Enigmatics in Kafka’s Fiction

What is the fear that is taking hold of our feelings in this millennium? What troubles and confounds our experience and reason? What is it that threatens, intimidates and terrifies us? Is it something dreadful coming back from the past, something that we wrongly believed had been completely subdued, but that now reemerges to drag us back to the insecurity and danger we thought we had escaped forever? Or is it something totally new that shakes and dissolves all our certainties, throwing open before us unpredictable, unthinkable horizons where the very notions of humankind and nature appear to crumble? What do we fear most? Repetition or difference? The return of a barbarism that is remote and prehistoric or the advent of a barbarism that is technological and post-human?

These questions themselves are not an enigma — they simply express a fear; enigma emerges when the two poles of these questions, the world of the past and the world of the future, pass into one another without border — when they are collapsed into an ambiguous problematic present.

This sense of an extremely problematic present is the basis of much of the anxiety that we sense when reading the works of Franz Kafka. Whether read as modern, postmodern, existential, surreal, or what you will, Kafka’s works have been interpreted to explain ways of looking at the present moment, whenever that present moment occurred, be it 1925, 1965, or 2011. Because Kafka indicated no precise dates in his stories, and because his stories are not set in any definite time, their characters tend to be interpreted by readers as actors in an always present.

The working conditions portrayed in The Metamorphosis or The Trial, though seemingly antiquated by modern computerized office standards, do not locate the works historically. If anything, they take Kafka’s works out of time rather than place them into a known age. This Kafkan time-zone, in which very unpredictable, often unthinkable events occur, is rife with anxiety for the characters who inhabit it, and it is equally anxiety producing for Kafka’s readers. It shakes and dissolves all our certainties. It is not new, of course, to consider Kafka’s works “enigmatic” in the sense of being puzzling and inexplicable; however, if we take the sense of enigma further and define it as that moment when fear of the past and fear of the future collide in the present, that is, this sense of enigma — perhaps new insights into some of Kafka’s stories may be gleaned.

On Kafka’s Method, The Metamorphosis and Mimesis

More notes on reading Kafka

To understand Kafka, it is crucial to understand his compositional method. But attempting to do so generates more questions than answers. His imagery evokes the Unconscious. Was Kafka practicing a kind of “automatic writing such as was to become popular among the surrealists? If, as it seems so in most of his texts, he enters a “stream of consciousness,” where does the drive to structural perfection come from? How is one to understand the intensely aware, self-reflective, un-dreamlike quality of his prose? Certainly you can stress Kafka’s modernism, his commitment to the potentiality redemptive goals of an aesthetic language that you find also in contemporaries such as Rilke. But you still confront the apparent oxymoron of “unconscious perfection.”

1:48 am

The work that opened my access to Kafka was The Metamorphosis, which I first read as a college student in Dumaguete in 2007. As I have learned since then, it is the text by Kafka that has opened his world to many other readers. Its impact was overwhelming. It’s one of those works that struck me, hit me to the psychic bone, and established my earlier attempts to study literature. Through the study of philosophy — existentialism in particular — and of the literature to which he belonged, at least linguistically, I had always hoped to acquire a key to the enigma of his work.

Kafka and the Irrational

More notes on reading Kafka

I have been noticing that some, or most, of Kafka’s stories begin in the middle, or rather, near the end, as the very specific situational details seize hold of the hero’s (and the reader’s) mind, and propel him forward. It seems that Kafka’s protagonists have in a sense already died; in the case of The Metamorphosis this thought occurs, yet you can plausibly reverse this perspective and argue that the protagonist is “given birth” by the story, that, despite Kafka’s deceptively “realistic,” often quasi-conversational style, the character’s prior existence as an individual lacks all specificity (The Metamorphosis being an elaborate exception, of course). His characters seem to lack memory: when K. in The Castle “remembers” a past, his words appear contradictory, strategic, disingenuous. And Kafka himself lends support to the notion that birth is to be understood as a literary event. In a journal entry, he had reportedly written: “Hesitation before birth. If there is a migration of souls, then I haven’t yet reached the lowest level. My life is a hesitation of birth.” Or something to that effect.

My word for evoking this strange fusion of birth and death perspectives in a narrative would be hierarchy. The instant Kafka’s characters come into existence, each moment is lived vertically, in relation to some “higher” dimension from which a process of judgment continually emanates. Verbal exchanges and physical movements are subjected to instant analysis of Kafka’s “mind,” an analysis that often seems unconnected to conventional notions of character and motivation. Clearly such a fusion of behavior and judgment corresponds to a religious view of the world, an assumption of some ultimate “external” validity, and the initial religious interpretation of Kafka can never become irrelevant. Yet religion and theology presume a doctrinal consistency in the “external” perspective from which worldly behavior is judged, and that is what I never find in Kafka. His protagonists’ mental language is imbued with ethical and spiritual values, but these “higher” words emanate from and immediately return to the physical, the worldly struggle that has, as it were, given birth to these characters, and that, by virtue of its ceaseless temporality, destabilizes all striving toward wisdom or detachment.

7:27 pm

Kafka and Absurdity

Some notes on reading Kafka

[transcribed from my reading journal]

I keep on dissuading myself from lumping Kafka with the existentialists. After all, here was a man who was not a trained philosopher or disciplined writer. While I have no access to the “original” forms — I can by no means understand neither German nor Czech — what I’m getting from the English translations are…striking. The language is simple and clear, lyrical but never fails to be legible, yet it demonstrates a complex wit. In my early attempts to read Kafka, I’ve found myself smiling — but never laughing — at the sick humor he injects into tales that could otherwise cause “nausea.” Kafka never indicated that he was expressing a deep philosophical theory in his aphorisms, but the word “existentialist” pokes out like a sore thumb.

Sartre recognized Kafka as an existentialist and Albert Camus considered him an “absurdist.” I’m not surprised. Reading him is like running a race; you find yourself fighting to read, like a passerby trying not to look at some gruesome crime scene, but you look anyway. I refuse to intellectualize at this point, and I only have vague hints on what “Kafkaesque” means, but somehow I know what to expect from the author. You just read the stories, knowing the end might be neither just nor reasonable.

This “absurdity” separates Kafka’s tales from Camus’ conception of the “absurd,” the claim that there is a fundamental conflict or dissonance from what we want from the universe (whether it be meaning, order or rational explanations of phenomena) and what we find in it (formless chaos). Camus, like Sartre, tended to teach lessons and dispense justice. Kafka merely taunted his characters, and his readers. Then they suffered.

8:15 pm