Just what makes Kafka so Kafkaesque?
Kaf·ka·esque - [kahf-kuh-esk] - 1. of, pertaining to, characteristic of, or resembling the literary work of Franz Kafka: the Kafkaesque terror of the endless interrogations. 2. marked by a senseless, disorienting, often menacing complexity: Kafkaesque bureaucracies. [Origin: 1945–50 Kafka + -esque]Kafka connotes a sense of strangeness, there is a quality about his work that is uniquely difficult to appreciate- his worlds are confusing and seemingly disorderly- his characters and settings difficult to place. Kafka does not need to isolate a tenor and vehicle to convey an abstraction; he provides a setting of transition, of transformation where one thing does not exist merely to represent another- in turn, creating a text not quite ripe for a systematic, deconstructive interpretation. Yet Kafka's work, has been at the mercy of interpretation, subjected to readings that appreciate the implications and not the nature of the text.
It is for this reason that Kafka’s work is traditionally considered dire, hopeless, pessimistic and just plain depressing. It is also the reason why the first line of many introductions to his stories sounds something like “Franz Kafka’s fiction doesn’t make any sense” (Baker xv). The term “Kafkaesque” has even been coined to convey this sense of surreal disorientation, it has “transcended the literary realm to apply to real-life occurrences and situations that are incomprehensibly complex, bizarre, or illogical” (Freed 182).
When Kafka’s “A Country Doctor” is oriented in a Freudian milieu, it is merely a short story filled with sexual frustration, oedipal angst and psychosis- almost a simple dream transcription.
When The Metamorphosis is treated like one grand-scale nightmare, it’s a typical horror story, appealing to an instinctive fear of pain, disease and isolation
When The Trial is politicized to an extreme and its dreamlike quality is lumped into “style” and “tone” alone, it is reduced to simple face.
Kafka has become synonymous with alienation and absurdity because he has been read in the context of “interpretation” yet what Kafka describes (even advocates) is the capacity for transformation. By relating to the dream as an integral part of the self, not as a mechanism or byproduct, but an extension of the self that is valid in its own right, one can surpass the limitations (and alienation) of waking life.
When we write something… we have moved to the moon with everything we have, nothing has changed, we are there what we were here, a thousand differences are possible in the tempo for the journey, but not in the fact of the journey itself; the earth having shaken off the moon, holds more firmly to its own identity, we however have lost our identities for the sake of a home on the moon, not definitively, nothing here is definitive, but lost nonetheless - Franz Kafka
Read more:
Kafka Meets Freud... and Whatever that Means: Introducing the link between them
Just what makes Kafka so Kafkaesque?
One popular (and quite possibly misguided) way of reading Kafka’s Dreams:
More than Metaphor
A Country Doctor: How Many Lit Critics does it take screw in some meaning?
Kafka on Trial: THE TRIAL and its Potentiality
Concluding (Somewhat) Inconclusively
Further Reading
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