The above diagram displays Kurt Vonnegut’s G-I Axis (good fortune versus ill fortune in stories), used to depict the narrative situation of Kafka’s characters. They do not experience the ascribed twists and turns of most narratives – they simply live, and then they die. This disaffection is born from paradox, as Malcolm Bradbury writes, leaving ‘the world unreal, detached from itself, suddenly made unhomely’ (1988, p. 268). In this intractable hollowness, a ‘temperament that sees a world where benign divinity has been replaced by random arbitrariness and absent authorities’ (p. 277), Kafka’s writings held a gripping relevance to the post-war world, which ‘came to resemble the imaginary one he constructed’ (p. 256). It is therefore no surprise that the Kafka-esque is connected to much post-war art, including theatre.
Much of the identity of the postmodern individual can be perceived in The Trial – such as ‘the abbreviation of Joseph K.’s name… which at once reduces his identity and seems to turn him into a case or a file’ (p. 258). This alienation pervades Kafka’s work through oppressive relationships. Isolation is especially created through sexual licentiousness, part of the ‘strong erotic charge [that] runs through all of Kafka’s writings, along with a troubling sexual guilt’ (p. 269). Berkoff therefore initially seems to be a fitting theatrical projector for Kafka, with his plays of sexually-minded young men caught in social systems. But his use of sexuality, far from being ambivalent, is what he words as ‘a loving appreciation of the male and female form’ (2000, p. 3). In his interpretation of The Trial, Berkoff translates the satirical elements of the novel onto an emphasised plane of physical theatre, but luckily the deeper existential anxieties and permeating frustration at human administration remains part of the play’s stronger points.
Nevertheless, Berkoff’s reading exhorts Bradbury’s suggestion that despite K.’s ‘hopes that a woman will intercede for him… his careless sexual activities seem part of his crime and instinct for self-destruction (1988, p. 269). Therefore:
K. himself is thus the source and cause of all the events, as if he is living in a dream which is from time to time separate from reality. Nonetheless the dream-reality grows more and more inclusive, and the gap between the familiar and the strange closes. (1988, p. 269)
Although this use of dream-like storytelling can be associated with the Modernist tropes of stream-of-consciousness and the Freudian influence on literature, I would argue that Kafka’s dream/nightmare is closer to the postmodern sense – equally permeated by the carnal and the mechanical, the real and the representative. Indeed, Kafka’s ‘mistrust of literature as an institution’ is a marker of his contemporary separateness and developer of ‘original patterns’, and informed the ‘idea of language as pure exorcism [that] fascinated him’, as Franz Kuna writes (1986, p. 131). This aspect of Kafka – literature as corrupting and language as purging – shares similarities with Dada’s communication breakdown; and is included in our staging of the court scene towards the end of The Trial, with the Judge proclaiming K.’s guilt with ‘blah, blah, blahs’. Kafka’s theories on language and literature can be best scene in his On Parables:
If you only followed the parables you yourselves would become parables and with that rid all of your daily cares. Another said: I bet that is also a parable. The first said: You have won. The second said: But unfortunately only in parable. The first said: No, in reality: in parable you have lost. (Kafka 2005, p. 457)
It is yet another paradoxical tangle. However, if Kafka truly believed that language was an exorcist, then perhaps theatre is the best medium to convey his works (he himself wrote a short play, The Warden of the Tomb). The primal scream against institutionalism, an Artaudian act made by K. towards the play’s conclusion, is perhaps what Kafka longed for – a pure and simple gesture untangled in paradox. This, too, is what we look for from a play.
Word count: 654.
Works cited
Berkoff, Steven (2011), The Trial, in The Trial, Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony: Three Theatre Adaptations from Franz Kafka, London: Amber Lane Press, pp. 5-69.
Berkoff, Steven (2000), East, in Steven Berkoff: Plays 1, London: Faber and Faber, pp. 1-42 (‘Author’s Note’, pp. 3-2).
Bradbury, Malcolm (1988), The Modern World: Ten Great Writers, London: Secker & Warburg.
Kafka, Franz (2005), The Warden of the Tomb, trans. by Tania Stern and James Stern, in Nahum N. Glatzer (ed.), The Complete Short Stories of Franz Kafka, London: Vintage, pp. 206-19.
Kafka, Franz (2005), On Parables, trans. by Willa Muir and Edwin Muir, in Nahum N. Glatzer (ed.), The Complete Short Stories of Franz Kafka, London: Vintage, p. 457.
Kafka, Franz (1999), The Trial, trans. by Willa Muir and Edwin Muir, London: Vintage.
Kuna, Franz (1986), ‘Vienna and Prague 1890-1928’ in, Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (eds.), Modernism: 1890-1930, London: Penguin, pp. 120-133.
Vonnegut, Kurt (2005), ‘Kurt Vonnegut at the Blackboard’, [online] <http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/voices-in-time/kurt-vonnegut-at-the-blackboard.php?page=all> [accessed 21 March 2013].