K. His characters are often office workers like himself that find themselves shambling through a web of obstacles in order to achieve a goal, but realize in the end that the ordeal was so disorienting that success becomes negligible. 

For example, in his short story Poseidon, Kafka illustrates the Ancient Greek god of the ocean as a weary executive absolutely swamped by paperwork. So swamped, in fact, that he has never had the time to explore his own watery kingdom! On the surface, Kafka pokes fun at the incessant and impossible demands of the workplace, insinuating not even a god can handle it all sufficiently. However, the deeper irony is that the only reason Poseidon is so busy is because he refuses to delegate any of the labor to a subordinate; he deems them unworthy of the task. In the end, Kafka’s Poseidon is imprisoned by his own ego, demonstrating an underlying self-perpetuating system.

The circular reasoning of Poseidon and Kafka’s other characters is what makes a scenario Kafkaesque. Being Kafkaesque not only lies in the absurdity of modern bureaucracy but the irony of the protagonist’s reaction to that absurdity- a recurring theme emblematic of Kafka’s literature. Kafka’s philosophy acts as both modern mythology describing the modern industrial age and an exploration between systems of arbitrary power and the individuals wound up in them. In Kafka’s short story The Metamorphosis, for example, the protagonist Gregor Samsa awakens as a horrifying, massive insect; however, his sole concern is to get to his office on time. Even in The Trial, which on the surface seems to directly discuss bureaucracy, the ambiguous laws and vague procedures address something far more sinister: the awful momentum of the legal system proves unstoppable. This is a system that doesn’t serve justice but exists solely to perpetuate itself. 

So on one side, it’s easy to spot and diagnose the Kafkaesque in our modern world. We rely heavily on increasingly elaborate institutions and administrations that have real consequences on every aspect of our lives, dictated by people we can’t see and rules we don’t know. On the other hand, however, Kafka reflects those systems back at his readers and suggests that by turning our attention to the bizarre and absurd, we can live in a world that we create- one that we have the power to change. 

“Man cannot live without a permanent trust in something indestructible within himself, though both that indestructible something and his own trust in it may remain permanently concealed from him.” -Franz Kafka