Kafka (1883-1924) was tall, dark and handsome (though with sticky-out ears), engaged three times (twice to the same woman), an attendee of public baths and cinemas (and brothels), a health nut (chewing each mouthful of food a set thirty-two times), a hypochondriac (who contracted tuberculosis [“Told you I was sick”]), bit of a wanker (judging from the pornographic magazines he subscribed to) and a dedicated writer (though a part-timer with a developed propensity for time-wasting).
His fabulous paranoia novel The Trial has been interpreted in many different ways. It has been read biographically as an account of his own particular circumstances with his indifferent fiancé, and his entanglements with bureaucracies while working energetically and ambitiously for a sort of trade union Accident Compensation Commission.
The French philosopher Sartre read The Trial as a Jewish writer’s parable of anti-semitism, while Sartre’s contemporary, Albert Camus, chronicler of the condemned, found a kindred spirit in Kafka and wrote, characteristically, that Joseph K finally “embraces the God that consumes him”.
Recently a piece in the English Guardian mentioned the identification of contemporary South African and Israeli novelists with Kafka and the inscrutability of their respective nation states. It quoted J.M. Coetzee that Kafka understood “the obscene intimacies of power”.
Certainly, when I was asked to do this stage adaptation I found I could easily give the project a 21st century tweak by adding a recent transcript from an Israeli court interrogation where a Palestinian was held in detention suspected of something so heinous it couldn’t be revealed, not even to his lawyer.
But it was also while I was working on this adaptation that I realised what seems so often ignored by interpreters of The Trial. And that was the sexual politics of it all.
So much of The Trial seems about sexual guilt. There’s an attitude to women, of fear, sexual availability and culpability. It runs through the book like a stain in a sheet.
