Kafkaesque nightmares

As in Kafka’s world, power and secrecy are mutually supportive - those who wield power are protected by a veil of mystery that disguises its functions and conceals its true nature. As Joseph K. notes in The Trial, “it is an essential part of the justice dispensed here that you should be condemned not only in innocence but also in ignorance”.

But Kafka’s stories can also be read as illustrations of the way power festers behind its veil of secrecy. In contrast to Orwell’s omnipotent state with its power-mad oligarchs, the powerful in Kafka’s stories are usually ridiculous figures, whose status, we deduce, is sustained only by the secrecy and conspiracy that protects them. It is significant that the protagonists of The Castle and The Trial are anything but deferent to the shadowy authorities - Kafka’s heroes come across as strong-headed, even pugnacious in the face of their persecution.

When Joseph K. is summoned for his hearing in The Trial, he gives an impassioned argument against the court’s legitimacy, inveighing against the shroud of mystery that envelops his case. We might especially sympathise with his articulate demand for open debate: “all I desire,” he tells the magistrate, “is a public ventilation of a public grievance.” Of course he never gets his wish - he is sentenced and condemned in secret, and dies in ignorance - but he remains defiant to the last.

Kafka was a poet rather than a prophet, and his complex vision is not reducible to simplistic political lessons. But it is still possible to see in his works an allegory of the vitiating effects of gratuitous secrecy, and the relationship between the abuse of power and the abuse of reason.

Perhaps by looking at the world with Kafka’s eye for the absurd, as well as his keen sense of injustice, could help inoculate us against the Kafkaesque becoming our reality.