Kafka, The Writer of Human Frustration
By: Fadoua Soussi
Tags: Writing Tips, Kafka, Education, Writing, Literature

Kafka, The Writer of Human Frustration

Photo by Emanionz on Unsplash

Franz Kafka’s literature is peculiar, ambiguous and difficult to access. However, the Kafkaesque style never ceased to be current, even now, more than 130 years after his birth.

The power of writing

“The Metamorphosis”, is perhaps Kafka’s most famous story. The story of the young Gregor, who one day dawns transformed into a huge insect, is a disturbing and chilling text about man’s vulnerability and his precarious position in the world, which, overnight, makes him an outcast.

But why did Kafka decide to tell his story in such an enigmatic way? Couldn’t he have written it in a more “realistic” or “credible” way? Many of his contemporary readers became annoyed with the mysterious nature of his literature, which, during his lifetime, prevented him from being recognised by a wide audience.

Kafka’s closed and enigmatic literature is a reflection of the absurdity of the authorities, rulers and, above all, the state bodies with which his characters are confronted.

In books such as “The Trial” or “The Prison Colony”, the author describes the powerlessness of the individual in the face of an anonymous power. This kind of helplessness, a central experience of the modern mass society, is known as “Kafkaesque”.

A life intertwined with literature

Everything in Franz Kafka was painful, some called it absurd, others Kafkaesque. A twisted and restless universe that made him the most revealing author of the last century. And this despite the fact that in his 40 years and 11 months of life, Kafka only finished 350 pages and left 3,500 unfinished. Among them three novels, a faithful reflection of his main characteristic, his neurotic perfectionism that made him an obsessive being who claimed to be “made of literature”. For him, more than an interest and inclination, more than a profession and entertainment, literature was his own life.

Franz Kafka’s writing presents the impotence of the human being in the face of the external factors, which can be a monstrous transformation, as in “The Metamorphosis” or the presence of an inbred and closed community that torments the main character of “The Castle”. Franz Kafka represents the permanent state of human frustration. Kafka is the most intense grey in the history of literature. It is the grey that the heirs of existentialism wanted to copy and that the American “dirty realists” were unable to express correctly.

Franz Kafka usually wore a “sweet mask” facing outwards, but he had a “dark side”, a convoluted inner world inhabited by what has come to be known as Kafkaesque. The author was born in Prague into a family of Jewish merchants and died in Austria, in 1924. He received a doctorate in law and also studied the mysticism of the Jewish religions in depth. In 1917, when he was thinking of going to Palestine, he became ill with tuberculosis and began to devote himself body and soul to literature.

His devotion to literature was such, that despite family opposition, five failed marriage projects, his work as an insurance agent and his serious illness that would end his life, he continued to pursue his dream.

Chronically dissatisfied, self-demanding to the point of flogging, neurotic and compulsive, Franz Kafka was not, however, the weak character that has been stereotyped. His strength to write despite his self-imposed inhuman perfectionism shows this.

His particular way of writing reflected a vision of his own — arising from his deepest fears, from the depths of his being — of what he wanted to tell and he intended to expose it in its entirety without any interruption. Maintaining that intensity was almost impossible. One only has to take into account the amount of work he did not manage to finish.

Nevertheless, there is a divorce between the Franz Kafka known to his peers and the Franz Kafka made by his contemporaries after his literary canonisation. The former was rather more jovial, vitalistic, cheerful and funny than the reader assumes after confronting his work. The personality of the flesh and blood Franz Kafka does not easily get caught up in the cliché of the Kafkaes coined under the influence of the narrative universe he created.

He was certainly naive, not very practical and private. He had enormous difficulties in organising his life, especially his relationships with women. However, he was not a bitter person, nor a party pooper, nor a mystic. He had a quick wit and was fond of making sparkling puns that he often spread in his encounters with people. He was also a good playmate and seemed to possess an extraordinary ability to cast shadows on the wall with his hands that caused amazement to those who looked at them.

Something that is repeated in several testimonies of those who conceived with him in life is that Franz Kafka gave a lot of importance to the fact of being well dressed and that he spent time to look like an elegance that did not attract attention. Neither the illness that ate him nor death could take away Franz Kafka’s captivating smile, a gesture that, according to the nurse who closed his eyes, remained on his lips after he had left.

Kafka’s insects

The Metamorphosis is Franz Kafka’s most famous short novel. Published in 1916, it surprised the literary world of the time because the anecdote that supports the story is as simple as it is absurd: a man wakes up one morning transformed into an enormous insect — apparently a beetle, although it is not explicitly mentioned in the text. He continues to live in his room, tolerated by his family, and to contemplate the passing of life from the perspective of an animal. After reading Franz Kafka’s most famous novel, the great writer Gabriel García Márquez decided to dare to write his first work, realising that the most important part of a narrative is not in the plot or the argument, that any one is worth, even an absurd one, but that the key lies in the way it is told and the reflective background it provides.

Franz Kafka is the voice of the conscience of an era. That is why he was more interested in the reflection that emerges from his works than in his narrative essence. In fact, he is not a narrator per se, because the events he relates do not follow and evolve in a suitable literary dynamic, but he settles down in front of a powerful symbol and there he leaves the reader alone to go around that point until he reaches his own conclusions, which are never far from those of the author.

The more absurd the symbol presented by Franz Kafka is, the more significant it is for the reader’s reflection. Franz Kafka’s characters are shaken and threatened by hidden instances. They are not important in themselves, but are prototypes of the helpless and disoriented man. The aim is to highlight the absurdity of life and, to do so, introduce a surprising distortion into the most everyday reality by using absurd and fantastic elements, such as the transformation of the commercial traveller Gregor Samsa beetle.