Kafka’s world of despair and our reality

“One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.”

This is how the Franz Kafka short story ‘The Metamorphosis’ begins. In the story, a clothes salesman named Gregor Samsa turns into a bug overnight. He is still human from the inside, but from the outside, he is an oversized insect lying on its back on a bed with its eight legs flailing in the air.

From the very first line, Kafka presents a plot verging on the absurd. For the rest of the story, Kafka doesn’t explain how Samsa transformed into a bug nor does he bother to come up with a cure to rid Samsa of this bizarre condition.

The story instead focused on how Samsa’s parents and his sister react to the situation. His family at first were compassionate to Samsa, but as time wore on they also seemingly forgot that there is a human behind the veil of an insect. In the end, when Samsa simply disappears, they were not sad but relieved.

This story encapsulates what makes Kafka stand out as an author. He never shied away from the use of surrealism. The worlds he created in his stories were never too detached from reality, a reader could easily identify different facets of it with what he sees around him.

However, in majority of Kafka’s stories, the protagonists are bound by some unique condition, either imposed upon them by a higher authority or something that intrinsically exists in them. And no matter what they do, they can never break free from those bindings. They inevitably succumb to their fate. In the end, the authority always wins.

A great example of the system always coming out on top in Kafka’s writings is his novel ‘The Trial’.

The story begins with Josef K., a clerk leading a normal life, getting arrested out of the blue. What was his crime? He didn’t know.

Throughout the novel, Josef keeps asking everyone, what exactly is his crime. But no one gives him a clear answer. To fight for his innocence, he pleaded his case to several shadowy authorities and stood on trial in secret courts. But no matter how much he claimed innocence, it didn’t matter.

Everyone, from the wardens who first accosted him to the invisible judge presiding over the case, everyone had made up their minds. Josef is guilty.

The story ends with Josef getting stabbed in the chest with a knife as punishment for a crime that was still a mystery to him.

Kafka wrote this novel in 1914-15 and it was published in 1925, after his death at the age of just 41.

It has been more than a century since Kafka wrote the novel. But the sinister bureaucracy and the helplessness of the common people against the all-encompassing system is eerily similar to our current reality.

We in Bangladesh live in a society where enforced disappearances are a reality. This is a country where a draconian act like Digital Security Act exists which can be used to lock away anyone for however long if they say or write something that the authorities deem ‘untrue’.

The common people are helpless against the system. Although the law says that the burden of proof lies on the accuser, when it’s the authority laying the charges, the accused are the ones who have to prove their innocence. The accused have to fight within the system to prove that the people running the system are wrong.

The way Kafka portrays the helplessness of Gregor Samsa and Joseph K. leaves the readers exasperated. It’s something every literature fan should experience.

However, reading Kafka’s writing is not an easy task. Kafka wrote in the German language. So most of the world has read the translated versions of his writing. In literature, meaning often gets lost in translation. Moreover, Kafka’s unique aphorisms and unconventional sentence structures make it even more difficult for the readers to decipher the meaning of his writing. Only seasoned readers with ample patience can read Kafka and enjoy it.

So in that sense, Bangladeshis can count themselves lucky. They don’t have to read his writings to experience the helplessness of his characters because they are practically living in Kafka’s world of despair.