The Pervasive Kafkaesque

Why do Kafka's fictionalized allegories and parables carry such an intense and pervasive sense of reality? The author of this article suggests that the Kafkaesque is not as simple as the release of negative emotions, but is a "negative capability" resulting from Kakfa's strong desire for freedom, his insightful understanding of conditions of unfreedom, and his unique literary style of freeplay, which deserves further analysis and discussion. The overwhelming sense of depression and oppression allegorically points to a patriarchal and authoritarian order or system, which, in terms of its generative logic, is the structure of "logocentrism," where the socio-symbolic order forms a binary opposition of "center" and "margin," following absurd laws of crime and punishment, and conditioning various existential and psychological states of the characters between the two poles. In postcolonial terms, this can be described as "internal colonialism." The representation of absolute power in Kafka's works is full of irony and paradox. For example, Kafka symbolizes absolute power in the image of death, but the force on the verge of death is still strong enough to strangle life on the rise. Bureaucracy in this system goes beyond red tape, and cloaks sheer absurdity as reason and law; the fear triggered is represented as a closed space that is paradoxically narrow and infinitely large. Drawing from the wisdom of Shakespeare, Walter Benjamin, George Santayana, John Keats, and Victor Shklovsky, and citing several of Kafka's fictional texts as examples, this article further discusses how the Kafkaesque is rooted in Kafka's aesthetic judgement in which the sense of "beauty" or "pleasure" is a force of good-a persistent desire for freedom-that underlines his works. One of the charms of Kafka's rhetoric is his ability to sculpt nightmares into moments that Benjamin calls "gestus," or gestures, which produce effects of irony, paradox, and ambiguity in the coexistence of opposed themes, creating room for both playful and serious interpretations.