Franz Kafka, his world, his mystery and his drama

The influence of Kafka, on Magical Realism and on a handful of contemporary narrators, is proverbial: García Márquez, Borges, Cortázar, Onetti, Sábato, Nabokov, Dino Buzzati or Kundera are inconceivable without the inventive and creative genius of the Czech author, of German expression. This magical recreation, of a narrative world of nightmares, where fantasy and reality, absurdity and truth, magic and verisimilitude, are confused and mixed, are of resounding and perplexing plot effectiveness. Thus we see, in his fictional world, the absurdity of a criminal accusation, in a judicial process: without a face, without an accuser and without credible reasons; or the satire of the contract to a surveyor who visits a castle, which he can never enter, without knowing who invited or requested him; or the fabulous nightmare of a man, who one day wakes up turned into a horrible insect. Hence, his narrative creations reflect the image of contemporary man, locked in a lonely and distressing labyrinth: in an absurd and meaningless world, full of perplexities and lack of communication with his environment.

A gloomy writer, who always bet on failure, with a proverbial feeling of fear of success – or of being a successful author – however, he possessed enormous talent, which he refused to recognize, or to recognize himself. The Kafkaesque spirit, since his time, radiated and permeated the origin of the plot and the narrative universe of a series of 20th century writers. In the Czech author’s fictional world, the everyday and the fantastic coexist: he wrote or described magical events, inspired by human events, but that seem implausible, or that put the laws of narrative verisimilitude in crisis. He created a narrative atmosphere, tinged with bureaucratism, that seems irrational and disconcerting, perhaps because of its macabre and oppressive nature, which has been called “the Kafkaesque” – an adjective or quality that created the 20th century. That is, it is a way of narrating that describes the human from the absurd, in an unexpected way, and with a sordid, disconcerting and sinister ending, which has generated theological and philosophical interpretations of Franz Kafka.

Kafka creates, in essence, a kind of psychological terror that is also absurd: he reveals the nature of bureaucracy, with its laws, sentences, decrees and surveillance systems, where the condition of a person is lost or disappears. He thus makes a criticism or satire of the individual-power relationship, which reflects the arbitrariness of the laws, of a vertical and invisible nature, in an infinite hierarchy of order.

A Jew without a synagogue, Kafka, a believer but not a practitioner (some say he was an atheist), hides the divine order as a substitute for the human order; and hence, in his work, an open interpretation of sin, guilt and rebellion of the individual against the divine will is gathered: between belief and loss of faith. In Kafka’s fictions, people are victims of a powerful machinery of destruction and domination over individuals. Hence, his characters seem helpless and resigned to their fate, as if they were paying a penalty on earth for the commission of a sin or as if they were waiting for atonement, through a scapegoat. Thus, we see Gregor Samsa, in The metamorphosis, who stops eating until he dies, without ever losing his reasoning or his human condition, from a spiritual point of view; and Josep K, in The process, that he does not defend himself before the law or the accusation and that he awaits, resigned and stoically, his execution, stabbed to death “like a dog.” Likewise, we see in letter to fatherthe tyranny of the father and in The processthe tyranny of a lawless bureaucratic order, where condemnation precedes punishment. In Kafka, in fact, his literary work has both moral and aesthetic value. His biography and the tragedy of his life are transformed into a nostalgia for time. In his personal history, the character (the biographical self) weighs more than his characters, and hence the mythology that encompasses his life as an author and the psychological weight that he exerts on his work of literary creation.

In most of the narrative plots of his fictions there is an anguishing atmosphere, in which there is usually a common thread, which points to the horror of power, always to a certain power. And in which various ways of facing that fear predominate: through concealment, disappearance or transformation (as in The metamorphosis). The presence of an authority that gives orders is obsessive in Kafka: the father, the State or the bureaucracy. Many narrative intrigues revolve around the Hegelian master-slave relationship. Hence, many of his characters feel slaves to a power, invisible or visible, real or fantastic; or of a power that invents or invents itself as an ontological paranoia of personal destiny.

Another legal and psychological relationship is the guilt-shame relationship. That is, he feels a feeling of guilt and shame caused by his father. As can be seen, Kafka felt like a being who was timid and overshadowed by the authoritarian and despotic power of his father, but perhaps he was not such, but rather oversized by his unhealthy identity complex, his pathological guilt and his weakness of character. In effect, he lived with the paranoia of a false perception of threat due to his fragility of personality, and hence he flagellated himself like a Tartuffe and did not value his strengths, but only his weaknesses. He thus saw in his father a practical and entrepreneurial spirit, while he saw himself as a melancholic, fragile, contemplative and dreamy being, who only wanted to write. The feeling of inferiority, in Kafka, is interpreted as a feeling of shame. The fear of power paralyzed him, and that is why it stands out as an obsessive force in his narratives, and became the center of gravity of his fictional plots. His work is, in effect, and to a large extent, a search for meaning in the absurdity of power.

He always perceived himself as a foreigner, a stateless person in the world: someone who lived on the edges of a hostile time, in the “labyrinth of a loneliness” that distressed him, but that fueled his narrative creations. That world that he felt is the one that he wanted to transmit to us and leave as a testament, testimony and symbolic legacy; and as prophecy, nightmare and destiny, what is called “the Kafkaesque” – similar to “the uncanny” in Freud. Kafka portrays us, in essence, a future world where guilt – without reason, justification or explanation – falls on the individual, like an anthem, when he cannot achieve the tranquility and spiritual peace that he longed for, dreamed of, sought and desired. Faced with the power that humiliated and dehumanized him, Kafka used, as a defense and compensation mechanism, writing – that is, literature –, the craft of the word that, strangely, he wanted to erase, not wanting to leave his manuscripts as a legacy to posterity (a pact that his friend Max Brod broke, as we know). This also reveals – or betrays – him as an insecure, self-conscious being with low self-esteem, incapable of recognizing himself and knowing himself; that is, to recognize his literary talent, which reflects: either a high rigor or self-censorship or a fear of being read by his lovers, his father, his sisters or his friends, after his death. What Brod does is betray the wills of his friend, who becomes his executor and editor, a gesture that contradicts the author’s will; but that the history of literature has no way of repaying him for this disobedience, leaving Brod as his alter egoprotector, editor-co-author. And like a legend, vital for Kafka’s work and legacy to survive and endure, as, in fact, they have survived and endured. A literary pair (or alter ego), of collaboration, confidentiality, complicity, fidelity and brotherhood, in the history of literature, is this one between Kafka and Brod – like the one between Borges and Bioy Casares.

Kafka only wanted to live to write under the light of a lamp: it was his obsession, his desire, his desire and his will, or the meaning in which he conceived of life. Writing was, for him, a religion, a ritual, a form of prayer to ward off loneliness, fear and anguish. For his desperate and anguished life, he built a castle as a refuge, a shell or shell, like that of beetles (as in The metamorphosis), to protect themselves from the outside world. That is to say, he built an inner world – full of nightmares, fears and anguish – in which he could hide behind to write, narrate and create characters that were the fictional extension – or expression – of his psychological drama, of his individual tragedy, of his storm. existential. Kafka built symbolic fortresses and lairs to hide or protect himself from the powers that threatened him – and that threaten man. Hence he took refuge in solitude, silence and writing, as a way to kill the anxiety and anguish that persecuted him. Or as a defense mechanism against boredom, work and celibacy.

The substrate of much of his work represents a satire and a criticism, at the same time, of totalitarian states –totalitarian systems or totalitarian powers–, from the family to the State (as we see in The process and Letter to father). Panopticons of surveillance and punishment underlie the microcosm of their narrative plots. As is known, Kafka explored and drew from his everyday environment to build his narrative arguments, from family power (father-son) to the power of bureaucratic administration (the State-and his self). His verbal imaginary advocates – or prefigures – totalitarianisms (penitential, penal or inquisitorial systems) with a corrosive and biting criticism, and at the same time, with irony and black humor, of the hierarchies of power. In Kafka we can see, in summary, a symbolic criticism of the despotism of the bureaucratic State, of the demonic machinery of bureaucracy, characterized by a hegemony of power over individuals. The hero – or antihero – Josep K, of The process, represents being overwhelmed by the weight of power; He is tried without a trial and without a crime, or for a crime that he is unaware of and that he is denied the right to know, that is, he is tried without a sentence, by a faceless, invisible court, which ends up cutting his throat, with impunity, an order executed by two police officers. anonymous. This allegory is, in short, an x-ray of the abuse of power of an invisible political and ideological order, which takes over its citizens.