Franz Kafka’s birthday, 3 July, was muggy and overcast this year. I was travelling from Oxford through central London, my destination a refurbished multistorey car park in Peckham, home of the not-for-profit arts organisation Bold Tendencies. That evening, on its concrete levels, Dame Kristin Scott Thomas was scheduled to read a selection of Kafka’s short fiction, commemorating the hundredth anniversary of his death. It was my first time at the venue and I arrived too early. Unsure where to go, I trudged up seven flights of multicoloured stairs before I reached a locked door with a sign informing me that there was no access to Bold Tendencies by this route. A word drifted through my mind. You can surely guess which one.

‘Kafka-esque’ must be one of the most hackneyed descriptors around. Since I arrived in Oxford to work on a project about Kafka’s legacy, I’ve heard it a great deal. It was also the reason I visited the British Library earlier that day. Wadham College’s library had just acquired a copy of the first English edition of Kafka’s The Trial, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir, and I intended to see how it had been reviewed. This handsome hardback, published in 1937, happened to be the personal copy of Cecil Day-Lewis, a Wadham alumnus. 

The first edition of The Trial now housed at Wadham had been sent to Day-Lewis for review, it seems, though I have been unable to find any review that resulted. It is likely that Day-Lewis never wrote one. To my surprise, however, I did uncover the earliest known use of the term ‘Kafka-esque’ in the English language.

The Oxford English Dictionary cites a rather contemptuous 1947 New Yorker article entitled ‘A Dissenting Opinion on Kafka’ by the American critic Edmund Wilson as the first instance of the word ‘Kafka-esque’ appearing in English in print. Recently, however, Brian K Goodman in his marvellous book The Nonconformists: American and Czech Writers Across the Iron Curtain has established that Day-Lewis was the one who coined the term. The source given is a 1938 dispatch written by Day-Lewis for the American Marxist magazine New Masses, praising Edward Upward’s first novel, Journey to the Border, which had been published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press the same year. 

Journey to the Border is both an autobiographical and an experimental work, a chronicle of a day in the life of an increasingly disillusioned left-wing intellectual struggling to reconcile his political convictions with his position as a private tutor to the son of wealthy philistines. In his review, Day-Lewis considers Upward’s debut ‘considerably more Kafka-esque in manner’ than Rex Warner’s The Wild Goose Chase, an allegorical novel of liberation through Marxism published in 1937. Rummaging among the file of reviews of Upward’s novel, I happened to find, tucked in alongside many pieces from 1938, another review by Day-Lewis of an anthology called New Writing, edited by John Lehmann, which featured an extract from Upward’s novel-­in-progress. In this piece, as in the 1938 review, Day-Lewis describes Upward’s writing as ‘Kafka-esque’. Day-Lewis’s review of New Writing, however, was published (in an issue of the BBC magazine The Listener) on 6 May 1936. The term ‘Kafka-esque’, I realised, had entered the English language a year before the 1937 publication of The Trial in translation.

While a version of Kafka’s final, unfinished novel, The Castle, had been available in English since 1930 and a collection of his shorter writings, The Great Wall of China, had appeared in 1933, the modern-day meanings of the term ‘Kafka-esque’ – powerlessness in the face of oppression by forces unknown, nightmarishly complex bureaucracy, hopelessness, repetition, dullness – were consolidated by The Trial. When Day-Lewis deploys the term in his 1936 review, however, he uses it to signify something completely different – the originality of Upward’s writing. Contrasting Upward’s ‘genuinely flayed’ characters with those of Christopher Isherwood, his former collaborator, who suffer from ‘acute neurasthenic exasperation’, Day-Lewis notes how Upward’s ‘kind of humour is quite original’. For Day-Lewis, ‘Kafka-esque’ indicates something funny and original, far removed from the dour and illogical menace of perverse bureaucratic systems. 

Day-Lewis quotes Upward’s protagonist ruminating on defying his employers as an example of this ‘Kafka-esque’ humour: ‘Defiance would be as ridiculous as rushing down to breakfast in pyjamas and shouting, “Shut the greenhouse door against the tarantula”, or “What have you done with my dancing girl?”’ But it’s not just the humour; it’s also the transformative power of unexpected novelty in Upward’s novel, Day-Lewis claims, that reminds him of Kafka: 

Upward’s characters save themselves by witnessing a transfiguration: a schoolmaster kicking a football, or (here) a steamroller coming out of a side road reveals to them the meaning and salvation of their own lives. This visionary Kafka-esque illumination makes Upward potentially a great writer. He is already a very fine one indeed. 

As Goodman notes, Upward formed part of ‘a rising generation of radical English writers … looking for new literary models to help them move beyond the formal limitations of proletarian fiction and the contradictions of their own bourgeois backgrounds’. These writers were collectively seeking modes of expression that would shatter the straitjacket of convention with style and humour. In 1936, when it first burst into the English language, ‘Kafka-esque’ meant something fresh, vibrant and new.

In his 1998 essay ‘Laughing with Kafka’, David Foster Wallace explores how ‘funniness is bound up with the extra­ordinary power of [Kafka’s] stories’. Certainly, Kafka is often far funnier than many assume – there’s his Olympic swimmer who can’t swim, his playfully boisterous children on a country road and his crossbreed creature that’s half-lamb, half-kitten. If the house of the ‘Kafka-esque’ has many rooms, they needn’t all be full of doom and gloom, or even laughter in the dark; they can also accommodate outright humour and wit. In its original sense, at least, there’s a strong case to be made for the transformative power of the ‘Kafka-esque’.