The Banality Of Absurdity

Rebecca Schuman is intrigued by the forthcoming Kafka videogame:

The game, according to [developer Denis] Galanin’s charmingly terse press kit, follows a hero named K., who “gets a sudden offer of employment” (ripped from the headlines, as it were—this is the premise of The Castle). This job offer “changes [K.’s] life, forcing him to make a distant voyage. Together with the hero you will experience an atmosphere of absurdity, surrealism, and total uncertainty.”

Sounds about right, yes? Maybe. What Kafka’s popular image obscures is that the real punch line of his works is not the fantastical, but the mundane. In The Trial, Josef K. gets arrested for no reason, but he doesn’t get thrown in a cell, waterboarded, and convicted. He goes back to work, and then spends the rest of his life wrestling with a bureaucracy that is vast, staggeringly incompetent—and boring. The primary story of The Metamorphosis is not actually that Gregor Samsa is a giant and disgusting bug-creature, it’s that his family is really, really bad at managing their finances. The centerpiece of In The Penal Colony, a massive and intricate torture machine, isn’t “remarkable” simply for its gory details—it’s remarkable because its inventor was a fool who wrote in gibberish, and it doesn’t actually work.