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 in September, and continuing with the Bodleian Libraries, which preserve a good part of the writer's papers, also in Oxford, and are preparing an exhibition to starting in May. The International Association of Theater Critics will dedicate its annual meeting, this time in May in Brno, to the validity of Kafka's ideas on the current scene. The XIX International Congress of the Goethe Society in Spain, to be held in May at the University of Barcelona, will analyze the impact of Kafka. In January, the Institut d'Humanitats will start a course with the best Kafka specialists in the country. Etcetera etcetera.
This entire academic apparatus was predictable, given that Kafka became one of the most influential creators by outlining and anticipating the anxieties of the 20th century. But what the Prague author, who died of tuberculosis on June 3, 1924, at only 40 years old, could hardly imagine was to what extent the springs of his literature were going to permeate – and almost structure – our 21st century. .
In 2001, the Royal Spanish Academy accepted the Kafkaesque/na word, defining it as “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 due to an inexplicable physical mutation (Gregor Samsa, who wakes up in his bed transformed into a monstrous insect, in The Metamorphosis). Or because of a trial against him, the causes of which he ignores (Josef K., in The Trial). Or by the impossibility of accessing the fortress, blurred by snow, fog and darkness, to which he has been called (K., the surveyor, in The Castle). Figures, all of them, victims of an unjustifiable and suffocating situation, in the face of which they feel powerless, and whose causes have no interest in correcting.
Now, books are one thing and reality is another. We are going to start 2024 before a panorama painted with Kafkaesque strokes. Every night we have dinner watching unbearable images on the news of children and adults destroyed by bombs in Gaza, who continually fall there as if it were impossible to avoid it.
Every once in a while Putin shows up his retouched face on TV to say that he will not give up his destructive efforts until he achieves his objectives (which, given the slowness at which the troops are advancing, is doubly worrying). All of this, not to mention other war conflicts with a more modest media profile, but also active and of no less cruelty, such as those in Burma, Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan and others that, combined, accumulate millions of deaths.
On the national scene, and overcoming the distances, signs of rigidity and immobility are also abundant, without those responsible attenuating them. High institutions such as the General Council of the Judiciary, unable to undertake their regulatory regeneration, seem to have entered a phase of absurd, harmful, Kafkaesque sclerosis. The main opposition party continues to be entrenched in a disqualifying attitude, which has even led it to hesitate in the face of calls from the President of the Government 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 her obituary 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 against them. But, in reality, we have made some progress. The demons are not so invisible now. Although people still seem unable to protect themselves from demonic outrages. As long as the latter does not happen, the world will continue to demonstrate that Kafka was not wrong. And if, in the more or less near future, artificial intelligence becomes irreversibly out of control, perhaps we should now treat it as the ultimate clairvoyant and total prophet.
