Kafka's Last Trial

The world was Kafkaesque before Franz Kafka; all he did was contribute the adjective. He was certainly not the first literary artist to identify the essential uncanniness of quotidian reality. From Catullus through Jonathan Swift and on to Heinrich von Kleist, ETA Hoffmann and Dostoevsky, the fictions we spin in order that life might be sustainable have been questioned, derided and upended, over and over. All the same, Kafka remains a special case. As George Steiner pointed out, no other great writer, not even Shakespeare, managed to arrogate to himself and make uniquely his own a letter of the alphabet. In the darker realm of literature, at least, K is king.