Samuel Earle: Locking down with Kafka
Kafka’s characters are almost always trapped – in a cage, a court case, an insect’s body, a false identity – and they share a feeling that the walls are closing in, and that a door, once there, is disappearing into the distance. This existential claustrophobia, at once vague and intense, resonates today, particularly under lockdown. In A Report to an Academy, a short story published by Franz Kafka in 1919, an ape named Red Peter gives a lecture to a scientific conference, recalling how he was hunted in the jungle and then awoke one day in a cage, unable to return to the old way of life he had loved.
“For the first time in my life I could see no way out,” the
ape says of his captivity. “Hopelessly sobbing, painfully hunting for fleas,
apathetically licking a coconut, beating my skull against the locker, sticking
out my tongue at anyone who came near me – that was how I filled in time in my
new life. But over and above it all only the one feeling: no way out.”
In our time of plague, a quasi-official cast of oracles has
emerged: Albert Camus, Daniel Defoe, Susan Sontag, José Saramago – writers
whose novels and essays on infectious disease have acquired a new pertinence
and reached new audiences. Kafka is nowhere to be found on such lists, yet in
his life and writing we encounter a different kind of relevance: less literal
and more ambient. He is a writer who inhabited a similar nest of neuroses to
those presented by a pandemic, and who made this nest his home….
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2021/02/locking-down-kafka
More posts on Franz Kafka
The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head: Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay
A Report to an Academy : Esteemed Gentlemen of the Academy! I feel honored by your invitation to present the academy with a report on my former life as an ape...
Books reviewed - Lost in Transformation: biographies of Franz Kafka
'Before the Law' - a parable by Franz Kafka
