Franz Kafka, Writer of the Absurd, on This Day in History

 

This Day in History: Franz Kafka, regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature, died on this day in 1924. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic. It typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers.

Both Albert Camus and Franz Kafka dealt with the Absurd, but Kafka targeted his idea of the Absurd on bureaucracies, and who has not had puzzling encounters in one form or another when it comes to bureaucracy. The only saving grace in Kafka's dystopia was that the bureaucracy was inefficient. "No one wants to inhabit a Franz Kafka novel. But the surveillance states he describes do have one thing going for them—incompetence. In Kafka’s stories, important forms get lost, permits are unattainable, and bureaucrats fail to do their jobs. Like the main character in Kafka’s unfinished story, “The Castle,” if you were trapped in Kafka’s world you could live your whole life doing nothing but waiting for a permit. But at least you could live. Incompetence creates a little space.

What is terrifying about Orwell’s 1984 is the complete competence of the surveillance state."~Sarah Skwire

Kafka's works recently went online thanks to the National Library of Israel, to which someone brilliantly responded, "If there’s one thing I think we can feel confident in, it’s that Kafka would hate having his work digitized online in a state-run archive run by midlevel bureaucrats of a nationalist state."

Some Kafka Quotes: “I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”

“I am a cage, in search of a bird.”

“A First Sign of the Beginning of Understanding is the Wish to Die.”

“I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.”

“It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves.”

― The Trial

“He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived.”

“In man's struggle against the world, bet on the world.”

“We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.”

“My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted.”

“Logic may indeed be unshakeable, but it cannot withstand a man who is determined to live.”