Reading group: searching for meaning in Kafka

All month, the Reading group has been hunting for meaning in Kafka. This isn’t an unusual thing to do. Oceans of ink have been spilled on the same subject over the years.

But it is possibly a daft thing to do. As plenty of commenters below the line have pointed out, the defining qualities of Kafka’s writing include: uncertainty, confusion, obscurity, elusive truths, concealed falsehoods, hidden meanings, meaningless revelations. Now that I’ve written that, I even worry that applying the words “defining qualities” to writing so elusive, changeable and slippery may be inappropriate.

Then again, another appealing aspect of Kafka’s writing is that it is open to contradiction. He doesn’t shy from self-delusion. His characters continue to inch their way up cliff faces, even though there may well be no summit. What’s more, although finding a true definition for “Kafkaesque” may be a futile task, it’s also an enjoyable and enlightening occupation. We’ve had some quite brilliant suggestions about the great writer’s intentions here on the Reading group. To try to include all of them would be yet another hopeless endeavour. So I’ll just suggest reading over the past discussions, and limit myself to quoting one marvellous post from theorbys:

Kafka is writing about our living in a world that is too vast and complex for us to understand by any means at all, religion, science, maths, art, or psychology (and in which the functioning of our very minds are also beyond our comprehension) … our ideas of a transcendental order of any kind, which we often believe supply an uber justification and order to this world, are even more incomprehensible because the transcendental order is absolutely incomprehensible to us. Eg why in the world does God kill so many babies, if God is the transcendental supreme? It just can’t make sense, but we have to live through it all anyway, and it is far from simple. The darkness in our minds and our social orders, literal, moral, or whatever else are still there and have to be lived through with varying degrees of awareness and sensitivity by all of us. We can make all sorts of choices, but can’t change the basic situation.

Whether he wanted to be one or not, Kafka is a great artist: he can’t solve the problem, but he can write about it brilliantly if necessarily obscurely. I think the basic premise that his writings are formatted as nightmares is correct. That makes the nightmarishness a literary quality, but it also corresponds to the way things really are, to our inner experience that just won’t stay inner. Kafka … has Gregor Samsa awake into the nightmare, the way Joseph K does in The Trial, because the nightmare is what is real. Humans have been able to act like the Samsa family, positive and hopeful about life, but humanity has never been able to quite shake the feeling that this is just not quite all real, even if we can’t seem to wake up (to use the dream/nightmare metaphor). Kafka as an artist has perfectly expressed this in a particularly dark and forceful manner. The Samsa family will go on, will be happy or unhappy, Grete get married and have kids, Mama and Papa will be proud grandparents, and none will have a thought about nightmarishness, not even after their experiences. But Gregor – he is the Kafka reader in the family.

Although in reality Kafka’s own sisters did encounter the nightmare, murdered in the gas chambers by the Nazi regime, which I doubt Kafka would ever have foreseen. But he did want to say that the social and/or transcendental “order” could break down in anyone’s life (eg Gregor) from one moment to the next, and the nightmares irrupt into one’s life at any time.

The idea that Kafka describes waking nightmares makes sense to me – it resonates.

Also, as I’ve read through Metamorphosis and Other Stories (and since moved on to The Trial), I’ve started to notice another aspect of Kafka’s unsettling worldview. The problem many of Kafka’s characters face isn’t just that they are overwhelmed by forces beyond their control. It’s also that they are bad at helping themselves.

Many of the definitions of “Kafkaesque” that we hit upon earlier this month can be seen clearly in the stories. The malevolent bureaucracies, the pitiless killing machines, the cruelty of fate. If Kafka’s characters are paranoid, it’s because everyone’s after them.

But there’s another layer of tragedy. The poignancy of the stories is often most deeply felt because these characters fail to save themselves, because they let themselves down, and because, as Neil Young puts it, they keep fucking up.

OK, it doesn’t seem to be Gregor Samsa’s fault that he’s been turned into a giant cockroach. But he isn’t simply unlucky. He also keeps on putting his horrible little insect feet right in it. Possibly the most agonising moment in the story comes when he disturbs his sister’s piano recital, creeps out into the open in front of the lodgers his family are so desperately trying to keep happy, and humiliates everyone. Similarly, Karl in The Stoker consistently says the wrong thing, while Georg goads his father into damning him. Kafka’s leads are their own worst advocates – as poor old K shows so literally in The Trial. He fails to organise his own defence, alienates those who might help him, is diverted from the best course by women, by his own lassitude and ill temper.

Think too of the Hunger Artist. As far as he is concerned, the world is to blame: first for refusing to believe that he can starve for more than 40 days, later for its indifference. “It was impossible to fight this incomprehension, this world of incomprehension,” he laments. It’s the classic cry of the Kafka protagonist. But we know that he is also partly the agent of his own despair. He’s the one who refuses to eat, after all.

Even the traveller in The Penal Colony is, for want of a better word, culpable. His failure to intervene in the cruel justice of “the Harrow” involves him in its outcome, not matter how he tries to reason things out:

The traveller reflected: intervening in other people’s affairs is always fraught with risks. He wasn’t a citizen of the penal colony, or the state to which it belonged. If he wanted to condemn this execution, or even to seek to obstruct it, he laid himself open to an objection: you’re a stranger, what do you know?

In the context, that seems pathetic. An innocent man is about to be carved up in front of him: so much for moral relativism. So much for us, too. Because as readers, we are spectators just like the traveller. We can’t help but see ourselves in his shoes. If we are to cast blame on him, we must also look at ourselves. And this is where Kafka really hits home. When he shows that there are no innocents, he shows us something about ourselves. The chilling truth that he suggests is that we can never be simply victims. We are also part of the problem.