ON KAFKA ETC

...The interesting thing is that it is not Kafka's aim to scare us. Despite all the bewildering things we read about they are conveyed in the most impassive fashion. The nonchalant way by which this wizardry conducted is truly amusing. Is that the total acceptance of one's own fate and the realisation of helplessness that Kafka is trying to relate? Or, perhaps, on a contrary it is the ultimate example of the Free Will manifested in the ability to transfigure the environ with nothing more than a blink of an eye?

By the time Mr Rossman has entered the captain's quarters he had already been fully aware of a stoker's troubles without even discussing it with him. There is no time for Kafka (or Max Brod indeed) to explain this jump, he is not here for that. Then reader has to adjust or abandon the ship! Pitch-black rooms and deserted corridors (though full of servants with candelabra couple of pages earlier) in Mr Pollunder's mansion are way too big for what the building seems from the outside. And finally, one fine morning Gregor Samsa wakes up to calmly discover himself turned into a giant insect. What does he do first? Tries to sleep it off!

This impassivity of Kafka's characters betrays an emptiness of their self. Sometimes they seem not to be aware of changes happening around them. At other times their ignorance gives way to a certain callowness: there appears to be no way for them to register the shift. It is as if life passes through their bodies and minds without leaving any traceable mark. Kafka's protagonist is but an empty outline caught on an empty voyage.

Kafka's text itself is void, arid even. The impossibility of situations nullifies rules of logic. Efforts to see meaning behind them can challenge the most prepared and patient of readers. We scrap for morsels of veritable information and sometimes every word in a sentence feels like a beginning of a whole new chapter spinning in different direction.

There is mystery to these metamorphosis that leave the reader enchanted. This is the poetic force behind a literary devise Kafka uses to build storyline and it grips us completely. Its use in all of his writings is so well-measured that it approaches the sublime. An that is the very effect Kafka seeks for there is no other way to portray the absurdity of life that flickers in front of our eyes.