After a long sabbatical enforced purely by extreme laziness disguised as equally extreme over-workedness, I have finally been motivated to post – about one of the greatest authors of the 20th century. While there are many others who may lay stake to the claim, I feel quite justified in saying that very few of these others had as much mastery of human emotion. As connoisseurs of Indian music say, no song is as melodious, or indeed, pulls at one's heart-strings as fervently, as does a Rafi song that's full of sadness; so too it may be said that Kafka alone, among his peers, has the ability to describe every emotion, in whole and in detail, in such a manner as to leave one spellbound.
Let's be clear – Kafka pulls no punches. He plows the depths of pathos. In some sense, he completes what Thomas Hardy begins – if the lives of Hardy's Jude and Henchard slowly descend unwaveringly into misery and obscurity, their Kafka-created counterparts are already there, leapfrogging more memorable and pleasant times. This isn't more clearly evident than in The Metamorphosis – Kafka's seminal work starts with the following line:
'When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself changed into a monstrous cockroach in his bed'
Neither does Samsa change back into a human at any point in the story, nor does he live happily ever after as do the ever-resilient vermin. That defines Kafka, this use of pain or relative misery as the starting point to his tale – and the end. Of course, his stories do often carry the promise of better times – but as often, they revert to hopelessness. Thou art from despair, and to despair thou wilt return.
At this point, one would just about be ready to dismiss him as an everyday fatalist, or, if one were particularly cruel, as a run-of-the-mill, throw-a-dart-and-you'll-hit-one, pessimist. But, as one would no doubt guess from my tone, one could not be more wrong. Kafka's stories do carry the hope of a change of luck, of a turn of fate, of the imminence of 'a final improvement in one's condition'. Whether they do (they don't) is a trivial matter, what leaves the reader struck is the manner in which Kafka follows and describes the protagonist's thoughts. He seems to have what it takes to find his way through the deepest and darkest labyrinthine passages of the human mind, and he isn't afraid of what he finds in them. Zen masters say that events are not happy or unhappy – both feelings are in the mind. This platitude, in a sense, symbolizes most of Kafka's stories (not all of them have the hero wake up to numerous tiny, vibrating legs). Events happen at the beginning of the story – they slowly and gradually affect the subjects, as the latter succumb to their thoughts.
And they slowly affect us too. Most readers, I'm sure, would come away with the opinion that Kafka's stories, with their minimalistic plots, are intensely allegorical. And in the vein of the Emperor and his new clothes, they would each pretend that they understood his work. But the truth, as Michael Hoffman puts it, is usually that 'We obscurely feel, we bet, we know that there is something more going on in a story, something probably to do with sex or violence or families or metaphysics, but we're damned if we know what it is.' The meta-story is sometimes relatively easy to decipher, as in The Judgment or An Old Journal; often, it is too abstruse for ordinary mortals.
While he doesn't shirk any morbidities in his writings (The Metamorphosis,
In the Penal Colony), he does, from time to time, allow himself to indulge in a little humor (For the Consideration of Amateur Jockeys), which makes him somewhat easier to stomach (but not too much). Most times, one enjoys, nay, is awe-struck by the manner in which he describes the dissolution of hope, and cruel disbandment of aspirations. As he says, 'There is infinite hope … but not for us'.
