World Literature I - A Comparison of the Marxist Positions of Franz Kafka and Gabriel Garcia Marquez within their respective masterpieces, The Metamorphosis and One Hundred Years of Solitude

Kafka takes a more classical stance on Marxism and this is clearly evidenced in the sub-text of The Metamorphosis. When Gregor misses his train to work in the morning, his mother declares “He isn’t well...why else would he have missed the train? The lad only ever thinks about the business. It nearly makes me cross the way he never goes out in the evenings” (Kafka 15). Gregor is a slave to his job and his undeserving family, whom he supports. Kafka is commenting on the real situation in Europe during his era, in which a small, elite class are taking advantage of the huge lower class to fund their luxurious lifestyles and to fight seemingly pointless wars. Kafka was known for meeting with a group of Socialist Czech writers who supported the idea of a bloodless class revolution, in which the vastly more numerous proletariat would overthrow the upper classes without struggle, and the people would work towards common goals. These sympathies identify Kafka as a pure Marxist, violent revolutionary Marxism being first conceived and put into practice by Lenin and Trotsky, several years after Kafka’s death.

Kafka’s strongest Marxist message is not contained within a detail or a phrase of his book; instead it pervades the plot of the text from beginning to end. The capitalist culture in which Gregor lives converts him from a worker to a dehumanized being whose labour is exploited. Friederich Engels, who, along with Marx, wrote the very first words of Marxist theory, once stated that “human power may be exchanged and utilized by converting man into a slave. Men had barely started to engage in exchange when they themselves were exchanged. The active became a passive, whether man wanted it or not”. Gregor is simply being used by the capitalist society he inhabits, and when he becomes useless and without value within the capitalist framework, his masters simply leave him to rot.

Kafka’s primary political focus in The Metamorphosis is the neglected and repressed proletariat that dominated Europe’s lower classes in the early 20th century. He uses Gregor as a medium to express this, such as when the character’s “attention was suddenly caught by the picture on the wall – which was already denuded of everything else that had been on it – of the lady dressed in copious fur...this picture at least, now totally covered by Gregor, would certainly be taken away by no-one” (Kafka 19). Gregor, a poor worker who thinks of nothing but the good of others, is being stripped of his rights and possessions one by one, and his family, the people whom he is forced to support, consider him literally to be vermin. Kafka himself, oppressed both due to his Semitism and his Socialist views, would almost certainly have agreed with Garcia Marquez’ Nobel Prize speech made almost 60 years after his death: “Why is the originality so readily granted us in literature so mistrustfully denied us in our difficult attempts at social change?”. Garcia Marquez’ question would appear to be directed at the oppressive, militaristic regimes that characterized many Latin American nations at the time.

Both authors express their views in an obscure, convoluted fashion, making these views harder to identify and are primarily sub-textual. The most explicit connection to Latin American history occurs when Garcia Marquez describes in some detail a massacre of revolting workers at a banana plantation in Macondo. It shows the government and the army of Colombia to be violent, irrational and corrupt. Garcia Marquez’ description is almost a journalistic account of the real Banana Massacre, which occurred in Santa Marta, Colombia in 1929. While Garcia Marquez’ text does not elaborate any political reasons for the massacre, the real Santa Marta massacre was caused by socialist and communist revolutionaries who stirred up a small revolt over labour laws. Garcia Marquez had good reason not to explicitly reveal his Marxist stance as, shortly after he had attended a Socialist Party meeting in 1964, the party leader was murdered by the Colombian government. Garcia Marquez would not have been safe, despite his literary fame, if a man as important as the party leader had been killed for his beliefs. Kafka also lived under an oppressive regime, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a fiercely militaristic and right wing institution that frequently put down worker revolts across its lands. Both authors risked their lives when they printed their works, and a single badly chosen word could have meant imprisonment, censorship, or worse.

Kafka and Garcia Marquez’ Marxist views are held in evidence throughout the texts discussed. The texts were not recognized as propaganda, however, either by the Marxist-Socialist forces of the 20th century or by their capitalist rivals. The discretion used by the authors in expressing their left-wing views allowed these texts to circulate freely and without the limiting label of bias or activism. Neither author is truly open about his views in the texts, as ,when the texts were written, both authors were under considerable suspicion due to the intolerance of the political system in which they lived. Garcia Marquez’ views were later revealed explicitly as he became famous at an international level and free from the shackles of censorship and oppression that he faced in his native Colombia. Kafka never had this freedom, as the Austro-Hungarian emperors became more conservative and oppressive after witnessing the power of Marxist Revolution in neighbouring Russia in 1917. When their texts were first published, both authors were still under the thumb of their respective regimes, and for this reason their Marxist views are expressed sub-textually.

Bibliography

Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis. Translated by Stanley Corngold, Random House. 1996

Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. One Hundred Years of Solitude. New York: Harper Collins, 2004.

John Mactavish, , accessed April 24th 2009

Gunter Wolfrich, , accessed April 24th 2009

Engels, Freidrich. The Origin of Family, Private Property, and the State. New York: Pathfinder, 1972.