Kafka
In The Trial, K is accused of a crime for which he is not informed and he finds himself lost in a laybrinthine bureaucracy trying to discover the true nature of his so-called crimes. But his attempts to discover what his �supposed� crime was are continually thwarted. He dies a victim of bureaucracy.
The �hero� in metamorphosis doesn�t have a very heroic life either. Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to discover that he has turned into a giant cockroach. Again, the endpoint of the story is the same - the hero dies. One of the few characters in Kafka�s work to escape a terrible fate is the prisoner in the story, In the Penal Colony. But the prisoner�s reprieve is only due to the intervention of luck, and luck, like happiness, is something that is in short supply in Kafka�s universe.
My strange love affair with Kafka began as a young adult. One of the first gay men I ever met told me that the proper reading list for any educated and intelligent person must include Kafka). At the time I didn�t take his words to heart. They struck me as pompous and egotistical. Kafka, and the other classic writers he reeled off (Herman Hesse and Conrad (Heart of Darkness)) were also mentioned but seemed too obscure and bizarre to a 21-year-old. I was still under the influence of realistic fiction at the time. But the realist novel quickly lost its appeal for me as my tastes grew and my ability to understand that the classics (as opposed to the everyday books I read) actually had something very deep and meaningful to say about the human condition. And that included my condition.
Years later I would finally take Kafka�s works off the bookshelf and begin reading. As I absorbed Kafka�s dark tales I noted a parallel development happening in my own life. Reading The Trial, The Metamorphosis and his other increasingly bizarre stories I found myself beginning to live out some of the same absurd and bizarre happening depicted in the stories.
This was particularly evident when I began to work in a series of bureaucracies (AGL, Legal Aid, Macquarie Bank) where I came face to face with the same, nightmarish, Kafkaesque situations. There was the feeling of alienation that I felt from people whom I had nothing in common with. And there were the empty and absurd rules and regulations that workers were supposed to follow. Finally, the meaningless and soul-destroying work that the bureaucracy assigned all individuals reminded me too much of Kafka�s novels.
The one Kafka novel that described my life perfectly was The Trial. In fact events in real life started to mirror this book so closely that I felt, at times, as if I had become one of Kafka�s dark and depressing characters. I felt lost and bewildered in the system just as K felt. For me the endpoint was little different from The Trial�s gloomy ending: the bureaucracy works to completely destroy the individual. The uniqueness of the individual is replaced by the reflex action of blind and obedient rule following.
I struggled for years against bureaucracy in jobs that I absolutely detested, but this struggle took its toll in the same way that it took its toll on Kafka and which he revealed in his diaries. The diaries are extraordinary documents. They open a direct line into Kafka�s psyche by detailing his intense emotional turmoil, not only in enduring his meaningless bureaucratic jobs but in describing the torment in his own personal life outside work.
I also kept a record of the humorous, frustrating, annoying, even absurd things that happened in my life. But I never realised how similar our psyche�s where until I compared my autobiographical scribblings with his. In fact, Kafka could be my autobiographical twin in parts. He would complain about his frustrations with his meaningless job which took away precious hours from his writing. I felt the same with my own meaningless bureaucratic jobs. He complained about friends and lovers and about his life, friends and family. I also complained about these things in exacting detail. In many ways I was the exact copy of Franz - the frustrated, anxious, exhausted, over-sensitive underdog. The man that, no matter how hard he tried, never seemed to find happiness.
Even with all the doom and gloom in his work Kafka did find comedy in the darkness and he was known to read out the blackest of his work to friends while laughing.
Now, whenever I feel like the world is getting on top of me, I try to think of my gloomy twin, Franz Kafka laughing away at the absurdity of life and that reminds me that, even at its worst, there is often something funny to be found in the human condition.
