Reading group: searching for meaning in Kafka

Writing so slippery is hard to define - but it leads us to a chilling truth about ourselves

All month, the Reading group has been hunting for meaning in Kafka. This isnt an unusual thing to do. Oceans of ink have been spilled on the same subject over the years.

But it is possibly a daft thing to do. As plenty of commenters below the line have pointed out, the defining qualities of Kafkas writing include: uncertainty, confusion, obscurity, elusive truths, concealed falsehoods, hidden meanings, meaningless revelations. Now that Ive written that, I even worry that applying the words defining qualities to writing so elusive, changeable and slippery may be inappropriate.

Kafka is writing about our living in a world that is too vast and complex for us to understand by any means at all, religion, science, maths, art, or psychology (and in which the functioning of our very minds are also beyond our comprehension) our ideas of a transcendental order of any kind, which we often believe supply an uber justification and order to this world, are even more incomprehensible because the transcendental order is absolutely incomprehensible to us. Eg why in the world does God kill so many babies, if God is the transcendental supreme? It just cant make sense, but we have to live through it all anyway, and it is far from simple. The darkness in our minds and our social orders, literal, moral, or whatever else are still there and have to be lived through with varying degrees of awareness and sensitivity by all of us. We can make all sorts of choices, but cant change the basic situation.

Whether he wanted to be one or not, Kafka is a great artist: he cant solve the problem, but he can write about it brilliantly if necessarily obscurely. I think the basic premise that his writings are formatted as nightmares is correct. That makes the nightmarishness a literary quality, but it also corresponds to the way things really are, to our inner experience that just wont stay inner. Kafka has Gregor Samsa awake into the nightmare, the way Joseph K does in The Trial, because the nightmare is what is real. Humans have been able to act like the Samsa family, positive and hopeful about life, but humanity has never been able to quite shake the feeling that this is just not quite all real, even if we cant seem to wake up (to use the dream/nightmare metaphor). Kafka as an artist has perfectly expressed this in a particularly dark and forceful manner. The Samsa family will go on, will be happy or unhappy, Grete get married and have kids, Mama and Papa will be proud grandparents, and none will have a thought about nightmarishness, not even after their experiences. But Gregor he is the Kafka reader in the family.

Although in reality Kafkas own sisters did encounter the nightmare, murdered in the gas chambers by the Nazi regime, which I doubt Kafka would ever have foreseen. But he did want to say that the social and/or transcendental order could break down in anyones life (eg Gregor) from one moment to the next, and the nightmares irrupt into ones life at any time.

The traveller reflected: intervening in other peoples affairs is always fraught with risks. He wasnt a citizen of the penal colony, or the state to which it belonged. If he wanted to condemn this execution, or even to seek to obstruct it, he laid himself open to an objection: youre a stranger, what do you know?

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