An ideology is a idea that represents our subconscious or collective beliefs without purely expressing them. For instance, the shark that is the antagonist beast of the 1975 Steven Spielberg psychological thriller Jaws, is an ideology because it provokes a deep and unsettling fear because its ability to represent the range of collective fears of both the town and the audience of the film. Its brief physical appearances reveal the animal as a biological fact – a literal animal, which is prone to defeat. But the tension structured prior to those appearances, and the lasting fear of the ocean commonly spoken about by those that watch the film, demonstrate that the shark provokes a sustained irrational response. This is not because the shark itself may strike at any time, but that the shark may expose a subconscious or repressed idea that the viewer fears to encounter. Consider that every time the shark attacks, it draws its victims under. The scenes of attack, such as its assault on the boat that goes out to hunt it, are less dramatic than the moments of rising tension prior, and the fear of the attack rests in that the shark may bring the person down below to the subconscious zone where those ideas that the shark represents may have to be encountered.
Like the shark in Jaws, Samsa’s absurd transformation represents the reflection of the subconscious and uncertain fears of both his family and the readers. Yet, differently than Jaws, we experience this fear from the perspective of Samsa. There are very few recognitions of Samsa’s body, and never a complete depiction. However the reaction to Samsa is always an external or reflected reaction. Samsa intends to proceed to work, and finds the event of his metamorphosis a trifle that will pass, like a brief cold. The reaction by his family and the workmen that comes to gather him are incomprehensible to him. In the way that the shark as the embodiment of fear is never fully identified with the body of the shark that attacks, Samsa is never fully identified with the body he has transformed into. Further, neither Samsa nor the shark have an identifiable point of origin. Yet the shark remains an external enemy we wish to defeat and send back where it came from, Samsa’s lack of origin forces us to identify with this lack of beginning. For this reason, Samsa forces us not to confront our ideology but to embody it, identify with it (especially the fear of seeing how others would react if we were completely honest or completely exposed), and live without our repressions. We also confront the fear that to live without our ideology, or to expose ourselves, would be horrifying to others and prevent us from life.
Kafka orchestrates an experience of trauma in the reader by forcing them to unwittingly become the origin of their fear. This is an inventive element of Kafka’s writing. I would broadly describe the style Kafkaesque as an unmitigated feeling of anxiety, stemming from a situation of absurdity, that is not only unresolved but frustratingly, the protagonist avoids resolving it all together.
