Kafka's Sarcasm and Arendt's Action

By Jeffrey Champlin

"[W]hat is wrong with the world in which Kafka's heroes are caught is precisely its deification, its pretense of representing divine necessity. […] The modern reader, or at least the reader of the twenties […] is quite serious when it comes to Kafka's sarcasm about the lying necessity and the necessary lying as divine law."

-- “Franz Kafka: A Revaluation (On the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of his death)”, Essays in Understanding

Arendt's reflection on Kafka emerged during World War II, appearing for the first time in the Partisan Review in 1944. The passage cited above occurs in the essay's section on The Trial. The manuscript then moves to The Castle, the stories in general, and concludes with an analysis of "A Common Confusion." Throughout the piece, Arendt repeatedly returns to the question of Kafka's modernity. She contrasts his contemporary readers of the 1920s with those of her time, who saw his prophecy of bureaucratic totalitarianism come true. The issue of Kafka's sarcasm has a key place in this contrast, and I see it pointing to a broader question of the relation between fiction and action in the present day.

Arendt's description of The Trial in terms of "sarcasm" raises a number of issues about the effect and intended meaning of Kafka's writing. Today, we generally use the term today to refer to a dismissive tone. The Oxford English Dictionary, however, reminds us that it has a provocative edge: "A sharp, bitter, or cutting expression or remark; a bitter gibe or taunt. Now usually in generalized sense: Sarcastic language; sarcastic meaning or purpose." Generalized sarcasm in the U.S. culture today often appears to merely indicate a subjective distance from dominant political or social narratives. In this sense, sarcasm comes close the genre of satire, which in its Latin form exposes the foolishness and often hypocrisy of those in power. In the 18^th century, Voltaire famously used it to not only attack the church and state but to test Enlightenment ideas themselves in fiction.

[caption id="attachment_16517" align="aligncenter" width="550"] A scene from the 1962 film adaptation of Franz Kafka's "The Trial." (Source: Hodgsonson)[/caption]

When Arendt says readers took Kafka's sarcasm seriously, she means that they didn't get it. The Trial famously recounts the arrest of the protagonist Josef K. on unannounced charges that nonetheless consume his life. On this note, we can recall Arendt's similar analysis of the failure of the public to register the cutting satire of the Threepenny Opera. Where Brecht wanted to present a vision of the corruption of humanity, viewers merely enjoyed it as a realistic depiction of the time. Although she does not use the term as such, Arendt interprets Kafka as a humanist, depicting the illuminating "good will" of the common man through contrast with the deception and imposed necessity of the ruling power. If Arendt is right, Kafka's optimism lies in a faith that the common man can disrupt the representation of divine necessity. (Remembering that "sarcasm" derives from Greek sarkazein, meaning to 'tear flesh,' points to a different, post-human Kafka. In this mode, he takes out the subject through the body in stories like "In The Penal Colony" and "The Vulture.")

It would be tempting to place Arendt's later thinking of "action" in the Human Condition on the side of contingency in opposition to necessity. However, action is not that simple because power can be more or less strict at different times. When people come together to start something new, it may seem in hindsight that the old way of doing things was merely contingent. However, without action, power may not have opened to the future.

[caption id="attachment_14740" align="alignleft" width="300"] The Human Condition (Source: Amazon)[/caption]

Michel Houellebecq's Submission, recently published in the United States, offers a contemporary opportunity to return to the question of sarcasm and satire in literature and politics. The novel imagines that a Muslim alliance party wins the national election in France in 2022, leading to the imposition of Sharia law. Houellebecq says that he intends it not as a provocation but as a possibility of what could really happen. At times, in his not wholly consistent interviews, he says that he merely wishes to entertain the audience; at others, he does imply a greater role for his work.

Writing in The Guardian, Alex Preston argues for the novel's satirical potential--not towards Islam but towards the passivity with which the French intellectual and political class abandon their unsatisfying worldviews and accept a massive change. If this is the case, the novel works through the classic technique of exaggeration meant to raise a problem to our perception. The characters never pause to think about their decisions, nor do they endeavor to act in Arendt's sense. In this way, putting the threat of a system with the "pretense of representing divine necessity " into the future raises questions about how we accept and authorize the systems we already live with today.

(Featured Image: "Franz Kafka". Sourced from Avondlog)