PEOPLE’S DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF ALGERIA

MINISTRY OF HIGHER EDUCATION AND SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH

MENTOURI BROTHERS UNIVERSITY OF CONSTANTINE
FACULTY OF LETTERS AND LANGUAGES
DEPARTMENT OF LETTERS AND ENGLISH LANGUAGE

THE KAFKAESQUE AND THE ORWELLIAN AS A

MODERNIST LITERARY RESPONSE TO THE HORRORS
OF THE TWO WORLD WARS
A Comparative Study of Franz Kafka’s The Trial and George
Orwell’s 1984

A dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfilment of the

requirements for the Master Degree in British and American Studies

Submitted by: Supervised by:

Miss Rayane ANSER Dr Ferdous GRAMA

June 2017
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To my parents, to my friends

and all my beloved folk

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Acknowledgments

Since the day I was born, two people have replaced their dreams with mine. I hope to be

paying back my parents a fraction of what they deserve the day they see me graduate. Because

of you two, I get to say that my dreams are possible and attainable. I am eternally indebted

and grateful to you both. I love you to the edge of the universe and beyond. By extension, I

would like to thank my siblings. I wish we all make our parents proud.

I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr Ferdous Grama, for being everything a student

could hope for. Because of you, I have been the subject of envy of many of my classmates.

You have done your job perfectly and have been wonderful throughout. You set the bar very

high and I aspire to, one day, be as passionate about what I do as you are. I hereby thank you

for all your precious time and for your devotion. I truly believe this work would not have been

possible without you.

This journey has had its ups and downs. It was filled with laughter and tears. Looking

back at it with a nostalgic heart, all seems worth it. The best part was getting to share it with

my wonderful friends. I have had the time of my life with you guys. Graduating alongside

some of you makes this experience all the more special and memorable. I am the luckiest to

have each one of you in my life. I wish to see each one of you a successful and happy

individual.
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Abstract

This paper examines and compares Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1925) and George

Orwell’s 1984 (1949) in order to show how the two World Wars have resulted in certain

parallels between the writings of the two authors. This, in part, comes to point out the impact

that the two World Wars had on literature, more particularly on the modernist movement in

the twentieth century. In The Trial, Franz Kafka articulates his personal anxieties as much as

he expresses other universal uncertainties that people who lived through wars often times

share. In 1984, Orwell writes about his fear of a world that survived a great war but has come

under the grips of a totalitarian rule. The impact of the First World War on Franz Kafka and

that of the Second World War on George Orwell is reflected and described in their two novels

by means of plots, characters and a set of themes. Kafkaesque and Orwellian writings,

ultimately, evoke a range of similar modernist themes that characterise post-war writing and

display the literary response to the horrors of the two World Wars.

Key words: Kafkaesque, Orwellian, Modernist literature, WWI, WWII.

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‫ملخص‬

‫يتناول ويقارن هذا العمل بين رواية فرانز كافكا ‪ The Trial‬ورواية جورج أورويل ‪ 1984‬من‬

‫أجل أن يبيّن كيف تم ّخضت الحربان العالميتان األولى والثانية عن وجوه شبه بين كتابات هاذين المؤلفين‪.‬‬

‫يبيّن هذا من ناحية أثر الحربين العالميتين عل األدب‪ ،‬وعلى وجه الخصوص تأثيره على حركة الحداثة‬

‫ضح فرانز كافكا بعض مخاوفه الشخصية بقدر ما يعبّر عن‬

‫في القرن العشرين‪ .‬في ‪ ، The Trial‬يو ّ‬

‫تخوفه من‬
‫مخاوف عالمية يتقاسمها أغلب من عاش خالل الحرب‪ .‬في ‪ ،1984‬يكتب جورج أورويل حول ّ‬

‫عالم نجا أهوال الحرب لكنّه وقع في قبضة حكم استبدادي‪ .‬تأثير الحرب العالمية األولى على فرانز كافكا‬

‫وتأثير الحرب العالمية الثانية على جورج أورويل معكوس في روايتيهما من خالل حبكات‪ ،‬شخصيات‬

‫ومجموعة من المواضيع‪ .‬خالصة‪ ،‬الكافكئية واألورويلية تثير مجموعة متشابهة من مواضيع حركة‬

‫الحداثة التي تميّز كتابة ما بعد الحرب وتبرز كيفية تجاوب األدب مع أهوال الحربين العالميتين ‪.‬‬

‫كلمات مفتاحية ‪ :‬الكافكئية ‪ ،‬األورويلية ‪،‬األدب الحديث ‪ ،‬الحرب العالمية األولى ‪ ،‬الحرب العالمية الثانية‪.‬‬
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Résumé

L’objet de ce travail consiste en l’étude et la comparaison entre le roman The Trial de

Franz Kafka et le roman 1984 de George Orwell afin de mettre en relief l’influence des deux

guerres mondiales sur ces deux romans modernistes. Ceci apparait du point de vue de

l’influence des deux guerres mondiales sur la littérature et surtout leurs influences sur le

mouvement moderniste du XXème siècle. Dans son œuvre The Trial, Franz Kafka exprime à

travers ses peurs personnelles, les peurs de tous ceux qui ont vécu durant la guerre. Dans son

œuvre 1984, George Orwell exprime également les peurs d’un monde ayant survécu au

cauchemar de la Seconde Guerre mondiale et qui se retrouve entre les mains d’un pouvoir

totalitaire et autoritaire. L’influence de la Première Guerre mondiale sur Franz Kafka et celle

de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale sur George Orwell, se reflète dans la manière des choix des

histoires, des personnages et des différents saluts de l’humanité. Les thématiques évoquées

par le Kafkaïen et l’Orwellien qui ont caractérisé le mouvement littéraire moderniste de l’après-

guerre ne sont que la reaction de la littérature au horreurs des deux guerres mondiales.

Mots Clés: Kafkaïen, Orwellien, Littérature moderniste, Première Guerre mondiale,

Deuxième Guerre mondiale.

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Contents

General Introduction………………………………………………………………………1

Chapter One: Historical and Personal Background

Introduction.........................................................................................................................5

1.1 Historical Background

1.1.1 Prague and the First World War…………………………………………...6

1.1.2 England and the Second World War………………………………….…...8

1.2 Personal Background

1.2.1 Kafka’s Life and Personal Struggles…………………………………...….10

1.2.2 Orwell, Socialism and Political Writing…………………………………...14

Conclusion...........................................................................................................................18

Chapter Two: Modernism in Literature and the Two World Wars

Introduction..........................................................................................................................20

2.1 Definitions and Context

2.1.1 Modernism in Literature………………………………………………....….21

2.1.2 The German Modern Novel…………………………………………….......23

2.1.3 The English Modern .Novel…………………………………………….......25

2.2 The Impact of the Two World Wars on Literary Modernism

2.2.1 The Modernism of the Kafkaesque…………………………………….…...27

2.2.2 The Orwellian and the War………………………………………………....31

2.2.3 Kafkaesque versus Orwellian……………………………………….……....33

Conclusion............................................................................................................................36
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Chapter Three: Comparing Modernist Themes in The Trial and 1984

Introduction.......................................................................................................................38

3.1 Totalitarianism and the Surveillance State……………………………......39

3.2 Individualism, Solitude and Alienation……………………………….......43

3.3 The Concept of Personal and Universal Guilt…………………………......48

3.4 The Concept of Law, Religion and the Absence of God……………….....53

Conclusion..........................................................................................................................57

General Conclusion…………………………………………………………………….....59

Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………..…61
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General Introduction

Not much has been said about the relation between Franz Kafka’s writings, George

Orwell’s writings and the war. This is mainly because while Orwell’s novels can easily be

read from a political perspective, the same can hardly be said about any of Kafka’s works.

Kafkaesque and Orwellian writings have been said to share nightmarish, passive and

pessimistic elements. The existence of these common components, however, has not

necessarily been attributed to the two World Wars. This study makes the contribution to the

existing literature by offering a political interpretation to one of the works of Franz Kafka in

comparison with one of Orwell’s most important political novels. In this respect, the main

concern of this paper revolves around how the two novels concerned with the study share

common themes that, in turn, exhibit a literary response to the horrors of the two World Wars.

This work examines and compares Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1925) and George

Orwell’s 1984 (1949) in order to show the impact of the two World Wars on literature as

embodied in the modernist movement. In its attempt to articulate and come to grips with the

profound impact that the First and Second World Wars have had on literature, this work sets

out to show how these two authors have developed a distinctive style of writing and how they

evoke certain modernist themes in the two works concerned with the comparison. An

interpretation of how these themes and styles reflect the impact of the war makes a significant

part of this study.

This work makes the hypothesis that the war has indeed a most felt impact on literature.

To pinpoint this impact and attempt to capture the feeling and mood of the era, two authors

from different cultural and literary backgrounds have been chosen. Many novels that reflect

the impact of the war on the psychology of the authors and thus on their literary production

normally exist. These two works have been chosen, nonetheless, because they display closely
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related themes and their authors have distinctive styles of writing. The two novels have been

written during or shortly after the end of the war. This is why Franz Kafka and George Orwell

are among those authors whose writings have known a certain shift in theme and style. These

two writers with these two particular works, thus, serve the aim of this study very well. By

applying a comparative approach, the questions raised previously should be resolved.

The results obtained from this study fit the thesis underlying this paper. The first point

this research assumes is the existence of a number of modernist themes common between the

two novels. This was found to be the case as the study points out and discusses four common

modernist themes. The second result which was found to fit the hypothesis has to do with

showing a correlation between the wars and the literary production of two authors. The two

World Wars were argued to have had a similar impact on the two authors in question.

Franz Kafka, a contemporary of the First World War, never took part in the conflict; his

life, however, was like everyone else’s heavily impacted by the events. This is evident in a

number of his works, notably The Trial. Written in 1914 with the outbreak of the war and

published in 1925, the novel can be seen as a prophetical vision of the eruption of

totalitarianism that followed the war alongside with the excesses of modern bureaucracy.

On the other hand, the world described in George Orwell’s 1984 inarguably contains

striking parallels with Hitler's Nazi Germany. The novel was published in 1949, four years

after the end of the Second World War showing how Orwell's vision of a dystopian world and

a future of totalitarianism were shaped by a decade of political turmoil.

This work is divided into three chapters. The first chapter aims at giving an overview of

the lives of the two authors as well as the cultural and social conditions that characterised the

period they lived in. The personal account of any given author plays a crucial part in the

understanding of their work. To this end, the lives of both Franz Kafka and George Orwell
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have been briefly explored to pave the way for a proper comprehension and analysis of their

work. A historical overview of the period is crucial here since the work makes constant

reference to the political aspect of the writing of the two novels. The study, after all, combines

a comparative literary analysis with a political reading of the climate that inspired the two

works.

The second chapter is intended to confine the work into a specific frame. Modernism,

the literary period that the two works fall within, is defined and its major characteristic are

pointed out. Along with that, an account of the English and the German modern novels, their

characteristics and evolvement is provided. The second section of the chapter inspects the

Kafkaesque and the Orwellian as literary models of the impact of the war on literary

modernism. The chapter then concludes by taking a first step in the comparison of the two

works. The notion of the Kafkaesque and that of the Orwellian are thoroughly compared.

The third and final chapter is centred on the comparison of the common themes between

the two works. The four themes chosen are modernist themes that reoccur throughout the two

works. Despite the existence of a larger number of common themes, the study has been

limited to the most predominant ones. Particular attention is pointed towards the main

character of The Trial and that of 1984, Josef K. and Winston Smith respectively. The two

characters manifest and, at times, embody the themes discussed. The existence of these

themes and the fact that they are common between the two works emphasises that the two

World Wars had a relatively similar impact on the two authors.

What motivated this work is a personal interest and admiration of both Franz Kafka and

George Orwell. Franz Kafka has been a pioneer of literature of the absurd in twentieth century

Europe and in the world, while George Orwell is universally known for his political novels

Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949). Of equal importance is yet another personal fascination
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with the eventful twentieth century in historical as well as literary respects. This was an

additional drive to work on a literary subject matter in relation to its historical context.
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Chapter One

Historical and Personal Background

Introduction

History and literature go hand in hand. This is why the historical critical approach to

literature is among the most commonly applied approaches, especially when the world behind

the text is as eventful as the twentieth century is. Because this work deals with two major

historical events, a historical overview is required. A personal background of the author

concerned with the study is of no less importance when approaching the work from an

autobiographical angle. Analysing a work of Virginia Woolf from a feminist perspective, for

example, could call for a brief overview of Victorian England where she grew up. An analysis

of the impact of the Great War on the role of women at the time, and by extension on

feminism, would also be vital if the historical dimension is taken into account . If we seek to

interpret the same work from a different perspective, however, other historical and personal

issues might arise. A modernist reading of the same work by Virginia Woolf would require an

emphasis on her personal experience with the war and with the specifics of war in shaping her

modernist thinking and view of the world. In that case, it is better to disregard the gender of

the author to focus on other aspects of her life which would better serve a modernist approach

to her work.

In the case with Franz Kafka, the significance of scrutinising the particulars of his life in

relation to his fictional characters is quite evident. In a scholarly article, author P. Margot Lev

argues that “Franz Kafka occupies a unique position among the narrators who use character

names symbolically” (1). This is only one aspect in which knowing about Kafka’s personal

life could be helpful when reading his works. It is of utmost importance to know about the life
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of Franz Kafka and his multiple psychological and personal struggles to fully appreciate and,

most importantly, understand some of his works. Kafka’s works and characters could be

considered more or less autobiographical. It is unlikely, after all, that two of his most

recognised characters randomly hold for name one of his initials; one as the last name ‘Josef

K.’ in The Trial (1925) and another as a full name. “K.” in The Castle. (1926) Ritchie

Roberston, Professor of German Language and Literature at the University of Oxford,

explains how events in the life of Franz Kafka have provided material and inspiration for his

various works: “The emotional hinterland of these events finds expression in Kafka’s letters

and diaries, and also — though less directly than is sometimes thought — in his literary work”

(viii).

While a personal background is more crucial to understand a work by Kafka, the

historical background is what surfaces to give meaning and context to the work of George

Orwell. Orwell lived through the First and the Second World Wars. He was only eleven years

old when the Great War broke out and was quite preoccupied with his life at a boarding

school. When the Second World War broke out, however, he was an adult and already a quite

prolific journalist and essayist. No one seemed to predict what the world was plunging into

and like many other writers, Orwell was baffled and pessimistic about the future of humanity.

This chapter offers both a historical and a personal background to the two works

concerned with the study. This brief overview is intended to help for better understanding of

the discussion that would follow in succeeding chapters.

1.1 Historical Background

1.1.1 Prague and the First World War

Prague, the current capital of the Czech Republic and the former capital of what was

until 1918 known as the Kingdom of Bohemia (a kingdom within the Austro-Hungarian

Empire) has witnessed an incredibly eventful and conclusive twentieth century. On June 28th,
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1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was

assassinated by Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo. Austria-Hungary declared war on

Serbia on the same day. Before this diplomatic incident came to a crisis, Prague had already

been home to an international conflict. Scott Spector, Professor of History and Germanic

Languages and Literature at the University of Michigan, draws a clear picture of what things

were like in Prague at the time: “There is something compelling about the extraordinary

conditions bearing upon national, ideological, and aesthetic identities that were particular to

turn-of-the-century Prague” (ix).

This international conflict is best illustrated by the German-speaking Jews who lived in

Prague at the time, especially throughout the First World War. In a study she entitled

“Kafka’s Identity Crisis” (2014), Sarah B. Classon argues that “the Austro-Hungarian Empire

at the turn-of-the-century presented many complex social and political challenges for its

Jewish population. The multi-ethnic empire’s lack of a cohesive national culture left it

vulnerable to political and social unrest of its varied ethnic groups” (32).

Franz Kafka, probably the most famous writer Prague produced in the twentieth

century, was a contemporary of the war. He was a German-speaking Jew who struggled

throughout his life with an identity crisis and, although with a lesser degree, with

discrimination. Classon makes the argument that “the Jews of Prague suffered little

discrimination from the Germans during the era of Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century”

(47), but almost two decades prior to the First World War, Jews across Europe were already

getting a taste of future anti-Semitism. In 1889, Jewish financiers were blamed for the

collapse of the Panama Canal project in what later became known as ‘The Panama Affair’.

Thousands of French investors lost their money. Kafka’s uncles, Alfred and Joseph Loewy,

worked for the Panama Canal Company and felt the brunt of French anti-Semitism. In the

following year, the loyalty of French Jews was put into question after Alfred Dreyfus, a
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captain in the French army, was found guilty of passing military secrets to the Germans. The

Dreyfus affair echoed the growing feeling of anti-Semitism through the decades in pre-Hitler

Europe (Preece xvi).

For a significant time before the First World War, Tomas Masaryka, a Czech university

professor, philosopher and politician, had been a keen advocate for the independence of the

Czech territories. He continued to fight for Czechoslovak independence throughout the years

of the war after he left the empire in 1914. Through the years of the war, a sense of

nationalism ascended within the civilians of Prague regardless of their ethnicities, and they

rallied together against the rule of the Empire. Most of the population of what later became

Czechoslovakia was opposed to the war. World War I ended with the defeat of the Austro-

Hungarian Empire and Prague became the capital of the newly established republic of

Czechoslovakia. Tomas Masaryka became the first president of this republic.

1.1.2 England During the Second World War

On the first of September 1939, Hitler invaded Poland. Britain and France united in

response and declared war on Germany. Britain had made the necessary precautions with

regard to the possibility of Germans bombing British cities. Germany, at the time, had a new

warfare strategy called ‘Blitzkrieg’ (meaning in English ‘lightning war’). This strategy

consisted, in part, of continued and extensive air raids on cities and towns. British cities

suffered majorly from German Blitz during the years 1940 and 1941. Two main procedures

were undertaken to minimise the casualties and loss of life. Firstly, evacuation of children

from British cities to the countryside exceeded eight hundred thousand schoolchildren

accompanied with over a hundred thousand teachers (Lambert n. pag.). Another half a million

of children under school age were evacuated with their mothers. An air-raid alarm system was

the precaution undertaken for those not evacuated. In addition to that, most people took hold
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of shelters that could be installed either indoors at one’s garden. This last measure, however,

was not one that all the population could afford to take (Lambert n. pag.).

A civil servant by the name of John Colville accurately describes the atmosphere after

the alarm of an air-raid wailed on the third of September 1939: “It was widely believed that

London would be reduced to rubble within minutes of war being declared, as recently

depicted to an alarmed populace in the film of H.G. Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come; and

it seemed that this was indeed about to happen” (Oates n. pag.).

As early as January 1940, rationing of food took place in Britain starting with primary

foodstuffs such as sugar, butter, bacon and ham; then shortly after, rationing of tea, jam and

cheese followed. The year 1940, however, brought some good news for the British as Winston

Churchill became Prime Minister and Britain won the conclusive Battle of Britain forcing

Hitler to postpone whatever plans of invasions he might have had. By 1941, people in Britain

were undergoing severe rationing of almost every household item as well as clothes. This is

when people were encouraged to ‘dig for victory’ and plant the land. Prior to the war, Britain

only produced less than a third of the food it consumed at home. From 1939 to 1945, land

cultivation increased with 6 million acres (Lambert n. pag.). English writer George Orwell,

who lived in London during the war, kept a wartime diary. The last record he kept of his

impressions of the war is something that depicts the mood of the time. On the 11th of

November 1942, Orwell wrote: “Church bells rung this morning – in celebration of the

victory in Egypt. The first time that I have heard them in over two years” (Davison and

Hitchens n. pag.).

1942 is a key date in the history of England during the Second World War because of

the publication of the Beveridge Report. Officially known as the Social Insurance and Allied

Services, the report came to promise the people living through the war an improvement of
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their conditions. Examples of changes brought about by the British government on the ground

vary from improvements in the health service to the expansion of free school meals and the

enactment of housing acts. The Beveridge Report would go on to inspire the establishment of

the welfare state in post-war Britain. The two last years of the war brought no major changes

to the life in England. Food rationing continued but was lessened with the implementation of

the Beveridge Report in early 1943.

1.2 Personal Background

1.2.1 Kafka’s Life and Personal Struggles

Franz Kafka was born on the 3rd of July 1883 in Prague. His parents, both merchants,

Hermann and Julie Kafka, named him after the Habsburg emperor, Franz Josef. After Franz

was born, Kafka’s family witnessed the death of two sons in their early months. The family,

however, welcomed three girls between the years 1889 and 1892. All three of Franz’s sisters

outlived him and eventually perished in the Holocaust.

From 1889 to 1893, Kafka attended school at the ‘Altstädter Deutsches’ Gymnasium

(German Grammar School) in Prague. Then from 1893 to1901, he went to the German

gymnasium, which is an academic secondary school, also located in Prague. Franz finished

the eighth and final grade at the school in 1901. Although the language of instruction in both

schools he went to was German, he was more or less fluent in Czech. Kafka also spoke

French, Italian and Yiddish (Preece xvi).

It is no secret that the exceptional relationship that Franz Kafka had with his father

helped in shaping his life and especially his writings. Franz was a sensitive young man; a

quality that would best serve him as a writer but not so much as his father’s only son. Herman

Kafka was a successful merchant who constantly pressured Kafka into taking over the family

business. When growing up, Franz often helped around the store that his father owned.

Herman was not kind to his employees and often called them his ‘paid enemies’. Ina letter he
 Anser 11

addressed to his father, Franz describes him in his own words as “a true Kafka in strength,

health, appetite, loudness of voice, eloquence, self-satisfaction, worldly superiority, presence

of mind, [and] knowledge of human nature ...”( Kafka 20).

This father-son relationship is thoroughly explored in Kafka’s Letter to My Father

which was published in 1919. It details the different aspects of this relationship from the

perspective of Franz. This letter has been most helpful to scholars in understanding the

conflict that Franz had with his father which eventually allowed for better understanding of

some of his works.

In short, Herman Kafka had high standards and expectations for his son. Kafka would

go on most of his life trying to prove himself to his father. He desperately sought his approval

in every endeavour he took upon, even by the simple act of getting married. Kafka realised

that his inability to sustain a relationship and go through with engagements deeply

disappointed his father and validated the image he had of him. In the letter, he explains that

there were many obstacles preventing him from getting married, the main one was that he was

‘mentally unfit for marriage’ (Griffith 139).

The Metamorphosis, published in 1915 was probably Kafka’s first attempt at depicting

the essence of this relationship on paper. Franz had the habit of sharing drafts of his writings

with his father. The Metamorphosis tells the story of a young man named Gregor Samsa who

suffers from a fantastic condition that wrecks his relationship with his father. By handing the

draft of that work to his father, Franz could have been trying to get him to ponder upon their

relationship by reading about the seemingly resembling relationship of Gregor with his father.

Kafka’s mother was more or less submissive to her husband and emotionally distant from

Franz. This could have been why he showed a great deal of emotional neediness especially

apparent in his letters to Felice Bauer, one of the four ladies that he got romantically involved

with throughout his adulthood.

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Kafka attended the Karl Ferdinand University of Prague from 1901 to 1906. He only

shifted to studying law after taking classes in German literature for the first semester. Franz

graduated with a degree in the science of law which allowed him to choose from a wide range

of occupations, something that strongly appealed to his father. Kafka’s day job was a full time

one at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute. He constantly expressed in his diaries that

he was not really happy with the amount of time he spent at his work. He would have

preferred to take on writing as a profession. Unfortunately, he needed the job and did most of

the writing in his spare time especially during the evenings.

Kafka started a diary in 1910 which would only get published posthumously along with

his major works. Some of his writings, however, were being published as early as 1912. They

were mainly sketches and stories published in magazines or as small books. In 1915, Kafka’s

most acknowledged short story, later translated as The Metamorphosis, was published. Two

other short stories followed in 1919, later translated as The Penal Colony and A Country

Doctor.

Although the works that were published during his lifetime did not gain him wide fame,

Kafka was not altogether obscure. His works received notable critical reviews and he was a

part of a group of Prague writers. It is in this group of writers that Kafka first met the

remarkably prolific essayist and novelist Max Brod. Brod later became Kafka’s closest friend

and eventually went against Kafka’s wishes to burn what the latter had felt were incomplete

works. It is solely to Brod’s credit that we possess Kafka’s later works such as The Trial , The

Castle and America which were published in 1925, 1926 and 1927, respectively. Translations

of Kafka’s works into English started appearing as early as the 1930s. Little was known about

Kafka’s life back then and because Kafka featured in his works characters undergoing

struggles with powerful, unjust institutions and organisations, he was seen as an author of

universal parables.
 Anser 13

Although Kafka would get involved with four different women in his very short

adulthood, he was always conscious of the struggle he would need to undergo to create a

balance between being a writer, which requires solitude, and the demands of being a married

man. Over the span of about 12 years, Kafka had a total of four relationships with four

different women. The longest of these relationships was the one with Felice Bauer. The two

first met in 1912 and got engaged for the first time in 1914. In the same year, Kafka broke off

the engagement only to reconcile with Felice the year after. It took the two another couple of

years to get engaged again and only a few months to call it off for good after Franz found out

he had tuberculosis in 1917. Kafka was again engaged but this time only briefly to Julie

Wohryzek during the year 1919. By 1920 he began corresponding with Milena Jesenka, an

unhappily married woman who later translated some of Kafka’s works into Czech. The two

rarely ever met with Milena living in Vienna. Their relationship broke off in early 1921. Two

years later, Franz met Dora Dymant with whom he started living in Berlin but eventually left

behind in 1924 to go back living in Prague (Preece xviii-xix).

Kafka took interest in the Zionist movement because of its promises of creating a new

social and cultural life for Jews. He learnt Hebrew and planned to immigrate with Dora

Dymant to Palestine. Kafka was Jewish by birth but had broad knowledge of both Judaism

and Christianity and was well acquainted with the philosophies of Nietzsche and

Schopenhauer. Kafka has often been read as an existentialist with philosophical and religious

allusions haunting most of his works. He was preoccupied by religious and existential

questions and famously said that “the meaning of life is that it stops” (qtd. in Grcic 445).

Towards the end of his life, Kafka read about religion more extensively. His individualistic

religious thoughts are fairly expressed in the form of aphorisms. Kafka died of tuberculosis in

a sanatorium around Vienna on 3 June 1924.

 Anser 14

1.2.2 Orwell, Socialism and Political Writing

George Orwell is only the pen name of the English novelist, essayist, journalist, and

critic Eric Arthur Blair who was born on June 25, 1903 in Motihari, India. Orwell’s father,

Richard Walmesley Blair, was an official in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil

Service. George spent his first year in India before his mother decided to take him, along with

his sister Marjorie, to England. In the summer of 1904, both parents and children came to

England, but Orwell’s father returned to India in autumn. His wife, Ida Blair, and the children

settled in Oxfordshire then moved to Henley in 1908. George’s father rarely ever visited his

family which is why, even after he retired in 1912, he did not manage to establish a strong

relationship with his son who grew up to think low of him.

In September 1911, George was sent to a boarding school at St Cyprian's, Eastbourne

where he spent 5 years. He noticed that the school treated the rich better than it treated the

poor. It was at that place that George first got a taste of the English class system which would

later inspire his interest in socialism. His experience at the school later found its way to paper

in the essay “Such, Such were the Joys” (1952).

Orwell started writing quite early. When at the boarding school, he wrote many letters

to his mother and, as young as 11 years old; he had one of his poems published in a local

newspaper. The poem was entitled “Awake! Young Men of England” and published by

Henley and South Oxfordshire Standard in October 1914 and then two years later “Kitchener”

by the same newspaper (Hammond 4).

In his essay “Why I write” (1946), Orwell says the following of his experience of

writing as a child: “I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding

conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions

were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued”( n. pag.).
 Anser 15

Orwell got a scholarship to study at Wellington College in which he spent a term in

1917 and then Eton College at which he studied until 1921. During these four years, Orwell

managed to write a short story The Vernon Murders (1918), a play The Man and the Maid

(1918), and publish four contributions in The Election Times. Because George could not

afford university education, he joined India Imperial Police Force in 1922 and later filed for

resignation in 1927 and left as early as January 1928.

George was keen on making a career out of his writing. His next quest was moving to

Paris where he continued to write short stories and poems such as Down and Out in Paris and

London (1933) and Burmese Days (1934). In October 1928, he got his first article as a

professional writer published in Monde under the title “La Censure en Angleterre”.

Orwell went on writing articles for the next few months that were to be published in

French as well as English publications such as Progrés Civique, and GK’s Weekly. His

articles took a sharp political turn and tackled subjects of unemployment that ranged from the

plight of the British workers to what it is like to live like a ‘tramp’. The years leading up to

1932 witnessed Orwell’s attempt to get his articles and essays published. He also took an

attempt at translation starting with Jacques Roberti's A la Belle de Nuit (1939)

WWII broke out in September 1939 and in two months’ time; Britain started its food

rationing policy. Orwell tried to take part in the war with the beginning of 1940 but was

rejected from military service on medical grounds. He reviewed Hitler's Mein Kampf (1925)

in New English Weekly and published a letter in Time and Tide calling for the armament of the

civilian population. In 1941, Orwell lectured on “Literature and Totalitarianism” to Oxford

University English Club and later published a piece with the same title and another entitled

“The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda” in The Listener then again on the same year he

published “Wells, Hitler and the World State'” and “Why Not War Writers?” in Horizon.
 Anser 16

In accordance with the sharp political voice that Orwell echoed through his various

publications, he developed yet another interest with his socialist orientation. Richard

Voorhees, an English Professor at the Purdue University, writes,

George Orwell was perhaps the most paradoxical English writer of his

time. He was an intellectual, but he continually damned intellectuals.

He was a first-rate political writer in spite of his fundamental horror of

politics, and a successful pamphleteer in spite of his constant warnings

to his readers to beware of his bias. He was witheringly contemptuous

of the majority of socialists; nevertheless, he believed that socialism

was the only thing that could save England. (15)

The circumstances that authors live in define, in part, what they choose to talk about in

their work. Orwell did not grow up rich. Since his early days in school, he saw how the rich

were treated better than the poor and formed a good idea of how the class system in England

worked. He developed a sharper political awareness from the time he spent in Burma. His

tendency and later clear adherence to socialism came about with his realisation that equality

could only be achieved with the abolition of classes, hard as it might be to do so: “Perhaps

this class-breaking business is not so simple as it looked!”, Orwell writes in his book, The

Road to Wigan Pier (1937), “on the contrary, it is a wild ride into the darkness, and it may be

that at the end of it the smile will be on the face of tiger” (n. pag.).

Very few writers have been as clear and upfront about what they hope to achieve with

their work as George Orwell has. In his essay “Why I Write” (1946), he states: “Every line of

serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against

totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it” (n. pag.).

 Anser 17

In his book Or Orwell: Writing and Democratic Socialism (2016), Alex Woloch argues

that “Orwell wants to signal his affiliation with democratic socialism and (more oddly) wants

to register his commitment to signaling this affiliation with socialism throughout his writing”

(n. pag.). Orwell is a socialist in his own terms and although he clearly states that his overall

intention is to serve socialism, a definition of it cannot be derived from what he says about his

works in relation to it. Instead of a definition, Orwell’s overall goal in writing is what

surfaces; what he intends to achieve through his work. American theologian, Ronald F.

Thiemann, writes,

He [Orwell] approached socialism ‘from below’, by a consideration of

the actual conditions in which the poor lived, worked, made love, and

reared children...he rebelled against highly theorized versions of

socialism because he was convinced that they blinded their advocates

to the plight and personhood of the poor- the real poor and not simply

the ‘poor’ as constructed by socialist theory. (134)

In a book entitled The Cambridge Companion to George Orwell (2007), John Rodden

explains how the Second World War has ‘matured Orwell’s socialism’. Orwell had a rather

naive and unrealistic idea of socialism, Rodden argues. Orwell is also argued to have strongly

believed that socialism could be built ‘on the bones of a Blimp’ and it was the answer to all of

England’s problems including the one at hand. According to him, only patriots fought the war

and socialism and patriotism went hand in hand (qtd. in Rodden 7). Whereas so many writers

have been clear adherents of the notion of ‘art for art’s sake’, Orwell embraced the opposite

extreme by having a clear and set purpose for his work and committing to it. To serve a cause

or side with an ideology was what appealed most to him but he did not want to fall short of

being an artist. In his essay “Why I Write” (1946), he clearly asserts: “What I have most

wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art” (n. pag.).
 Anser 18

He describes how he was so keen to write because he has something to write about and how

he did not care that much about how to write it. In his essay “The Frontiers of Art and

Propaganda” (1941), Orwell explains: “What books were about seemed so urgent that the way

they were written seemed almost insignificant” (n. pag.).

During the years of the war, Orwell’s writing and publications continued to have this

distinctive political colour until his first major work Animal Farm came about in 1945.

Shortly after, the Second World War came to an end. By this time, Orwell had already started

working on yet another political novel entitled 1984 which would later become his most

known work.

The novel was published in 1949 and received exceptional critical and popular reviews.

At the same time, Animal Farm was being translated into Russian paving the way for

Orwell’s fame and the popularity of his works in Europe and the rest of the world.

Unfortunately, Orwell did not live long after to celebrate his success. He died of pulmonary

tuberculosis aged 46.

Conclusion

Indeed, works of literature can only be studied with reference to the historical context

and personal aspects of the author’s life. Exploring aspects of Franz Kafka’s life especially his

relationship with his father sheds some light on some anxieties his characters suffer from.

Knowing about life in international Prague during the First World War helps trace the origins

of Kafka’s identity crisis and what might have influenced the sense of the absurd in his work.

On the other side of the spectrum, Orwell was the poor man who lived through the horrors of

the Second World War and witnessed the world fall in the grips of Hitler and Nazism. It was

almost inevitable for him to take an interest in socialism and in political writing. This brief
 Anser 19

personal and historical background would immensely facilitate the comprehension of the

various points this study intends to raise.

 Anser 20

Chapter Two

Modernism in Literature and the Two World Wars

Introduction

It is needless to emphasise the importance of defining what is meant by literary

modernism before studying aspects of modernism in any work of literature. Other questions to

consider vary from what makes a work a modernist one to whether or not there is more than

one type of modernism. Scholarly speaking, it has been very useful to categorise works of

literature in this way; categorising a number of works of a certain historical period depending

on the literary aspects they share can significantly facilitate studying them. Tracing the reason

behind the literary shifts and movements as directly influenced by the historical events of the

period can, therefore, be very evident. In the case of modernism, two events can be said to

have had a major impact on the movement: World War One and World War Two.

The objects of this study, within this modernist frame that is yet to be defined, are

works of two writers; Franz Kafka and George Orwell. These two writers, in their literary

production, have quite a few things in common. Their literary styles, with their distinctive

voice and reoccurring themes, made for a trend in literature. Adjectives and adverbs were

derived from the names of the two artists to describe works and texts that have similar

characteristics in terms of form and content. The influence of these two writers is so broad

and universal and the adjectives ‘Kafkaesque’ and ‘Orwellian’ are to be found in various

languages and literary cultures. Historian Sander L. Gilman explains, for example, that “today

there is no literary language in which the adjective ‘Kafkaesque’, or the adverb

‘Kafkaesquely’, is not understood”, he goes on to make the claim that, at least in English,

Kafkaesque “ is a word in use for more than 50 years” (7). It is a must, therefore, to attempt at
 Anser 21

defining what is meant by ‘Kafkaesque’ and what is meant by ‘Orwellian’ with consideration

to their relationship with literary modernism. This, in part, is what this chapter aims at

clarifying.

Because this research revolves around two works of literature in the form of a novel,

defining as well as pointing out some characteristics of the German and the English modern

novels is another objective of this chapter.

This chapter also inspects the relationship between the World Wars and the writing

styles of the two artists to see if it is the war that made the works of Kafka so Kafkaesque and

those of Orwell so Orwellian, or if the war only stimulated a current that was already

occurring. Finally, a comparison of two aspects between the two concepts will take place: the

aspect of the political as well as that of the modernist in the Kafkaesque and the Orwellian.

2.1 Definitions and Context

2.1.1 Modernism in Literature

To define is to limit. This is why an attempt at defining modernism or any literary

movement for that matter could mistakenly put limits on a term that holds very broad

meaning. For that reason, I intend to define modernism within a specific context, a political

context.

According to the Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Theory, modernism is a

movement that emerged sometime in the late 19th c. and prevailed on an international level

throughout the 20th c. Fiction among other art forms was especially influenced by this

movement. It is mainly suggested that modernism has reached its peak during the 1920s

(Cuddon 441).

Modernism was ‘first and foremost a cultural crisis’ with some founding beliefs being

put to question for the first time by revolutionary thinkers of the like of Nietzsche. Then it
 Anser 22

became a political crisis with the First and later Second World Wars (Bartram 3). Historian

Eric Hobsbawm speaks in his book Age of Extremes (1994) of the collection of man-made

conflicts and crises that characterised the twentieth century beginning with the First World

War of 1914–18. These events, he argues, have shaped the landscape of the world and

especially that of Europe in all aspects of life and art (22).

The main concern of this research revolves around a political case of the modernist

movement more than a cultural one, although the distinction can become blurred sometimes.

After all, political events have their fair share of impact on the social and cultural life. British

vexillologist Graham Bartram says,

what might be termed the ‘spirit of modernity’ was characterised by a

series of challenges, ranging from Protestantism to scientific enquiry,

to the dominant and hitherto all-embracing theological worldview of

the Catholic Church; and it culminated, in the mid to late eighteenth

century, in the Enlightenment’s proclamation of the universal values of

critical rationality and the freedom of the individual. (2)

Modernism in literature is often characterised by a deliberate breaking away from

tradition, defying norms, and experimenting with new language and style. In fiction,

modernist works illustrate some of the defining moods of the era: the spiritual ruin of the war,

the search for meaning, the alienation of the individual and the general feeling of loss and

despair.

A former professor of German Literature at the University of Virginia by the name of

Walter H. Sokel claims that the use of the term ‘modern’ to signify something other than

contemporary or current but rather revolutionary and unprecedented dates back to the

nineteenth century with the French poet Baudelaire. The term ‘modernism’ however was only

well established in literary criticism in the 1920s (Bloom 37).

 Anser 23

It is not an area of much deliberation and speculation to assume that the war has had a

significant impact on the cultural life of individuals. Artists are famous for their sensitivity

and vulnerability which is why inspection of a historical period could easily be performed by

examining the art produced in the era. No art form is probably as frank and articulate as

literature is in depicting the mood of an era. In the realm of political literature, some aspects

of literary modernism can come to signify the impact of the war on writers. The events as well

as the feelings that the characters of modernist works undergo could be seen as a direct mimic

of postwar sentiment.

2.1.2 The German Modern Novel

If there is any one genre of literature whose development can be linked

to this ‘modern age’, and in particular to the ethos of bourgeois

individualism that emerged in the Enlightenment era, it is that of the

novel, whose focus on the changing relationship between the individual

and the social world equips it to play a vital role in these modernising

societies’ discourses about themselves and in their imaginings of their

futures. (Bartram 2)

The term German modern novel encompasses not only writings of German authors but

the whole scope of literature written in the German language during the literary modernist

movement in Europe. To speak of Austrian literature separately from other literature written

in German could prove to be very hard: “at issue is the relationship between Austrian

literature and the ‘German literature’ that ambiguously refers both to the literature produced

by the larger neighbour and to all literature written in the German language” (Kohl and

Robertson 1). For purposes of this study, an analysis of the literary work at hand would be
 Anser 24

held within the broader frame of German modern literature, rather than Austrian modern

literature.

Historically speaking, three major events took place during the twentieth century that

could have had an impact on the development of German literature: The two World Wars and

the fall of the wall of Berlin in 1989/1990. This work concerns itself with a German modern

novel that was published more than a decade prior to the Second World War. This is why it

will only examine the impact of the First World War on this type of novel.

Expressionism, which is often seen as a movement in art could also be traced in German

literature. Often confined within the frame of modernism, the movement came about in the

early twentieth century in Germany. It is claimed that the term ‘expressionism’ could “be

applied to literature, but only judiciously” (Cuddon 261).

According to The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Theory, Expressionism

was a reaction to nineteenth-century realism. In literature, “the main principle involved is that

expression determines form, and therefore imagery, punctuation, syntax, and so forth. Indeed,

any of the formal rules and elements of writing can be bent or disjointed to suit the purpose”

(Cuddon 261). Within literature, theatre was most influenced by this movement but “it can be

argued that expressionistic theories have also had some effects on writers like Wyndham

Lewis and Virginia Woolf, as they certainly had upon Kafka” (Cuddon 262). Franz Kafka is

thought to be a champion of expressionism in fiction, especially in his early stories such as

The Judgment (1913) and The Metamorphosis (1915) (Ryan 4).

The First World War resulted in yet another trend in German literature. In the Penguin

Dictionary of Literary Terms and Theory, it is claimed that “at the end of the First World War

activism (in German Aktivismus) denoted active political commitment or engagement among

and by intellectuals. Historically it is closely associated with expressionism” (Cuddon 9).

 Anser 25

Bartram argues that one characteristic of the German modern novel is “the articulation

of previously taboo aspects of sexuality” (4). Kafka’s The Trial (1925) could be said to

manifest this exact characteristic very clearly. The theme of sex and seduction appears in

almost every chapter of the novel. The main character of the novel, Josef K., is involved in

many sexual encounters with a number of different women. In one passage, it is clear that

Kafka is trying to portray Josef K. to be a little eccentric in the way he perceives women: “I’m

enlisting women helpers, he thought in mild surprise, first of all Fräulein Bürstner, then the

usher’s wife, and now this little nurse, who seems to have an incomprehensible desire for me”

(Kafka 77). All in all, expressionism, activism as well as exploring the sexual are all

modernist traits which show, in varying degrees, the impact of the war on the German modern

novel.

2.1.3 The English Modern Novel

The Victorian age is often known as the age of the novel. Realist, thickly plotted, and

filled with characters, the Victorian novel was long and often published in three-decker form.

This popularity of the novel genre in the nineteenth century has probably paved the way for a

better reception of the modern novel despite its difference and nonconformity.

Because modernism is characterised by a break away from conventions in art and

literature, the novel genre brought about new themes. This, in turn, called for new techniques

with which to tackle these new themes. The spirit of modernism was manifested through

experimentation in form and content, possible themes were limitless and writers felt an

absolute freedom to write in unconventional and unprecedented manners.

It is quite crucial to point out the historical context in which the English modern novel

appeared and evolved and to refer to any possible correlations between what was happening

in England at the time and how was that reflected in fiction. The long twentieth century was
 Anser 26

full of events, the most important of which were the two World Wars. Although all modernist,

English novels that came before the First World War, between the wars, and after the Second

World War still differed.

The turn of the century witnessed an extension of realist aesthetic. Modernists who

wrote and published their works before the war were traditionalists who, despite diving into

new depths of the human mind and exploring new ideas, preserved the old forms of writing.

Examples of traditionalist modernists are H.G Wells and Arnold Benett (Jayapalan 308).

The period between the wars was characterised by a dominating sense of

disillusionment. The war had shocked all of western civilisation and writers showed that

through their works. It is often argued that “What the novel conveys is a sense of emotional

dislocation. In a time of war, old points of reference, old values and convictions have gone”

(Peck and Coyle 269). The form of the English novel differed greatly with the introduction of

revolutionary techniques such as ‘stream of consciousness’ and nonlinearity. Today, no

innovation speaks of modernist experimentation like stream of consciousness, the pioneers of

which were the English writers Virginia Woolf, and the Irish James Joyce.

The third phase into English modernist fiction was the one taking place in the aftermath

of the Second World War. Orwell’s 1984 (1949) is a good example of the English modern

novel in that period. Although Orwell’s novel does not manifest some of the characterising

innovations of literary modernism such as stream of consciousness and nonlinearity, it still

has its fair share of modernist appeal. Historian N. Jayapalan argues that: “the modern novel

presents realistically the doubts, the conflicts and the frustrations of the modern worlds. It is

therefore pessimistic in tone” (308). This, in a way, is how Orwell’s 1984 is modernist. The

novel is highly dark, bleak and pessimistic. The ending of the book only emphasises this idea

of mere hopelessness and tragedy. Professor Sara Martín Alegre argues that “the period 1945-
 Anser 27

1960 also saw the entrance of fantasy into the English novel on a large scale” (16). Orwell’s

1984 (1949) and Animal Farm (1945) are two of the best examples of how the use of fantasy

in literature shows the impact of war on authors of the period. About this specific point,

Alegre says: “Orwell's use of fantasy suggests that far from being escapist, fantasy can be a

way of expressing the anxieties caused by history in an alternative way” (16).

2.2 The Impact of the Two World Wars on Literary Modernism

2.2.1 The Modernism of the Kafkaesque

From crazy brat reading Krazy Kat

To Kafkaesque this Kafkaesque that

Never saw ‘action’ ransacked my dance act

Came up with a nance act

How Kafkaesque! (qtd. in Gilman 8)

Kafkaesque is a term often used and rarely understood. Amateur writers overload their

writings with terminology that makes it seem sophisticated and fancy, even if not necessarily

accurate. Although most of those who use the adjective ‘Kafkaesque’ to attribute some traits

to whatever it is they seek to describe are probably aware that the word takes origin in the

name of the 20th-century writer; Franz Kafka, they are not likely to be using it correctly. This

is mainly because they lack knowledge of what it is about Kafka’s work that is so

‘Kafkaesque’. Now before one is indulged in criticising the misuse of the word these days, a

definition of it must be presented.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘Kafkaesque’ as anything “of or relating to the

Austrian writer Franz Kafka (1883–1924) or his writings; resembling the state of affairs or a
 Anser 28

state of mind described by Kafka” (Gilman 7). A probably more articulate definition is one

that The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Theory offers. According to the

dictionary, Kafkaesque is:

Characteristic of the style, tone and attitudes of the writings of Franz

Kafka (1883–1924), and especially the kind of nightmarish atmosphere

which he was capable of creating through the pervasive menace of

sinister, impersonal forces, the feeling of loss of identity, the evocation

of guilt and fear, and the sense of evil that permeates the twisted and

‘absurd’ logic of ruling powers. His novels The Trial (1925) and The

Castle (1926) and the short story ‘In the Penal Colony’ are particularly

noteworthy for such features. (Cuddon 382)

These banal definitions are more or less what Kafkaesque is on the surface. Indeed,

people who use the term so loosely might have this superficial understanding of the word.

This, of course, is not incorrect but it hardly does the word and the concept it encompasses

any justice. The ‘state of affairs’ and ‘the state of mind’ that categorises the works of Franz

Kafka is what needs to be pointed out. Gilman describes Kafkaesque as “eerie, randomly

occurring, too real, yet somehow not real enough” (7).

Kafka’s characters are probably what is most Kafkaesque about his works and what best

indulges in the exceptional ‘state of affairs’ and ‘the state of mind’ characterising his fiction.

If we take the example of Josef K. in The Trial (1925), a clear picture might be drawn of what

Kafkaesque really means. Josef K. is a man in his mid-thirties who wakes up one morning and

starts off with his daily routine only to be interrupted, between bites of his breakfast, by a

group of men who come to arrest him. The men offer so little explanation, if any, of what

charges is Josef K. being arrested on. To sink in what Gilman has said, this is the ‘eerie,
 Anser 29

randomly occurring’ part. The story ends with Josef K.’s execution and him not yet

understating what crime he has committed. The man is indeed killed; ‘too real, yet somehow

not real enough’.

In the preface to the Oxford edition of The Trial, Roberston explains how Kafka’s

narrator acts so ‘Kafkaesquely’ and how a reader of Kafka’s works must strive at

comprehending the text,

The narrator is himself puzzled by the phenomena he recounts.

Kafka’s fiction is thus characteristic of modernism in demanding an

active reading. The reader is not invited to consume the text passively,

but to join actively in the task of puzzling it out, in resisting simple

interpretations, and in working, not towards a solution, but towards a

fuller experience of the text on each reading. (x)

Yet, many of the traits that Kafka’s characters bare are, quite bluntly, attributed to

Kafka himself. Gilman explains “The Kafkaesque works of Franz Kafka are the most read and

most contested in ‘modern’ literature. But the man seems just as Kafkaesque” (8). A full

understanding of Kafkaesque remains unattainable. Exploring the psyches of Kafka and his

characters can, despite all, be very helpful.

Besides the Kafkaesque qualities of Kafka’s works, Kafka has often been read as a

modernist. Eric Bulson, a Professor of English at Claremont Graduate University, asserts that,

Along with Beckett, Kafka was responsible for creating the “dark

works of modernism” by which Adorno means to say those works

devoted to the absurdity of modern life that were unafraid to confront

and then laugh at all that is untrue about truth ... Kafka struggled to

find a form of writing that would enable him to resist from within as he
 Anser 30

wove together stories, parables really, about rationalized life told in the

plainest language possible by narrators as guarded and mysterious as

the desperate characters they are always sending for and then avoiding.

(Rabaté 66)

According to Bulson, Kafka’s works, as part of literature of the absurd, are modernist

works with a darker twist. Besides being modernist with the themes and ideas they evoke,

Bulson claims that the very form of Kafka’s works is one that is quite modernist (Rabaté 66).

Kafka is maybe a different modernist than Ernest Hemingway or T.S Eliot. They were

disillusioned with the post-war world and could be said to have showcased this

disillusionment clearly through their characters or the complexity of their works. The modern

world was complex, vague and filled with uncertainty and so was their literary production.

Kafka took on a different approach to evoke the same notions. He made up characters who

acted with incomprehensible calm and tranquillity in the face of the most unusual of

circumstances and incidents. His plots were not especially complex or interwoven. His aim

was to mock and show the absurdity of modern existence. Throughout Kafka’s life and his

work, one can come across famous sayings that show the wisdom of this man’s absurdity.

Kafka famously said: “Even if no salvation should come, I still want to be worthy of it at

every moment” (qtd. in. Stach 84).

In a nutshell, it is indisputable that Kafka is modernist, even if in his own way. This

idea finds support in the words of Gilman who asserts that “all the world registers ‘Kafka’ as

a ‘brand name’, to be used when evoking the horrors and complexities of the modern world”

(8)
 Anser 31

2.2.2 The Orwellian and the War

Orwell opens up his essay “Why I write” (1947) saying,

From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that

when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about

seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so

with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that

sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books (n.

pag.).

It is well established that George Orwell was a pioneer in political writing, not only

based on common interpretations of his works but also because that is basically how he

identified himself. Orwell wrote in response to what was happening on the political scene. He

fought in the Spanish Civil War and shared his insights and personal experience in Homage to

Catalonia which was published in 1938. Later on, Orwell took his accounts of political life

and wars to fiction.

Orwell’s home country, England, has often been central to European affairs which is

why it was not difficult for an intellectual like Orwell to predict that another war was

underway. Despite the fact that he lived in Morocco for a few months in 1938, Orwell

managed to see that a war was coming when many others did not. This being said, he

probably did not imagine the scope of the war and how it would ravage Europe and shake it to

the core. Coming Up for Air (1939), his first novel and a work which he wrote during his

time in Morocco was published not long before the outbreak of the Second World War. This

novel reflects the author’s predictions about the impending war. Critic Valerie Meyers says

that the book which was a “meditation on the coming war and written in the first person, was

Orwell's first attempt to comment directly on the current political situation in a novel” (17).
 Anser 32

Animal Farm (1945) was Orwell’s second attempt at writing about politics in the form of

fiction. The novella which was published in 1945 was an allegory of Russia in the years

leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917 as well as the years following the revolution

when Russia was under the rule of Stalin in what later became called the ‘Stalinist era’.

Because Orwell was not only a novelist but also a journalist, an essayist and a critic, it

would be inaccurate to describe all of his literary production with the adjective ‘Orwellian’. It

is probably the anti-Utopian novel 1984 that really has set in motion, what came to be

regarded later as, the Orwellian of Orwell’s works.

Both the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War are said to have inspired

Orwell’s 1984. The novel is set in a fictional country called ‘Oceania’ in the year 1984.

Orwell wrote the book after the end of the Second World War in the span of three years, from

1946 to 1949. He created a complex story of a society living under an oppressive totalitarian

government that is represented by a party called ‘Big Brother’. This, in part, is what came to

be regarded ‘as Orwellian’, but to equalise Orwellian with authoritarian would hardly be

accurate. Many concepts present in Orwell’s novel constitute what is meant by Orwellian.

‘The Ministry of Truth’, the ‘thought police’, the ‘thought crime’, ‘doublethink’, ‘ownlife’ are

only a few examples of the complexity of Orwell’s creation. An emphasis of the Orwellian

was on the importance of language and words in shaping people’s thoughts and opinions. No

concept is probably as Orwellian as that of ‘Newspeak’. Newspeak is the language that came

to replace English and which people of Oceania spoke. The main difference between

Newspeak and English is that the former has, and continues to have throughout the novel, a

significantly smaller number of words than English. Old dictionaries of Newspeak were

constantly replaced by new ones which contained less and fewer words each time. There was

no need for words that meant the same thing and more and more synonyms became obsolete

with every new edition of the dictionary.

 Anser 33

A further elaboration of the use of language to influence the thoughts and actions of the

populace and how it interprets life and truth was evident in Orwell’s use of words to mean

their opposites,

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. (6)

This deliberate irony cuts very deep into the meaning of Orwellian. This insight that

Orwell had on the relation between language and politics was also expressed towards the very

end of his essay “Politics and the English language” (1946). Orwell explains: “Political

language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give the

appearance of solidity to pure wind” (n. pag.).

2.2.3 Kafkaesque Versus Orwellian

The comparison of two things is based on the premise of similarities as

well as differences because completely identical or sharply different

things cannot be compared. Certainly, this is not from the general view

of philosophy since no two things are completely identical or sharply

different. (Cao 65)

A cottage industry has grown around the Kafkaesque and the Orwellian. The meaning

of the two terms is hardly distinguishable and in many cases, it is relevant to use either

adjective to mean the same thing. This study has directly informed two lines of comparison

between the two concepts at hand. Kafkaesque and Orwellian are both modernist as well as

political products.
 Anser 34

The spirit of the first line of comparison could find echo in the words of Sander L.

Gilman who so accurately asserts that “Kafka’s work and his life seem to lend themselves to

infinite readings and finite exploitations” (9). So far, Kafka has been thoroughly read as an

existentialist, an expressionist, a Zionist, a modernist and to quote Gilman once more “as a

(whatever he will be next month)” (9). What about a ‘political writer’? Can he be seen in this

light?

The twentieth-century, during which Kafka spent his very brief life, is not short of

political events. Two world wars in the span of one generation could only result in a few

political writers. Kafka only lived to witness the First World War and the question remains:

has that made a political writer of the Prague-born Kafka?

This idea of Kafka’s interest in politics, let alone of him writing in response to political

events, has largely been dismissed on the grounds that Kafka himself manifested clear

unconcern and indifference when the Great War broke in 1914 and remarked: “Germany has

declared war on Russia. – Swimming in the afternoon” (qtd. in Preece 131).

Bill Dodd, reader in German Studies at the University of Birmingham, makes the claim

that unlike his famous diary entry, Kafka’s texts make for a relatively strong case of Kafka’s

politics. He explains that the works from the year 1912, before Kafka’s style took on an

existentialistic colour, presented a political and social critique much like that of Dickens,

especially in The Man Who Disappeared (1927) and with relatively less straightforwardness

in The Metamorphosis (1915). The Judgment (1913), he argues, marks for a much felt turn

towards the political in Kafka’s works. Even here, Dodd emphasises: “political readings often

appear to compete with other interpretive approaches” (Preece 133).

The case is maybe not very solid for the German language writer Kafka in the realm of

political literature, but when talking about the scope of twentieth century political writers, one

can rest assured that the name of the English writer George Orwell would sooner or later
 Anser 35

come up. For much of his career, Orwell wrote with a goal in mind. He wrote pamphlets,

essays, articles and many texts with a campaigning nature and a programme for change. In

1946, Orwell wrote an essay entitled “Politics and the English Language”. In the second

paragraph of the essay, he discussed how the English language was declining and how this

“decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes” (n. pag.). In the

following year, an essay entitled “Why I Write” was published and since then, the political

intentions of Orwell’s writing were no longer disputable. Orwell frankly declared that every

writer could only have four motives to write, one of them being what he calls ‘political

purpose’,

Using the word "political" in the widest possible sense. Desire to push

the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples' idea of the kind

of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is

genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have

nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude. (Orwell n. pag.)

The second line of comparison is one that thrives to show the difference between the

modernism of that which is Kafkaesque and of that which is Orwellian. Previous sections of

this study have already discussed the modernism of the Kafkaesque. It was argued that Kafka

was a different modernist than T.S Eliot and Ernest Hemingway in the sense that their texts

were especially modernist in form and content but Kafka’s fiction laughed at modern

existence through character traits of indifference and inconsistency.

Modernism is a movement that swept across Europe in the twentieth century and was

preceded by the realist movement. Much like any other movement, it is hard to pinpoint when

exactly did literary realism end and when did modernism start. Not that the end of one

necessarily marks the beginning of the other since movements often times overlap. Successive

movements can also share a set of characteristics. Sokel says in this regard: “Furnishings and
 Anser 36

sceneries of realism and modernism were often indistinguishable, and the boundaries between

the two movements were extremely porous” (Bloom 38).

One aspect of modernism that makes for a good point of comparison between Kafka and

Orwell is that of modernism in relation to realism. Certain characteristics of realism colour

some of the modernism of the two authors. In the case with Kafka, on the one hand, Sokel

argues that, towards the beginning of his writing career, Franz looked up to the French writer

Gustav Flaubert. Flaubert was, of course, a giant realist and his influence on Kafka was

especially apparent when the latter “placed his narratives in the locales of contemporary

bourgeois and petty-bourgeois life, especially during his early and middle period, in works

such as The Judgment, The Metamorphosis, and The Trial” (Bloom 38).

Although Orwell was 21 years old when Kafka died, which was more than two decades

into the twentieth century, Orwell still manifested many characteristics of the nineteenth-

century movement of realism. His main influences were the British writers Charles Dickens

and Rudyard Kipling who were pioneers of realism. Orwell published an essay on Dickens in

1939 in which he criticised the author’s different stance on how the problems he depicted in

his novels should be solved. Orwell’s works share the notion of realist representation of life

present in Dickens’ works but they immensely differ from them in the spirit of social

criticism. Orwell, who was an advocate of socialism to the point of fanaticism sometimes,

thought that “Dickens had no organized programme for improvement [and that he] tends to be

pro-capitalist, because he opposes revolution; he believes in a change of heart, not a change in

the political system” (qtd. in Meyers 27).

Conclusion

Key terms and concepts must be pointed out and defined before any study could be

carried out. Stepping into the muddy waters of modernism and post-war modernism calls for

exceptional caution and attention to what any of these concepts means. This was done with a
 Anser 37

thought in mind, which is that no definition is sufficient to any concept and definitions could

easily limit the meaning of what they are intended to define. Despite that, one could still

admit that it was quite necessary and inevitable to do so.

This chapter has also taken a first step in the actual discussion of the two concepts that

lend their names to the title of the study. The Kafkaesque and the Orwellian, what they mean,

how they are modernist and how do they showcase a response to the war.

A comparison between the two authors and their literary production by means of

comparing the political and the modernist of the Kafkaesque and the Orwellian is what this

chapter concluded with. This is to pave the way to the final chapter in which a comparison of

the modernist themes, which reoccur in the two works dealt with in this study, will take place.
 Anser 38

Chapter Three

Comparing Modernist Themes in the The Trial and 1984

Introduction

The following chapter represents the core of this research. It is the actual discussion of

the themes present and common between Franz Kafka’s The Trial and George Orwell’s 1984.

These themes will be argued to be modernist as well as present in these post-war works as a

result of the war itself. The discussion will cut through the impact of the war on modernist

writing as exemplified by the two works compared. For limiting purposes of this research, the

comparison has been narrowed down to four themes despite the presence of many others. In

an introduction to his translation of some of Kafka’s short stories, John R. Williams

articulates most of the themes that this chapter endeavours to compare. Williams also points

out that these theme are both Orwellian and Kafkaesque,

Rather like ‘Orwellian’, the term Kafkaesque has come to be used,

often enough by those who have not read a word of Kafka, to describe

what are perceived as modern traumas: existential alienation, isolation

and insecurity, the labyrinth of state bureaucracy, the corrupt or

whimsical abuse of totalitarian power, the impenetrable tangle of legal

systems, the knock of the door in the middle of the night (or, in the

case of Josef K. in The Trial; just before breakfast). Kafka appears to

have articulated, even to have prefigured, many of the horrors and

terrors of twentieth century existence, the Angst of post-Nietzschean

world in which God is dead, in which there is therefore no ultimate

authority, no final arbiter of truth, justice, or morality. (xii)

 Anser 39

The first theme that this chapter explores is that of totalitarianism and the surveillance

state. This theme can be said to be both modern and contemporary. An argument will also be

made that it is present in modernist literature as a result of the two World Wars. The chapter

then moves on to the dominating theme of individualism, alienation and solitude. This is

probably the most felt theme of all as it is evident and embodied by the protagonist of each of

the two works. The third theme this chapter takes on revolves around the concept of guilt.

This concept will be explored on two levels, personal as well as universal notions of guilt.

Finally, the chapter concludes with a theme that truly translates the mood of despair that

characterised post-war modernist writing. This fourth section discusses the concept of

religion, law and the absence of God.

3.1 Totalitarianism and the Surveillance State

The concept of the surveillance state is one that is very common in contemporary

politics. It takes origin in the twentieth-century with the introduction of revolutionary

technology that has changed the course of events in wars. Associated with this is often

another concept, that of totalitarianism. These two notions often times go hand in hand. One

can hardly speak of a totalitarian state that does not practice some kind of surveillance on the

people under its rule.

Living through the Second World War and observing parts of western civilisation fall

under a totalitarian rule, Orwell could not help but write down his fears of a world dominated

by a totalitarian power. In Europe alone, there was Adolph Hitler's Nazi Germany, the Soviet

Union under Josef Stalin and Benito Mussolini's Italy. To mimic that, Orwell created Big

Brother’s Oceania which is now more or less synonymous with totalitarianism. Orwell’s

novel, 1984, presents a totalitarian rule where people’s actions, thoughts and desires are

monitored and dictated by the government of Big Brother. In the book, the government
 Anser 40

reaches this disturbing extent of power through several methods: Big Brother controlled

information for example. The protagonist Winston Smith himself worked for the government

in what was called ‘The Ministry of Truth’. Needless to say, the ministry did exactly the

opposite. It controlled the news which were nothing but absolute propaganda of the party and

the government. Through constant surveillance using telescreens, the government monitored

what citizens said and did. The ‘thought police’ arrested those who committed ‘thought

crimes’ and, in this way, Big Brother controlled what the citizenry thought. Other methods

varied from controlling what people ate and the amount of food they could eat to dictating the

significance of sexual intercourse to be one of duty to the government.

Because one of the key tactics of WWII was spying and espionage, Orwell flavoured his

novel with characters who made it their life mission to expose traitors of the government. In

one passage, Orwell describes a scene where two children of his neighbours’ were playing a

game in which they get hold of a traitor. In this scenario, Winston was the traitor: “Both of

them were dressed in the blue shorts, grey shirts, and red neckerchiefs which were the

uniform of the Spies” (29). Being a member of the ‘Spies’ was like being a boy or a girl scout,

only that you are doing it for the government. Winston reflected on how, this way, Big

Brother was working for its future maintenance through the training of newer generations. He

also thought to himself that these children will probably be turning in their own mother as a

traitor in a couple of years,

With those children, he thought, that wretched woman must lead a life of

terror. Another year, two years, and they would be watching her night and

day for symptoms of unorthodoxy. Nearly all children nowadays were

horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations

as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little

savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel

 Anser 41

against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party

and everything connected with it. (Orwell 31)

This example of spies and traitors touches on the concept of the surveillance state which

is key to the success and maintenance of any totalitarian power. Big Brother did that very

well. There were telescreens, microphones and informers in every corner. Furthermore,

posters of Big Brother in which the eyes of a horrific man figure seem to be following one

everywhere were common scenery in the city. Orwell describes early in the novel the lack of

privacy that Winston and all the other citizen lived in,

Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right

ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing,

opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from

the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the

eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS

WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran. (Orwell 3)

Winston was not safe from surveillance at home either since everyone had a telescreen

at home. A telescreen that recorded and transmitted any sounds, conversations or actions that

anyone took on at any point during the day: “It was even conceivable that they watched

everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to.

You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every

sound you made was overheard, and except in darkness, every movement scrutinised” (Orwell

5). The lack of privacy in Winston’s life was so deep and consuming that a simple evening to

spend by oneself seemed something of a dream to him: “It seemed to him that he knew

exactly what it felt like to sit in a room like this, in an arm-chair beside an open fire with your

feet in the fender and a kettle on the hob; utterly alone, utterly secure, with nobody watching
 Anser 42

you, no voice pursuing you, no sound except the singing of the kettle and the friendly ticking

of the clock” (Orwell 122).

The way by which Orwell decided to end his novel only emphasises the horrors of

totalitarianism. Winston was a rebel who could not settle for the rule of Big Brother. He

sought to join a revolution to overthrow the party. Sadly enough, he gets caught, imprisoned

and tortured into becoming a party adherent “Winston's conformity is achieved through

indoctrination, surveillance and torture” (Meyers 115). The significance of this ending serves

the purpose of the novel well. Orwell intended people to fear and fight against totalitarianism

and the loss of privacy. His audience at the time was one that had witnessed the horrors of

The Second World war. He meant to help people avoid a fate just as dark as that of the war.

For Franz Kafka, totalitarianism is embodied in bureaucracy. In The Trial (1925), Josef

K. is caught in a nightmarish problem. He is arrested, tried and finally brutally executed in the

most bizarre of circumstances. It would all seem a little less unfair if he had indeed been

guilty. It would also be a little less outrageous had K., at least, been able to wrap his head

around what he was arrested and being tried for. In a Kafkan world, the system is deliberately

made too complex and too vague to be comprehended. Just like Winston Smith, Josef K. is

arrested. One would readily see the difference however; Winston Smith understood his crime.

In 1984 (1945), there is indeed a law. Everybody knows and understands that Big

Brother is the law. All one needs to do is be a fanatic adherent of the party’s philosophy.

Punishment is a result of disobedience. The government uses surveillance on everyone but

torture only on those who are thought or suspected to be traitors. This is a means to an end for

the government. The end is its continuation and maintenance. This, however, is hardly the

case in The Trial. The totalitarian system in the latter is abusing its power at random. The law

is also absent or, at least, inaccessible. Kafka is frank in tone when putting forth the irony
 Anser 43

behind K.’s arrest: “After all, K. had rights, the country was at peace, the laws had not been

suspended — who, then, had the audacity to descend on him in the privacy of his own home”

(Roberston and Mitchell 7). One could argue, nonetheless, that the random and unjustified use

of power is also a means to the government’s maintenance. The government needs to be

feared. This could more easily be achieved if people feared both justified and unjustified

punishment.

Forms of totalitarian systems created in modernist fiction varied on the surface but were

practically similar in significance. Whether it is Big Brother’s totalitarian state or Josef K.’s

nightmarish law system, a modern concern has revolved around the excess and abuse of

power. The war was a choice of extremism and so would be any choice of totalitarianism and

the absolute absence of privacy. The reason both Orwell and Kafka’s novels are outstandingly

important is because they could be categorised as works of prophetic literature. The world

will always have to fear and fight extremism. It is because of this predominant theme of

totalitarianism and the surveillance state that these two works will always be relevant and

have a place in political debate.

3.2 Individualism, Solitude and Alienation

No theme is more unique and characterising of modernist writing like that of

alienation and estrangement. It is rather reasonable to assume that the war played a big part in

generating this kind of feeling. The modern man felt isolated and detached from his

community. Human connections withered, a sense of individualism grew and people

continually led more isolated lives. This common feeling of solitude and alienation could

especially be felt in literature. Modern man inspired the fictional characters that lived in

books. Writers deliberately created stories where protagonists lived isolated. This was, in part,

to express the solitude that they have themselves felt. ‘No man is an island’ became
 Anser 44

something of the past. 17th-century John Donne knew nothing of modern man when he gave

that title to one of his poems. Modern man was indeed an island.

No writer knows and can speak better of solitude and alienation than Franz Kafka.

Indeed, Kafka experienced what it was like to be isolated from one’s family and from one’s

community. He grew up around a father whose very image constantly pushed young Franz

away. He felt alone around his parents and siblings and developed a sense of individualism at

a very young age. American literary critic and essayist, Phillip Rahv, explains how the

complicated father-son relationship has resulted in the estrangement of Kafka: “In chronic

conflict with him [Kafka’s father], young Franz was driven to extremes of loneliness and

introspection that constantly negated themselves in the idea of integration in the community

through marriage, children, and the practice of an honourable profession” (63).

According to Rahv, the isolation that young Franz felt because of his father motivated

the former to seek paths of integration elsewhere. Kafka thought he would feel less alone if he

managed to get married, have children and be a typical member of the community. Kafka

eventually failed to get there. He was doomed to lead a life of isolation and loneliness. His

complex Jewish identity certainly did not help give him a sense of belonging. What Kafka

never failed at, however, was writing about what he felt. In that regard, he was a good

representative of twentieth-century sentiment of alienation and estrangement. Gilman says,

In many ways Franz Kafka was a typical Jewish male of turn-of-the

century Central Europe – in every way, that is, except for his uncanny

ability to capture on paper the uncomfortable sense of alienation he felt

... His ability to express what he felt about his own complex Jewish

identity, in a form that was accessible from every direction, made him

into the author who most fully captured the sense of alienation, in all of

its forms, that haunted the twentieth century. (7)

 Anser 45

In The Trial, Josef K. is quite a good representative of modern man in regards to the

lifestyle of isolation he chooses for himself. K. lives alone as a tenant despite the fact that he

can comfortably afford a house. He is not married and does not have children. His only family

is his mother with whom he barely maintains a relationship. He, however, has been doing

quite well at the professional level. He has a good job at which he has risen quite fast. His

boss thinks him indispensable. K. is by no means forced to live in this manner. It has been a

matter of choice to him all along. Kafka wrote The Trial at a time when people around him

were being enlisted to serve in the First World War. He was turned down from service due to

his fragile medical condition. Kafka could not help but feel left out and alone. In his article

“Franz Kafka: Faith and Vocation” (1946), Savage argues that the K. in The Trial is a

representation of Kafka himself. This notion of the lonely hero is one that Savage explores

thoroughly in his article. He talks about the sense of isolation that dominates both The Trial

and The Castle and how being isolated is an important character trait of K.’s,

First of all, it is necessary to remark the atmosphere of isolation in

which the action of each of the novels and tales takes place. This action

centres around one individual and one alone and he is a patent

representation of Kafka himself. It is solely his own obsessions which

preoccupy him; other human beings enter the scene only in a

subordinate relationship to the isolated hero, whose relationship with

them is never one of equality, of personal communion. His interest in

them is chiefly as means to an end: can they be used to subserve his

overriding purpose to secure his acquittal from the Court or to obtain

for his activities the acknowledgment and sanction of the Castle

authorities? (237)
 Anser 46

On the other side of the spectrum, one does not fall short of implications of how the war

inspired the feeling of individualism and isolation that dominates George Orwell’s 1984.

‘Ownlife’, a word that Orwell coined in his novel, is especially relevant to the concept of

solitude in the modern world. Even though in the story the protagonist Winston Smith longs

to have an ‘Ownlife’, he is nonetheless very lonely and in solitude. In one passage, Winston

expresses how he thrives to be alone but knows is not supposed “to do anything that

suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly

dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: OWNLIFE, it was called, meaning

individualism and eccentricity” (Orwell 104). Ironically, Winston’s longing for time to spend

by himself was triggered when he was around other people. It is how much he felt alienated

from his community that motivated him to take on a more individualistic path. Meyers

explains Orwell’s choice of a common set of traits to characterise his characters. Although

stretched to new levels, the characteristics granted to Winston were only an extension in a

trend of Orwellian writing: “he [Orwell] gives Winston more extreme characteristics of earlier

heroes: loneliness, guilt, physical weakness, sexual repression and frustration, alienation from

society, desire for spiritual and moral integrity” (Meyers 127).

When it comes to the concept of alienation and solitude, Winston is rather a perfect

embodiment of modern man. He literally is alone in the sense that he had no family and he

was no longer married. Unless you count people Winston worked with whom he thought was

painful to be around, he had no friends either. On a more abstract level, he was alone in his

way of thinking, in the sense that what seemed to be perfectly enough to other people never

came close to satisfying him. In short, he was different and therefore alone. Valerie Meyers

argues that creating a character in this manner in 1984 stimulates Orwell’s earlier fiction. In a

comparison with other characters in Orwell’s fiction, Meyres says,

 Anser 47

The hero's struggles to achieve integrity supply the plot and the

narrator's ironic point of view. Lonely, guilty, lustful and obsessed with

the past, Winston Smith feels as alienated from his colleagues at the

Ministry of Truth as John Flory in the European Club at Kyauktada, as

out of sympathy with the values of his society as Gordon Comstock or

George Bowling. (114)

Not only is this theme of alienation and solitude present and dominant in the work, it is

also very evident. The novel is filled with passages where Winston clearly expresses the

overwhelming feeling of loneliness he experiences. He is startled at how it only bothers him

that life has come to be so empty and depressing. This only stresses the already alienated state

of being he finds himself locked in. Orwell draws a dim picture of Winston’s existence

saying: “He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable. What certainty had

he that a single human creature now living was on his side?” (Orwell 34).

Later in the story, it seems as if Winston’s luck finally changes. He develops a

relationship first with Julia and later with O’Brien. At that point of the story, Winston almost

ceases to feel alone. Orwell, however, goes back to emphasise the concept of solitude firstly

with Winston after discovering that O’Brien is nothing but a thought police agent, and

Winston loses that hope to have a friend. Towards the very end of the story and after Winston

is tortured and brainwashed, it is Julia who starts to embody the notion of solitude and

alienation after Winston betrays her and becomes a typical fanatic of Big Brother’s ideals.

Regardless of who is alone and who is left out in the story, the concept of individualism and

alienation is present from the very beginning to the end of the novel. There was no escape for

modernist writers from creating characters who went about their lives alone. They were only

being truthful to the image of post-war modern man who was extremely individualistic and

isolated.
 Anser 48

3.3 The Concept of Personal and Universal Guilt

A feeling that accompanied and characterised much of post-war writing during the

twentieth-century was one of guilt. Writers manifested this feeling in different ways; certain

authors looked inward to trace the source for guilt, others looked the world’s choice of war

over peace, many others could not reasonably explain what had spurred those feelings of

shame and guilt within themselves.

Franz Kafka was a pioneer of self shame and guilt. Phillip Rahv says: “Born in Prague

in 1883 of middle-class Jewish parents, Kafka appears to have developed early in life an

inordinate sense of guilt. The idea of the insolubility of the most ordinary, even routine,

human problems depressed his youth and later inspired his art” (62). Initially, Kafka had

looked at himself to validate those feelings which were most evident when Kafka expressed

himself sexually. Kafka is thought to have tortured himself over what he thought were

extreme sexual fantasies. In a note to Max Brod, Kafka once admitted: “I intentionally walk

through the streets where there are whores. Walking past them excites me, the remote but

nevertheless existent possibility of going with one. Is that grossness?”(qtd. in Friedlander74).

Throughout The Trial, Kafka wittily associates the theme of sex with that of guilt. One

idea, for example, is that defendants seem more desirable to women the more they lean

towards being guilty: “Those who’ve been accused are the most attractive. It can’t be guilt

that makes them attractive, for — as I at least, as a lawyer, have to say — they’re not all

guilty; nor can it be the punishment that is to come that makes them attractive now, for not all

are punished; it can only be the proceedings instituted against them that somehow become

part of them” (Roberston and Mitchel 132).

The case of sexual shame and guilt is rather an individual and personal notion for

Kafka. He did, nonetheless, express broader and more universal insights on guilt. He often

expressed to his friend Max Brod how he does not wish to disturb the universe. A universe
 Anser 49

that he felt had enough burdens and problems. He felt the guilt to be alive, the guilt of not

appreciating life and the guilt of wishing to die. Rahv argues that in the case with Kafka,

The guilt-motif seems to be the key to his psychology ... From the

psycho-analytic point of view, his novels, The Castle and The Trial,

built as they are on the theme of guilt, are enormous projections of self-

punishment, of imagined wrong-doing and atonement. No measure of

suffering, however, can atone for the unnamed guilt continually

welling up from the unconscious. (Rahv 66).

The issue with Kafka and guilt, one can conclude, is that he believed that the deeds he felt

guilty for were irremediable.

Just like with personal guilt, Kafka does not fail to exhibit the sense of almost universal

guilt throughout his work. Milena Jesenská, one of Kafka’s love interests who later translated

some of his texts, says that “All his works describe the terror of mysterious misconceptions

and guiltless guilt in human beings” (qtd. in Bloom 1). In The Trial (1925), the story of the

man who is arrested, tried and executed for a crime he does not understand, Kafka does not

fail to create a character that feels the guilt regardless. With time, K. starts questioning his

own innocence. He is guilty according to Kafka. His guilt lies within his actions, or lack of

them thereof, to prove his innocence. His guilt is his ignorance of the law. Harold Bloom

argues that the concept of guilt in The Trial is much like the Freudian concept of guilt. It is

one that is neither evitable nor manageable. It is just there in every corner of life. All people

are made to deal with it,

The guilt of Joseph K. is primarily ignorance of the Law. Certainly

Kafka could be judged closer to Freud in The Trial than he usually is,

since Freudian “guilt” is also hardly distinct from ignorance, not of the

Law but of the reality principle. Freud insisted that all authority,
 Anser 50

communal or personal, induced guilt in us, since we share in the

murder of the totemic father. Guilt therefore is never to be doubted, but

only because we are all of us more or less ill, all plagued by our

discomfort with culture. Freudian and Kafkan guilt alike is known only

under the sign of negation, rather than as emotion. Joseph K. has no

consciousness of having done wrong, but just as Freudian man nurtures

the desire to destroy authority or the father, so even Joseph K. has his

own unfulfilled wishes against the image of the Law. (19)

Another interpretation relating to the concept of guilt in The Trial takes on the idea that

Josef K. is indeed guilty. His crime was the kind of relationship, or lack of relationship, that

he maintained with his mother. Roberston argues that “it may be more satisfactory to find a

concrete reason for K.’s arrest than to impute it to vague existential guilt” (xiii). This

interpretation that Roberston elaborates on in an introduction to the Oxford edition of The

Trial captivates the meaning of ‘guiltless guilt’. K. is guilty in the sense that he had neglected

his mother, but he surely does not feel the guilt. The main point, nonetheless, is that there is

indeed logic behind labelling K. as a guilty man.

Inspecting George Orwell’s life and writings, one also stumbles upon these two layers

to the theme of guilt; personal guilt as well as collective one. On a personal level, Orwell’s

feeling of guilt was related to his place within the class system. In his book Orwell: The Road

to Airstrip One (1985), Ian Slater argues that before Orwell participated in the Spanish Civil

War, his writings were indeed socialist but mostly in the sense that Orwell put himself

through miserable conditions because he felt the guilt of being privileged. Ironically, it is not

because of the war that Orwell felt this modernist guilt. He thought that the war, if inevitable,

could help wipe out some of the class distinction and hopefully some of the guilt he felt.

Slater claims that “before Spain, Orwell’s penchant for writing more from the point of view of
 Anser 51

a guilt-ridden observer than from that of an analyst of social conditions with any shared

political focus ... Of course, Orwell’s guilt-bred sentimental view of the proletariat was

something that he shared with many of his contemporaries” (107).

Orwell did what any writer could be expected to do when overwhelmed with feelings.

He channelled those emotions into writing. 1984’s main character; Winston Smith is a man

who had quite a few things to feel guilty about. For starter, Winston, who vaguely

remembered his deceased family, knew deep down that their death had something to do with

him. Even before he managed to get a fuller picture of what had happened to them, he felt

guilty for their death: “He could not remember what had happened, but he knew in his dream

that in some way the lives of his mother and his sister had been sacrificed to his own” (Orwell

38).

In one episode, Winston recalls a clear interaction with his mother and sister. It was a

time when he was about ten years old. His mother had got hold of a little morsel of chocolate.

Winston remembers how he wanted the piece of chocolate all to himself. His mother,

however, gave him three quarters of the piece and handed the quarter left to his baby sister.

He was hungry and greedy. He snatched the chocolate out of his sister’s hand leaving her

crying and ran away. Orwell describes the feeling of shame and guilt that Winston felt at such

a young age, especially since that was the last time he saw his mother and sister: “after he had

devoured the chocolate he felt somewhat ashamed of himself and hung about in the streets for

several hours, until hunger drove him home. When he came back his mother had disappeared

(Orwell 206).

Gradually, Winston is made to accept his guilt and eventually make peace with it.

Winston is aware that feelings such as guilt, sorrow, regret and even forgiveness are

something of the past. But it is because he craves to experience those human feelings again

that he learns to forgive himself. Meyers says: “Vaguely aware that his mother in some way
 Anser 52

sacrificed herself for his survival, Winston learns to accept his guilt, because the memory has

given him insight into normal human relationships” (131).

Much like Orwell, the process by which Winston copes with his guilt and eventually

overcomes it is through writing. Orwell felt ashamed to be privileged, so he wrote in the hope

that he would bring forth some change and rid himself of that feeling. Winston wrote about

his mother and sister to honour them. To remember their sacrifice was to honour them he

thought. This was also an attempt to help him forgive himself: “Winston's diary is not only an

attempt to reclaim history, affirm ethical language, and communicate with a remote future

audience; it is also therapy, enabling him to relive his past and expiate guilt and shame, as

when he narrates the episode of his visit to a prostitute” (Meyers 131). Here, Meyers touches

on another source for guilt identical with that of Kafka. Unlike Kafka, Winston is a fictional

character. There is, however, something of sexual guilt that seems common in modern man,

be he real or fictional.

Although there is a more literal indication of guilt in Orwell’s novel with Winston being

found guilty of ‘thoughtcrime’, treason, being an enemy of the state and conspiring to throw

the government of Big Brother, this is nothing but a literal indication to this theme. The

universal layer lies within the survivor’s guilt that Winston feels. Just like the World War had

left many people feeling guilty to still be alive while many others died, Winston feels guilty to

have outlived his family. Orwell could be said to have experienced something similar. Meyers

says that “Like many of his generation, he hated war and knew it to be ultimately futile, yet

felt guilty that he had never fought” (16). Survivor’s guilt is by definition something one feels

after having survived a tragedy. It is no wonder, therefore, that this concept dominates much

of post-war writing.
 Anser 53

3.4 The Concept of Law, Religion and the Absence of God

“God is dead” (Nietzsche 120) is probably one of the most quoted statements of modern

existence. It is no secret that Nietzsche had left a great deal of influence on people’s lives

since he first shared this insight with the world in his collection Gay Science in 1882. Authors

of the turn of the century and those who lived and wrote throughout the twentieth-century

could be said to have been adherents of this philosophical thought. A great deal of modernist

writers were either potentially or self-proclaimed atheists; Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Virginia

Woolf, Albert Camus, Samuel Becket, only to name a few.

Religious life and the belief in God were further jeopardised and impacted by the

horrors of two World Wars which took place with only a two decades interval. Although hard

times tend to bring some people closer to their religion and intensify their belief in God, the

same cannot be said of the impact of the war. War often leaves people disillusioned as it rips

them of every spec of hope and optimism. Modernist writers were champions of

disillusionment. They manifested their disbelief in any form of truth or reality, and rejected

the idea that there was any power controlling the universe besides that of Man. For example,

Lost Generation writer Gertrude Stein said: “There ain't no answer. There ain't going to be

any answer. There never has been an answer. That’s the answer” (qtd. in Goldstein 660).

Ernest Hemingway, on the other hand, claimed that “all thinking men are atheists” (7).

The group of American writers that came to be known as the ‘Lost Generation’ has

presumably lost its belief and old values as a result of the war. Even then, it is argued that

“American writers were by no means so lost at that time as their contemporaries in defeated

Germany, and the importance of Kafka is that he was without question the most lost of them

all” (qtd. in Savage 222).

 Anser 54

Franz Kafka who lived through the First World War was an atheist. He was Jewish by

birth but is famous as a writer for his existentialism. He simply thought that modern existence,

if not existence altogether, was absurd. He famously said that “we are nihilistic thoughts that

came into God’s head” (qtd. in Bloom 1). Kafka’s stand on religion and God, however, was

not as simple as it might appear. Although both his life and his work seem to support the

notion that he was a disbeliever, disbelief itself did not seem to satisfy him. Different

interpretations of his work do nonetheless fall in the same direction. There seems to be a

common set of concepts evoked when any analysis of Kafka takes place. French writer,

philosopher, and literary theorist Maurice Blanchot says,

The commentators are not fundamentally in disagreement. They use

almost the same words: the absurd, contingency, the will to make a

place for oneself in the world, the impossibility to keep oneself there,

the desire for God, the absence of God, despair, anguish and yet of

whom are we speaking? For some, it is a religious thinker who believes

in the absolute, who hopes for it, who struggles endlessly to attain it.

For others, it is a humanist who lives in a world without remedy and, in

order not to increase the disorder in it, stays as much as possible in

repose. According to Max Brod, Kafka found many paths to God.

According to Mme. Magny, Kafka finds his main consolation in

atheism. (qtd. in Hayes 73)

The chief argument of many atheists is related to the idea that the existence of God, who

is all knowing and all good, would require an absence of evil and suffering. The existence of

war is, therefore, evident proof that there is no such thing as a God. Man is not all good which

is why he is capable of creating evil. Kafka’s works do, however, offer alternatives to the

concept of God. In The Trial (1925), the law is the alternative which is, ironically enough, not
 Anser 55

accessible anyway: “… the gaping abstractions of Kafka’s texts undoubtedly invite reading of

the castle, the court, the imperial message, and the law as God” (Liska 17).

In The Trial (1925), there was no God that Josef K. could turn to for salvation. There

was no external power that was to overcome that of the court and of the law that Man creates

then abuses. This is probably how Kafka interpreted the role of God in his life, too. He could

not see any clear role that God was playing in his life and in that of the people around him.

And if God did exist, then he created a power that he later abused. Kafka could be said to

have viewed law as religion, simply. The best two examples are present in The Trial (1925) as

well as The Castle (1926) Roberston argues that “Kafka’s novels about individuals

confronting a powerful but opaque organization — the court or the castle — seemed in the

West to be fables of existential uncertainty” (x).

In other words, Josef K. is only an example of the distance between modern Man and

God. The fact that K. never turns to God, even in these darkest of times shows the ever

widening gap between modern Man and God: “… Kafka sought to show how God, in the

wake of modern man, has been expelled from those traditional spaces that had been assigned

to Him” (Rahmani 51). Rahv also adheres to this idea. He goes as far as saying that displacing

the distance between the human and the divine is a vital part of Kafka’s works: “Kafka made

the un- knowability of God his chief postulate and the lack of communication between man

and the powers that rule him its first corollary” (Rahv 71).

George Orwell who lived through the Second World War, on the other hand, is often

called ‘the Christian atheist’ or ‘the pious atheist’. He believed so little or nothing at all but

manifested some contradictions throughout his life, sometimes even through his work. This is

probably due to the fact that Orwell never managed to reach a conclusion in philosophical

matters. He certainly was not willing to identify with something he did not fully believe in
 Anser 56

and call himself a Christian. The alternative to being religious in that case would be to be

moral,

Orwell refused any truck with "might makes right," that tempting

substitute for extra-worldly faith. He was prepared to live without such

a faith but admitted that he faced a "big hole. He never pretended to

have found a solution to this vexed philosophical problem, and turned

for moral grounding to the persistent "decency" of the ordinary man,

especially the English common man. (Simms 293)

Just like Kafka, Orwell presents an alternative to God. In an exchange between Winston

and O’Brien after the former was arrested, O’Brien asks if it is God that Winston believes in

and thinks would defeat Big Brother. Winston replies that he does not believe in God but in

what he calls ‘the spirit of Man’. O’Brien does not hesitate to tell him there is no such thing

(Orwell 340). This is to emphasise the notion that not only God is nonexistent but any

alternative to it other than Big Brother. Big Brother is the system, the government, the law,

religion, God and everything one might hold for truth. Before Winston enters the room where

O’Brien investigates him, he takes part in a conversation with a man named Ampleforth.

Winston asks Ampleforth what is it that he is arrested for and the latter responds: “We were

producing a definitive edition of the poems of Kipling. I allowed the word ‘God’ to remain at

the end of a line. I could not help it!” (Orwell 332).

The similarities between Big and the traditional notion of God are rather striking.

People know of and believe in Big Brother and God but they cannot see them. Both God and

Big Brother are an object to love, fear and worship. Anyone who deviates from what this

powerful figure dictates or even perceives as the right path will be punished. This insight on

how love and fear are supposed to go hand in hand when the average creature, or in the case
 Anser 57

with Big Brother the average citizen, looks at the figure authority is something Orwell

expressed in his essay “Such, Such Were the Joys” (1952),

Take religion, for instance. You were supposed to love God, and I did

not question this. Till the age of about fourteen I believed in God, and

believed that the accounts given of him were true. But I was well aware

that I did not love him ... But the whole business of religion seemed to

be strewn with psychological impossibilities. The Prayer Book told

you, for example, to love God and fear him: but how could you love

someone whom you feared? (qtd. in Gottlieb 131)

The party of Big Brother works this way because it prefers that people’s devotion is

channelled towards it rather than in any other direction. Religion can also represent a form of

sanctum for those who might decide to rebel. It works hard against the survival of any form of

faith. Although hopeful for change, Winston himself admits to Ampleforth that “we are the

priests of power,’ he said. ‘God is power. But at present power is only a word so far as you

are concerned” (Orwell 333).

All in all, modernist writers who first faced a cultural shock with the introduction of

revolutionary insights on the divine and the metaphysical, and later a political and social

shock with the two World Wars were ready to put their beliefs aside and contemplate at a

world where ‘God is dead’. Kafka and Orwell are only two of many writers who did not

refrain from displacing some of their personal existential anxieties on paper.

Conclusion

It is not unusual to stumble upon books that evoke the same themes, especially when

their writers have grown up within the same country and during the same period of time.
 Anser 58

However, for two books to share many themes despite the differences of language they are

written in, the time when they were written and the literary culture they belong to calls for

investigation. This chapter has both pointed out the themes that the works at hand share, as

well as their relation to the two World Wars.

 Anser 59

General Conclusion

The historical critical literary approach revolves around the idea that works of

literature cannot be taken outside of their historical context. Studying post-war literature

necessarily calls for investigating the impact of the war on the author of the work and on the

work itself. This study has attempted to address the issue of the impact of the war on

literature. Through the comparison conducted, the results obtained were found to fit the

hypothesis. The war had a significant impact on the writing styles of the two authors. This is

evident in their works and how they share a number of themes. The existence of these themes

has been constantly associated to the war.

On the other hand, literary modernism, originating in the late 19th-century and

blooming in the 20th, especially in the period between the two World Wars, is characterised

by set of features. The emergence and evolvement of a number of these features has been

partly attributed to the war. Writers who lived through the First and the Second World Wars

were disillusioned with the world around them. They manifested relatively similar reactions to

the new realities that the war had brought to their attention. New and revolutionary techniques

have been developed along with new themes and subjects that reflected the post-war

atmosphere.

The ground covered by this research can be summarised in two points. The first point

has put forward the view of existing similarities between works from different literary and

cultural backgrounds. The second point is one related to establishing a correlation between the

historical and political climate on literature. This work has established a parallel between a

novel by Franz Kafka and another by George Orwell. The relationship between the

Kafkaesque and the Orwellian has been explored beyond the already existing superficial line.

By extension, this work has often made reference to other works of the two authors. The
 Anser 60

available evidence from other works seemed to match the original findings. These additional

results provided confirmatory evidence of the correlation between the literary production of

the two writers and the impact of the war.

Kafka and Orwell, both leading writers of the twentieth-century, produced two distinct

masterpieces echoing in two distinct ways the modernist movement in literature. Kafkaesque

and Orwellian are self-conscious breaks with traditional ways of writing exhibiting literary

modernism as directly influenced by the two World Wars. The Kafkaesque fear and the

Orwellian dread, closely related yet distinctively, different are exceptionally relevant to the

horrors of the two world wars.

This study has only touched upon a subject area that can be further studied and

investigated. Hopefully, this work would pave the way towards further investigation of two

important fields of study. The first one is related to reading and interpreting the works of the

German language writer Franz Kafka from a political perspective. Existing literature falls into

a direction that characterises Kafka as a philosophical writer. He is considered a pioneer in

literature of the absurd. It might seem exactly absurd to consider Franz Kafka a political

writer. This is precisely why this study is thought to have offered a fresh perspective to

studying the works of an author who received a great deal of attention and criticism already.

The second area of study that this work is hoped to have contributed and brought

attention to has to deal with comparative studies of authors who come from diverse literary

and cultural backgrounds. The work is hoped to have shifted the focus of the cross-cultural

comparative studies from areas of differences to those of similarities. Two authors with

different personal and cultural backgrounds have been found to share a great deal in their

literary aesthetic because they experienced a similar historical event.

 Anser 61

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