A Kafkaesque Realization for Arendt - Part IV

The following is the final part of my mini-series reviewing Kafka's short stories in relation to Arendt's Human Condition. I sincerely hope you enjoyed my analyses of The Metamorphosis and The Hunger Artist! Please do read the first part that strictly discusses Arendt's main concepts of the "active life" and how humanity has grown up to essentially spit in its face. With that being said, let's move on to the last story left to discuss, in which I will bring up the quintessential concept defined after Kafka - the mysterious and absurdist Kafkaesque.

3. An Imperial Message & The Kafkaesque:

There is no doubt that Kafka’s greatest skill was to create black humor out of characters that despair at the hands of unjust political loopholes inspired largely from the real-world loopholes he observed in the age of early modernism. With rigid and authoritarian administration taking over most facets of life, the essence of that facet or work is ultimately drained in the effort of drudging through the bureaucratic processes allowing its facilitation in the first place. An Imperial Message is one of Kafka’s shorter yet straightforward stories that resemble Arendt’s concerns with action in the HC, establishing his own idea of the “Kafkaesque” alongside it.

 The story narrates a simple example that perfectly captures an example of this realization. It follows the deliverance of a message from a dying emperor to “you” (the reader), a faraway subject in his domain.  However, the herald dispatched to inform you faces an impossible challenge: wading through the infinite dwelling-places of the crowd. Not only must the herald pass the private rooms of the palace, but also the stairs, courtyard, second palace, and so on for “thousands of years.” Kafka employs repetitive language to portray the sheer difficulty in this task: “Never will he win his way through. And if he did manage that, nothing would have been achieved. He would have to fight his way down the steps, and, if he managed to do that, nothing would have been achieved…” And, as an indirect victim of this Sisyphean task, you, the recipient, wait forever at their window for the message to arrive.

The story’s ending is haunting, indicating a sense of bleak futility in something as natural as the conveyance of information. Notice how the content of the message itself, even though directed from an extremely important person to “you”, holds no importance whatsoever – it is the unending striving of the process that Kafka focuses on. Kafka writes, “If there were an open field… soon you would hear the marvelous pounding of his fist on your door.” Instead, all you can do is forever dream of the message you may receive from someone who has left the mortal plane long ago. 

Immediately, this story appeals to the concept of Arendt’s action in the HC. The exchange of information is precisely what Arendt believes to be action – an “activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter.” It is the basis on which society advances, records history, and discusses the future. Kafka shows that something even as easy as this is rendered impossible by the notions of political indirection and the more abstract, chaotic nature of what I would like to call “the system”. The physical obstruction of crowds in the herald’s path is perhaps a metaphor for the interference of unending tasks that the era of bureaucracy brought upon the elemental human functions of communication and connection.

This brings us to what it means to be “Kafkaesque”, a definition that has evolved for over a century. Even though the events of Kafka’s works are absurdist fiction, they are almost always set in worlds that are governed not too differently from our reality. As a result, the characters bring out the problems in our legal and political system in glaring ways, much like Arendt does in a more philosophical context. Thus, we can say that the worlds of his stories are “Kafkaesque” – they share the commonalities of the common man entrenched in a mundane existence in an increasingly cold and alienated world, controlled by corrupt authority and the increasing greed of society. 

For Arendt, this truly is chaotic – there is no place for art or plurality in such a world, and greed has largely overtaken the worth of work. Consequently, the powerful man builds more and more complicated mazes that bind the others in continuous futility, whether it be financial, political, or even psychological. This is how Arendt subliminally brings out the fear of “Kafkaesque” qualities as the fragmented result of a flawed vita activa in The Human Condition.