Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard all have a certain existentialist dimension in their writings, as do Camus, Sartre, Jaspers and Heidegger, with whose works the term existentialism has been more or less equated since World War H.
Kafka's relationship with existentialism is much more complex, mainly because the label "existentialist" by itself is rather meaningless. In terms of content, Kafka was highly skeptical and even inimical toward the expressionist demand for the "new man." This moralistic-didactic sledgehammer method repulsed him. While Kafka was perhaps not the great craftsman in the sense that Flaubert was, he admired this faculty in others. To me, it merely proves the painter's inner chaos." What he rejected in expressionism is the overstatement of feeling and the seeming lack of craftsmanship.
FRANZ KAFKA BIOGRAPHY SERIES
However, if we consider what he thought of some of the leading expressionists of his day, he certainly cannot be associated with the movement: he repeatedly confessed that the works of the expressionists made him sad of a series of illustrations by Kokoschka, one of the most distinguished representatives of the movement, Kafka said: "I don't understand. Of course, Kafka does have certain characteristics in common with expressionists, such as his criticism of the blindly scientific-technological world-view, for instance. To reduce Kafka's symbols to their "real" meanings and to pigeonhole his world-view as some "ism" or other is to obscure his writing with just the kind of meaningless experience from which he liberated himself through his art.Įxpressionism is one of the literary movements frequently mentioned in connection with Kafka, possibly because its vogue in literature coincided with Kafka's mature writing, between 1912 and his death in 1924. Only the events themselves can reveal the basic absurdity of things.
FRANZ KAFKA BIOGRAPHY CODE
Kafka's world is essentially chaotic, and this is why it is impossible to derive a specific philosophical or religious code from it - even one acknowledging chaos and paradox as does much existential thought. Yet the overriding response one has is one of tragedy rather than irony as one watches Kafka's heroes trying to piece together the debris of their universe. Such a universe about which nothing can be said that cannot at the same time - and just as plausibly - be contradicted has a certain ironic quality about it - ironic in the sense that each possible viewpoint becomes relativized. Thus a total view must inevitably remain inaccessible to him. This, in turn, is the result of Kafka's view - which he shares with many twentieth-century writers - that his own self is a parcel of perennially interacting forces lacking a stable core if he should attain an approximation of objectivity, this can come about only by describing the world in symbolic language and from a number of different vantage points.
The reason for this is that the stories offer a wide variety of possible meanings without confirming any particular one of them. If their endings, or lack of endings, seem to make sense at all, they will not do so immediately and not in unequivocal language. Kafka's stories suggest meanings which are accessible only after several readings.
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