FRED MISURELLA
89
represents reality. The human being is only a pale shadow of what his
dossier contains; (3) in the traditions of psychological and religious
thought , human error, fault , or guilt seeks its proper punishment;
but in the Kafkaesque system the individual is punished and then
must search for the fault ; and (4) while the Kafkaesque world con–
tains humor, it does not allow the luxury of objective laughter; rather
it puts humanity inside the joke, into what Kundera calls the "horror
of the comic." In doing so, the Kafkaesque denies individuals the
heroic grandeur of tragedy .
Modern history tends to produce the Kafkaesque on a grand
social scale, Kundera goes on to say. He points to the increasing ten–
dency of those in power to make themselves divine, the growth of a
bureaucracy that institutionalizes the labyrinth for all societies ("as
far as the eye can see," in Kundera's phrase), and the increasing de–
personalization of individuals. Having been expelled from the uni–
versity, seeing his books destroyed, and having his name erased from
the telephone book, Kundera has experienced this depersonalization
firsthand, but he is quick to add that depersonalization occurs in the
West as well as the East. In fact he sees the whole planet becoming a
model of the world Kafka described in
The Trial
and
The Castle.
This
depersonalization has an interesting technological note in Kundera's
description of the Kafkaesque universe as a mechanism that is pro–
grammed as if it were a computer, but whose operator has left the
keyboard. It is a conception of the absurd, but it is also an analogy
very close to the eighteenth century deist's model of the solar system
as a wound clock. Yet while the organizing principle of time imposed
an order that eighteenth century man could understand and mea–
sure, an unknown system is the primary organizer now. A circuit
can break at any moment or the program may last forever . No one
knows ; no one
can
know because we do not understand the limits of
the machine or the original programmer's language .
Kundera relates this philosophic vision to Kafka's experience in
his family and at the office. In a totalitarian society, Kundera says,
the Kafkaesque manifests itself by erasing the line between public
and private lives. So Kafka's writing anticipated twentieth century
political and social developments because those developments corre–
sponded to his private experience . The totalitarian regime, Kundera
says, attempts to make society one big family: in doing so it denies
private life. While many critics have read Kafka's work as an expres–
sion of a desire for community and human contact, Kundera says
that
The Trial
and
The Castle
are really about the loss of privacy.
The
