I’d rank him right up there with anybody in the twentieth century. Nothing could be funnier. He couldn’t finish reading the first part of The Trial to an audience of friends without laughing too hard. Everything with him is ridiculous, impossible, incredible, fantastic. From both novels, one of which is incomplete, to his short stories, there is a persistent humor and systematic theme unrivaled by anyone. He compared his own work to “a new secret doctrine, a cabbala,” and it is. Most of his work revolves around the same thing: a pathetic individual struggle against a bureaucratic, invisible, authoritarian machine or petty, insignificant social structures and customs. The individual is always in some awful, phantasmagorical, intolerable, impossible situation. Thomas Mann views his work in relation to the divine. He calls Kafka a religious humorist, but there's more to it. In his detailed explanations of the trivial and banal, the morbid fascinations and low seriousness, there is a spark that illuminates the unknowable and transcends the basic human predicament.
An atheist would find religious significance in Kafka. And even though he has been categorized as fantastic literature, through the most commonplace circumstances Kafka elucidates the modern experience precisely and imaginatively without being suffocated by literary transparency like other modern writers. He passes on classical references and arrives at the center of the dilemma right off the bat. Meaning supersedes little, detailed explanations to such a degree as to be intuitive and forthright. Like real life, there is almost no suspense. We know what's happening, where it's all going.
I don't particularly like “The Metamorphosis.” It seems too contrived, perfectly serious and suitable for publication. But publication was not his goal. He wasn’t that kind of writer. He was trying to make sense of his own situation, our situation, so you’ll find a real struggle there, a genuine pursuit. Take “The Great Wall,” an unfinished story whose ending is so obvious it need not be written and works on its own independently. The terrifying nightmare of his creation is revealed within a few paragraphs. It’s so futuristic as to be almost telepathic. It’s this kind of breakthrough that muscles past modernism, his own the era, and puts him almost in another category altogether.
There is a charm in his incompleteness, real value. The absurdity is too much to bare. I like the fact that he was not obsessed by fame, publishing or output. The fact that he was of regular means and worked a regular job, composing in his free time, permits an indubitable significance and refinement. Dead at 41 years of age, a boyish face like he didn’t have to shave. But it’s his message that remains relevant. Was it Orwell or Richard Aldington who said of Joyce’s Ulysses: those little immaterial quasi-conscious half-thoughts running through the mind one hardly pays attention to? Joyce wrote a book composed of them! No one before thought this would suffice for fiction. But, artistic integrity and psychological discovery aside, what is accomplished by it? In a more general sense, what is the function of art? You get a good sense of it in Kafka; he works on many multi-faceted levels, with other dimensions.
His small output was extraordinary. He chose fiction as the vehicle for his message. The message could not be related any other way. It wouldn’t (couldn’t) make sense in a philosophical essay. Here it is more meaningful, more humorous. Novels like McCarthy's Blood Meridian should be considered more fantastic than Kafka. The circumstances surrounding Blood Meridian are more surreal than anything in Kafka, almost implausible in real life. In his criticism of violence in America and the modern world, McCarthy glorifies it at times to the point of gratuity. Violence is not present in our daily lives unless you’re a soldier. The same thing happened when Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers came out in the nineties; a criticism of violence by over-exaggerated presentations of it. What’s accomplished? With Kafka you are in real life. The problem is right there in your lap, your existence. You understand the parameters.
Now what?
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