“Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation,” wrote a modern American poet. Here, ‘relation’ is used both as ‘a set of connections’ and in its other sense of ‘relating something’ or telling a story. The shock of nothing making sense in life, according to this poet, compels a sharper sense of the unexpected connections among these nonsensical bits of experience. The nonsensicalness of things might also feel like being part of a bizarre story — somebody else’s story over which one has no control at all. This is what people mean when they say that they have had a ‘surreal’ or ‘Kafkaesque’ experience. They are trying to convey something that has not only baffled or terrified them, but also made them see the world and their own lives differently. The uncanny has, somehow, made them cannier human beings, and this strange new keenness of vision makes them reach out to literature, art, cinema or dreams for the right adjectives.

It is this ‘somehow’ that seems to have become a verifiable process in the cognitive sciences, and calling something Kafkaesque may be closer to the truth than hitherto imagined. Psychologists from California and British Columbia have shown that human guinea-pigs thrown in at the deep end of a disturbing and inexplicable Kafka story emerged better equipped to make sense of life’s hidden patterns than another set of readers who were given the same story, but rewritten to make clearer sense. The unmodified story confronted the first set of readers with what these psychologists call a “meaning threat”: the shock of the unexpected that comes from reading something that fundamentally does not make sense. The story thus forced its disoriented readers to comb it for another set of patterns, for a meaning that would yield itself only to a more attentive, and less complacent, reading. This is what heightened the readers’ cognitive faculties, out of a desperate need to get back their bearings in a world suddenly rendered terrifyingly unfamiliar. The psychologists say that the same sort of thing could happen with a ‘surreal’ film like David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.

What they do not quite say, however, is that there is good nonsense and bad nonsense, good surrealism and bad surrealism. What distinguishes the meaningful from the inconsequential, in spite of both being nonsensical or surreal, is this capacity to shock the mind and senses into unexpected recognitions of truth. People have come stumbling out into the real world from both Blue Velvet and, say, Shob Charitra Kalponik. But why is it that the mysteries of the former unsettle one’s perception of reality, while all the poetry in the latter merely makes one hit the malls for that exquisite tangail Bipasha Basu looked so gorgeous in at her husband’s deathbed?