138 years ago today, Franz Kafka was born in Prague in what is now the Czech Republic. Those 138 years span a massive upheaval in modern life and its structure, yet Kafka continues to hold sway over us and our collective imaginations. One can explain this fascination easily enough: Kafka tells us parables of the modern world in which we live; nothing fundamental has really changed. His novels and stories are short, disturbing, claustrophobic and hopeless and act as a mirror for an era which so far has contained two world wars and two global pandemics.
Kafka’s relation to the modern world can be put more precisely. He is the writer of alienation and bureaucracy, of the age of the masses and of faceless men of diffuse responsibility and obscure rules. For thinkers like Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin there is a presaging of fascism and the holocaust in his writings. Perhaps because we are not done with this horrific legacy we are not yet done with Kafka. I, however, think Kafka is more than a prophet of destruction or a recounter of alienation. His work does not somehow presage only the modern office or modern genocide. It speaks to a variety of contemporary issues. Kafka is not the writer at the heart of modernism, or ‘modern’ life in some sociological sense, he speaks to us today in his depiction of themes that define our current moment. It is this I hope to explain in what follows.
First a digression. Today also marks, give or take a month, three years since the publication of one of my first essays at 3:AM Magazine, called The Sōseki of Prague. Kafka is the author I wrote about first and the one I write about most, he is the one I return to again and again. I have written, so far, four essays on Kafka. The first, mentioned above, is a whimsical piece. The second, Kafka in Amerika, came out exactly two years ago and looks at Kafka’s Amerika and attempts to connect it to what defines the United States as a cultural and geographical location. In writing that piece I first had a thought that Kafka resonates with our current era in many ways, that he is the writer of modern life in the sense described above. In the next two pieces I tackled animal ethics, climate change and the pandemic. It was a surprise to find Kafka could still speak to us on such topics almost one hundred years after his writings were first published, though this itself could be a sign of a Kafkaesque stagnation.
Thinking about this further, I think there are three themes in Kafka that converge with our modern lives. In descending order of plausibility they are: inaction, race and globalization. We will deal with the most plausible first.
In the last two pieces I wrote on Kafka, inaction became a major theme. It is a common motif in Kafka, exemplified for me by the passage in The Castle in which K. - the story’s protagonist - waits to intercept the castle official Klamm. He waits and waits and does nothing:
the wait was longer than K. had expected. He had long since finished eating, it was bitterly cold, dusk had given way to total darkness, and still Klamm did not come. ‘Could be a while yet’, a rough voice said suddenly, so close that K. jumped. It was the driver, who was stretching and yawning noisily, as if he had just woken up. ‘What could be a long while yet?’ asked K., not ungrateful for the interruption, because the continual silence and suspense had been tedious. ‘Before you go away,’ said the driver.
K. waits but Klamm never arrives. K.’s plan depended on doing nothing and so it fails. Inaction is a great theme in Kafka. His protagonists are uncertain, decide to wait, or if they do act, act meekly and ineffectively. There is perhaps no better examples then his short story Before the Law in which a man from the country comes across a gate blocked by a doorkeeper. The doorkeeper says the man may not pass, and that he is only the first of many, increasingly powerful, doorkeepers. The man waits to be admitted, tries to bribe the doorkeeper, and only when he is dying does the doorkeeper reveal that the door was for him and him alone; with his death the door will now be shut.
Although I am not a political pessimist, I find that modern politics is struggling with an issue of political inaction. For partisans, or better yet polemicists, of labor politics it is the fall of union membership the signals an era of declining political power. When it comes to the pressing issue of climate change and at the very least a move towards renewable energy, progress is being made, but at a glacial pace that is condemning certain parts of the world to unnecessary suffering and injustice. In fact, the last few years signal a horrific transition to a new era of constant disaster, as indicated by the worsening heatwaves, fire seasons, and natural disasters the world over. Even the seemingly manageable hotter summers are disastrous. Heat kills, and many cities based in typically cooler climates lack the infrastructure and architecture to deal with this shift in intensity. Think also of issues around Animal Rights and what is to be done in the face of undeniable and objective cruelty. Every day we slaughter more than 200 million animals for food, killing them just as horrifically as we keep them. These horrors are not what one thinks of as one sits down to eat.
This problem of inaction was, I think, heightened during the pandemic. The United States is yet to come to terms with just what has happened, and in this light the conspiratorial chattering that has accompanied the whole affair – and indeed much of US politics – is perfectly understandable. When one is out on one’s own, everything is a threat. The United States is a vast wilderness, and like many wildernesses a novel disease has infinite potential for devastation. That 600,000 Americans died in the course of a single year from a disease that, although we did not know how to treat, we knew how to minimize the impact of, will be a horror to be worked through by that nation’s citizens. Part of the issue though, is that for anyone imbedded in American life, it was unclear what to do in the face of such devastation. Those who took the novel coronavirus seriously tend towards hermetically sealing themselves off from the rest of the country and polity. Under such conditions it was unclear how to protest or agitate such that those in power would do something about the crisis. As I wrote in my piece on reading Kafka during the pandemic, it was as if there was some kind of mysterious law that prevented action and solidarity. However, it is also worth noting that these 600,000 deaths are not distributed evenly across the population. Service workers and the poor, the elderly and infirm, the unhealthy and indebted were all more likely to succumb to this disease. Its effects were a mirror to the divided society in which we live. This too is Kafka’s insight, that the world is hostile to certain figures. The Castle looms large as obvious example of this, and I am always reminded of the horrifying passage about how easily the Assistants move through the snow blanketing the village beneath the castle while K. struggles to make any progress whatsoever. When we read Kafka today it is worth remembering that we are not always the protagonist.
Inaction is easy enough. It might be surprising to say that there is some hint of the question of race and identity in Kafka. Amidst protests over racist police killings and hysteria about critical race theory the politics of race is inescapable in modern life. Thinking about Kafka and race is a strange move, and one that risks parochialism. On this question I am a partisan of Mark Christian Thompson’s work Kafka’s Blues which argues Kafka is a thinker of blackness and the immigrant experience. For Thompson Amerika, and the story of Karl Rossman, newly arrived, mistreated and lost in a strange land, is in fact a mirror of America’s race relations, past and present. Thompson tracks down a source for this, a book called Amerika: Heute und Morgan (America: Today and Tomorrow) that Kafka would have read, and focuses on Amerika’s original German title: Der Verschollene. Thompson goes on to connect the word Scholle with the history of both slavery and immigration in America. Scholle, according to Thompson, implies both being lost and grounded. Are not those who came to America, freely or otherwise, both lost and looking for a new ground, and new home? Thompson’s argument is underdetermined, but it can be said that a sense of hostility and alienation is part and parcel of the experience of racism and colonialism that afflicts the modern world. The psyche destruction racism and colonialism bring, however, cuts both ways. Frantz Fanon was keen to point this out in his work on colonialism, but James Baldwin too was aware that the American history of racism is a history that entangles black and white Americans alike. This point is worth remembering before we object that Kafka’s alienation is universal and would thus miss the specificity of the experience of blackness.
Thompson makes much of the nautical metaphors and ideas that abound in Amerika, tying them to the image of the slave trader ships that carried swathes of humanity from Africa to America and in doing so carved out the sinister riverbeds through which recent history has run its bloody course. Yet the nautical metaphors do not just reach backwards into the past, they reach forward into the future. An age of refugees and immigrants, a world beginning when Kafka was writing, and firmly established by the upheavals Kafka did not live to see, is also indicated by these nautical metaphors and this deep sense of a hostile world that pervades Kafka’s work.
This brings me to perhaps the least plausible way in which Kafka’s work is connect to modern life. My current hypothesis is that there is something in Kafka that can be connected to the idea of globalization. This idea emerged as I was writing my first essay on Kafka which was an investigation of passage in Japanese novelist Natsume Sōseki’s The Gate which was eerily reminiscent of the infamous Kafka story Before the Law. In my investigations I was unable to establish if Sōseki had read Kafka or vice versa. What was intriguing was a moment around 1902 when Kafka and Sōseki were almost on the same continent. Between 1901-903 Sōseki was in Britain attending the University of College London as Japan’s first English literary scholar. That this was even possible was part of the process of a world transforming into the globalized world we know today, a world of mass cultural exchange and immigration. This idea obviously is tied into Amerika, but I also wonder if the horror of Kafka’s claustrophobic set pieces reaches maximum effect against the background of a world that is, for those of us wealthy and lucky enough to read and pontificate about Kafka, essentially open. This is the most speculative part of my argument about Kafka’s resonance with the modern world, and there only hints at how such a moment of transformation may have inflected his writings.
Although these three themes or connections seem disparate, they might be connected. They are obviously fragments of modern life and they go together in this trivial way. However, I think they feed into each other. Globalization brings with it not the origin of ethnic conflict – this seems to me a historically untenable claim – but a transformation and modernization of it. Inaction is a problem of a world that is both massively interconnected yet larger than ever before. Climate change is often said to have this character, a global problem with few good local solutions; our only salvation is total transformation. Inaction is also a problem of division both internal and external and thus comes back, however tangentially, to the question of race and alienation raised above. It seems like perhaps all these themes can be ciphered through Kafka, that his thematics are buried in the foundations of modern life. This, at least, is my hypothesis. Perhaps one day I will find an answer. Or perhaps I never will; some things should remain buried.