Fathering the Kafkaesque: Transcendental Authority and the Problem of the Absurd in Kafka

Kafka has since been credited with his own informal literary genre, the Kafkaesque, which is characterized by an illogical, senseless, often nightmarish complexity and a mood of despondence and hopelessness. He was a troubled man beset by anxiety and depression; John Updike supposes that Kafka’s nervous system “flayed of its old hide of social usage and religious belief, must record every touch as pain” (The Complete Stories ix). The Kafkaesque connotes the horrific and bizarre, but this skewing of Kafka’s reputation towards cynicism is surprising and perhaps unwarranted. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus discusses the philosophy of absurdism, which claims that the efforts of humanity to find value and meaning in life are doomed and therefore absurd; Camus compares this absurdity to the “futile and hopeless labor” of Sisyphus, condemned to “ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight” (119). Camus praises Kafka for his depiction of the absurd, but he qualifies his praise by claiming that Kafka introduces “hope in a strange form” (130). Hope is not typically associated with the Kafkaesque, but contrarily, Camus interprets Kafka as purposeful and deliberate. Camus and Kafka agree that the world is absurd and that rationalism—the belief that reason is the basis of all truth, that logic explains all the workings of the world—is insufficient. But Kafka’s writing is not purely a venting of frustrations, not startling and bizarre merely for the sake of being startling and bizarre. Kafka should be read not as a cynic, but as a skeptic. Cynicism implies passivity: acknowledging a problem without attempting to remedy it and finally succumbing to apathy. If he had been a cynic, Kafka would have written truly hopeless stories. As a skeptic, Kafka recognized the absurdity of the world and surmised that there must be a means of rectification. The question becomes: What is the absurdity that Kafka depicts, and what is his hope?Bachelor of Art