Ashoka University’s English and Creative Writing Departments hosted “Kafka-ed: A Symposium” to commemorate the death centenary of the celebrated and canonical author, Franz Kafka on 30th September and 1st October. Adalbert Stifter Verein e.V, a cultural institute in Munich that has overseen a plethora of Kafka-centric events this year, supported the event, allowing for it to be conducted under the banner of their event Kafka 2024.
Spanning two afternoons, the symposium was a well-constructed and insightful tribute to the author, not limiting itself to the territory of tragedy and surrealism traditionally associated with Kafka. Vighnesh Hampapura, the organiser of the symposium, told The Edict that to experience the Kafka-ed there needed to be an understanding of Kafka that goes beyond the view of hopelessness, absurdity, and existentialism usually associated with the author. Borrowing from Neel Vaidya’s presentation, Hampapura said that to be Kafka-ed is “for Kafka to get under your skin.”
Even the poster of the event that included Tetsuya Ishida’s Gripe indicated the creative turn this symposium intended to take. It is “a Kafka-esque painting that conveyed the oddity of his writing and we were hoping, the event,” said Veda Menon, one of the English Representatives (24-25). To market the event further was a Kafka wall in the library cafe— a wall covered in pictures of quotes, excerpts, and art to encapsulate the Kafka-esque. Andrea Fernandez, English Representative (24-25), said, “it also allowed us to bring Kafka (literally) into the everyday, in a mode and location accessible to us all!”
Pointing out the role of time, a play on the past and the present, in the term Kafka-ed, Menon said “Kafka is dead and we are celebrating his death centenary, so Kafka-ed (past tense) is fitting. Yet, there’s something lovely and right there about the title- that he is over and very much not.” She said that the symposium attempted, and succeeded given the immense turnout, in bringing together students from across disciplines to engage in academic discourse with Kafka. According to Fernandez it “seemed to transcend the boundaries between what is 'literary' and what is not, bursting open the literary space into that universal space of feeling.”
Writer, translator, and activist V. Ramaswamy began the symposium and discussed a variety of “stories and anti-stories that could be Kafka-esque.” In interpreting the Kafka-esque as “phantasmagorical” and “nightmarish”, he spoke about the works of the “maverick” Subimal Misra who, according to V. Ramaswamy, “ingested various writers”. He said that the influence of Kafka as one of these ingested writers is visible in the morbid and jarring excerpts that were summarised. Like the themes in Kafka’s work, Subimal Misra’s fiction too hosts the quality of creating disturbances in one’s reading of a text. It became more evident when V. Ramaswamy read an excerpt from an unpublished translation of Subimal Misra’s work. The audience was stunned. Hampapura later remarked that the audience “needed a moment” to absorb what had just been read.
Alexandra Verini, Assistant Professor of English, discussed the disturbance of the reader by referencing the cognitive dissonance within Kafka’s body of work. She narrated her own journey with Kafka and the Kafka-esque— from having envisioned the term to being a “shorthand for super serious, wearing black, smoking cigarettes, sort of intellectualism”, which received murmured assent, to also finding it to encompass the suffering that lays in tandem with “psychological alienation” and possessing the culture of a “displacement between the mind and body.” Referring to Marie de France’s poem ‘Bisclavret’, Professor Verini drew comparisons between Kafka and mediaeval literature stating that it was Kafka-esque to place the former in conversation with other authors across temporal spaces.
Shruti Jain, Associate Professor of German Language, Literature and Culture at OP Jindal University, brought in two poems written with AI assistance. They brought into conversation Kafka’s mother, who goes almost unheard of in the wake of his letters to his father but still contributed to his childhood struggle, according to Professor Jain, as a “beater” during a hunt, with his father as the hunter. The poems, heavy with emotion, were presented on screen alongside the audio of Professor Jain’s recitation, as she sought to embody Kafka and his grievances. Given the volume of reworks that had been made to the poems with her input, she spoke about the impossibility of AI having the ability to write these poems alone.
Aditya Vikram, Research Fellow at the Centre for Studies in Gender and Sexuality (CSGS), read Kafka’s novel, Before the Law. Vikram spotlighted the surrealism and absurdism that the other speakers alluded to within a more political context. They said that according to Kafka there seemed to be “an endless deferral of what we call justice.” Vikram closed Day One with a theoretical reading of the novel, affirming Kafka as a philosopher of law.
Alexander Phillips, Assistant Professor of English, opened Day Two with the goal of reading Kafka “unprofessionally”. He described the Kafka-esque to be “fantastic, bizarre, and dark”, not unlike V. Ramaswamy’s own understanding of the term. While discussing Kafka’s absence from his academic repertoire, Professor Phillips said that Kafka had a “negative presence in a professor’s academic profile.” He said that while those like Marx remained at the forefront of discussion in his studies, Kafka was always an underlying, inescapable presence and yet, he was rarely the primary focus of study within certain academic circles, furthering the need for an unprofessional reading of the same. There is the importance of, according to Professor Philips, “the ultimate satisfaction of finding Kafka outside the academic discourse in our own unprofessional readings.” Given this effect of Kafka, his impact, and yet his “negative presence”, what would the world be without Kafka?
Huzaifa Siddiqi, Assistant Professor of English at Ashoka University, began with the question — what would happen if Kafka’s works, his letters, and his diaries had, as per his request, truly been burnt and lost? He argued that new forms could arise, beyond the Kafka-esque readers and critics have created. These binaries within Kafka and the Kafka-esque, their positive and negative presences in the world, matter not, as Professor Siddiqi said, “Kafka is neither true nor false, Kafka is necessary.”
The necessity of Kafka in the political sphere, intimated by Aditya Vikram, was furthered by Teaching Fellow, Neel Vaidya in his reading of The Penal Colony. Vaidya placed the surreal absurdity mentioned in Vikram's reading of Before The Law alongside discussions of justice. He called the effect of Kafka here, “absurdism that calls our attention to the absurdity of justice.”
Sonal Dugar, Teaching Fellow, and Vighnesh Hampapura brought these profound conversations to a close with their presentation “The Weather in Love; or, Either the World Is So Tiny or Else We Are So Gigantic”. They performed a piece of correspondence, a thread of emails, replicating the form of Kafka’s own Letters to Milena. In their discussions of love and longing they brought up the terms “letter time” and “letterless time”, the space between Kafka’s conversations with Milena. This introduced a vein of temporality, different from what Professor Verini spoke about in her presentation.
The symposium questioned traditional understandings of the Kafka-esque and placed it beyond the realm of the morbid, surreal, and unconventional. Kafka was not a man whose creativity, as Dr. Shruti Jain explained, was limited by his struggle. The effect of Kafka was expanded to incorporate thoughts of familial ties, conversation amongst texts, and most profoundly, love and wonder. Each speaker put forth their own definitions, bleeding into one another, bringing to light the unseen branches of the Kafka-esque. Abiding by its traditional conception and simultaneously redefining it, the symposium embodied the spirit of being “Kafka-ed”.
(Edited by Giya Sood and Srijana Siri)
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