Kafkaesque

You wake up one morning and everything seems to be wrong. You understand nothing from what is happening around you and people you thought you knew, now behave in a strange way. Welcome to the Kafkaesque world where things are never what they used to be.

The biography of Franz Kafka (1883-1924) may explain the surrealism of his stories. Born in Czech Prague to a German-speaking Jewish family, Kafka could feel like a pariah of his times, misunderstood by his relatives and friends alike. The monotony of office work, as well as various failures in personal life, turned him into a withdrawn man who found seclusion in literary fiction. His novels – the Trial and the Castle, among others – depict fantastical realms where bureaucracy controls every sphere of life and people are sentenced for uncommitted crimes.

Unfortunately for Kafka, his works were discovered long after his death. The writer himself seemed to doubt his talent as, while bedridden by tuberculosis, asked his close friends to destroy whatever he had produced. They did not obey and Kafka's novels and stories hit bookstores. The German originals were soon followed by English translations, which popularized Kafka and his perception of the human nature. In 1946, the word “Kafkaesque” entered the English language.

The apple doesn't fall far from the tree. “Kafkaesque” is defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as “marked by surreal distortion and often a sense of impending danger.” Another source adds that the word may relate to “a nightmarish complex, bizarre, or illogical quality.” Examples provided by both dictionaries include: “the kafkaesque terror of the endless interrogations,” and “Kafkaesque bureaucratic delays.” It must be noted that the capitalized version of the eponym is now more popular.

A better definition of the word provides Frederick R. Karl, a biographer of Franz Kafka. “What's Kafkaesque,” said Karl in an interview given to the New York Times in 1991, “is when you enter a surreal world in which all your control patterns, all your plans, the whole way in which you have configured your own behavior, begins to fall to pieces, when you find yourself against a force that does not lend itself to the way you perceive the world.”

The paradox of the Kafkaesque world is that, despite realizing the fruitfulness of our actions, we still endeavor to find our way out. Josef K., the main character of the Trial, not even once does doubt that his fate has been already sealed, yet he tries to convince the soulless bureaucracy about his innocence. “For of course the fact of being accused,” says the Trial's narrator, “makes no alternation in a man's appearance that is immediately obvious.” At the end, Josef K. dies “like a dog.”

The word “Kafkaesque” has recently been making a brilliant career in (surprise, surprise) law jargon. The first utterance of the eponym in an American courtroom was registered in the early 1970s and, according to the New York Times, every next decade has brought over 100 other instances.