It’s hard to find a writer who isn’t influenced by Franz Kafka. The Metamorphosis stirred late Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez to start writing short stories.
The Goethe Institute in Bangkok will host a three-day Kafka Festival on the 90th anniversary of writer’s death, starting today. There may have never been a more appropriate time to examine the world through Kafka’s lens. His name has infiltrated the English language in a way that perhaps only Orwell has.
The current condition of Thai society, in fact, may be more Kafkaesque than Orwellian, the authority of the coup-makers over the people more metaphysically disorientating than the Ministry of Peace’s brutal Stalinist control and surveillance. Our situation is tragicomic in the vein of Kafka’s work.
Prof Thanomuan Ocharoen, keynote speaker of the Kafka Festival, contends that Kafka did not ever write about politics, although Thai readers often think he did. An expert who has also translated many of Kafka’s works from German, Thanomnuan will speak about “The Kafka Perception in Thailand” tonight.
“Most Thai readers of Kafka read translated versions, whether in English or Thai, and the bigger picture could be even more abstruse,” Thanomnuan said, noting that readers of Kafka in Thailand range from general readers to translators and writers, from publishers to professors and students.
“There are also readers who have turned to Kafka because of their love for [Japanese writer] Haruki Murakami,” she added.
Thanomnuan explained that the German language Kafka used was simple, but his ideas were incredibly complex, the meanings of which are inevitably affected, at least to a degree, by translations.
“The fact that Kafka was writing as a Jew in Prague who was using the German language to express himself is often overlooked by general readers. It’s important to recognise that he was writing from a marginalised place. His understanding of Jewishness surfaced more in his later works, such as Letter To His Father,” Thanomnuan said.
On the other hand, in an academic sphere, Kafka can be so over-theorised that it becomes difficult to separate his works from his relationship with his father and his tedious employment in an insurance office.
Kafka wanted all of his manuscripts burned after his death, but they have instead been translated and read all over the world. In Thailand, the first to be translated was the short story A Hunger Artist in 1970. His work has also been rewritten and reinterpreted into plays, including Kafka And I by Bangkok University’s Black Box Theater, which was also performed in Prague in 2011.
That his legacy is preserved against his will is Kafkaesque in itself. The individual remains a subject of a greater authority, and the authority a vehicle of an indistinct greater power. Kafka lives on in the writings of others influenced by his works, such as in the philosophical musings of Albert Camus and Jorge Luis Borges.
Thanomnuan herself was won over by the depth of and immortality of Kafka’s works.
“I didn’t understand Kafka at first but I loved the challenge of finding out what he had to say about humanity. His works can be depressing, his characters lack the ability to see, the ability to get help. There’s never anyone to rely on. The characters move around lost in a labyrinth,” she says.
The strength of Kafka’s works indeed lies in their timelessness and their universality. The universe continues to concoct the same jokes on every man. The punch line is obscure, elusive; the plot casually morphs into surreal absurdities and mundane failures and misfortunes. Humanity itself is a joke. In his writings, there is not one specific philosophy, but an endless experiment with the ironies of reality, the scrutiny of everyday experiences.
Critic Walter Benjamin once wrote: “Oh no,” said Kafka, “our world is only a bad mood of God, a bad day of his.”
In A Country Doctor, Kafka writes: “It’s easy to write prescriptions, but difficult to come to an understanding with people.” Yet in Kafka’s world of bureaucratic offices and musty attics, we uncover nothing, meaninglessness. Kafka’s reality is presented in ambivalence and conflict.
The Kafka Festival commemorates the writer with various events, including film screenings, scenic readings and skits.
The Kafka Festival will run until June 5 at the Goethe Institute. The opening ceremony is tonight at 6pm. There is no admission fee. Call 02-108-8242.
