Kafka and Violence of Modernity

Ramin Jahanbegloo

In her obituary for Franz Kafka, Milena Jesenska sketched him in the following words: “He was a hermit, a man of insight who was frightened by life… He saw the world as being full of invisible demons which assail and destroy defenseless man… All his works describe the terror of mysterious misconceptions and guiltless guilt in human beings.” Kafka used to say of himself that he was “ a nihilistic thought that came into God’s head.” Nihilism is certainly part of Kafka’s crucial notion of “violence”, where Kafka’s genius exposes many shades between the individual and the work of repression and terror. The world of Kafka is that of shabby and musty offices and registries where the dark side of modernity is exposed in terms of decay, punishment and violence. Kafka’s works presents a sickness of modernity where, as Walter Benjamin says, “we can no longer speak of wisdom. Only the products of its decay remain.” As such, in Kafka’s writing the gestures of violence are mixed with the secrecy of places and the solitude of the individuals. For Kafka, the solitude is not only a state of living alone, but that of being lost in the modern world. It is an enduring condition of emotional distress in his characters who feel estranged, misunderstood or rejected by others. For a Kafkaesque individual evil is everywhere, and redemption is inaccessible. Let us take Kafka’s The Trial, which is considered as his blackest work. It is the story of Joseph K., an able and conscientious bank official who is awakened one day by several men, who arrest him at his house. The investigation in the magistrate's court turns into a squalid farce, the charge against him is never defined, and from this point the courts take no further initiative. He appeals to intermediaries whose advice and explanations produce new bewilderment. He is finally executed while he is still looking around desperately for help. In The Trial, Franz Kafka conveys his personal views of the corrupt and unjust judicial and political system in which he lived, while he also illustrates a strikingly accurate omen of totalitarian regimes. After reading The Trial, one may think that the story was written in Nazi Germany or in Stalin’s Russia as the treatment of the character Joseph K. parallels much of what happened in Europe during the first half of twentieth century. However, Kafka’s nightmarish description of mysterious Courts and absurd laws remind us of some judiciary systems in today’s world. The violence represented by these absurd laws is exemplified not only by the practice of injustice but mainly by the fact that the judiciary has implanted itself in every aspect of society, and there is no escaping it. The way Kafka describes the offices of the Court, being in poor states of repair and with a bad quality of air, brings the reader to understand that the system is arbitrary and unfathomable. There is a constant fog surrounding the offices, which clearly indicates how, clouded the visions of this Court and judicial system are. What Kafka shows us is that innocence is a concept which is of no importance in a world where the main goal is to alienate the individual from the rest of the society. As the priest, who is actually the prison chaplain, says in the story, “It is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary” What is necessary is to accept the absurd process of being guilty without knowing what the guilt is. Actually, the tile of Kafka’s novel in German is not The Trial , but Der Prozess, which reminds us that the trial is in reality a process, where “ The verdict is not suddenly arrived at, the proceedings only gradually merge into the verdict.” The judiciary described by Kafka is a staged, artificial system, partially frightening and partially comic and absurd which as K. concludes, “It turns lying into a universal principle.” What Kafka shows his reader in The Trial is that truth and existence mutually exclude one another. Even if Kafka’s heroes believe somehow in freedom they cannot have any conception of it because they exist in a world of lie and violence. They feel imprisoned on this earth which is shrinking and becoming smaller every day. The only progress in Kafka’s closed world is the metamorphosis of a human being into an insect as it happens in his Metamorphosis.  The Metamorphosis opens  with Gregor Samsa waking up to find that he has been transformed into a ghastly giant bug, and must figure out how he is going to get to work and continue living. This ambiguity of existence in The Metamorphosis corresponds to the ambiguity of meaning in The Trial, where the judicial system is isolated, incomprehensible and irrelevant to Joseph K. and utterly unhelpful to his search for truth and meaning. In The Metamorphosis, Kafka shows us another form of violence, which is based on the idea that our human lives are transitory and our fortunes subject to the whims of fate. Gregor Samsa's metamorphosis calls into question all the assumptions of our daily lives: that success and appearance and social position matter. What ultimately kills Gregor Samsa is not the physical experience of becoming an insect; it is people's cruelty to him as a result. As we interpret The Metamorphosis, we should remember that Kafka himself wrestled with social life. Milena Jesenska explains Kafka’s sensitivity in a letter written in 1920 to Max Brod: “We are capable of living because at some time or other we took refuge in lies, in blindness, in enthusiasm, in optimism, in some conviction or others, in pessimism or something of that sort. But he (Kafka) has never escaped to any such sheltering refuge, none at all. He is absolutely incapable of living, just as he is incapable of getting drunk.”  In The Metamorphosis, Kafka explores how our self-identity is construed by our role in society and especially how other people treat us. In this story, the body is thoroughly changed, but the mind remains exactly as it is. Samsa has to cope with this change. He has to work with his horrible effect on his family. His family comes to despise him and hate him. Gregor dies not as a vermin, but as a human being thinking of his family thus ending the long decline that began when his father had injured him. “He remembered his family with deep feelings of love. In this business, his own thought that he had to disappear was, if possible, even more decisive than his sister’s. He remained in this state of empty and peaceful reflection until the tower clock struck three in the morning. From the window he witnessed the beginning of the general dawning outside. Then without willing it, his head sank all the way down, and from his nostrils his last breath flowed weakly out.” The violence in The Metamorphosis is as severe and tragic as in The Trial.

Kafka wrote, “Man cannot live without permanent trust in something indestructible in himself, and at the same time that indestructible something as well as his trust in it may remain permanently concealed from him.” With Kafka we live in a boundlessly deceitful world ruled by evil demons which live in our spheres of experience with the world. That is why in Kafka’s novels there is no such division between the outside world and the inner experience of the individual. In Kafka’s world the individual is confronted with an incomprehensible and absurd violence as much as he has to submit himself to an unknown fear. In other words, the individual’s life is in grip of a power. This power widens from the privacy of the family circle to society as a whole. In Kafka, there is a permanent analogy between the paternal power and the penal power. There is a story about Franz Kafka and his younger friend running into Hermann Kafka leaving his shop in Prague. As they drew near him, Hermann asked Franz Kafka to go home. In a whisper to his friend, Franz explained: “My father, he is worried about me.” And he added: “Love often wears the face of violence.” Also, in his famous hundred -page Letter to his father, which he wrote when he was 36, Kafka affirms “My writing was about you, all I did there was lament what I couldn't lament at your breast. It was an intentionally drawn-out farewell from you, and though it was really forced by you, it proceeded in the direction I determined.” Needless to say, Kafka’s mother intercepted the letter, and Kafka writes The Castle (the only book-length work published after the letter to Hermann)  which is free of any explicit paternal struggle, a theme certainly dominant in other major works like The Metamorphosis or  Amerika. The Castle is the story of K, the unwanted Land Surveyor who is never to be admitted to the Castle nor accepted in the village, and yet cannot go home. The most powerful official of the Castle is called Klamm suggesting silence and oppression. However, the messenger of the Castle goes by the name of Barnabas, which means the son of consolation. This was a name given by the Apostles to Joses that he had earned by his example. Thus, the first thing we learn about Barnabas is that as a believer he exhorted, encouraged and comforted others. Kafka portrays Barnabas as a messenger of hope in a world of absurd rules exemplified by the Castle. As in The Trial in The Castle written in 1922 and published posthumously in 1926, Kafka shows his reader that regardless of who or what is in control of the Castle and of the village the power structures are kept in place by the pervasive fear of a ubiquitous bureaucratic system and by the threat of a punishment that is seldom actually administered or experienced. In Kafka’s The Castle, power does not emanate from a single individual or site, but in the multiple interactions between the villagers and the authorities and between the villagers themselves. The Castle represents for Kafka a model of dehumanization, bureaucratization, and authoritarianism. Moreover, the darkness surrounding the Castle and the joyless atmosphere of the village further support the notion that the effectiveness of the power held by the Castle is felt rather than seen. However, the existence of an all-seeing observer foregrounds the radical need for the internalization of rules and self-vigilance as practiced in totalitarian societies. Once again, Kafka describes the nightmare of modern bureaucracy wedded to the chilling madness of techno-industrial civilization. Though the literature of Franz Kafka cannot be reduced to a political doctrine of any kind, Kafka’s political attitude and his skepticism towards all political parties and institutions is perhaps best expressed in this description of marching workers from his Diaries: “There are the secretaries, bureaucrats, professional politicians and all the modern sultans for whom they are paving the way to power.” What Kafka reveals us creates is an awareness that, in modernity, power as violence is intimately bound to both law and justice. Just as power can be the source of violence, law and justice also share this ambiguous inheritance. But everyone strives to attain the Law as Law is the mediator of justice and power. In The Problem of Our Laws, Kafka situates the laws as secondary to the interpretations of it. “Our laws”, Kafka writes, “are not generally known; they are kept secret by the small group of nobles who rule us. We are convinced that these ancient laws are scrupulously administered; nevertheless, it is an extremely painful thing to be ruled by laws that one does not know.” Kafka is saying that there is no law outside of its interpretation. In stories like The Penal Colony, The Castle, and of course, The Trial, Kafka’s characters are trapped in a system of rules and laws they know very little about. Within Kafka's famous novel, The Trial, there is another story, entitled “Before the Law.” This is what we read:

“BEFORE THE LAW stands a doorkeeper. To this doorkeeper there comes a man from the country and prays for admittance to the Law. But the doorkeeper says that he cannot grant admittance at the moment. The man thinks it over and then asks if he will be allowed in later. "It is possible," says the doorkeeper, "but not at the moment." Since the gate stands open, as usual, and the doorkeeper steps to one side, the man stoops to peer through the gateway into the interior. Observing that, the doorkeeper laughs and says: "If you are so drawn to it, 'just try to go in despite my veto. But take note: I am powerful. And I am only the least of the doorkeepers. From hall to hall there is one doorkeeper after another, each more powerful than the last. The third doorkeeper is already so terrible that even I cannot bear to look at him." These are difficulties the man from the country has not expected; the Law, he thinks, should surely be accessible at all times and to everyone, but as he now takes a closer look at the doorkeeper in his fur coat, with his big sharp nose and long, thin, black Tartar beard, he decides that it is better to wait until he gets permission to enter. The doorkeeper gives him a stool and lets him sit down at one side of the door. There he sits for days and years. He makes many attempts to be admitted, and wearies the doorkeeper by his importunity. The doorkeeper frequently has little interviews with him, asking him questions about his home and many other things, but the questions are put indifferently, as great lords put them, and always finish with the statement that he cannot be let in yet. The man, who has furnished himself with many things for his journey, sacrifices all he has, however valuable, to bribe the doorkeeper. The doorkeeper accepts everything, but always with the remark: "I am only taking it to keep you from thinking you have omitted anything." During these many years the man fixes his attention almost continuously on the doorkeeper. He forgets the other doorkeepers, and this first one seems to him the sole obstacle preventing access to the Law. He curses his bad luck, in his early years boldly and loudly; later, as he grows old, he only grumbles to himself. He becomes childish, and since in his yearlong contemplation of the doorkeeper he has come to know even the fleas in his fur collar, he begs the fleas as well to help him and to change the doorkeeper's mind. At length his eyesight begins to fail, and he does not know whether the world is really darker or whether his eyes are only deceiving him. Yet in his darkness he is now aware of a radiance that streams inextinguishably from the gateway of the Law. Now he has not very long to live. Before he dies, all his experiences in these long years gather themselves in his head to one point, a question he has not yet asked the doorkeeper. He waves him nearer, since he can no longer raise his stiffening body. The doorkeeper has to bend low toward him, for the difference in height between them has altered much to the man's disadvantage. "What do you want to know now?" asks the doorkeeper; "you are insatiable." "Everyone strives to reach the Law," says the man, "so how does it happen that for all these many years no one but myself has ever begged for admittance?" The doorkeeper recognizes that the man has reached his end, and, to let his failing senses catch the words roars in his ear: "No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it.” After narrating this parable, Kafka, through the mouth of his two characters, Joseph K and the priest, discusses the various interpretations of it, one of which refers to the man's superiority to the doorkeeper because he is a free man; he chooses to wait of his own free will, whereas the doorkeeper is a bondsman. He must remain at the door until the man dies. This dilemma exists all through Kafka’s work and this is where Kafka remains our contemporary. As Adorno says magnificently in his Notes on Kafka, “The crucial moment, however, towards which everything in Kafka is directed, is that in which men become aware that they are not themselves-that they themselves are things.” If this is truly the case, no other author than Kafka would have been to portray and describe modernity in its violence and absurdity.