The Wish Machine and the Absurdity of Responsibility: Was Kafka Realistic?

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between literature, reality, and the reader, through the lens of modernist prose, focusing on the works of Franz Kafka. By analyzing the “poetics of indeterminacy” and the anti-mimetic approach, it highlights how modern art creates reality rather than depicting it. Using The Castle as an example, it demonstrates how Kafka’s works explore bureaucracy as a metaphor for abstract power and alienation, encouraging readers to actively interpret and reconsider the boundaries of understanding reality. The paper also emphasizes the role of language in reflecting a deeper reality and the doubt surrounding its communicative function, which remains limited in modern conditions that destabilize perception. The theoretical insights of authors such as Roland Barthes, Günther Anders, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Gianni Vattimo, and Giorgio Agamben are considered in relation to Kafka’s ability to explore the relationship between the individual and society, within the context of modernity. The writer points out the lack of stable foundations in the world, while also recognizing that art can be both an excess and a deficiency in relation to existence. Modernity in his works brings a conflict of different values and systems of signs, as well as a sense of alienation, while narrative art creates a space where chaos is attempted to be made bearable without diminishing its weight. Kafka’s vision of modernity, in which the meaning of existence is under constant pressure from emptiness, remains relevant, allowing us to reconsider our categories of normality and reality.