Any Kafka fans here? I have recently been rereading and rereading (again) my old Kafka books. The more I read them, the more aware I become of his genius and the complexity of his character.
Franz Kafka was born on July 3, 1883 in Prague to German speaking Jewish parents. Trained as a lawyer, Kafka is famous for his dark works of fiction which are usually a mixture of “surreal distortion” of reality and a dreamlike journey into situations where much remains unanswered.
I first began reading Kafka in college. I have to confess that I found in immediate affinity to what I understood to be his semi-schizoid, detached personality. Since then, I have read his work time and time again, and every single reading proves to be more enlightening than the previous one.
Kafka has also been called one of the most influential fiction writers of the 20th century, as most of his work was published after his death in 1924. Incidentally, we are lucky that his work actually made it to publication despite Kafka’s specific instructions to his publisher and lover to destroy them after his death. We are indeed lucky that those two ignored that strange request.
Kafka’s books are indeed influential and at times foretell dark chapters in human history. In my opinion, his seminal work, The Trial, foresees a police state where a system which is accountable to no one slowly and painfully takes an average person’s liberty, sanity and then life away for reasons that are never made clear and are left to the reader’s interpretation. Again, the surreal and trancelike journey of this novel make it even more interesting. But there is much more to The Trial than just the story of a hapless individual caught in the web of a police state. The Trial is also a prediction of what a police state created by the “modern man” will look like. He remarkably foresees the helplessness of citizens who would live in systems such as the Nazi Germany, the USSR and the Islamic Republic. The “court system” described in The Trial is eerie similar to IR’s show trial “justice system,” and, in my opinion, is a must read for Iranians.
In Metamorphosis, the essence of humanity is the focus. What is it that makes us human? A salesman wakes up one day to see himself transformed into an insect like creature. At first, his family is somewhat understanding, but as time goes by, he becomes nothing but an annoyance and an embarrassment to them. But all throughout, he feels everything. His humanity is still intact. Even he himself feels as if he has become a burden to the family. In the final scene, the human insect, sick, tired, and at death’s door, is attracted to music, the sound of his sister playing the violin for a trio of mysterious boarders at their home. Putting his survival at risk, he wonders into the room, just to listen to the music, to enjoy what is left of his feelings as a human. Metamorphosis, in my opinion, also has another dimension to it, and that is the idea of racial supremacy, where the idea of a person turning into an insect and the others’ reaction to him is a metaphor for how people treat others which they see as inferior.
In all, Franz Kafka was an extremely complex character. But it is exactly that complexity that gave rise to his multi dimensional stories and characters in those stories. He died in 1924, and is buried in Prague. I’ve never been to Prague, but if I ever travel there, his grave site is surely a place that I will make sure to visit. The human race is fortunate to have men and women of Kafka’s caliber among its ranks.
