Anyone who has suffered through a confusing, hellishly bizarre, and seeming endless nightmare will already have a sort of introduction to the writings of Franz Kafka. He occupies a literary niche comprised of himself, alone. Should anyone write anything at all similar, their work will be invariably be described as Kafkaesque; even so, their work will be only a pale glimmer of the real thing.
Some, no doubt, will say that’s just as well. Kafka’s stories aren’t the sort anyone would knowing choose for leisure reading. Nonetheless, his stories are worth reading.
Hallucinatory strangeness is placed side-by-side with mundane banalities and horrific realities. It’s a mixture that compels attention even when healthy impulse might incline you to close the book and find something more pleasant to read.
On the other hand, you may find yourself inexplicably drawn back to his stories. Kafka’s writings force thought into uncomfortable new considerations. That’s what turns his “scribblings” (Kafka’s own description), into Art.
Albert Camus said, “The whole of Kafka’s art consists in compelling readers to re-read him”. The fact that so many of his stories were left unfinished adds to his mystic.
“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect”. That’s the first sentence of The Metamorphosis, Kafka’s longest and best-known short story.
Gregor was alarmed, but he didn’t scream. Curiously,
His first concern was the clock. It was half passed six. He would miss the seven o’clock train. His tardiness might cause him to be given notice. He was the sole provider for his parents and sister.
How would they get on if he were fired? Gregor continues this line of worried musing until he hears his mother tapping
at the door. she says gently, “Gregor, “It’s a quarter to seven. Hadn’t you a train to catch”?
And so the story unfolds.
Horror competes for attention against the everyday consuming worries of everyday life. There are things that must be tended to - even if Gregor has turned into an insect. This conflict of incomprehensible events mixed with, plodding, even boring quotidian concerns is typical of Kafka’s writings.
Kafka begged the first publisher of Metamorphosis to keep the illustrator from picturing the insect in any way - not even from a distance.
He feared a specific image of the insect would distract readers from the sympathetic pathos he intended with his metaphor.
His request has been ignored many times over.
Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis might just as well have been to an incurable-invalid rather than to a human-sized insect. It would be all the same to Kafka. His story was not about a science fiction insect. It was about the peculiar ways’ humans react to incomprehensible interventions in their otherwise commonplace lives.
It’s a theme the runs through all his work, even when the life intervened isn’t human.
In Kafka’s story, The Burrow, the protagonist is an unnamed, brooding, burrowing creature of unidentified species. This burrower spends all of the next thirty-five pages ruminating on the splendidness of his much beloved burrow, along with the problems and threats that must always be considered in its maintenance.
He’s kept busy repairing the many tunnels and rooms that make up the complex. He frets about remodeling projects and possible additions. “Should it be this, or that”? He asks himself this sort of question about everything he’s about - or almost about - or could have been about.
In between these ponderings, he reflects appreciatively on the comforts of the snug tunnels and warm chambers of his labyrinth. All is well . . . unless . . . or if . . . “Oh dear. What’s that sound”? Its sort of a scratching sound. He can’t tell from exactly where.
He wonders if the scratching could be from a neighboring burrower like himself, an intolerably noisy neighbor endlessly scratch, scratch, scratching. Worse yet, the scratcher might be
a predator. He starts to think of the scratcher as, the Beast.
This fussy agonizing continues until the last page and final non-conclusion.
Kafka never finished the story. He died of tuberculosis two months later. He suffered from the disease for some extended time before it killed him. Friends said he referred to his disease as, the Beast.
There is no monster in The Burrow, only the expectation of one. Most of Kafka’s tales might be described as fantastic realism, a surrealistic mix of improbable and commonplace salted with angst and confusion. I think there is also a tender sympathy for the creatures and humans in his stories. It’s almost an existential point-of-view. Things happen. We don’t know why, even if we did, there’s nothing to be done about it. Oh well, perhaps we can at least be kind to each other – if possible.
Sometimes it’s not possible.
The distinguished visiting explorer that narrates In the Penal Colony has no authority to do anything but look, ask questions, and take notes. The Commandant of the Penal Colony has invited him to witness the execution of
a soldier condemned to death for disobedience, as well as insulting behavior to a superior. The soldier’s crime was failure to salute his Captain.
The explorer has no interest in watching an execution, particularly one so unjust.
He attends anyway, but only as a courtesy to his host, the Commandant.
The instrument of execution is a bizarre two-story high mechanical killer of many moving parts. The officer
in charge of the machine is zealously proud of his role in maintaining and operating this complicated machine.
He sadly confides to the explorer the increasing difficulty of getting proper replacement parts shipped to the island. The officer is infatuated with the engineering beauty of the machine. He is indifferent to the fate of the condemned man.
The explorer asks how the machine performs the execution.
“Ah”! exclaims the officer, “There is the exquisite perfection of it all”. The condemned man is laid face down, bound hand and foot, and a rack of tattooing needles is positioned inches from his back. This rack, called the Harrow, is lowered to the point of tickling contact. Then slowly, incrementally, the needles push deeper, tattooing the sentence of the condemned man upon his back. The process doesn’t stop until the body has been completely pierced.
The officer dryly adds, “The prisoner is usually dead within six hours”.
The explorer is appalled. He probably can’t stop this execution but does what he can.
He petitions the Commandant and the administrative staff to get this monstrous machine decommissioned. He eventually succeeds. The condemned man is saved. The officer falls apart, devastated, his beloved machine will be taken from him.
He escapes his wallowing anguish by suicide. He arranges his machine one last time to tattoo the words, BE JUST all the way through his quivering body until he is dead.
The central character in The Trial, Josef K. is criminally charged for an unstated crime that will result in trial and probable conviction - of some unknown sort - at some unknown time, with the possibility of imprisonment - perhaps even execution.
Josef K. spends the entire novel trying to find out what he did wrong and how he can fix it. The reader slogs along with him as he is shuttled from agency to agency and bureaucrat to bureaucrat. He is endlessly frustrated. He hires a lawyer who seems equally mystified, although the lawyer does have a huge stack of complicated forms that he’s pretty sure will bring some answers.
They don’t. Eventually, after 160-some pages of suffocating meandering confusion, Josef K. is taken to a courtroom and convicted. He still doesn’t know what he did wrong.
Two tall Wardens of the Court, in long overcoats, take him by each arm. They walk three-abreast down a long featureless road, miles from town. The Wardens seem like pleasant fellows. They chat amiably with Josef K. as the trio walks along. Finally, they stop, saying, “Here we are”. Each pulls a butcher knife from his overcoat. Then they stab Josef K. until he is dead.
Except for the stabbing, this story will likely have a familiar ring to all of us who have suffered through any dealing with government process, or any other sort of bureaucracy. It’s a maddening ordeal that gets worse with each new generation’s improvements.
Kafka used a tangled maze of bureaucratic idiocy
as the monstrosity in The Trial, just as he used Gregor Samsa’s transition into an insect as the monstrosity in The Metamorphosis.
In The Burrow, the monster never shows up but still disturbs normality.
The monster of In the Penal Colony is not the Machine, but the insane imagination of those who conceived it.
Any monstrosity that disturbs normality would do as well as any other.
Kafka didn’t write about monstrosities.
He wrote about disruptions in the matrix of normality.
Franz Kafka (1883=1924)
Before he died
of pneumonia he requested that all
of his writings be destroyed.
His request was
ignored.
I’m grateful.