Kafkaesque kahf-kuh-ESK
Something described as Kafkaesque
has an often nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality to it. More
broadly, anything relating to or suggestive of the writing of Franz Kafka may
be said to be Kafkaesque.
Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was a
Czech-born German-language writer whose surreal fiction vividly expressed the
anxiety, alienation, and powerlessness of the individual in the 20th century.
The opening sentence of his 1915 story The Metamorphosis has become one of the
most famous in Western literature (“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from
uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect”),
while in his novel The Trial, published a year after his death, a young man
finds himself caught up in the mindless bureaucracy of the law after being
charged with a crime that is never named. So deft was Kafka’s prose at
detailing nightmarish settings in which characters are crushed by nonsensical,
blind authority, that writers began using his name as an adjective a mere 16
years after his death. Although many other literary eponyms, from Austenian to
Homeric, exist and are common enough, Kafkaesque gets employed more than most
and in a wide variety of contexts, leading to occasional charges that the word
has been watered down and given a lack of specificity due to overuse.
