Strong Words

Is it possible to sum up an author in one short paragraph? Kafka, for example. Well, Franz, I think you’ve already done it. What a master!

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For we are like tree trunks in the snow. In appearance they lie sleekly and a little push should be enough to set them rolling. No, it can’t be done, for they are firmly wedded to the ground. But see, even that is only appearance. (The Trees, in The Complete Short Stories)

An entire oeuvre distilled into this minuscule prose poem. There is The Trial; one’s mode of life disappearing in a moment, to be replaced by another, strange and phantasmagoric. A Hunger Artist suddenly loses popularity. A visitor arrives In the Penal Colony to find a regime that has long since died out - only the torture-machine remains, and falls apart during his visit, killing the last believer. The translation or is that nomenclature - ‘explorer’ - significant, with its suggestion of new ideas that signal a culture’s collapse? Old beliefs have disappeared into dust. Not convinced? On the opposite side we have The Castle; it both governs the village and is impenetrable to it. And do not forget that vast empire which seems to exist on nothing but rumour and faith (it is in The Great Wall of China).

What’s this all about? 

Kafka is writing on fundamentals: the nature of a belief, a culture, a climate of opinion; the zeitgeist. He evokes the atmospheres that determine how times and places think and act. That world of ideas and feelings, unthinking mental habits and self-conscious rituals; Kultur, to use the German. It is a human construction - a social artifice - that can only exist through the activity and consent of its members. As natural as valleys, rivers and plains; as high and as solid as a mountain. Few think to question such ways of life; while the habits are…habits; the rituals as automatic as eating and sleeping. The valleys lose their trees, the river is narrowed, the plains have no fields only houses; yet still the valleys, river, plains, and above all, the mountain remains. We see the occasional stranger. Odd chaps. They want to enter the castle! And why so confused when inside our institutions? It’s just an ordinary courtroom, nothing to be scared about. One day an earthquake shatters the landscape. A strange man has knocked on Joseph K.’s door. Gregor Samsa awakes to find himself a gigantic insect. What seemed like a rock is actually plasticine. This is culture, a form of life; or, on a more personal note, it is one’s place in society, one’s role and persona. Incredibly tough and super-fragile. Lasting for millennia it can vanish in a second. We enter a thousand-year-old church and blow out its last candle.

What’s it all about?

We live in worlds we think are real. They are real. However, some of this reality is made not of material things but of fictions, that last only for as long as we believe in them. Then there are the authors, always writing their new stories….