In his fine essay published earlier this month in The Nation, Alexander Provan considers the recent literature on the life and work of Franz Kafka and argues for a more expansive appreciation of the novelist and short story writer than the impression of him in “the popular imagination [which has] been subsumed by a one-word slogan: Kafkaesque.”
“Kafka’s singular insight,” writes Provan, “was that the ‘rationalization’ of society, with the bureaucracy as its engine, was increasingly shaping individuals and relations between them. His genius was to make this observation into something more than a trope or a theme in his writing, to give this new social force a literary form.”
Yet if “Kafkaesque” is as author Louis Begley describes — the existential predicament of struggling “in a maze that sometimes seems to have been designed on purpose to thwart and defeat [Kafka’s characters]. More often, the opposite appears to be true: there is no purpose; the maze simply exists” — then, as Provan enumerates, these are indeed Kafkaesque times:
Kafkaesque “is the explosion of the international market for mortgage-backed securities and derivatives, in which value is not attached to the thing itself but to speculation on an invented product tangentially related to (but not really tied to) that thing. It is FEMA’s process for granting housing assistance after Hurricane Katrina: victims were routinely informed of their applications’ rejection by letters offering not actual explanations but ‘reason codes.’ It is the Bush administration’s declaration that certain Guantánamo Bay detainees who had wasted away for years without trial were ‘no longer enemy combatants’ and its simultaneous refusal to release them or clarify whether they had ever been such.”
The 'Not-So-Rough' Guide 
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