The New Semantics of the Kafkaesque
In conversation with a friend who is well versed in neologism, the discussion often returns to Franz Kafka. Trace the roots of any word back far enough and you’ll find historical context largely removed from contemporary meaning, but Franz Kafka and the evolution of the term Kafkaesque specifically, my friend suggests, provides an unusually vivid, precise, and whiplash-speed example of how a reference turns from the signified to the signifier, how this is happening more and faster than ever, how there is much to be lost and much to be gained.
Consider, as one must in issues of contemporary semantics, the Internet - The Kafkaesque has come to signify not just the strange and bureaucratic world of Kafka’s fiction but also, more generally, despair, illogical longing, and the kind of terror without reason which makes a nightmare so precisely nightmarish. These feelings have not been so easily surmised by one word or phrase in the English language prior to Kafka’s posthumous rise to fame, and more specifically, his online rise to notoriety no just as an author but as a brooding individual, a character, and perhaps even a trope. Sharing quotes from Kafka’s journals online becomes a way for youth to signify both intellectual prowess and existential dread. “Kafkaesque” (Breaking Bad Season 3 Ep 9) wherein Jesse sells meth to recovering addicts provides a new reference point for the term, as does Michael Scott in The Office citing his girlfriend’s impenetrable references to the Kafkaesque as an insurmountable rift between the two as he breaks up with her — references get layered at warp speed online, and The Kafkaesque becomes largely divorced from the literature to which it owes its heritage.
Kafka is a quintessential read in high school English class because The Kafkaesque has seen an almost disproportionate integration into everyday language and we have to teach these kids what it all means, my friend has said. Still, increasing alarm bells decry the fact that high school students quite literally are not reading at all. Perhaps you consider these alarm bells overkill, but people are certainly reading less than they used to. It’s a strange concept - the idea of a society that references literature in conversation which it has never read. Still, my neologism-knowledgeable friend sees Kafka, and the Kafkaesque, as providing a case study for a prevailing role of literature in an illiterate world. Allow the main themes expressed by an author, the messages, the meaning, even the background of it all to be bundled up and packaged into their very name. The bulk of value, of course, will be lost in this process. Some value, historical accuracy, necessary context, prevailing ideas, will remain. A cost benefit analysis, if you will.
At the Morgan Library, in the recently opened exhibition titled simply Franz Kafka, it appears that this analysis has been run and a winner drawn - the ideas of semantics, of trope, and of the image of an artist as separated from their substance run the show. The result is something vacant and soulless.
At the Morgan Library, Franz Kafka is located on the second floor of the museum in a single gallery hall that has been sprung with colorful pop-up walls for the occasion. Plastered in shades of pink over cranberry red paint, the introductory text outlines the exhibition’s intentions:
“This exhibition charts Kafka’s outwardly uneventful life and many afterlives, exploring how the stories he published and those he left incomplete have continued to engage readers, writers, scholars, and artists around the world.”
Franz Kafka is a highly frontloaded exhibition. Immediately after the introductory walls, I am met with Andy Warhol’s portrait of Franz Kafka. It’s a wonderful portrait, contrasting Kafka’s face and gaze in various geographic shapes and shades of blue. For some inexplicable reason, the curators have decided to mount this portrait on a pop-up wall painted deep blue, matching the specific shade of polymer paint and silkscreen ink on the canvas itself. This detracts from the portrait and doesn't bode well for the rest of the exhibition.
Beyond the Warhol, which is presented as the star of the show, there are Kafka’s manuscripts, diary entries, postcards, and original photographs of Kafka. A copy of Ein Arktiscjer Robinson is encased in glass, hovering below an explainer text which reveals that Kafka, once, read this book - “Kafka’s reading took him as far as the Arctic!” A short film titled “A Ride Through Prague in an Open Tram” (1908) by Jan Krizenecky plays below text which explains that “the film cut out just as Kafka’s family apartment comes into view on the right.” These artifacts of dubious significance are interspersed between more wall text. “Kafka and Judaism,” “Kafka and Health,” “Kafka and His Travels.” "In his postcards to his younger sister Otta, Kafka shows his playful and jovial side!”
A first glimpse at original Franz Kafka manuscripts, now in the United States for the first time, is significant. The history of Franz-Kafka-the-Writer is, indeed, of some cultural value. Still the exhibition showcases a vast quantity of substanceless text and color overflowing around the real works on view; it becomes interchangeable with the real translations and prints of Kafka’s own words. The viewer is overwhelmed. The viewer is inevitably wading through sludge. It creates a sense that the exhibition is saying nothing at all.
Above one photo of Franz Kafka with friend Juliane Szokoll, I see an exhibition text that is of particular interest – “When we see him petting a dog alongside Juliane Szokoll,” it reads. “Perhaps he doesn't seem quite as lonely as the Franz Kafka we know"
The “we” in question strikes me as in eerie parallel to the observations made by my neologism-obsessed friend - the exhibition is assuming an audience who knows the Kafkaesque but does not know Franz Kafka. It is assumed that anyone visiting this exhibition, and thus reading and engaging with this text, will find their place within this universal “we;” understanding Kafka-the-Trope, and now, engaging with the history of the Man-Behind-the-Trope on a deeper level. Reading Kafka’s “meditations” for example - often imbued with whimsy and a hopeful strangeness in contrast to much of the rest of his fiction, might too, challenge “our” perspective of Franz Kafka as fiercely lonely. The exhibition, however, is interested in Franz Kafka’s image not as created by his works, but rather as removed from them.
The exhibition seems to take the separation of art and artist so literally that it flips the root of the concept on its head - demystifying and sterilizing Kafka-The-Man so thoroughly that, while one might get a sense of why this quirky character might have produced the absurdist melancholy style work he did, the actual body of work itself is, if not rendered irrelevant, then at least mostly ignored. This separation of art and artist is cold, complete, and empty. It is all artist, no art. Or even, all man, no artist. The installation design parallels graphic design, the gallery curation parallels a web page, the exhibition speaks to Kafka-The-Crash-Course, or, Kafka! You’ve-Heard-About-Him-On-The-Internet. It measures the cultural temperature with decent accuracy - “we” have heard of the Kafkaesque. “We” might not yet quite know what it means. A Google search could help, but so too, can the Morgan Library. Fill in a few gaps in our collective knowledge, smooth over a few jagged edges with a few definitions and anecdotes and big bright colors. This is an exhibition that deals utterly in the realm of semantics and definition - who was this Kafka guy? Was he really having as little fun as he said he was?
It is unclear who this exhibition is for. On the one hand, the answer is clear: for everyone. The collective “we” is all encompassing. But then, so too, the coin flips, the pop-up walls come down, the Warhol and the manuscripts are returned to their respective private collections and Oxford libraries, and the writing on the wall is washed away. Nothing has been lost, and nothing has been gained. The Kafkaesque (adjective, not proper noun) has sprung one step closer to The Shakespearean or The Freudian; enshrined in public vocabulary with a Museum Retrospective. This Kafkaesque becomes isolated now, more than ever, from the body of work that it claims to represent.
