I think it was when I read the short fiction of Franz Kafka that I first encountered the idea that a short story in its entirety could be a kind of metaphor, or could conversely take what is normally a metaphor and turn it into reality.
Let’s say, for example, that you’re feeling very depressed, and you say to yourself, “The whole world hates me.” Obviously this is a metaphor; it feels true but is not literally true. But you turn it into a story: The whole world literally does hate you—even your Ikea-style flat-pack furniture hates you.
What I was encountering for the first time in those very short Kafka stories and fragments was a form of writing which was so concise that it could be consumed in a single gulp and which could be understood to be, in its entirety, a metaphor for something else.
I’ll be the first to admit that most of the stories in my collection Melancholic Parables largely crib this narrative concept from Kafka outright. Which is not to say that the parables are Kafkaesque, or not in the way one would expect.
Part of Kafka’s brilliance was the way in which he perfectly captured the absurd horror of modern life, and I think it is that aspect of his writing that people are normally referring to when they use the term Kafkaesque.
But I have also read an anecdote about how Kafka would bring his latest short story around to a friend’s house and give a reading for a few friends. According to the anecdote, as he read his own story, Kafka would be bursting into uncontrollable bouts of laughter.
I’m sure that his laughter was not cruel; he was not taking sadistic pleasure in the sufferings of others within the inhuman modern world. I think it was the kind of laughter which says, “This situation is irredeemable, so what are you going to do? Laughter is all we have left.”
My parables are not really about the horrors of modern life. They take place in a much more confined space, bound within individual emotions. But I tried to infuse humor into many of them—or at least what passes for humor with me—and I think the inclination to laugh at sadness is also, in its way, Kafkaesque.
Anyway, if the mood rises, I hope you’ll have a look at Melancholic Parables. Details are here.