It’s difficult to imagine that there was ever a time without the word “Kafkaesque.” Yet the term would have meant nothing at all to anyone alive at the same time as Franz Kafka — including, in all probability, Kafka himself. Born in Prague in 1883, he grew up under a stern, demanding, and perpetually disappointed father, then made his way through college and entered the workforce. He ended up at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute, where he was “subject to long hours, unpaid overtime, massive amounts of paperwork, and absurd, complex, bureaucratic systems,” says the narrator of the Pursuit of Wonder video above. But it was during that same period that he wrote The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika.
Of course, Kafka didn’t actually publish those eventually acclaimed books in his lifetime. After his death, that task would fall to Max Brod, the writer’s only real friend, and it entailed violating the author’s explicitly stated wishes. On his deathbed, Kafka “instructed Max Brod to burn all of his unpublished manuscripts”; instead, Brod “spent the following year or so working to organize and publish his notes and manuscripts.” Now that he’s been gone more than a century, Kafka’s reputation as one of the greatest literary figures of the twentieth century is more than secure, and it would take a dedicated contrarian indeed to argue that Brod did wrong not to toss his papers onto the bonfire.
Perhaps Kafka’s reputation would have found a way to grow one way or another, respond as his writing does to a psychological discomfort we’ve all felt to one degree or another, in one setting or another: doing our taxes, waiting in airport security lines, calling tech support. On such occasions, we reach for the term “Kafkaesque,” which “tends to refer to the bureaucratic nature of capitalistic, judiciary, and government systems, the sort of complex, unclear processes in which no one individual ever has a comprehensive grasp on what is going on, and the system doesn’t really care.” Typical Kafka protagonists are “faced with sudden, absurd circumstances. There are no explanations, and in the end, there is no real chance of overcoming them.”
These characters are “outmatched by the arbitrary, senseless obstacles they face, in part because they can’t understand or control any of what is happening.” They feel “the unyielding desire for answers in conquest over the existential problems of anxiety, guilt, absurdity, and suffering, paired with an inability to ever really understand or control the source of the problems and effectively overcome them.” Yet “even in the face of absurd, despairing circumstances, Kafka’s characters don’t give up. At least initially, they continue on and fight against their situations, trying to reason, understand, or work their way out of the senselessness, but in the end, it is ultimately to no avail.” To Kafka, it was all part of another day in modernity. Here in the twenty-first century, it seems we may need to start looking for an even more powerful adjective.
Related content:
What Does “Kafkaesque” Really Mean? A Short Animated Video Explains
Franz Kafka’s Kafkaesque Love Letters
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
