Wednesday
In a recent Literary Hub article, Emily Temple honors the 95th anniversary of Franz Kafka’s death (June 3, 1924) with a list of times she has encountered the media calling something Kafkaesque. As is often the case in such matters, the term has been much abused, but that shouldn’t make us any the less grateful to the author for setting up a framework that allows us to describe aspects of our lives.
Temple’s piece gave me the idea of starting a list of other literary allusions that have become so common as to be used routinely, often by people who haven’t read the works. But let’s start with “Kafkaesque,” for which Temple shares the definition of Kafka biographer Frederick Karl:
What’s Kafkaesque is when you enter a surreal world in which all your control patterns, all your plans, the whole way in which you have configured your own behavior, begins to fall to pieces, when you find yourself against a force that does not lend itself to the way you perceive the world. You don’t give up, you don’t lie down and die. What you do is struggle against this with all of your equipment, with whatever you have. But of course you don’t stand a chance. That’s Kafkaesque.
Among the items on Temple’s list (for which she provides links) are:
Sex with Alvy Singer (the character played by Woody Allen in Annie Hall)
Getting banned for life from Airbnb
The NYC subway system
The commute from Princeton to Manhattan at rush hour
The NSA
The no-fly list
The death penalty
Dilbert
Bond court
The California housing crisis
Trump’s bromance with Putin
The Amazon marketplace
Penn Station
Prison grievance systems
The American healthcare system
Fixing your credit report
The legal battle over Kafka’s papers
Here’s are some others. Think of how impoverished our thinking and speaking would be without them:
Orwellian
Big Brother
Dickensian
Scarlet letter
Catch-22
Sophie’s choice
Down a rabbit hole
Creating a Frankenstein
Selling your soul
Achilles heel
Trojan horse
Odyssey
Siren Song
Jekyll and Hyde
Quixotic
Scrooge
Don Juan
Romeo
Lolita
Uncle Tom
Albatross
Chasing a white whale
Pound of flesh
Road less traveled
Consider this a starter list. Send in your own favorites.