Kafka

Franz Kafka is the perfect example of a What the Fuck writer. When you are done with a Kafka story you are filled with an overwhelming feeling of What the Fuck did I just read?

Kafka narrates the absurd in the most everyday language. When a story (Metamorphosis) opens with a man waking up as an insect it's odd. When the man's most important concern is how he is going to get to work that day (it's not easy getting out of bed being a bug) that's absurd.

That's when you start looking for the metaphors and allegories to try and make sense of it all.Kafka's story of the Country Doctor is said to have Freudian references to dreams and the inner psyche. (The Country Doctor tells an ordinary story of an ordinary doctor on an ordinary house call - until his patient's relatives strip him naked and force him into bed with the sick man.)

The Penal Colony is said to have Biblical references to the vengeful Old Testament God in one of the most gruesome descriptions of a torture device that takes 8 hours to kill a man. It's got this incredulous twist at the end which I must not reveal. Kafka's writing is the literary equivalent of a Dali. If you like Kafka's dark and dingy place you'll like Haruki Murakami's equally surreal work.

When the literary critics are done the psychoanalysts step in. What kind of writing can one expect from a man who was deeply troubled for the most part of his life and asked for volumes of his unpublished works to be destroyed after his death? The diagnostic speculations range from suicidal to schizophrenic to anorexic.

The most interesting story to read in this context is A Hunger Artist about a performer who fasts as a spectacle for fans to admire. But what makes him an artist? Is it the hunger artist himself or the eager spectators who make fasting an art form? And is he fasting because he is a determined artist or because he hates food? Back to Kafka, did he mean anything deep and layered in his writings or is that just how his mind worked?