"The problem with Kafka's fiction is that while in general the surface presents a generic world, recognisable even to those of us living a century later, the content is not familiar; it does not counsel the reader with wise observations on the human condition or provide practical information and descriptions of places for the reader to absorb and use in their lives; there isn't even a happy ending in sight. The only resort for the reader is critical: 'What do I make of this?'."
I would venture that Kafka's fiction "--does not
counsel the reader with wise observations on the human condition--" is exactly why it remains a literary art that
remains powerful and continues to resonate
nearly a century after his death. One can make a cogent case for
the primary mission of literature to be one of relaying stories of how
characters, heroes and heroines both, meet their challenges head on and come
out the other side, changed, but wiser and more or less intact, but I fear the
rhetoric he would use would be the kind of religious insistence which,however
presented and finely parsed with philosophical what-ifs and teleological
what-nots, maintain rather simply that fiction , fabulation of any kind, be
instructive.
That would be instructive in the ways of a culturally
dominant habit of pervasive rationalization that there is a purpose to the way
things are, that each trial is a test of faith and character (judged against a
vague, abstruse creed) and that the individual is required to keep faith and
entrust their well being and souls to Church, State and Banks.
Kafka is an artist precisely he didn't have much for the
finely tuned , beautifully poetic rationalizations of one might term
"moral fiction"; he was rather obsessed, both as individual and as
writer making an aesthetic choice, to be true to his alienated, bleak, cruel
existence where attempts to cajole and seduce a person to look on the bright
side of things only intensifies that nothing makes sense and that existence is
cruel, amoral joke. His loyalty was to truth as he experienced it, and his fiction, splendid eviscerations of
folk tales and judgment past, makes a reader consider their feelings of similar
psychic destitution and do the work of
making something , something beautiful, truthful and meaningful, where nothing
existed before.