I’d heard the word “Kafkaesque” being bandied around for years, but only had a vague idea what it meant.
So, upon recently renewing my local library card, I was emboldened to take out their copy of “The Trial” to try to find out what “Kafkaesque” really means – or should mean. (Often words, which are misused, metamorphisise officially to their misused meaning. “Literally” is now accepted as often meaning “used for emphasis while not being literally true”.)
A friend commented: “Ahah! Starting with the light reads, eh?”
In fact, I was greatly impressed by the attractive narrative style of Franz Kafka. There are two horrendously violent incidents in the book. Apart from that, the story proceeds in a very charming and engaging way. The narrator and the subject seem to be intertwined.
At several points the story is “Monty Pythonesque”. At one point, lawyers go up stairs to try to enter a court, only to be pushed down the stairs by a court official who is in a bad mood. The lawyers realize they have no right to demand entry to the court, so they simply carrying on going up the stairs, one by one, only to be pushed down again, in order to eventually exhaust the court official so that he gives up preventing them from entering the court. It’s one step away from “Is this the ten minute argument or the full half hour?”.
We have the situation where very strange people, only tangentially connected with the courts, are said to hold influence in the legal system. The painter who paints the judges, for example. But, even more ridiculously, the gang of little girls who hang around outside the studio of the painter.
So it is a charming, in parts funny tale. Josef K, the subject of the book, doesn’t know what he is accused of. So he has to prepare a defence of everything he has ever done. After consulting lawyers and others, and tramping round weird court premises, he is none the wiser. Except it seems that it is a classic “who you know, rather than what you know” scenario. If you play the sycophant to the court, it seems they let you off. Josef K goes the other way and decides to fight the non-existent charges. I won’t give away the ending, but it is sobering and disturbing.
So where does this leave us regarding the use of “Kafkaesque”. Well, I would only use the word for a situation which has dark elements, hilarious parts and the presence of a labyrinthine bureaucracy where one can never know what one is accused of.
* Paul Walter is a Liberal Democrat activist and member of the Liberal Democrat Voice team. He blogs at Liberal Burblings.
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
The street in Australia named after my great great grandfather
Lib Dems pick Richard Kilpatrick as candidate for the Greater Manchester Mayoral election
Matt Wardman
David Warren
Roland
David Raw
9 Comments
The work that comes to mind is Kafka’s novella, ‘Die Verwandlung’ (Metamorphosis) about a man who wakes up to find himself transformed into an insect and how he deals with the people nearest and dearest to him. In typical Kafka style, we never know why he has changed, just as the ‘hero’ in The Trial never knows what he is accused of.
The world that Kafka describes is basically illogical, where answers to fundamental questions are neither acknowledged nor given. I feel a bit like Kafka sometimes when contributing to LDV!
Love the statue, it captures the idea of Kafkaesque perfectly.
I have never read The Trial but your description reminds me strongly of my one experience of an English Magistrates Court. At no point did anyone involved pretend to beleive that the Crime had actually occured as described, the only witnesses were the alleged victims & The Defence didnt challenge the Prosecution account.
Paul
Good article.I have never read The Trial , but know it well from adaptations .The best , Steven Berkoff s from many years back , videoed from National Theatre production .I think you are spot on with Pythonesque , commentary , Paul , have you seen the film of Terry Gilliam , Brazil, very similar !
Aged 17, hitchhiking around Europe, I was arrested in Amsterdam for busking. The police took me to the hostel where I was staying to get my rucksack. I knew I was going to be locked up so I managed to slip a book down the back of my trousers. I just grabbed it at random off the shelf, I had no idea what it was.
I spent three days locked up in Warmoestraat police station until a detective from Rotterdam came to interview me as a suspect in a case involving smuggling weed from South Africa 10 years previously. Obviously it wasn’t me. They released me.
The book that I had secreted was ‘The Trial’ by Franz Kafka.
This was a kafkaesque experience.
Peter, what a great story. Has made my morning!
Yes, Kafka is a master of the absurd and he makes it seem so natural. A more serious message of “The Trial”, I think, is that people who feel guilty get found guilty. Suppressed self-criticism undermines the ability to fight.
“Metamorphosis” carries meaning for anyone who suddenly finds themselves discriminated against and/or viewed with distaste – for being Jewish, for being Gay, for being disabled, for being old…
However, perhaps the most politically-usable of his works is “The Castle”. Man spends all his remaining life trying to find his way through a bureaucratic system only to be told, when dying, that it has special provision for him that he failed to access. Or the bureaucratic system could be God.
Thank you Peter – LOL!
The statue stands outside the Kafka Museum in Prague.
kafka had an impact on me when i was a student, the frustration of The Trial was felt very keenly. That said, it was only a very little frustration when trying to work out what was going on in William Faulker’s world …
Still, happy days! 🙂