Kafka anyone?
Every once a century or so, a writer comes along who clearly captures a great truth about what it is to be human. Victor Hugo gave us Quasimodo … a twisted, ugly man on the outside, whose heart held unmatched love, devotion and beauty. Quasimodo gives us a sublime being whose story is our story. Physical appearance trumps morals in human society, yet in the end, heart, compassion and love keep us alive.
So Kafka.
Kafka gives us worlds of absurdity and threat. Where innocent people find themselves charged, convicted and condemned … through no crime of their own. In Metamorphosis, a man wakes up a giant beetle. Like the rest of us who find ourselves under siege from within or without, he makes do. He finds himself a beetle and he does the best he can. He adjusts. He mourns the loss of his ability to work, to communicate, to go about his day. But he persists.
So the first time I ever heard about this word by Kafka, I must have been a teenager, or younger, a child. I heard someone talk about the story plot, and it terrified me. How could someone survive being turned into a roach? No escape, no chance at life again, no walking, no being held by your mother?
For a child, it was unimaginable horror. It was unsurvivable.
Yet today as an adult, I understand what that beetle assault really means. It is the constant hostility of the world, and people driven by greed, who will attack and destroy. It is those people driven to have more, to take at the expense of others, who turn the rest of us into beetles and leave us bedridden.
Or, we face the person in power … such as the “officer” in In the Penal Colony. This character, one of literature’s most unsettling, uses a giant metal point to write lessons in prisoners’ backs, until they expire.
Likewise, for transgressions and sometimes without them, we find ourselves severely punished and facing sentences unbearably harsh, inhumane even for a criminal. Even a criminal deserves humane treatment. Otherwise, what are we?
We like truth, or verisimilitude, in writing. We expect a logical progression of events, and characters who act consistently.
Yet at the same time, brave writers can break from so-called reality and give us grotesque situations that better capture the human experience than a so-called real portrayal.
