Another "Kafkaian Image"-Translated from Pavel Campeanu

The predilection towards the tragic comedy relies in the contrast between lucid rationality and the scarcity of action. The artist sees the monstrosity of the world but not the possibility to change it. He is strong enough not to adapt to it, but too weak to change in resonance with his human demands. The situation is at the same time tragic and comic too, as the artist is dominated on the plane of reality by what he tends to determine on the ideal one. It is because of that that he feels the need to detach himself from his own condition by distancing himself and to reconsider it with a relentless lucidity.

Kafka was born in a period when the last remains of the political credibility of the Jew community living in Böhmen were destroyed as a social unity in the course of the chauvinistic chase. The respect for oneself disappeared entirely, too. There was a real anti-Semitic feeling even among the Jewish people. The absurdity in Kafka’s short-prose writing marks its way unobserved and results in being observed in the most common facts of everyday existence. The thread articulation that binds an already known reality with the imagined absurdity is very fine and flexible. That is precisely why the barrier between the absurd and the rational is so fluid and therefore the invented stories question the real ones, even those that are largely accepted. On the other hand, it is in the work of the Irish writer that the fantastic dimension is clear, enormous fiction being completely separated from reality. In Kafka's case the absurd world emerges out of reality, more exactly directly from its components. On the other hand and rather in an arbitrary mode, the absurdity emerges nevertheless out of the real world it imposes over.

In relation to the absurdity of the world, the main distinction among Kafka and the writers of the absurd consists in the attitude towards the concepts of the law. In the most frequent cases the absurdity in Beckett’s short prose detects the absurd situation man finds himself in and limits to express it while using symbolic images.

The Kafkaian hero that experiences to the verge of exhaustion the transformation of the discrete absurd laws into brutal ones is doing all human possible to reinstall justice in the world. He dreams about regaining a more real and breathable air. It is true that this impulse remains a wishful desideratum the way towards rationality remaining unknown. But this simple desideratum is even tougher than reality. Desperation keeps itself in spite of the failures that put an end to the tendencies of achieving that specific desideratum. Although eventually inefficient, the striven for road towards rationality and justice separates the vision about Kafka’s world strictly from the world of the absurd.
This essential category is the most easy to be noticed by comparing the dimension of the two categories of characters. It is both in the prose of the Prague writer and in the absurd writing that we deal with tortured characters by a hostile world. These characters manifest a scaring capacity of adaptation to the most inhuman conditions of existence. But while the resignation of the characters is complete and for that reason their action limits itself to a sterile struggle in the rigorous sphere of the captivity, the Kafkaesque characters, especially main heroes as for instance Karl Rossman in “The Stoker” manifest a “disarming” lack of wonder or indignation while facing the absurdity of their own condition, spontaneous tireless energy in the search for a solution.

The differences between the Kafkaesque universe and those of the writer of the “nothingness” and “the absurd” are as profound as those above named similarities. The world is run in accordance with absurd laws. These represent nevertheless not the laws of conscience but of real relationships among people.

It is on rare occasions that Kafka describes the social condition of the subject being tortured by the effects of exterior actions, nevertheless objective by their origin. On the other hand it is very rarely that Beckett’s prose writing deplores a human condition that points to the emergence of absurdity in the split conscience of the sole human being.

The above mentioned differences represent key concepts to distinguish in the impact that Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett had on Romanian writers and on the development of several literary genres in Romania.



Bibliography
Primary Readings:

Kafka, Franz. Drucke zu Lebzeiten. (Hsg. Jürgen Born, Gerhard Neumann, Malcolm Pasley und Jost Schillemeit unter Beratung von Nahum Glatzer, Reiner Gruente Paul Raabe und Marthe Robert)Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag. 2002.
Kafka, Franz. Drucke aus dem Nachlass I. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag. 2002. (Hsg. Jürgen Born, Gerhard Neumann, Malcolm Pasley und Jost Schillemeit unter Beratung von Nahum Glatzer, Reiner Gruente Paul Raabe und Marthe Robert)
Kafka, Franz. Drucke aus dem Nachlass II. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag. 2002. (Hsg. Jürgen Born, Gerhard Neumann, Malcolm Pasley und Jost Schillemeit unter Beratung von Nahum Glatzer, Reiner Gruente Paul Raabe und Marthe Robert)

Secondary Readings in Articles of Magazines and Periodicals:


Alberes, R.M. et Pierre de Boidesferre ,,Kafka’’ Viata Romaneasca 12, (1965) :p.1.
Franz Kafka . Patru proze in versiunea lui Paul Celan. Excursia in munti, Doi oameni trec in fuga, O solie imparateasca, In fata legii. trans. Paul Celan in Sec.XX11-12, (1984). p.100-102.
Câmpeanu, Pavel. "Un alt Kafka”. Sec.XX December 12, (1967): p.90-96.