Kafka has fallen out of favour in the modern age.
The German-speaking Bohemian author, Franz Kafka (1883–1924), I mean.
In contrast, the software, Apache Kafka, is prominently favoured in nine out of the first ten Google results for the search string Kafka.
Perhaps rightly so. After all, software is designed to aid not to befuddle, and to disperse existential angst not to replicate it on paper. Although, it’s a toss-up which of computer-esque or Kafkaesque better describes the alienation of man from mankind.
Since computers are all the rage, I’ll favour the “underdog” Kafka on this blog.
Image of the man?
I expected the search engine to throw up pictures of a human-sized beetle with a rotting apple stuck in its carapace. Even after having read five hundred pages of Vintage Kafka that contains all of his shorter works, I still identify the author with his novella The Metamorphosis. Or rather, with the protagonist, travelling salesman Gregor Samsa, who wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a monstrous vermin-beetle-creature.
The beetle is nasty; his story is sad.
The revulsion, the absurdity, the helplessness of this ungeheueres Ungeziefer (the German original helps spur the imagination), the ostracism that follows, and the final sinking into irrelevancy—they’re the sequence of events anyone on social media dreads. What happens if one day you wake up “ugly”, “disabled”, “different”, and ultimately incapable of communicating with the rest of society?
So despite his poor performance in search results, Kafka is still germane today. Continue reading “Kafka’s Harrow”
A Quiver Of Quotes 