The academic world is preparing to commemorate, in 2024, the centenary of the death of Franz Kafka. There are already several conferences and exhibitions underway, starting with the University of Oxford, which is organizing an international conference for September, and continuing with the Bodleian Libraries, which keep a large part of the writer’s papers, also in Oxford, and they are preparing an exhibition from May. The International Association of Theater Critics will dedicate its annual assembly, this time in May in Brno, to the validity of Kafka’s ideas in today’s scene. The XIX International Congress of the Goethe Society in Spain, which will be held in May at the University of Barcelona, ??will analyze the impact of Kafka. The Humanities Institute will start a course in January with the best Kafka specialists in the country. Etc., etc.
All this academic apparatus was predictable, since Kafka became one of the most influential creators in profiling and anticipating the anxieties of the 20th century. But what the Prague author, who died of tuberculosis on June 3, 1924, aged just 40, could hardly imagine, was to what extent the springs of his literature would filter – and almost structure – our 21st century.
In 2001, the Royal Spanish Academy accepted the Kafkaesque/a na voice, defining it as an “absurd, distressing situation”. In other words, oppressive, typical of a nightmare, with an incomprehensible motive and insurmountable effects, sometimes emanating from an anonymous and impregnable bureaucracy.
The protagonists of Kafka’s works are trapped people. Either because of an inexplicable physical mutation (Gregor Samsa, who wakes up in his bed turned into a monstrous insect, in The Metamorphosis). Or because of a trial against him, the causes of which he does not know (Josef K., in The process). Or because of the impossibility of accessing the fortress, obscured by snow, fog and darkness, to which he has been called (K., the surveyor, in The Castle). They are figures, all of them, victims of an unjustifiable and suffocating situation, in front of which they feel powerless, and whose causes have no interest in correcting. However, books are one thing and reality is another.
We will start in 2024 in front of a panorama painted with Kafkaesque strokes. Every night we dine watching the unbearable television news images of children and adults torn apart by the bombs in Gaza, which are constantly falling there as if it were impossible to avoid it.
From time to time, Vladimir Putin flashes his retouched face on television to say that he will not give up his destructive drive until he achieves his goals (which, given the slowness with which the troops are advancing, is doubly worrying). All this, not to mention other war conflicts with a more modest media profile, but also active and of no less cruelty around the world, such as those in Burma, Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan and others, which, combined, they already accumulate millions of dead.
In the national scene, and saving the distances, the signs of rigidity and immobility are also abundant, without those responsible to mitigate them. High institutions such as the General Council of the Judiciary, unable to undertake its regulatory regeneration, seem to have entered a phase of absurd, harmful, Kafkaesque sclerosis. The main opposition party remains locked in a disqualifying attitude, which has even led it to flinch at the Prime Minister’s calls to arrange a meeting in which to try to resolve the country’s crises…
Milena Jesenská, recipient of the Letters to Milena, referred to Kafka in the obituary she dedicated to him as someone who “saw the world full of invisible demons fighting and destroying defenseless people”. Today, demons continue to operate and ordinary citizens remain defenseless before them.
But, in reality, we have made some progress. Demons are not so invisible now. Although people continue to seem unable to put themselves out of harm’s way from demonic abuse. As long as the latter does not arrive, the world will continue to prove that Franz Kafka was not misguided. And if, in the more or less near future, artificial intelligence irreversibly exceeds itself, we may have to treat him as the ultimate clairvoyant and total prophet.
