A Kafka Kick to the Face [matt]

My world was recently rocked by a strange man born nearly 125 years ago named Franz Kafka. Due to my typical lack of self-control, as well as a need to understand what literary theorists and philosophers were talking about when they said a work was “Kafkaesque,” I picked-up The Complete Stories a few weeks ago. Having devoured all of Kafka’s short stories, I feel pained in heart and mind and now need to bleed-out the nastiness he has infected me with, which would likely please him to hear. In a letter he once wrote the following;

I think we ought to only read the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write?... We would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

Franz Kafka has stabbed me, confused me, disgusted me, and, ultimately, challenged me. My desire is to write on a few of his stories in depth, but for this medium I will restrain myself and try to give a small glimpse into some writings that really can give quite a “blow on the head” just as much today as they did long ago. To do so, I will briefly comment on three stories; In the Penal Colony, The Metamorphosis, and The Burrow.

In the Penal Colony was by far the biggest smack in the face Kafka delivered to me personally. It is the story of an explorer’s visit to a certain penal colony. While there he is to be given a demonstration of a “remarkable” device that slowly kills condemned prisoners. It does this by continually stabbing them, the stabs slowly writing-out what the person has done onto his mutilated flesh. The officer who is showing this apparatus to the explorer is obviously quite fond of the machine; it is, to him, a thing of absolute beauty, dispensing judgment in an amazingly original manner. The machine is well made, immaculately clean, and “perfect” for the dispensing of “justice.”

This entire scene drips with irony. And blood. It is a story of the failures of the m/Modern world. The machine is amazing, but heartless. It is used on innocent, illiterate men who are never told what their crime is and obviously won’t have an idea what is written on their skin since they cannot read in the first place! Ultimately the officer takes his own life on the machine, sacrificing himself to his machine and his ideal of a mechanized world. The story ends with the explorer taking a boat away from the colony, but refusing to take with him a guard and prisoner that also long to escape. I believe Kafka is referring to the river Styx, implying that we live in a hell of our own creation. We have damned ourselves, loving machines and progress without ever asking bigger questions about justice, love, mercy, or right and wrong. Perhaps it is too late to ever cross back over the river, and we are stuck forever in our self-made hell. Maybe we can never cross the river.

We are given a glimpse of this m/Modern hell in The Metamorphosis. The strange story begins with Gregor Samsa waking up from a poor night’s sleep, only to discover that during the night he has become a giant insect. At first, the description of Gregor’s transformation is what disturbs the reader. But that quickly changes. The really disturbing truth is that Gregor is more concerned about how he is going to get to his dead-end job than the fact that he is now an enormous bug! Is it possible that in our bureaucratic, capitalistic, machine-ruled world our humanity is already gone? That we have freely given ourselves over to this sham of a world, never to be returned? I believe this is what Kafka is implying. Gregor is not surprised by his tranformation because his humanity was stolen from him long ago by the pressures of the m/Modern world. He hides away in his room, refusing more and more food or contact from the outside. Perhaps his long fast from human food and contact is the way he finally finds the redemption of his humanity, even if it does not equal freedom from the metamorphosis that has occurred.

The Burrow, like The Metamorphosis, is a foul story relating our lives to the lives of animals. It is told first-person by a man who seems more animal than human, living in a massive burrow he has dug into a labrynth-like maze. It is a place for him to hide from his “enemies,” and find safety and satisfaction in his own workmanship. The reality, though, is that the burrow and his enemies have become two sick obsessions. The narrator admires his “perfect or almost perfect structural devices,” which allow him to slip in and out without being noticed, though he recognizes that they are nothing more than “the mark of a restless nature, of inner uncertainty, disreputable desires, evil propensities.” This burrowing man is obsessed with his hole, so fearful of losing it that he even hates the burrow itself; “to be honest I cannot endure the place…with new anxieties instead of peace.” This man sits in his burrow, or outside of it, eating raw meat and worms and obsessing over his construction. After all of the work and obsession, this man is more animal-like and troubled than when he began. He suffers the anxieties and disconnections that are common to our troubled times. He is a disgusting parody of us; after all, I can think of no better desciptors of the men and women of the Western world than a people of “restless nature,” full of “inner uncertainty, disreputable desires, evil propensities.” It hits very close to home.

So I ask; are these not the problems of our own day? Some fight and struggle to overcome. Others live within, never wanted to truly question their societally-constructed reality. Either way, we are entrapped in a paradigm that simply does not fit who we were made to be. We cannot live without our machinations, yet so many turn out to be efficient but ethically dubious. We let meaningless McJobs (thank-you, Douglas Coupland) rule our lives and before stealing our very humanity. We become so obsessed with humanity’s stuff that we lose our humanity in the process. Kafka stories are grotesque, horrible tales that affect us like a disaster, especially when we realize they are about us and our (post-)modern condition. My hope is that Kafka’s literary axe can break into the frozen sea inside all of us. Perhaps it’s not too late…