American poet/critic W.H. Auden once called Franz Kafka "the voice of the 20^th century," saying, "He speaks for our age in the same way that Shakespeare once spoke for his." What Auden meant was that since Kafka's death, his work has had more influence on serious writers from around the globe than the work of any other modern writer. According to Auden, Kafka captures the psychological reality of modern man better than anyone else has done.

Since Kafka's stories are usually considered surreal, it may initially be difficult to understand Auden's strange praise. For example, "Metamorphosis" is a story about a young man, the sole support of his family, who wakes up one morning and discovers that overnight he has somehow been transformed into something distinctly inhuman. (Translations include "monstrous vermin", "dung beetle", and my personal favorite, "cockroach.") He goes through his morning rituals, trying to pretend nothing has happened, until his family discovers him and screams in horror, forcing him back in his room. By the end of the story, several weeks later, the family puts him out with the garbage as if he had never lived.

"The Penal Colony", usually the title story of a Kafka collection, has a Star Trek quality to it. It's the story of an international observer from some unnamed human rights organization or internationl governing body (there was no United Nations in Kafka's lifetime). The observer travels to an alien and primitive country to examine their penal system for human rights abuses. He discovers a man being tortured to death in an elaborate game-show-like ritual that requires him to guess his crime before he dies. The observer is hesitant to speak up because he fears that he's interfering with the culture and customs of the country. But his reticence becomes increasingly inhuman and bizarre as the prisoner screams for mercy while the reluctant observer puzzles about whether or not he should speak up. At last the observer summons the courage to raise his hand and meekly suggest that perhaps, just perhaps, sentencing someone to die and torturing him to make him guess his crime is unjust. "Unjust?" the executioner shrieks. "UNJUST?" He stops the killing contraption (something like a giant sewing machine stitching the name of his crime in the prisoner's back). He rips the prisoner out and leaps back under the needle himself, reprogramming the machine to inscribe the word "unjust" on his own back. Meanwhile, the pitiful victim becomes the deranged executioner, drooling gleefully over his former captor's gruesome death. "Oh dear, have I made a mistake?" the observer wonders. Then the machine explodes.

Another frequently anthologized story is called "A Hunger Artist". This story is about a man who's a circus performer. Essentially he sits in a cage for months on end and goes without food or water as an audience applauds this feat of endurance.

These are three of Kafka's most often read stories, and most of the less well-known stories are stranger. So how can a man who writes about such strange situations and such bizarre characters be the single writer most likely to "speak for" the psychological reality experienced in everyday life by you and me?

The truth is that Kafka, like all great writers, was also a great fortune-teller. He was acutely aware of cultural and social changes that would become more apparent some years after his death. We haven't noticed these changes. But writing in a more innocent time, Kafka was more aware of them and was able to portray them in a more vivid and chilling light.

Think about these points:

Regarding "Metamorphosis," it would hardly have been said in Kafka's time that the demise of the family and the physical and sexual abuse of children were perhaps the most important problems of western society. Yet in this story, Kafka brilliantly captures the subtle deceits and manipulations that allow family members to dehumanize one another and to move gradually closer and closer to killing to one of their children. Moreover, in Kafka's time few Europeans would have been pessimistic about the development of capitalism. Except in Russia, few questioned the way big business, with its separate values and priorities, was beginning to over-ride the values and priorities of smaller social units like communities and families. These two parallel developments are explored together here; moreover, the connections between them are also suggested.

Regarding "The Penal Colony," political realities in many areas of the world today are just as strange as the world Kafka depicts. Bosnia, Somalia, the Sudan, China, Afghanistan, Iraq; many places come to mind. Moreover, the crazy position of U.S. and U.N. "observers" and "peace-keepers" is hauntingly like what Kafka describes.

Regarding "A Hunger Artist," it certainly wouldn't have been foreseen in Kafka's lifetime that a major neurotic illness involving voluntary starvation (anorexis nervosa) would reach epidemic proportions in some western societies, particularly our own. Nor would it have been foreseen that war criminals in World War Two and later wars would develop such a reputation for enjoying the starvation of their victims. (Kafka died prior to World War Two, but all the living members of his family were murdered at Auschwitz, as he too would have been had he been alive.)

First and foremost, of course, they were the product of his sensitive and talented mind. But three factors are thought to have been influential in shaping the way that mind saw the world.

The turn-of-the-century politics of the region of the world where he was born. Kafka, a German Jew, was a native of Prague, Czechoslovakia, and a young man during World War I. The 20^th century is said by some pundits to "have begun and ended in Sarajevo," by which they really mean the whole region of Eastern Europe--Kafka's spiritual neighborhood. The political instability of this region mirrors and foretells the political instability of much of the 20^th and 21^st century world. Moreover, this political instability offers opportunities for psychologically unstable people like Slobodan Milosovich to impose their whimsical wills on large numbers of innocent people. Much of Kafka's fiction is at least partly about bizarre older aggressive men doing just that.

His family life. Speaking of bizarre older aggressive men, Kafka was supposedly influenced to an extraordinary degree by his father. By all accounts, his father was an unusually stupid and cruel man who couldn't appreciate his son's intellectual gifts. (By profession the elder Kafka was a butcher.) Somehow Kafka's father seems to have so undermined his son's emotional growth and self-confidence that Kafka, like Gregor Samsa, lived in his parents' apartment for his whole life, despite having an unusually important executive job.

His job. Kafka was a ranking executive of a government agency whose function was to compensate workers who were horribly maimed in industrial accidents (or to compensate their families if they were actually killed). All day long at the office it was his job to write detailed, meticulously objective accounts of exactly how accidents happened. This was to be done for the purpose of determining whether or not and to what extent the government, and/or the worker's employer, was at fault. Of course the best outcome from the insurance agency's standpoint was for the worker himself to be found to have been at fault, so nobody else would be liable to compensate him or his family for the injury. Kafka must have been appalled by his job, but it became the source of his unique literary style. One of the hallmarks of a Kafka story is the way in which emotionally devastating events are related to the reader in an aloof deadpan voice that sounds unaware of the horror. This voice came directly from the forms he wrote on the job.

Kafka's most famous novel, The Trial, is probably the first story ever written about a new 20^th century phenomenon, arrests carried out by "secret police." Before Kafka's time, it was unthinkable that a man would ever be arrested by the authorities of a modern, civilized government without being told what his crime was, what his punishment might be, or who would determine if he lived or died. But that's exactly what happens to the main character in this story, a successful young banker named Josef K. As a secure member of the upper middle class, a man with a respectable job and connections in high places, K. at first scoffs at the arrest as a silly mistake. After all, the policemen aren't wearing uniforms, and they don't act like policemen. Besides, as they wait for word on what to do with K., one of them casually sits down and begins to eat K's breakfast. Who can take the police seriously when they act like that?

But K. soon realizes he's entered a bizarre world no one completely controls. Here his good name and connections are useless. No one has heard of his friends in high places. He's told to appear at Court on a Sunday, an unlikely day and time. He's given an address he's never heard of, but knows to be in the middle of a slum where no one would imagine there would be government offices. Being the stand-up sort of fellow he is, he does what he's told. But when he arrives at the Court he's even more miffed. The address he has been given turns out to be the seedy apartment of a common worker (I think a plumber). The plumber's wife is there. She's oddly solicitous of him. (Either now or later, I can't remember which, she'll try to seduce him.) But when she can't deflect him from his purpose of going to Court, she opens up the back wall of the apartment; sure enough, the tiny apartment opens into a huge auditorium where scores of people are milling aimlessly around.

K. hears his name called. He goes to the podium to defend himself, speaking very eloquently, with the absolute assurance of the self-righteous. But his voice begins to falter as he gradually realizes that no one is listening to him. Before long, the plumber's wife lies down on a table right under his nose and starts engaging in sexual intercourse with one of the ushers. No one pays any attention to them either. Later, the plumber's wife will compliment K. on how beautiful his speech was and say how deeply he moved her. Puzzled, K. asks how she could have been listening to what he was saying while she was doing you-know-what with an usher the whole time he was talking. She deflects the question by sighing and saying that she's obligated to sleep with the ushers to help her husband in his career. This doesn't make any sense either, but from now on, nothing he hears from anyone makes very much sense.

For an unspecified time--maybe several days, maybe several weeks, maybe several months--Josef K. hears more and more about how his trial is going, who might help him, and how he should behave. He's free to go on with his life as if nothing were wrong, much as Gregor Samsa tried to do when he first realized he'd been transformed into a cockroach. But the illusion of normalcy is pointless, as it was for Samsa. It becomes gradually more and more clear that he's doomed. The police are never identified, and he never hears what his crime is. But his landlady, his supervisor at the bank, and ultimately even his uncle come to act more and more as if they too just accept the fact that he's somehow guilty, even if they don't know what he's guilty of.

The last two "helpers" he meets are a powerful Court lawyer, masterfully played by Jason Robards, and the Court chaplain, masterfully played by Anthony Hopkins. These are not your everyday lawyer and chaplain. For example, the lawyer and his housekeeper keep another one of his clients prisoner in a pantry in the lawyer's kitchen, starving him and making him memorize thousands of pages of meaningless Court documents. When this client asks how his case is going, he's castigated so harshly that he weeps, and is then allowed to repent by kneeling and kissing the lawyer's hand. As for the chaplain--well, I'll let Anthony Hopkins (Hannibal Lechter in "Silence of the Lambs") show you what he's like.

Below I've listed four features that are almost unique to and always characteristic of Kafka's stories.

1. In Kafka's stories, relationships which should be precious are regarded as trivial, while trivial relationships and things are given exaggerated (even comic) importance. You can see this in "Metamorphosis" if you compare the way the family treat the lodgers who come to rent rooms from them with the way they treat their own ill son. Also, note how much kinder the housekeeper is to Gregor, at the end of the story, than anyone in his family is. In the movie of The Trial this is also evident in many individual scenes, such as the imappropriate affection strange women often display for Josef K, and the curious child-like dependence of the clients on the tyrannical lawyer.
2. In Kafka's stories, there's an absurd, arbitrary power dynamic. That is, power changes hands repeatedly and arbitrarily, so that it's impossible to say who's in control or why things happen. This feature is basic to much of the plot of "The Penal Colony" and The Trial. It's also evident in "Metamorphosis" if you think of the "metamorphosis" that takes places not only in Gregor, but in his father, who transforms from a helpless dying old man dependent on his son into a revitalized man of the world. (In fact, Gregor and his family do switch places.)
3. Often in Kafka's fiction, the characters have a stated goal which is never reached, but in their pursuit of this goal, they come to redefine who they are or what their purpose in life should have been. The reasons for these transformations remain mysterious, especially to the characters who undergo them. By the end of The Trial, even Josef K. in some sense or another knows he's guilty (especially in the novel, though perhaps this is downplayed a bit in the movie). The goal of freeing himself from responsibility for a crime he didn't commit becomes replaced by the goal of trying to understand what his responsibility to his fellow man was and how he could so badly have misunderstood it.
4. In Kafka's fiction, there's always an absurd devaluation of human feelings. For example, characters can watch murder or torture or extreme cruelty without appearing to flinch, as the observer does in "The Penal Colony." Also, they can have their own personal feelings trampled unmercifully without registering a peep of objection, as Gregor Samsa does in "Metamorphosis."

I assume we can all think of modern news stories that also have these characteristics.