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Walter Benjamin said of Kafka that his work dealt in ‘the purity and beauty of a failure’ That ‘once he was certain of eventual failure, everything worked out for him en route as in a dream’ Wresting the Czech novelist from the critics who had variously lumped him into one of two camps – the psychoanalytic or the mystical – Benjamin was keen to assert the far more prosaic origins of Kafka’s absurdity: the ultimate fallibility and smallness of man that ultimately renders all fleeting and often fortuitous achievements, funny   What Kafka dealt with from an almost metaphysical perspective, became the subject of latter-day comics dealing in the far more kitchen-sink enactments of this same scenario – the petty anxieties of the Petit Bourgeois This was the social strata rendered humourless by the bald ambition and anxiety that attends climbing the social ladder, becoming an easy target of ridicule along the way Kafka is the Paul Klee to Tony Hancock’s John Bratby, but the state embodied by both, the sense of wry detachment, and sense of alienation from the systems of governance and bureaucracy that ultimately decide one’s fate, also continued the experience of childhood I have often marvelled at the ways in which our society maintains the idea that adulthood should constitute the discarding of such scepticism, to me, insisting on a form of delusional and uncritical conformity The childish amongst us, of which a large concentration seem to exist in the fields of artistic expression and academia, are those who have not yet ceded to the forces of economic one-up-manship, who no different to how we were when we were five, see much of the world as constituting a mystery of jargon and dumb stress   I have long been interested in the psychic impacts of social mobility The orphan state it creates in the winners, and the anguish left for everyone else This state of detachment from bureaucratic forces, the imperviousness to success and failure that I describe here, ought to be the experience of childhood And yet I wonder whether it was a prelapsarian state cut short for