A Cage Went in Search of a Bird: Ten Kafkaesque Stories, by Naomi Alderman et al. (Catapult, 224 pp., $16.95)
A gents of the state bring highly serious yet vague criminal charges against a citizen, abruptly turning his life upside down. Though a conviction will mean a harsh penalty, the defendant’s urgent requests for clarification of his supposed offense meet with dismissal. The aloof and malevolent bureaucracy treats him with contempt.
While the explanation of a charged crime may be fundamental to due process, the state and its operatives do not care. They revel in their ability to wield arbitrary power and to taunt and intimidate. The officials refuse to divulge the exact charges, at least until so late in the game that it is impossible for the citizen to mount a proper defense. At the climax, two agents escort the citizen through the streets to the place of his execution. The momentary appearance in a far-off window of a possibly sympathetic stranger, whom the victim imagines to represent mercy, compassion, fairness, and humanity, turns out to offer no reprieve at all.
The plot and themes of Franz Kafka’s brilliant, unfinished masterwork The Trial will sound all too familiar to those who have followed the prosecution of Donald Trump and his conviction on vague charges of having committed election fraud through the falsification of business records related to a legal nondisclosure agreement. Due process has gone out the window. As the editors of National Review observed on May 29, the prosecutors, acting at the behest of sworn enemies of Trump, did not even reveal almost until their closing arguments, after the defense had cross-examined witnesses and made its case to the jury, the precise nature of the charged crimes — namely, federal campaign-finance-law violations.
A century after Kafka’s death on June 4, 1924, his bitter, absurd, ironic vision has come full circle with the conviction of a former and possibly future president of the United States. Kafka’s prescience is astounding. He has been highly relevant over the past century, never more so than during the mass repressions of totalitarian states. All these years later, as we try to make sense of the erratic actions of a politically driven judiciary hounding an admittedly divisive public figure, the pertinence of his vision stares us in the face.
Yet what can most people in the street tell you about this oracle? The public’s understanding of his oblique and surreal novels, stories, letters, and fragments is sadly limited. To the extent that people have any notion of Kafka, it tends to go something like this: a weird recluse who lived in Prague and wrote about the experience of ordinary people at the mercy of an aloof, inscrutable bureaucracy, and about a man who woke up one morning as a cockroach. That’s fine as far as it goes, but it does not convey granular understanding. Even with a century’s hindsight, the concerns and the identity of this modernist genius remain poorly understood. “Kafkaesque” is a catchphrase used in reference to anything a little weird.
The reason for this CliffsNotes-level grasp has partly to do with the abstruseness, indeed impenetrability, of so much of Kafka’s writing and with the failure of attempts to adapt his work for mass consumption. Of course, that is not to say that writers should refrain from pondering what Kafka has to say to us in 2024 or from imagining how his themes and scenarios might play out in the age of TikTok, Zoom, and DocuSign.
All of which brings us to A Cage Went in Search of a Bird: Ten Kafkaesque Stories, a highly anticipated anthology prepared for the centennial of Kafka’s death. The workings of inscrutable bureaucracies play out in surprising ways in the hands of the ten talented authors included here.
In Elif Batuman’s darkly funny “The Board,” a would-be purchaser of an apartment accessible by a highly confusing route — you go up several floors and then descend via a ladder and chute to the basement digs — finds out just how discerning the building’s managers are when they subject him to a face-to-face interrogation. They ask pointed questions about everything from his lack of past home ownership to his nocturnal habits to the shoes on his feet. It grows clear that they revel in tormenting the candidate with so many circular and needling questions, and that a suitable lodger may be impossible to find. Indeed, that may be the point. Batuman in “The Board” adapts and transposes one of the conceits of Kafka’s The Castle, in which brutal nighttime interrogations continually thwart those who seek to enter the eponymous structure, whose functions and purpose remain shrouded in mystery. If The Castle illuminates how people fritter away so much of their waking lives on inconsequential questions and never get around to exploring or challenging the power dynamics that drive what goes on in the world, “The Board” captures how a petty bureaucracy wields arbitrary power by stipulating impossible standards and reminding the peons of a blighted polity getting there from here is impossible.
That is not to say that the lords of the bureaucratic and autocratic order are happy. Keith Ridgway’s “The Landlord” is about the relationship between the tenant of an apartment and the unit’s owner, who stops by often to talk with the young lodger. The landlord often voices anguish over his wife’s failing health. “He always wanted to talk,” the narrator tells us. “To take my money—the rent, of course—but also to talk, to pass the time, to ask my advice, to worry sometimes about his son, the boy in the garden, but more often to talk about his wife.” The landlord is an unattractive older man with a depressed spouse, and the reader cannot help suspecting that the intensity of his need to converse and share mental and spiritual space with the lodger manifests a desire to experience vicariously a time of life when possibilities were wide open and had not yet hardened into dreary and oppressive routines punctuated by physical decay and death. The unfree resent the free for a reason.
“Death has not touched me,” Ridgway’s narrator states. “Perhaps that makes me useless to him. Or perhaps the inverse is true.”
Some entries in this book show technical daring and innovation worthy of Beckett, a prime example being Yiyun Li’s “Apostrophe’s Dream,” whose cast includes a comma, a period, a colon, a semicolon, a hyphen, a question mark, an em dash, and the other usual suspects. Their repartee offers a hilarious take on the vying for power of disparate members of a polity. But the standout here is “God’s Doorbell,” in which Naomi Alderman applies Kafka’s themes of inscrutable inner workings to one of the most unsettling trends of our time, the rise of artificial intelligence. Machines extrapolate from the data and intelligence given to them to construct a modern-day Tower of Babel. “The machines did not stop. In the whirling darkness of the upper atmosphere the Tower grew taller — more slender and more ethereal. In places it was made of tiny machines holding hands, one with the next with the next.” The story slyly inverts Kafka. Here, the fearsome and unfathomable castle is not just a looming presence on the horizon but an artifice of our own making. It comes from within us.
The stories collected in A Cage Went in Search of a Bird are surreal, dark, often hilarious, and not unworthy of a volume dedicated to the memory of Franz Kafka. A small cavil is that the writers do not seem particularly interested in their subject’s background as a lawyer or the specific legal nature of the official malfeasance he envisioned. To go beyond the common, imprecise understanding of Kafka as a writer concerned simply with bureaucracy, it is essential to plumb the chicanery of the law as depicted in his short pieces and fragments no less than in his unfinished novels.
In Kafka’s “The Penal Colony,” the tale’s protagonist, a visitor to a strange country, comes upon the site of an execution involving a peculiar modus operandi: an elaborate machine comprising interlocking chains and needles that tortures and mauls anyone caught in its grip. The official overseeing the execution of a soldier tried and condemned for disobedience explains to the explorer that he is also the judge in the legal proceedings that led to the imposition of the sentence. The explorer reacts with distaste to the effort and ingenuity that the powers-that-be have put to use to devise such an elaborately cruel means of execution. He goes so far as to disparage the machine’s design and to threaten to tell the official’s superiors what he thinks of the whole thing. The official relents, the condemned man gets out of the death machine’s grip, and the official himself gets stuck in its maw and meets a bloody demise, to the delight of the condemned man.
To the explorer, and the reader, it is clear that the inmate who escapes execution has no principled objection to capital punishment. What James Burnham said about the Left’s stance on foreign wars and conquests also applies here: It is really a question of who/whom. In writing the highly metaphorical “Penal Colony,” Kafka anticipated how progressives who sought to transform a judicial system they viewed as unduly vindictive toward some segments of the populace would not render it fairer or more humane, or do away with severe punishments but, as soon as they gained the upper hand, would harness it as a weapon to use against those they disliked. Of all Kafka’s stories, it may be “The Penal Colony” that best helps us grasp his vision of the law as a weapon in the hands of whoever wields power in a given moment, rather than as a set of objective precepts applied neutrally and fairly on behalf of the greater good.
This theme comes across even more powerfully in a piece just a fraction of the length of “The Penal Colony.” In the fragment “Before the Law,” Kafka describes a citizen’s arrival at the gates of the law, where a sentinel denies him entry and notes that deeper inside are more gates and guards who will not permit passage. The citizen is determined, though, and waits outside the gates with a patience and endurance that would far exceed most people’s. Finally, dying of exhaustion, he learns from the doorkeeper what would have become evident to him had he made it to the inner gates: The entire network of portals is designed specifically to stymie him and thwart his desire to get at the workings of the law and the motives, inducements, and backroom dealings that drive the legal system. Once again, the law is not a neutral instrument in the service of principles with universal application but a tool, indeed a weapon, for the persecution of those the regime holds in disfavor. It’s hard not to see in this narrative echoes of the prosecution of Trump at the hands of a district attorney and attorney general who campaigned on a promise to get him.
Perhaps as a result of Trump’s trial, a more explicitly legal understanding of the term “Kafkaesque” will come to replace the vague definition that has obtained for so long. One in which the regime manipulates the procedural aspects of the law, repeatedly interrupts defense witnesses, and limits the range of experts the defense can call to the stand, all in the interest of projecting awesome and unanswerable power and cowing citizens who cling to antiquated constitutional and philosophical ideals.
Those who preside over corrupt systems do not deign to explain themselves to their subjects, as Kafka made clear in the fragment “A Message from the Emperor,” but choose instead to hide behind many intricate and mutually reinforcing walls and courtyards. Citizens should know better than to expect transparency and accountability from those who abuse the law. To imagine such things is pure fancy, although, as Kafka reflects at the end of “A Message from the Emperor,” in Willa and Edwin Muir’s translation, “you sit by your window and dream it all true, when evening falls.”