The everyman in Franz Kafka
intended to simulate ‘a violent ejaculation’ , 2 and though bizarre this detail is telling of Kafka’s minds et as he wrote this moment after a full night of tireless writing, the climax is symbolic of a final and fatal sexual frustration that makes him vulnerable and in a sense impotent in the judgment of his father, especially as his fiancée had seemed so physically uninterested in him as to object to the lack of a friend’s presence at their wedding even under ‘the weight of his kisses’. The characters in Kafka’s stories often meet their end through what is essentially the withdrawal of vital sustenance, whether it be from drowning as for Georg, or from the Penal Colony’s slow bleeding, or the final starvation of Samsa. This motif is vital in demonstrating that a Kafkaesque world is marked by a slow and parasitic death, whereby the individual is doomed not through hot-blooded dramatic violence but through a drawn-out death in clear opposition to a romantic martyrdom. Perhaps Kafka rejects any sense of martyrdom or noble death because human pride is a recurring and rejected motif throughout much of his work. Kafka’s stories often truly relish exposing the absurdism of pride, and its presence usually comes with a harsh comeuppance. In the story A Hunger Artist the titular character is a once famous circus performer who engages in extended periods of extreme self- starvation. He speaks limitlessly and with pride of his abilities as an ‘artist’ and at last is allowed to starve himself to death once the circus no longer find him financially useful. He does this in an apparent and extreme commitment to finding ‘satisfaction’ in his art, but in his final words he reveals that he starved himself simply because ‘I couldn’t find any food I liked’. Kafka’s d isdainful comedy even extends to a man apparently willing to die for his art. The officer of In the Penal Colony takes immense pride in following to the death a ridiculous ideology. He presides over the execution of a prisoner for an absurd crime, with the execution device inscribing the prisoner’s crime onto their body as they eventually bleed to death. His beliefs are founded upon logical absurdities, he adheres fervently to the almost cultish mantra of ‘Guilt is never to be doubted’ and he performs his nightmarish role with an almost inhuman ‘enthusiasm’, reflecting with nostalgia on the era of the old Commandant when this ritual of extreme guilt was popular: ‘ those were the times! ’ . He ultimately attempts to become a martyr of this ideology, to be killed symbolically as its final victim. However, once the moment of his martyrdom arrives the literal ‘machine’ of his ideology malfunctions and begins ‘falling apart’ , resulting in his immediate bloody death by stabbing. Instead of a story of martyrdom Kafka makes his story a sardonic parable of a man whose wrongful pride and faith in a flawed system resulted in a bloody, meaningless and deflationary death. Kafka’s humour partly stems from an impulse to reject the dignity of the everyman and any semblance of pride in part through the satire of those who have an authentic commitment to a lofty ideology in their work and value it even more than their lives and bodies.
Kafka’s work did not exist in a vacuum, and he wrote abstractly in response to the urban ized post- industrial totalitarian society in which he grew up. Kafka reacted with a seething dislike of the
2 The sentence in German following Georg’s jump from the bridge is ‘In diesem Augenblick ging über die Brücke ein geradezu unendlicher Verkehr.’ Hoffman (2007) has it as ‘at this moment a quite unending flow of traffic came over the bridge’ which is in line with other translations; the noun ‘Verkehr’ has several different interrelated meanings and usually does mean ‘traffic’ coming from the verb ‘verkehren’, meaning ‘to exchange’ or ‘to flow into’; it can also be a shortening of ‘Geschlechtsverkehr’, euphemistically meaning ‘intercourse’. This is all to say that the sexually charged connotation would have been known and was reasonably intended by Kafka.
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