Not every nonsense captures our attention. There are things we cannot conceive of and do not dwell on; they seem trivial and useless to us. Yet, other things rivet us, and it seems that we find a truth in them where our imagination cannot find peace: it wanders in search of a point of balance, but what it builds cannot stand despite standing.
Franz Kafka is perhaps the writer who, more than others, made this form both an ascetic and a political discipline. Kafka's asceticism is without God and immediately political: it is that of the immense suffering of the ape in A Report to an Academy, who, imprisoned, gains the ability to mimic humans in their language and culture through the sheer necessity of survival.
In the book, he writes: "Imitating human beings was not something which pleased me. I imitated them because I was looking for a way out, for no other reason." However, it is not just an imitation of any humans; Kafka highlights that this imitation is meant to attain "the average education of a European".
Now a Music Hall star, the ape does not complain about the life it has achieved in Europe but does not forget its nightmare; he does not want to see by day the semi-domesticated ape that his impresario has gifted him and with whom he takes his "pleasure with her the way apes do" by night, and does not want to see her because he recognises all too well "in her gaze the madness of a bewildered trained animal".
Towards the end of his life, which marks the first centenary this year, Kafka wrote Von den Gleichnissen. The word 'Gleichnis' poses quite a challenge for translators. It can be rendered both a 'parable' and 'simile' and has an etymological connection with the English word 'like', which indicates comparison and equivalence. It could thus be translated as 'On Parables' just as well as 'On Similes'; indeed, there are different translations that follow one choice or the other.
Although not religious, Kafka was influenced by the rich Jewish religious culture of parables. The Hebrew word for 'parable' is māšāl, whose multiplicity of meanings also revolves around the idea of resemblance, as does, albeit with significant differences, the Arabic maṯal.
In this very short piece, the narrator introduces us to the fact that many complain that all we have are these parables/similes, which ask us to go to an indeterminate ‘beyond’—something that is inapplicable for freeing us from the daily toil of life. Thus, the narrator merely reiterates what we already know: "The incomprehensible is incomprehensible".
The explorer in In The Penal Colony—clearly a Westerner— witnesses the execution of a man who belongs to the colonised country where the story is set, and what he undergoes is completely nonsensical: he is executed without a trial and without even knowing the charges against him, nor does he speak the language in which the machine that will kill him is being described.
the man looked at the convict and asked the officer: does the detaine know his sentence?
no -said the officer he will experience it on his own body.
Franz Kafka in the Penal Colony. pic.twitter.com/phki2NVfjX
— Mehdi Ali (@MehdiAli98) October 18, 2021
Nonsensical is political: the explanation is for the Westerner, not for the death-sentenced. The lack of sense is even more blinding because the machine inscribes the broken rule onto the skin of the condemned through a cumbersome mechanism of needles.
What the machine writes, however, is complicated by flourishes and decorations, and it is only after hours, through the pain of the needles repeatedly piercing his flesh, that the condemned man understands, just before his death, the sentence being written on his skin, which emblematically in this case is: Honor Thy Superiors!
Through an intuitive yet elusive logic, the gate to the law in Before the Law stands open before the countryman, who only discovers at the time of his death that it was open solely for him and that he could have entered at any time. Yet, there is something weak about the powerful people in Kafka's works.
The judges in The Trial are humiliated by Joseph K., and often this weakness is even verging on the comedic, as they deal with the daily toils mentioned in On Parables, like the judge who replaces a light bulb in the middle of the night in the house of his defendant.
One should not be deceived about the lethality of these Kafkaesque figures: Joseph K. ends up being executed ’Like a dog!’; the machine in In the Penal Colony destroys itself because there are no longer funds to maintain it. It kills the condemned before he can reach the futile enlightenment of understanding why he is being executed.
In Jackals and Arabs, written shortly before the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the jackals, both aggressive and weak, beg a visiting Westerner, seen as predestined simply because he is European, to slit the throats of the Arabs with a pair of sewing scissors, out of a desire for cleanliness ('Cleanliness—that’s what we want— nothing but cleanliness', says the leader of the jackals). Interestingly, according to the author both Jackals and Arabs and A Report to an Academy should not be considered as parables.
In fact, for some scholars, Jackals and Arabs should be seen as pointing not to an unspecified “beyond” but the very specific beyond of Palestine. Reading this tale now sounds particularly sinister: "It seems to be a very old conflict—it’s probably in the blood and so perhaps will only end with blood", which, upon closer inspection, reaffirms the nonsense of oppression: if a conflict is ancient then it begins and ends in violence.
More than a hundred years later, these scissors have changed shape and offensive capability, and along with them, a new form of nonsense takes its first steps—a nonsense that intertwines oppression and mathematics in a way never seen in history.
