Kafkaesque

“Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.”  (first line from The Trial, by Franz Kafka, 1883-1924) 

Kafkaesque.  It’s a wonderful adjective.  Kafkaesque connotes an absurd situation in which you find yourself trapped, powerless, and clueless.  You are controlled by a powerful, impersonal, and unapproachable bureaucracy.  A Kafkaesque scenario is nightmarish. You want to escape, and you can’t.
It’s a measure of Kafka’s literary stature that his name was turned into an adjective.

Franz Kafka was born into a middle class, unobservant Jewish family.  He lived his entire life in Prague.  During the day he worked as an official in an insurance office.  At night he wrote the novels and short stories that made him an icon of Western literature.

Much of Kafka’s writing is difficult to interpret, surreal, multi-layered, allegorical, written almost as-if in a bad dream.  Sometimes his stories feel grim, even ghoulish.  Simultaneously, many of his stories are laced with satire and ironic humor.  Some of his stories have been called prophetic, foreshadowing the totalitarian regimes of the mid-20th century.

Frequently his stories are deeply personal explorations into his tormented and neurotic psyche.  At yet another level, his stories are about unfulfilled religious yearnings.  He seems to search in vain for a distant, well-guarded, and unapproachable deity.  Some scholars detect in his writing similarities to the Jewish mystic writings of Kabbalah.

Kafka’s health was poor. For many years he suffered from, and eventually succumbed to, tuberculosis.  Tuberculosis was the great killer of its time, accounting for up to 1 in 7 deaths.  It was a respiratory illness spread by people working in close quarters to one another, affecting a disproportionate number of the poor. Kafka died in 1924.  It wasn’t until 1943, with the development of Streptomycin, that tuberculosis could be cured.  In the meantime, tuberculosis was contained by good hygiene and avoidance of overcrowded conditions.

Which brings me to another respiratory disease and the current pandemic.  It’s a situation in which I am trapped and powerless.  Decisions affecting tens-of-thousands of lives are being made daily by God knows who. It feels nightmarish.  I want to escape it, but I can’t.

 “It’s like the flu.”  “It’ll go away.”  “We’ve got it under perfect control.”   “It’ll all be beautiful.” Someone must have been telling lies about coronavirus for without having done anything wrong, the world changed, and one fine morning we were confined to our homes.   It feels Kafkaesque.