Conservatives Love Kafka – But He Doesn’t Love Them
Last month, cultural commentator Peter van Onselen had a recommendation for Twitter — read The Trial by Franz Kafka.
It was something of a subtweet, as van Onselen was decrying the modern left as being hopelessly bureaucratic; obsessed with finding victims for victimless crimes. And van Onselen is not the only one to take this line. With increasing regularity, conservatives are using the phrase “Kafkaesque” as a way of levelling blows against “cancel culture”, and what they see as the “mob mentality” of Twitter.
The phrase in the hands of these conservatives is designed to cast the left as a new form of oppressive system — precisely the kind of messy, controlling structure that Leftists aim to dismantle. And, in the process of this repetition, the phrase has been bastardized and reduced. “Kafkaesque” is just one more buzzword, as drained of its original meaning as “fake news”, twisted and warped so as to no longer represent its original intent.
The Problem With The Canon
One of the worst things you can do to a book is turn it into a classic.
Books in the canon are everywhere, and in being everywhere they become boring — like photocopies of the Mona Lisa, littered randomly in the street. Moby Dick is a strange, funny work of surrealist art, filled with diatribes about the best way to tie knots; then, the second it gets prescribed in a classroom, it becomes as heavy and dusty as a doorstop.
Michel Foucault is a demented pervert, an alchemist of language who somehow thinks that the human being can be understood by making the internal external, rather than vice versa; then he’s a photocopied pamphlet that you have to drag yourself through for the next tutorial. Walt Whitman is a madman who counted blades of grass and saw God in everything; then he’s a leather-bound book on the top shelf of a particularly grotty bookstore. Jane Austen is an incisive, sharpened cultural critic; then she’s the fodder for modern sub-par rom-coms.
The more complicated the author, the more they are reduced by this process of becoming exalted. Canonisation is a process of sanding off complexities; of critical engagement obscuring a work, rather than revealing its jagged edges. And perhaps no author has been so flattened by his exalted status as Franz Kafka.
Kafka Is So Much More Than His Reputation Implies
Kafka’s deification, though it never happened in his lifetime, is age-old. His novels are prescribed texts in classrooms around the country; the famous opening line of his short story ‘The Metamorphosis’ has become a meme.
Along with this deification has come the reduction. There is just too much in his work to be communicated wholly within a cultural and critical narrative; too much oddness, humour, horror.
Kafka’s deification, though it never happened in his lifetime, is age-old.
Even back in the early two thousands, David Foster Wallace was decrying the ways that Kafka’s stories had been reduced from absurdist universes into barren planets to be strip-mined for themes. “A signal frustration in trying to read Kafka with college students is that it is next to impossible to get them to see that Kafka is funny,” Foster once wrote, complaining that the stories were ruined by the “high-efficiency critical machine” of theme-unpacking and technique-decoding.
Nothing has changed since Foster Wallace wrote those words. But in recent years, a new element to the process of reduction has been added — Kafka has been adopted by the conservatives.
“Kafka-Esque” Has Been Robbed Of Its Meaning
The trouble is with the term “Kafka-esque”. Broadly taken, that phrase is now understood to mean unnecessarily strange; bureaucratic. And that’s how the conservatives use it, decrying everything from “cancel culture” — another term that has been sapped of its original meaning — to vaccine roll-outs as “Kafka-esque.” The criticism, apparently, is that these systems are messy; pointless; poorly constructed, as confusing as the eponymous trial that hapless hero Josef K. finds himself swept up in in the book of the same name.
But the mistake that conservatives make is thinking that Kafka railed against merely messy structures. The focus of his writing was not simply those naturally confused and overstrained systems of organisation that human beings place themselves into; hierarchies. Kafka wasn’t criticising bureaucracy itself. He was criticising imbalances of power, and imbalances of power frequently express themselves through hierarchies.
The mistake that conservatives make is thinking that Kafka railed against merely messy structures
The systems that conservatives frequently highlight as “Kafkaesque” do not express inequalities of power. “Cancel culture”, if taken to mean long-ignored and suppressed voices reclaiming their place in the mainstream conversation, is not “Kafkaesque.” If anything, it is the precise opposite — a Kafkaesque system of control and subjugation being widened in scope, and finally made inclusive.
The sadly departed cultural theorist Mark Fisher understood that. He saw Kafka’s writings as being about embarrassment, and how the rich and powerful embarrass those without political standing into falling into line. “Kafka understood that no matter how absurd their rituals, pronunciations, clothes might appear, the rich are unembarrassable,” Fisher wrote. “That is not because there is a special code which they understand — there is no code precisely — but whatever they do is alright, because it is them doing it.”
That’s the meaning of the term Kafkaesque. Not that systems can be messy. But that systems can control, and subjugate, and destroy. And until conservatives understand that, they won’t understand Kafka.
Joseph Earp is a staff writer at Junkee. He tweets @JosephOEarp.