I am back with Thoughts and Content, where I talk about books, what I have been watching and all other things. This newsletter is focussed on a lot of my favorite writers but specifically Franz Kafka and Jose Saramago. I hope you like it.
The Causality of Little Acts, Meaningless Jobs and the Necessity of Kafka
Stuck in front of a spreadsheet for the last two hours, I am reminded of a Kafkaesque scenario. A little cursor moving from one cell to the next, numbers magically appearing and disappearing, the mundanity of the infinite task that the protagonist repeats again and again. The screen becomes a stage, on which a tiny game is being played, yet for the perceiver like the protagonist in any story, the profundity is lost for they are stuck in the story. What holds utmost significance when viewed with the curiosity of a child, loses its significance when embedded into the routine life. Josef K never realises the fatalistic tale he exposes to the world, and through this non-realisation, he neither expounds nor negates any greater truth. All Josef K is left with, at the end of his story, is emptiness. Yet, is this emptiness one of negation? A null sum game that gets played for no reason but of an absurd comic relief or one that is a symptom of necessity.
In the Trial, the priest of the cathedral explains that, “it is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary.” From this point, we return to our original scene, to a Kafkaesque protagonist stuck in a supposedly meaningless job, or a job that does not provide a subjective sense of meaning to the actor. Our actor diverges from a Kafkaesque protagonist in the salient way, that the actor is aware of the absurdity of their situation, that is, in the micro realm, the actor is frustrated, complains, stomps his feet and gives into suffering, yet returns to perform the same infinite routine again. It is only the awareness that becomes the point of divergence. This divergence converges when we realise that the awareness in itself is absorbed into the causal structure of the world that we inhabit, where everything affects everything, where all doors are linked to one another, where the individual is inextricably linked to the society and the society to the individual, when we reach the point where we realise that all the judges, the lawyers, the peasants, and the protagonist cannot escape this infinite bureaucracy and yet is isolated. As Kafka, puts it in the Castle, “those who are ignorant naturally consider everything possible,” the actor by their awareness is limited.
At this point, one misinterprets Kafka in a narrow nihilistic sense. The question, with which we began, still remains. What do we have to learn from Kafka and the infinite causal structure about our meaningless jobs?
I’ll start with two stories- one narrated by Walter Benjamin about a 18th Russian statesman Grigory Potemkin, who goes into depression, in his essay on Kafka, and the other about Adolf Eichmann’s trial.
“Potemkin was having a crisis and was therefore inaccessible, but affairs of state were pending. There was a stack of documents that urgently needed to be signed, and the high officials were at the end of their rope; but a junior clerk named Shuvalkin who was informed of the problem took hold of the documents, impassively marched into Potemkin's bedroom, presented the papers to him, and pressed him to sign them. Without blinking—at least, so it seemed—Potemkin signed all the documents presented to him one after the other. Everyone knows what happened: when the high officials finally had the famous documents in hand, they were stupefied to decipher in each instance the name Shuvalkin.”
As Benjamin recounts this story, he calls it a herald racing two hundred years ahead of Kafka’s work, and the enigma that beclouds it is Kafka’s enigma. The Kafka’s enigma about the transference of names, probing into the ontological nature of a shared identity is also one that I often think about in the context of being Shuvalkin. A junior clerk, who walks into the office, and actually starts the machine again, is oblivious of his own responsibility to an extent that he loses his identity. Can it be construed as a reminder of Kafka to be present? Or an absurdity where the absence of radical responsibility, in itself keeps the bureaucracy moving, and the mere necessity of individuals who are present would lead to a situation like one of Potemkin’s depression?
In the second story about Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem for his involvement in carrying out the Final Solution on Jews, Eichmann pleads to Kant’s categorical imperative, which roughly states that morality should be based on a universal law that must be adhered to at all times. In Kant’s imperative, the legislator is the moral self, while Eichmann considers Hitler as his legislator. In a certain sense, Eichmann hands over his autonomy of self over to Hitler, and as he pleads in the court, that he was just doing his job, and he never thought about the actual causality of his action. Hannah Arendt terms this as the banality of evil, where one doesn’t think of the causality of their actions and disregard the radical responsibility of existence, and is reduced to someone doing their mundane job with no regard of its consequences.
In both the stories, we notice a Kafkaesque element. We notice the causality of all that we do and how it leads to a larger outcome. Two actors on the extreme spectrums of autonomy, perform tasks which they do not attribute a broader meaning to, which they perform as automata and which leads to a comical and a tragic outcome respectively. The question of radical responsibility does not cross the actor’s mind and if they did realise the profundity of their actions, the outcomes could be different or if not different in the macro scale, at least at the micro level of their own personal beings. Embedded within the same, is the nature of an infinite causality that reminds us of the profound role of an individual in an assemblage of tiny actors, where the individual is not atomized but exists as the part of an assemblage. A machinic causality, where a tiny gear amplifies its effects and leads to a much grander outcome than one realises.
Every time I read Kafka, I am reminded of the necessity of non-entity. Of every little action that propels the story forward. The absurdity of the infinite bureaucracy paradoxically also maintains it, and every actor plays their part in maintaining it. Everyone works for the Castle. The little numbers in the spreadsheets become parts of reports. A stamp marks the seal of approval for legitimacy in a court of law. The causality that extends throughout our lives is a reminder that we exist, and what we are doing matters, not just in abstract philosophical terms, but firstly in material outcomes where there is a concrete trail of every action throughout a microcosm, and secondly in existential terms, as the example of Eichmann and Shuvalkin demonstrate. The ideal of Kafka is not to offer a truism, but to create meaning and adopt a radical responsibility towards life, to never rule oneself out, and to find curiosity and a sense of exuberance in life. The fact that a little act like filling a number in a spreadsheet can ripple through our Kafkaesque lives to create an overall meaning that is grander than us. This search of meaning in itself gives birth to curiosity, for it is the way where no job actually lacks meaning. The inherent message is to never negate oneself, for even if Josef K ends up empty, he is still significant, if not in an egotistical sense then as the space that fills the emptiness of a meaningless bureaucracy. It poses the important question of awareness of our place, and through that understanding to expand the subjective meaning of our lives.
At the end, Kafka also offers us an escape, for beyond the necessity preached by the priest at the cathedral, there is also a truth. There is always the promise of escape, to make something, when all meaning is lost and in all of that creation is hidden the absurdist promise of Kafka, that “justice is always next door.”
The Subtle Genius of Jose Saramago, and the Deviations from Kafka
In Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, Jorge Luis Borges plays with the idea of the role of author and context in the book. When separated by ages, Pierre Menard writes Cervantes’ Don Quixote line by line, without ever knowing that such a book already exists, we are left with the question that is every re-iteration of the same literature, a different experience and hence a different book. Every time, I read Jose Saramago, I wonder the same. The echoes of Kafka seem to resound in certain books, while Pessoa literally roams as a ghost in another. The themes are so Borgesian and how he quotes Walter Benjamin, creates a universe where Saramago seems almost invisible. Yet, this very invisibility in itself, this imperceptible backseat that he takes in the mundanity of the narrative structures that he builds point out his own understanding and confidence in language, and also points at something more profound which is the distinctness of each book despite feeling familiar. Like Pierre Menard’s Quixote is not the same as the one written by Cervantes, in a wide departure, Saramago seems to be aware of this little game he is playing with us, and rather than a literal copy, he is presenting to us a mockery, a very subtle satire that uses the themes of Kafka and Pessoa as tools to show the contradictions in their own narratives, or produces a stark anti-thesis to their ideas.
All the Names, in a lot of ways is a Kafkaesque book. A lonely clerk, who works in the labyrinthine Central Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, is thrown into a pursuit over which he has no control. Like most Kafkaesque stories, Senhor Jose seems to be a medium for the structures of the society or the literary narrative, to manifest itself. However, Saramago turns the Kafkaesque narrative on itself, and seems to be asking a deep existential question, which is that are we in control of our lives or not. Despite repeated claims of the protagonist being driven by fate, Saramago clearly poses situations where the progression from mundanity to absurdity, is a clear causal phenomenon which is driven by every choice of Senhor Jose. The aspect is exemplified in multiple scenes, where Senhor Jose thinks in counterfactuals, drawing out storylines about what would have happened if he had done something differently, or long drawn out conversations with walls and ceilings where he contemplates his transition from a clerk who lacks agency to a madman who is enjoying the absurd freedom. This is a stark departure from Kafka where the protagonist is a victim of a larger system which extends beyond him. Saramago brings back the protagonist from being the cog in a machinery, and explores the personal life of an otherwise mundane man. He explores the existential tussle between being an individual and existing as a part of a superstructure where everything has a well defined purpose, in much overt fashion than Kafka. He is drawing out the importance of each human life, by tracing the journey of a single file from birth to death, how Senhor Jose’s obsession with the woman who he can’t find shows us both the alienation of an individual in a society, and the importance of being seen, of being searched for.
Saramago is extending the Kafkaesque structure to extricate us from the nihilism it might induce. He is offering us agency, and showing the blindness of conformity in itself. The journey to freedom, a treatise from life to death and the vagaries in between, and the emotionally bankrupt life that a superstructure imposes on us, might not have a value attached to them but surely are stressing on the conflict we live within. As he writes, “Nothing so tires a person as having to struggle, not with himself, but with an abstraction.” I believe he is offering us the strength to continue that fight.1
Things Mentioned in the Newsletter
The Trial by Franz Kafka
The Castle by Franz Kafka
Illuminations by Walter Benjamin
Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals by Immanuel Kant
All the Names by Jose Saramago
The Year of Death of Ricardo Reis by Jose Saramago
Link to the Chomsky- Foucault debate in the picture.