A century after his death, Kafka still sums up our surreal world
A sneak preview of a new exhibition about him sends shivers down my spine
Rachel Cooke
Tomorrow, it will be 100 years since the writer Franz Kafka died in a sanatorium near Vienna from tuberculosis – and the good news is that as major literary anniversaries go, this one is easy to mark. You could, for instance, simply read him: a short story, perhaps, or a few pages of Ross Benjamin’s new, uncensored translation of his diaries. If you’re in Oxford, where his papers are in the Bodleian Library, you can see a new exhibition about him, and gawp at his sputum jar and a syringe of the type with which those treating him used to inject cocaine directly into his larynx; you might also wander in the city’s University Parks, where a giant inflatable “Jitterbug” – like Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis, it is half man and half insect – has appeared, as if from outer space.
Or you could just go about your regular life, and wait for the K-word – Kafkaesque – to float, unbidden, into your mind. The newspapers or the BBC will probably deliver at breakfast time, but if for some reason they don’t, there must be a bill you need to query, some kind of rebate you’re owed. Personally, I find that battling with the council over its stupid exercises in confirmation bias – questionnaires about low-traffic zones that permit only one “correct” answer – is good for reaffirming my sense that faceless, slightly sinister bureaucracy is indeed all around. But there are also a growing number of friends I can text, the better to find out how their David-and-Goliath office struggles are going. Oh, the glorious word soup that spouts endlessly from the mouths of HR departments!
In Oxford myself last week, I had a sneak preview of Kafka: Making of an Icon, and it was genuinely shiver-inducing to see the first page of the manuscript of The Metamorphosis in the gloom of the gallery. Its author, you notice immediately, crosses out hardly anything, those famous sentences emerging from his imagination fully formed, like poetry he already knows by heart. Yet the much bigger thing, for me, was the defining sense of a writer who matches the times perfectly. Andy Warhol’s 1980 portrait of Kafka, in which Franz looks at once liverish and spry, is in the show – but as someone observed at the opening, his fame has far exceeded 15 minutes, growing exponentially until the present: the era of bots and distant call centres, of strange new orthodoxies, groupthink and institutional capture. If the exhibition had a soundtrack, it would be the music that plays on a loop when you’re on hold to your broadband provider.
A selection of recent news stories, each deploying Kafka’s name or spirit, covers a wall. The tribunal that recently ruled Roz Adams had been subjected to a “Kafkaesque” disciplinary process at the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre after she questioned rules about trans counsellors working with female survivors must, I assume, have happened too late to be included. But there are many others, including a piece in which a reporter describes seeing a copy of Kafka’s novel The Trial – an innocent man is arrested for an unnamed crime – at a shrine for the Russian opposition leader, Alexei Navalny. Standing before it, I wanted to light a candle myself. If Kafka died young and virtually unknown, his name is ineluctable now: a shorthand so beautifully useful, simply by using it, you feel less ragged.
Rachel Cooke is an Observer columnist
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