Leni

   

   

 
My first post on Kafka’s novel,  The Trial includes an image from the film adaptation by Orson Welles, showing Anthony Perkins as Joseph K, and Romy Schneider as Leni cuddling together.  Maybe it was the awful video transfer I was watching, but I couldn’t get through this movie, and I read the book twice in succession.  It’s another very faithful adaptation…again I say, perhaps too faithful.  But unlike Chabrol’s Bovary, and Heart of a Dog about which I entertained similar, but ultimately abandoned reservations, I’ll pass on this one.  Welles told Perkins that the movie should play like a black comedy, a directive very much in keeping with Kafka’s intent, I think, but the comedy doesn’t come through in what I saw here.

Romy, however, was fabulously seductive as Leni, the nurse of the imperious advocate (Welles) who terrifies his clients whom he is supposedly helping.  Like all the women in The Trial, Leni exerts a tremendous erotic pull on Joseph K, a pull which is simply “a snare” in Kafka’s universe.  A snare keeping Joseph from…what?

Kafka redux

Have you ever read a book, closed the covers, then started in on reading it again right away?  I never have until now.  I finished Kafka’s The Trial, and now I am reading it again.  It is a remarkable book!

I cannot by any means see this novel as a parable about contemporary society, politics, bureaucracy, totalitarianism, or other thematic streams discussed by many reviewers.  For me, this book is pure poetry of the most difficult sort.  And a very dark, ominous sort as well.

Key to this book is tone, something I go on about at length when I rhapsodize about Flaubert.  (Is it a surprise that Nabokov, not a generous critic, had tremendous admiration for Kafka?  He too was a master of tone.)  The book manages to tread the line between a precise, believable, concrete description of things and a world that is totally fearsome, inexplicable, and unexpected.  It is not surreal, but its situations certainly have the feel of dreams, but dreams become absolutely concrete! 

The characters in this book speak a farrago of nonsense about everything, but always with great confidence in what they have to relate, and with tremendous precision, as if they are scholars (talmudic, some have commented) of the structures they analyse.  None of it makes any sense from the point of view of our world, but it makes total sense to them.  The beauty of the writing is that it makes us see it from their point of view, against our will!  That’s the terrible frisson it creates.

There is philosophy here, and satire, and satire of philosophy.  There is commentary here on the nature of human beings and their tragic, fallen state.  And there is fatalistic resignation, not much hope, but laughter that, maybe, makes it bearable.  It is not a happy work, but it is uplifting in a way.

The Trial – Cliché and Not

I just finished reading The Trial, by Franz Kafka.  When I read it many years ago, it did not make a big impression, but this time I am floored.  Kafka has been a victim of his posthumous success in a way.  Consider this passage from the blog where I found the film still shown above:

When people use the word ‘Kafkaesque’ they are referring to a kind of powerlessnes in the face of a faceless bureaucracy, with vague suggestions of impending doom- marked by a ‘senseless, disorienting, often menacing complexity’ (Wikiman)-as in a ‘Kafkaesque nightmare’ or as indeed in Kafka’s posthumously published masterpiece ‘The Trial’  Everybody can identify with his chilling tale- with its surreal ending and dark humour. ‘He sounds like my kind of guy!” said Bill Gates on being told his corporate trials (Microsoft’s monopoly) were like the ordeals of Joseph K. Terry Gilliam’s 1985 movie ‘Brazil’ is all Kafka–starting with a Joseph K type arrest.

Well, this is all a bit too easy, although it is clear that there is a connection. [I guess this writer has not read The Trial: there was no mistake in his case, as there was in “Brazil,” and there was no violence.  Everything was in order…] Personally, I like the way R. Crumb, in his biography/adaptation of Kafka lampoons the literati as they throw around the term “Kafkaesque” in their cocktail chatter.

What struck me about the novel was the metaphysical nature of the situation.  The religiosity of it.  K’s execution is like Abraham’s sacrifice of Issac, without the saving intervention of God!  And we know that Franz had issues with his father, not to mention THE father.

As George Steiner points out in his introduction to the Everyman edition, what is the sense in taking The Trial to be a premonition of the Nazi death-bureaucracy, Stalin’s NKVD, or other state organs.  The people in The Trial are too ordinary, and they act that way.  They don’t beat people.  They don’t torture.  They all try to do their job.  And most importantly, K is totally complicit.  Why doesn’t he flee – he never even tries to determine the nature of his charge.  He ACCEPTS the system totally.  No, this is a religious parable we are being treated to, one in which the “hero” is irredeemably lost from the start.  Not by accident does the climactic episode with the story of the door to The Law happen in a cathedral, related by a priest, and followed by a rabbinical discourse on the varieties of possible interpretations.  The Old Law meets the New Law, and it ain’t pretty.

The other element of the story that surprised me was the contant sexual element that runs through it.  K moves from one attentuated erotic encounter to another, always unfulfilled of course.

And since I brought it up, I might as well rant on about it – this movie!  I love Monty Python, and I think Gilliam’s animations are funny.  I think 1984, Brave New World, and Zamayatin’s We are literary masterpieces!  But I thought this film was trash.  The look of it was pretty cool, but that’s about how far it went.  The praise that is heeped upon it as a “cult-classic” ignores the fact that is waaaaaay too long; utterly hackneyed in its themes and plot; and positively boring at times.  Cult-classic indeed.  I guess that’s the tip-off.