An oft-told story: A young man gets up in the morning to see two strangers on either side of his bed. He asks them who they are. They reply they have come to arrest him. He asks why. They give no reason. They arrest him and a trial is held. Even during court proceedings, he doesn’t know why they’ve arrested him. One thing leads to another and the story assumes phantasmagoric proportions.

This is Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial in a nutshell… sort of. The story has a ring of truth to it. Call it relevant to our times or use the phrase ‘art imitating life’ to describe it. It won’t do justice to it. The novel was written a little more than a century ago. In the context of the 21st century — and I’m not alluding to Pakistani society alone, but the reference is to all those parts of the world that are hit by social unrest or political tumult — the story is also factually correct. We live in constant fear, sometimes for no reason and oftentimes for reasons that have nothing to do with us. No one can resist the bureaucratic forces that govern us. We all know who those forces are and how they operate. And they are merciless.

This is the reason Kafka strikes a chord with writers, thinkers and philosophers. The fear of persecution is a subject that has several layers of meaning, because it carries an element of the unseen. The unseen is both intimidating and fascinating. It has creative gravitas.

June 3 is Prague-born writer Franz Kafka’s 94th death anniversary. Books & Authors reflects on his creative legacy

Kafka’s countryman Milan Kundera — arguably one of the greatest living authors — in his groundbreaking thesis The Art of the Novel created the epithet ‘Kafkan’ to underline the drift of Kafka’s work. It implies, as one critic elucidated, the world as a trap in which “the comedy is not the counterpoint to the tragedy.” To Kundera, Kafka — the author of masterpieces such as The Castle, The Trial and The Metamorphosis — gave us the possibilities that the genre of the novel can explore; possibilities that a bureaucratised world entails, or lacks. Kundera has also said about Kafka that he “transformed the profoundly antipoetic material into the great poetry of the novel.”

What is antipoetic material? Poetry exploits the possibilities of a language’s rhythm. In order to create rhythm, the poet uses words or phrases which flow with the kind of movement that defies the prosaic aspects of life. The word antipoetic doesn’t suggest ‘absence’ of poetry; rather, it hints at the resistance against the poetic, the rhythmic. A bureaucratic system attempts to achieve exactly that: break the natural rhythm patterns of life.

This is aptly highlighted in Kafka’s most discussed novel The Metamorphosis in which a young salesman, Gregor Samsa, wakes up in his bed to discover that he has turned into a huge insect. He doesn’t believe it. It’s all a nightmare for him. It is not. Once he accepts the reality, that he is now an insect, he steps out of his room to carry on with the life that he has thus far been living. But now the world around Samsa looks at him differently, because the rhythm has been broken — nay, ruptured.

Urdu short story writer Naiyer Masud, who passed away last year, was an admirer of Kafka. He translated some of his pieces into Urdu under the title Kafka Ke Afsane. Discussing The Metamorphosis in the preface to the book, Masud argued, “The fact that Samsa has turned into an insect doesn’t just petrify Samsa or his parents, but shocks the reader. However, once he gives in to the reality that he is no more a human being, the transformation, the metamorphosis, doesn’t remain an important issue.” The acceptability of the broken rhythm of life!  

Wait. Are things that simple? No. Can there be more than that? Yes: a bureaucratised world that exists within a person. This is the world that doesn’t allow us to get rid of our fears, because of the coexistence of certain instincts that a single person has, causing one conflict (within that person) to rear its head after the other. Kafka’s story A Hunger Artist epitomises this thought: it pivots around an artist who fasts for a number of days on the trot. His act is interspersed with periods of recovery after which he gets in his cage (yes, he gets encaged to perform) to go on a hunger spree. Then comes a time when the fasting act goes out of vogue, and the spectators’ interest in the artist wanes. He dies, only to be replaced by a panther. 

Mind you, Kafka is not being sympathetic to the artist. He is being brutally honest about the self-realisation (in modern-day context: self-policing) that straitjackets a person. He can get out of it, but chooses not to. Those who act as spectators are no different either. 

 PS: Haruki Murakami’s novel Kafka on the Shore has nothing to do with the Czech author. Or is that a false claim? It is not. Perhaps it does.

The writer is a member of staff

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, June 3rd, 2018