Why Read Kafka in a Time of Covid
If times stay normal, we tend not to notice our own madness
David Pickus, July 2020
People interested in books tend to know something about Franz Kafka. However, the word “Kafkaesque” often circulates in so broad a way that it impedes understanding. As I see it, to the extent that it used, “Kafkaesque” is primarily a synonym for “nightmarish,” especially if it takes the form of a strange interruption of everyday life. We do not need to define the nature of the nightmare very strictly. It could be a comparatively everyday instance of aggravating and unwelcome events, as in someone saying “They kept me on hold for so long. It was Kafkaesque.” Kafka’s name serves to signify “bad in an unfamiliar way.” Sometimes, in very loose usage, like “These prices are Kafkaesque,” the term means “You won’t believe it.” Kafka’s name refers to what we shouldn’t have to believe, but nevertheless is.
A word’s meaning rightly changes if it starts to be used differently. Still, there is something lost if we make this multi-purpose adjective serve for an understanding of Kafka himself. Kafka is not his adjective (though you can imagine he left some fragment in his writing where he imagined he was). Kafka’s work, even though it is always about unhappy and anxiety provoking subjects, has a more precise meaning than generally nightmarish. In fact, his works can easily mean the opposite of what people imply when they use his name. Taking up this line of inquiry is a good way to enter the world of Kafka’s works in general.
Almost everyone would understand me when I speak of Kafkaesque tax forms and insurance regulations. Yet, even though those things are often hard to understand and sometimes are intentionally tricky, they aren’t what Kafka described, say, in The Trial. In that novel, the main character is arrested and never discovers why. He constantly learns new information and has new experiences, none of which reveals what he most needs to know. That’s Kafkaesque. With tax and insurance complaints, on the other hand, though it is often quite difficult to get accurate information, there typically is a reason why things have gone wrong. The problem is that we do not like the reason, maybe because we think the rules are unfair, or we feel we have not been properly informed. If we call situations like that “Kafkaesque,” we may be signaling our frustration, but we are distorting the message that comes from reading Kafka’s works themselves.
It is too wide a lens to say that Kafka wrote about things that are bad, or even that he wrote stories and novels about the inexplicably bad. Such a broad definition does not capture what is specifically Kafkaesque and about Kafka, namely that his writing is about something that is arguably even worse than merely being bad. For instance, in another of his famous stories, The Metamorphosis, the protagonist became a giant insect, but no attention is paid to figuring out why, or about declaring that there is no explanation. Instead, the plot revolves around how the main character is supposed to get out of bed and go to work. Kafka does not focus that much on explanations or their absence. He focuses on the experience of being trapped. I agree with those who say that everything he wrote pertains to this theme.
To be sure, the notion of “being trapped” can be defined so loosely that it can cover anyone with troubles or sorrows. However, Kafka’s characters are always trapped in very precise ways, albeit weird ones. In varying ways, they consider the possibility of escape, or express a desire to do so, but that is typically as far as it gets. As a reader, one must prepare oneself for the experience that effort on the part of the protagonist only deepens the problem. In this sense, the term “Kafkaesque” when it moves from away from general use into literary analysis has a narrower and more precise meaning than “Shakespearean,” “Goethean,” etc. It means the various forms Kafka used to portray being trapped, as well as the window into our human condition once we realize the predicament.
This “trapped-ness” is easiest to understand if we recognize that some of Kafka’s best work is not as mysterious as it seems, at least in the sense that we must regard his writing as opaque and obscure. There may be opaque and obscure reasons why a person is arrested, or can’t get out of bed, or can’t deliver a message, etc., but Kafka describes all such painful and bizarre situations with lucid clarity. He does not invite us to say, “I cannot explain this.” Rather, we are supposed to imagine ourselves trapped in the same odd way that the characters are trapped. Then we must ask what this imprisonment means.
The point is that the bulk of Kafka’s work can be read as a parable (a tale in which one thing stands for something else). This difference with Kafka is the imaginatively unusual situations in which his parables are set. Even more interesting is the fact that, at the same time as Kafka stretched his reader’s limits as to the form of the parable, he also significantly expanded the scope of what is allegorized. By the way, with Kafka there is no profit in trying to distinguish between parable, allegory, and fable. All of those terms could be applied to his works, provided that you focus on all the horrifying ways that people can be stuck and confined.
A good example is what I think is one of the best of Kafka’s efforts, namely Ein Bericht für eine Akademie (A Report to an Academy). This story is narrated by an ape who is standing in a fancy room full of high-class culture figures, reminiscing about the path that took him from being shot, wounded, and imprisoned in a cage, to being a prominent celebrity. Though his smooth language downplays the fact that his fame consists of being a captive circus performer. From the start of literature, talking animals have been a source of interest and amusement. But in all the examples from Homer and the Bible onward, little, and often no, attention is paid to the way an actual animal may feel, while, simultaneously, maintaining the sense of unreality, so that we do not think too much of actual animals, but propel our attention back to the human world. This literary balancing act is hard to do, and Kafka did it. From today’s standpoint, it should be kept in mind that a century ago academies such as the one described, had enormous prestige, much the way that some prize granting institutions have today. Imagine that, instead of giving a Nobel Prize to the scientists who discovered a cure, the Nobel Academy named a laboratory rat as the winner and allowed it to give a speech. Something like this is Kafka’s premise.
Even though Kafka was sincerely moved by the plight of animals at the hands of people, the story remains a parable about human society. The crux Is that Red Peter — that is the ape’s name — is educated to the point where he goes from being a speechless, flea-ridden creature to an urbane, German-speaking, red wine drinking, public figure. Here, the fact that this story, one of the few that he published in his lifetime, first appeared in journal edited by Jewish philosopher Martin Buber called Der Jude makes it likely that it was meant and understood as a parable about anti-Semitism. That is, Peter the Ape tries to make himself acceptable to the world around him, but it does not work. So too, a great many European Jews tried to assimilate into culture around them, but they were rejected by a society that resented their efforts, disdained their talents, and refused to accept their humanity.
Still, I am not suggesting this parable has only one rigid meaning, and its message is not solely directed against those who try to fit in. As you might have guessed, Peter describes himself as being trapped. Then he says repeatedly that he has no Auswege or “ways out”. Thus, it is not the case that Peter entirely rejects his European life. He no longer fits into his homeland and does not truly belong in his new home. He is trapped between them, just as the modern Jews of Kafka’s generation were caught between a majority culture that refused to accept them, and traditional villages of their ancestors and elders, ones that they did not wish to return to and which would not really welcome them if they tried.
Once we see the matter this way, parable perhaps primarily referring to Jews and anti-Semitism grows wider. We can say that it applies anywhere that people make much of being “nice” and “decent,” while still never really accepting someone below their “league.” The fact was that in Kafka’s society many educated and otherwise upstanding people really did treat Jews this way. They did not join the anti-Semitic movements of Kafka’s day and were willing to associate with Jews without resorting to discourtesy or insult. However, they retained the notion that Jews deserved worse than normal folks. The unspoken ganging up was ever-present and social reality was split in two between a civil level and a mean one. Kafka was likely made sensitive to the insidiousness of this problem by his experience in his own society. However, he wrote so it could apply anywhere, not only to one group of people.
I am aware that someone may ask whether we should see the parable as being about antisemitism, or about the ways that people are trapped by the silent aggression of other. The answer is both, and more. Once we see this parable applying to one society, in one way, it becomes possible to see the phenomenon almost everywhere, including in the most normal-seeming environment. For instance, even though most people consider themselves decent, it is striking how common it is to see workplaces where a few people are treated worse than others, or a family with one scapegoat, etc. In addition, some people, due to their physical appearance, are simply treated a notch or two worse than everyone else. This state of affairs can last a lifetime, and while it is easy enough to discern, it is likely never commented upon; neither from those doing the mistreatment, nor from those being mistreated. Rather the stigmatization is simply an unspoken normal, one stretching on and on. Likewise, Kafka’s story — in fact rather short — gives the impression of stretching on and on. That’s the point.
The argument that anti-Semitism and a kind of general social “game playing” can help us understand Kafka’s story about Red Peter the Ape, needs an important qualification in terms of aesthetics. Kafka’s writing operates best if allowed to be read in an airtight fashion. That is, it would puncture the artistic impact of the story if we said that it was only about this particular group of people, or this social phenomenon. There is nothing in Kafka’s words that allow us to step out of the reality he presented and substitute it for one which we consider to be more real. The same way that the strangest dreams can also be the most vivid, so too, a description of the oddest circumstances — an urbane, eloquently-speaking circus animal — can seem matter of fact if we have no way to break out of the world that is presented. Analyzing the story by saying “it really means X” thus breaks an aesthetic spell, diminishing its ability to teach us how horrible it feels to be trapped in a world you cannot leave, but also cannot join with any dignity.
This is also the place to add something about the style of Kafka’s writings and why we deceive ourselves if we think it is easy to write like him. A cliché about Kafka is that his work has a “hallucinatory” quality. But this is a half-truth. It is correct that, like a hallucination, Kafka’s efforts aim to make something we know is not real appear to be true. However, that is the easy part. This quality in Kafka reminds me of a valuable lesson I learned a long time ago when I tried to improve my acting skill by taking some lessons. What I mostly learned was how easy it is to be a so-so actor — mimicry is natural to humans — and how hard it is to be a very good one. That commonplace saying about “getting inside a role” is true. Even if the play is mediocre, good actors do not try to take on the general characteristics of, say, an angry person, but seek to be a specific person who gets angry. That becoming of someone else is hard, and, like most amateur actors, I honestly could not do it especially well.
Similarly, it is not very hard for an author to imitate Kafka’s style in a so-so way. You only need to pick something extravagantly weird and unsettling and describe it as if it is real. But Kafka goes the additional step that separates the professionals from the rest. He eliminates that implicit wink, the one you see in the amateur actor, that says “I’m just pretending to be someone else.” If you do not believe this, you can try the following experiment. Come up with a Kafkaesque situation of your own and try to write an allegory. But only under one condition: at no point in your writing, not even for a second, can it be given away that you, the writer, are aware you are writing a parable, and are communicating this awareness to the reader. The work must be, as said, airtight. It must evoke something outside of itself, something in our recognizably human world. Yet you cannot even hint that you know that. You must trap the reader in the story world so that when they finally surface in their own (which you do not let them do easily), they no longer feel at ease.
To illustrate this rising back to the more uncomfortable surface, I want to conclude by discussing a parable I normally would not mention, but which I bring up now because it is particularly apt for our age of infection and lockdown. It is called Der Bau or The Burrow. It concerns, as the title suggests, the doings of a mole-like creature, but one who knows how to see, who speaks German and who, naturally enough, spends his time digging. It is interesting to note how much everyday knowledge about moles Kafka incorporated into the story. Apparently, he liked a 19th-century popular account of animals called, Illustrirtes Thierleben by Alfred Edmund Brehm. This book is full of careful descriptions and it can even today can get one thinking about how an animal experiences the world. So, when Kafka had his turn, we take up the digging creature point of view. It does not occur to the narrator to mention that he is a mole any more than it occurs to us, when unburdening our troubles, to interrupt ourselves to say that we are anatomically modern humans. The animal is talking about his experience and the point is that he dug a burrow and must now be at pains about its upkeep.
In my judgment, scholars of Kafka cheat if they refuse to take a stand on what the burrow might represent. If you do not acknowledge that Kafka’s works are parables and that parables must be about something specific, then you make things all too easy on yourself and let the import of Kafka simply elude you. Yet, if you interpret the parable too crudely or clumsily, you simply miss the point. You take a stand on what it represents in order to trap yourself even deeper within.
For myself, I cannot read A Report to an Academy without feeling overwhelmed with sadness when thinking how accurately it anticipates an aspect Nazi genocide. Yet, we are not speaking of something confined to the Holocaust, but about one aspect of the ostracization that recurs continually and in innumerable shadings. Only a few of these shadings are openly genocidal, and many of which are so invisible in their harm that they pass for sociability. This is the unspoken trapping of the socially weaker into following rules of civility, while allowing tormentors to pick and choose when they do or do not want to reciprocate. It is impossible to understand much of our social life without grasping this piling-on quality depicted in the Kafka story. Similarly, The Burrow describes another ubiquitous and harmful aspect of our lives that is, nevertheless, easy to miss. This is the madness inherent in the quest for security. The narrator of the story wants to be safe. This is his principal aim, safety. He cares about security. Greatly. He wants to be safe and draws you into his obsession? You must imagine that he brings up the principal concern repeatedly. If you start to feel first annoyed then smothered by the narrator’s repetitiveness you are reading Kafka very well. The Burrow is about this unending need for reassurance, and the consequences of not being able to satisfy it.
In pre-covid days I could easily have been tempted to say the parable is about lies and our response to them. The key point is that the narrator has dug an extremely elaborate burrow, with many hiding places, as well as storage for everything he needs. Now, he’s set. He only has to make sure that nothing goes wrong. Imagine you have just gotten away with telling a truly convenient lie. Your story has been accepted as reality and everything is fine, except that you now notice a small inconsistency where you haven’t noticed anything before. Alternately, imagine that you belong to one of those families, couples, workplaces, etc., where there is a public front that everyone has to adhere to. Just when appearances have been smoothed out to make everything look wonderful, another wrinkle emerges. So that one gets smoothed out. But then…
Given what we said about keeping the parable “airtight,” the point is not that the story is exclusively about telling lies, but that it is about a quality inherent in the telling of lies, namely the sense of insecurity felt by anyone trying to stay hidden. The capacity to identify with this sense of insecurity is what makes the improbable premise of the talking mole seem altogether realistic. For there is no plot of any import. It is just the narrator telling us about life in the burrow, which primarily means his efforts to stay safe in the burrow. He spends a lot of time obsessing about a fake entrance, which he initially praises, but later declares to be totally inadequate. Later, deep in the story, he hears a slight hissing noise. Or maybe he didn’t. No, wait. There it is again. He did hear it after all. But he cannot find the source. So maybe it is just the wind? And on it goes. The Story has no ending. It just stops.
Some scholars suggest that Kafka intended to finish it but did not do so before his final illness. It could be. However, this accidental ending is just as good, if not better than other ones Kafka could create. Once someone is in this state of mind it simply never ends. This is why the story fits the pandemic of 2020 particularly well. Still, there is one weakness with my interpretation of the story as being a parable about lies. Typically, if we ourselves do not benefit from lies told by others, we consider it a good thing when they are unmasked. But the story loses its force if we lose all sympathy for the digging narrator and wish him to be harmed by the unseen enemies he frequently mentions. Simultaneously, it is unlikely that Kafka expects us to take this digger at his word. The action exists primarily in the realm of hypotheticals, some of which, at least, are highly tenuous. Hence, the story also reminds me of the mental state of someone who could have been exposed to an infectious pathogen, but probably was not, even though some doubt remains. They cannot put their mind at rest. Or, putting their mind at rest only serves to provide leisure for unsettling their minds further. A few pages into the story, Kafka’s mole announces that he has much leisure time. He is, after all, sheltering in place. This is not a peaceful or secure thing. He uses it the same way that those in anxiety ridden isolation typically use it.
What conclusions can we draw from The Burrow? In one respect, the answer is easy: no conclusions. Drawing conclusions would miss the crux, which is to go on and on. The parable is about this quality of not being able to leave and not being able to end. This indeterminate state blends into an exhausting condition of not being able to adapt, and not being able to receive help, and not being able to learn, and not being able to rest. The circumstance of living a lie, and even more of living in a raging pandemic, enables us to grasp this intangible quality more distinctly. However, to experience this quality in such a seamless fashion we must turn to the world of the story itself. There is a line at the start of the story that is important, but difficult to translate: Freilich manche List ist so fein, daß sie sich selbst umbringt. It means something like “Indeed, some cleverness is so delicate that it kills itself.” Some forms of self-protective reasoning shade into madness. In fact, all our reasoning is, in some sense, self-protective, and all of it, at least in some small degree, likely shades into lunacy. But, if times stay normal, we tend not to notice our own madness. Seeing what we do to ourselves in all its everyday terror is the gift — if that is the word for it — of Kafka’s story, The Burrow.
