What makes something "Kafkaesque"? - Noah Tavlin — Transcript

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1. 0:06"Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K.
2. 0:09He knew he had done nothing wrong, but one morning, he was arrested."
3. 0:14Thus begins "The Trial,"
4. 0:16one of author Franz Kafka's most well-known novels.
5. 0:20K, the protagonist, is arrested out of nowhere
6. 0:23and made to go through a bewildering process
7. 0:26where neither the cause of his arrest,
8. 0:28nor the nature of the judicial proceedings
9. 0:31are made clear to him.
10. 0:32This sort of scenario is considered so characteristic of Kafka's work
11. 0:36that scholars came up with a new word for it.
12. 0:40“Kafkaesque” has entered the vernacular to describe unnecessarily complicated
13. 0:44and frustrating experiences;
14. 0:47like being forced to navigate labyrinths of bureaucracy.
15. 0:51But does standing in a long line to fill out confusing paperwork
16. 0:55really capture the richness of Kafka's vision?
17. 0:58Beyond the word's casual use, what makes something Kafkaesque?
18. 1:02Franz Kafka's stories do indeed deal with many mundane and absurd aspects
19. 1:08of modern bureaucracy,
20. 1:09drawn in part from his experience of working as an insurance clerk
21. 1:14in early 20th century Prague.
22. 1:16Many of his protagonists are office workers
23. 1:19compelled to struggle through a web of obstacles
24. 1:22in order to achieve their goals,
25. 1:24and often the whole ordeal turns out to be so disorienting and illogical
26. 1:29that success becomes pointless in the first place.
27. 1:33For example, in the short story, "Poseidon,"
28. 1:35the ancient Greek god is an executive so swamped with paperwork
29. 1:39that he's never had time to explore his underwater domain.
30. 1:43The joke here is that not even a god can handle the amount of paperwork
31. 1:47demanded by the modern workplace.
32. 1:49But the reason why is telling.
33. 1:52He's unwilling to delegate any of the work
34. 1:54because he deems everyone else unworthy of the task.
35. 1:58Kafka's Poseidon is a prisoner of his own ego.
36. 2:03This simple story contains all of the elements
37. 2:05that make for a truly Kafkaesque scenario.
38. 2:08It's not the absurdity of bureaucracy alone,
39. 2:11but the irony of the character's circular reasoning in reaction to it
40. 2:15that is emblematic of Kafka's writing.
41. 2:18His tragicomic stories act as a form of mythology for the modern industrial age,
42. 2:24employing dream logic to explore the relationships
43. 2:27between systems of arbitrary power and the individuals caught up in them.
44. 2:32Take, for example, Kafka's most famous story, "Metamorphosis."
45. 2:36When Gregor Samsa awaken's one morning to find himself transformed
46. 2:40into a giant insect,
47. 2:42his greatest worry is that he gets to work on time.
48. 2:45Of course, this proves impossible.
49. 2:49It was not only the authoritarian realm of the workplace that inspired Kafka.
50. 2:54Some of his protagonists' struggles come from within.
51. 2:57The short story, "A Hunger Artist,"
52. 2:59describes a circus performer whose act consists of extended fasts.
53. 3:05He's upset that the circus master limits these to 40 days,
54. 3:09believing this prevents him from achieving greatness in his art.
55. 3:13But when his act loses popularity,
56. 3:15he is left free to starve himself to death.
57. 3:19The twist comes when he lays dying in anonymity,
58. 3:22regretfully admitting that his art has always been a fraud.
59. 3:25He fasted not through strength of will,
60. 3:28but simply because he never found a food he liked.
61. 3:31Even in "The Trial,"
62. 3:32which seems to focus directly on bureaucracy,
63. 3:35the vague laws and bewildering procedures point to something far more sinister:
64. 3:40the terrible momentum of the legal system proves unstoppable,
65. 3:44even by supposedly powerful officials.
66. 3:48This is a system that doesn't serve justice,
67. 3:50but whose sole function is to perpetuate itself.
68. 3:54What political theorist Hannah Arendt,
69. 3:56writing years after Kafka's death,
70. 3:58would call "tyranny without a tyrant."
71. 4:02Yet accompanying the bleakness of Kafka's stories,
72. 4:05there's a great deal of humor
73. 4:06rooted in the nonsensical logic of the situations described.
74. 4:11So on the one hand, it's easy to recognize the Kafkaesque in today's world.
75. 4:16We rely on increasingly convoluted systems of administration
76. 4:20that have real consequences on every aspect of our lives.
77. 4:25And we find our every word judged by people we can't see
78. 4:29according to rules we don't know.
79. 4:32On the other hand, by fine-tuning our attention to the absurd,
80. 4:36Kafka also reflects our shortcomings back at ourselves.
81. 4:40In doing so, he reminds us that the world we live in is one we create,
82. 4:45and have the power to change for the better.