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Franz Kafka and the truth we are afraid of
Summary
Kafka’s sceptre casts a long shadow on Asian writers, including in India, where his novels have been translated into Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Tamil and Malayalam
In June 1924, as Franz Kafka—tubercular, obscure, and a month short of his 41st birthday—lay dying in a sanatorium in Austria, he had no idea of the eventful afterlife he’d go on to have. A century later, Kafka still haunts our imagination, immortalised in the word “Kafkaesque", liberally invoked across cultures and languages to describe the systemic absurdities, ironies, tragedies and cruelties that plague the human condition. Kafka’s writing continues to inspire a burgeoning ecosystem of films, books and artwork, bolstering a bustling tourism industry in Prague, the city of his birth.
Kafka’s literary genius is, no doubt, at the centre of his enduring global appeal. But there is also a certain je ne sais quoi about his mystique, an ineffable quality that “makes Kafka Kafka", as scholar Karolina Watroba writes in her recent book, Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka.
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Starting from Oxford, where the bulk of Kafka’s papers are kept at the Bodleian Library and where Watroba is a fellow of All Souls College, travelling to Germany, the Czech Republic and, curiously, Korea, she undertakes a journey to trace the legacy of the writer and decode his (often peculiar) impact on the world, 100 years after his untimely passing.
Watroba begins her quest by grappling with a knotty question that scholars of Kafka continue to reckon with: Who does Kafka belong to?
Born in 1883 in Prague, which was then a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Kafka grew up speaking Czech, German and Yiddish. He chose to write in German as the language “carried more cultural cachet than Czech…and gave Kafka access to a much bigger and more prestigious literary market," Watroba writes. Later in life, Kafka went on to learn Yiddish and expressed a desire to move to Palestine, though he was neither a militant Zionist nor interested in anchoring his identity in his Jewishness alone. It was his friend and literary executor, Max Brod, who made much more of Kafka’s religious origins than the writer did during his lifetime. By the time Kafka died, the Austro-Hungarian empire had fallen, and four different cultures—German, Austrian, Czech and Jewish—were soon at loggerheads over their claims on him.
Such contentious questions of belonging and appropriation are not unfamiliar to readers in the subcontinent, where Partition forced writers such as Saadat Hasan Manto and Qurratulain Hyder to choose sides and flatten their identities. Even though cultural citizenship still remains a heated topic, thanks to translations and the world wide web, it is impossible for one party to exert an exclusive claim on any author.
As Watroba shows, Germany and the Czech Republic may be the chief opponents in the battle for Kafka’s legacy, followed by Israel, his influence runs across much less expected terrains, like India, Japan, China and Korea. Even as Czech political leaders like Antonín Novotný and Václav Havel tried to co-opt Kafka into their nationalist agenda, French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre demanded, in 1962, that Kafka be “demilitarised". Like all great writers, Kafka belonged to no one and everyone.
Such was the influence of Kafka’s writing that he was being translated into Japanese, Korean and Chinese a decade after his death in these countries—in 1933, 1955 and 1966, respectively. Between 1960 and 2003, his unfinished novel The Castle was rendered into Korean more than 37 times. In 2010, Seagull Books published an English translation of writer Matéi Visniec’s novel, Mr K Released, in India (the only publisher to have done so), a sequel to The Trial by Kafka, featuring its central character Josef K, who, for reasons unfathomable to him, is arrested one fine morning for unspecified crimes. Those with a passing awareness of the recent history of India and other Asian nations like Japan, China and Korea, with the shadow of authoritarian regimes looming over them, will understand the attraction of Kafka in such societies. Even in the Middle East, where Kafka is being reimagined as an icon of Jewishness, his “work is part of the Arab political lexicon," historian Jens Hanssen writes, “precisely because many Arabs feel they have experienced his fiction as reality."
The key to Kafka’s persistence in the collective subconscious of the 21st century is explained in part by Hanssen’s statement. A hundred years after his death, Kafka’s fiction remains a conduit not only for the dysfunctional sociopolitical realities of our lives, but also for the inner truth that so many of us are unaware of, or afraid to access. As the 20-year-old Kafka once said to a friend, “Some books seem like a key to unfamiliar rooms in one’s own castle." Literature, Kafka believed, was the panacea for life’s pains. His writing is informed by a similar cathartic power.
Indeed, Kafka’s belief finds a wide resonance among his readers, especially if they encounter him for the first time through his best-known masterpiece, The Metamorphosis. Although told from the point of view of a man, a working professional at that, the appeal of the story isn’t in the specificities of the tragedy that befalls Gregor Samsa. Rather, it transcends his personal circumstances to deal with universal feelings of exclusion and alienation. Small wonder, Samsa’s confinement became a symbolic representation of our lives during the covid-19 lockdown, his rejection by his family compared to the fate of immigrants in Britain under Brexit.
Samsa’s reach extends to other cultures as well, far from Europe. The protagonist of Korean writer Han Kang’s International Booker Prize-winning novel, The Vegetarian (2015), aspires to a state of transformation that alludes to his fate. While Samsa woke up one fine morning as a monstrous bug against his wishes, Yeong-hye in Kang’s novel deliberately gives up meat with the hope of turning into a tree. In fact, Kang later admitted her debt to Kafka in an interview. Like Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, who named one of his novels after the writer (Kafka on the Shore, translated in 2005), Kafka’s sceptre casts a long shadow on Asian writers, including in India, where his novels have been translated into Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Tamil and Malayalam, even adapted into Marathi for the stage.
Personally, as a teenager dealing with complicated family situations, I found solace in Kafka’s fiction in high school. My introduction to his labyrinthine imagination was through The Metamorphosis, a book that propelled me to learn German, one that I still re-read every few years. With each reading, Gregor Samsa’s story keeps yielding fresh layers of meaning, insight and humour. But increasingly, it gives me a steely resilience to accept my isolation from, and belonging to, the world I live in. I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling this way.
Somak Ghoshal is a writer based in Delhi.
