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Oct. 4th, 2013
In reading “The Trial”, one is treated to some provocative suggestiveness of aggressive sexuality, even if there is not the explicit treatment of sex that we are used to receiving even casually in our more pornographic age. Here we have some discussion on Kafka’s somewhat tortured psychosexuality as it is implicated in this novel.
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The court’s intervention in his life also opens up other side’s of K’s character, especially his sexual appetite. Previously, like Meursault in Camus’s “The Stranger”, he satisfied his sexual urges with a weekly visit to a prostitute. Now he suddenly develops an interest in Fraulein Burstner which finds expression in a sexual assault [albeit consisting only in some aggressive kissy-face]: he is “like a thirsty animal furiously thrusting its tongue over the water of the spring it has found at last”, a complex comparison suggesting brute appetite alongside an elemental need. In the court premises he is enticed by the usher’s wife, who is apparently also the sexual victim of the examining magistrate, and in the lawyer’s office he is easily led into an affair with the housekeeper Leni. There is undoubtedly some misogyny in the portrayal of these women. The endearments of the usher’s wife (‘you can do whatever you want with me’, and the promiscuity ascribed to Leni, recall the pseudo-scientific theory of Otto Weininger, vastly popular in turn-of-the-century Central Europe, that all women could be classified as either mothers or whores. Leni’s webbed hand, which K calls “a pretty claw”, suggests an evolutionary throwback to a more primitive phase of humanity.
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Although he was far from inexperienced sexually, with many brothel visits and some short-lived holiday romances, Kafka often felt a disgust with sexuality and an ascetic desire to escape from it. In such moods, he felt that women - whom he blamed, following a common misogynist tactic, as the projection of his own sexual desire - were dragging him down into repulsive material existence. In 1918 he wrote in his notebook: “Sensual love deceives one into ignoring heavenly love.”
-- Mike Mitchell, introduction to Kafka’s “The Trial”
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The court’s intervention in his life also opens up other side’s of K’s character, especially his sexual appetite. Previously, like Meursault in Camus’s “The Stranger”, he satisfied his sexual urges with a weekly visit to a prostitute. Now he suddenly develops an interest in Fraulein Burstner which finds expression in a sexual assault [albeit consisting only in some aggressive kissy-face]: he is “like a thirsty animal furiously thrusting its tongue over the water of the spring it has found at last”, a complex comparison suggesting brute appetite alongside an elemental need. In the court premises he is enticed by the usher’s wife, who is apparently also the sexual victim of the examining magistrate, and in the lawyer’s office he is easily led into an affair with the housekeeper Leni. There is undoubtedly some misogyny in the portrayal of these women. The endearments of the usher’s wife (‘you can do whatever you want with me’, and the promiscuity ascribed to Leni, recall the pseudo-scientific theory of Otto Weininger, vastly popular in turn-of-the-century Central Europe, that all women could be classified as either mothers or whores. Leni’s webbed hand, which K calls “a pretty claw”, suggests an evolutionary throwback to a more primitive phase of humanity.
[...]
Although he was far from inexperienced sexually, with many brothel visits and some short-lived holiday romances, Kafka often felt a disgust with sexuality and an ascetic desire to escape from it. In such moods, he felt that women - whom he blamed, following a common misogynist tactic, as the projection of his own sexual desire - were dragging him down into repulsive material existence. In 1918 he wrote in his notebook: “Sensual love deceives one into ignoring heavenly love.”
-- Mike Mitchell, introduction to Kafka’s “The Trial”
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