"Poets dont invent poems
The poem is somewhere behind
It's been there for a long time
The poet merely discovers it". (Jan Skacel)
The Kafkan is not a sociological or a political notion. Attempts have been made to explain Kafka's novels as a critique of industrial society, of exploitation, alienation, bourgeois morality, – of capitalism in a word. But there is almost nothing of the constituents of capitalism in Kafka's universe: not money or its power, not commerce, not property and owners or the class struggle. Neither does the Kafkan corresponds to a definition of totalitarianism. In Kafka's novels, there is neither the party nor ideology and it jargon, nor politics, the police or the army.
So we should rather say that the Kafkan represents one fundamental possibility of man and his world, a possibility that is not historically determined and that accompanies man more or less eternally.
Not the curse of solitude but the violation of solitude is Kafka's obsession.
Kafka transformed the profoundly antipoetic material of a highly bureaucratized society into the great poetry of the novel; he transformed a very ordinary story of a man who cannot obtain a promised job, into myth, into epic, into a kind of beauty never before seen.
History does not invent. It discovers. Through new situations, History reveals what man is, what has been in him, for a long, long time , what his possibilities are.
The enormous social, political, and "prophetic" import of Kafka's novels lies precisely in their "nonengagement", that is to say, in their total autonomy from all the political programs, ideological concepts, and futurological prognoses.
And it matters little whether the preconceived truth is called revolution or dissidence, Christian faith, or atheism, whether it is more justified or less justified; a poet who serves any truth other than the truth to be discovered (which is dazzlement), is a false poet.