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Kafka on Trial
| Article
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19282 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1991 |
1,791 Words |
| Author
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Herb Greer
Herb Greer is an American writer and playwright who lives in
Britain and on the Continent. |
Orson Welles was fascinated by the novel The Trial and made a mildly interesting film out of it, borrowing a Kafka anecdote, "Before the Law", as a kind of introduction. This tells of a wretch who wishes to enter a gateway to the Law, but is made by a Gatekeeper to wait. His wait is literally lifelong. As he is dying, he asks the Gatekeeper why no one else had tried to enter. The answer is that this gate was nurfur dich bestimmt, that is, it was made only for the man himself and no one else may enter. "And now," says the Gatekeeper, "I am going to close it."
This story is in fact a poor parallel to The Trial, since nothing about the Law is arbitrary or mysterious. The man is afraid of the Gatekeeper's authority and of others who, he is told, are beyond the gate; this fear holds him back. The closure at the end is quite logical and sensible, since after the man is dead there will be no need for a gate that only he can use. It is, in a way, not at all Kafkaesque. And yet Steven Berkoff uses the same parable to introduce his own adaptation of The Trial in London.
The reason for this is made plain in an introduction to the published text of his play, where Berkoff displays a spectacular misunderstanding of the book, and, indeed, of Kafka himself:
K's guilt for which he must die is the guilt of betrayal: the guilt of betraying his inner spirit to the safety of mediocrity. For every action that is not expressed through fear, for every desire that wells up in the breast and is not given vent in action through fear turns into a little rat of guilt that gnaws away at your vitals. For every shout held back, for every venture not ventured on, for every regret in the soul, for every compromise you make and slur you took adds to the sorry storehouse of guilt that screams out for justice. The soul screams out for vengeance, starved as it is in its dark and stinking hovel. Guilt is the difference between what your spirit sings out for and what your courage permits you to take. Joseph K's guilt--Kafka's guilt.
Berkoff then refers to the parable of the Gatekeeper and the Law. That is all very intense and dramatic and quite neat, but also very cockeyed. If one is going to be literary about it, the guilt described in Berkoff's melodramatic paragraph has little if anything to do either with Kafka or K., but a great deal to do with the early nineteenth-century English poet William Blake, and his "Proverb of Hell": "Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted
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