The liberation of the samsas

Abstract

Lukacs contends that Kafka pointed the way toward modernist abstraction and formalistic experimentation. As such, he sees Kafka as expressing a metaphysicalangst beyond redemption. Via an analysis of Kafka's use of formal means in Die Verwandlung I counterargued that Kafka, precisely by his use of these means, viz. the use of one narrative unit as “fiction” providing a solution to the reality of a larger narrative unit, does provide a solution to thisangst. Moreover, whereas Lukacs states that the first duty of the bourgeois intellectual has become “the rejection of an all-pervading fatalisticangst, implying a rescue operation for humanity rather than any breakthrough to socialism,” 11clearly implying that Kafka, while not doing the former, a fortiori fails to do the latter, I believe the present paper shows that Kafka does both. He does so by proposing to a narrative problem a solution which clearly has social implications as well: the elimination of mediation.