In Our Time - Kafka's The Trial

Episode Date: November 27, 2014

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Franz Kafka's novel of power and alienation 'The Trial', in which readers follow the protagonist Joseph K into a bizarre, nightmarish world in which he stands accused of an unknown crime; courts of interrogation convene in obscure tenement buildings; and there seems to be no escape from a crushing, oppressive bureaucracy.Kafka was a German-speaking Jew who lived in the Czech city of Prague, during the turbulent years which followed the First World War. He spent his days working as a lawyer for an insurance company, but by night he wrote stories and novels considered some of the high points of twentieth century literature. His explorations of power and alienation have chimed with existentialists, Marxists, psychoanalysts, postmodernists - and Radio 4 listeners, who suggested this as our topic for listener week on In Our Time.GUESTSElizabeth Boa, Professor Emerita of German at the University of Nottingham Steve Connor, Grace 2 Professor of English at the University of Cambridge Ritchie Robertson, Taylor Professor of the German Language and Literature at the University of OxfordProducer: Luke Mulhall.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time. For more details about In Our Time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com. UK slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. Quote, somebody must have been telling lies about Joseph Kaye. For one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.

So begins the trial, the celebrated novel by Franz Kafka. The reader's drawn into a bizarre, nightmarish world in which nobody will tell Joseph Kay the charges against him. Courts of interrogation convene in obscure corners of tenement buildings. Sex and sadistic punishment seems arbitrary, and there seems to be no escape from a crushing bureaucracy. Kafka was a German-speaking Jew who lived in the Czech city of Prague

across the end of the 19th beginning of the 20th century. He spent his days working as a lawyer for an insurance company, but by night he wrote stories and novels considered now some of the high points of 20th century literature although few were published in his own lifetime. His explorations of power and alienation have chined with existentialists, Marxists, psychoanalysts, post-modernists,

and Radio 4 listeners, who suggested this as our topic for Listener Week in our time. So thank you to Roy Bailey and Lauren Hall, the two of you who made this suggestion. With me to discuss Kafka and the trial are Elizabeth Bow, Professor Emerita of German at the University of Nottingham, Steve Connor, the Grace II Professor of English, at the University of Cambridge,

and Ritchie Robertson, Taylor Professor of German at the University of Oxford. Steve Connor, as well as the trial, people may have heard of Kafka's other novels, the Castle and his novella metamorphosis. Can you give us an idea of the work he produced and his themes as a writer?

And he died in his 40, didn't he? TB, there we are. Yes, I mean, he begins writing in about 1908 as young man. In his lifetime, he published only two collections. of stories and in fact stories are what he seems to have devoted himself to mostly and apart from his most completed novels are I suppose the trial and the castle the castle being the last work that he undertook and his third novel the the first that he started to work on in about

1911 is usually published under the title America None of these three novels are in fact complete. They move progressively towards, I think, a darker, more obsessive vision of a single individual struggling to find some sensible way of proceeding in a tangled web of uncertainty and obstruction. the world of Kafka's world and one really always wants to say this that there are certain writers who inhabit who construct worlds that are somehow bigger almost more important, more inclusive

than the actual novels that they write. Dickens would be another, Lewis Carroll will be another and Kafka's world is one of a kind of extraordinary strangeness that can burst into everyday life but rendered with a oddly insistent levelness and muted lucidity.

The three novels that deal with these predicaments, the first America in a rather unsurprisingly knockabout kind of way. But the extraordinary thing about Kafka really and the thing that perhaps is most important to remember is that the stories are where the extraordinary bursts into the mundane and has to be made sense of. And how does the trial fit in, how does it slot into the preoccupations of major preoccupations as a writer? Well, the trial, I think, focuses on the law, but actually it's the law as a kind of system of deferral, a system of indirectness. It stands for all systems that somehow don't really seem to have a centre or a purpose or a point. And in that sense, it stands for,

this new modern experience of bureaucracy itself, the experience of the office, which for many writers from Charles Lamb onwards, Dickens certainly, has been the kind of rival to literature. In the case of Kafka, very literally a rival we've heard. You know, he had to carve out time from his work in an insurance company, the workers' insurance company, to write. And yet those two worlds of writing kind of bleed into each other.

So his literary writing in a certain sense is trying to make sense of this other world that has become the experience for all of us somehow, an experience of language. No one is quite sure who's in charge of it, what its purposes are. There might not be quite time to go into the proposition that working for insurance through the day helped his writing, just like TSA working in the bank helped his writing. But we'll pass on that.

Yeah, there are other insurance writers as well as Stevens too was an insurance agent. Yes. Elizabeth Bo Kafka, he was born in Prague in 1883. He died there in 1924. It was a time and place of great change in the Austro-ungarian Empire. Can you tell us something of the historical setting of this work? Yes, well, Kafka's literary world is a strange world, and he inhabited what in many ways a very strange world, as it seems.

The empire came to an end when Napoleon crowned himself in 1804, jumping forwards to 1867, you have the establishment of the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary. Kafka came from Bohemia and the Bohemian lands were denied the kind of rights which were granted to the modgers. Then during the First World War, Mazurik went to London in 2015 and the Republic of Czechoslovakia was founded in 1918 and October. The Jew monarchy was a multi-national polity. The biggest group were the Slavs of about 45%, then Germans, 23%, modgers, 19%, and then a mixed bag of others. In the lands of the Bohemian crowns, there were about 5 million Czechs, I should say,

and about half as many Germans. In 1910, the Jewish population here was about 1,000. 1.3%, but it was much larger in Prague, around 7%. And according to one biographer of Kafka, of the German minority in Prague, they were by this, Prague was by now definitely a Czech city. Of the German minority, about 85% were probably of Jewish extraction. These percentages were all their world,

but how many numbers, how many people in Prague were, were Jewish? I haven't got the number on my sheet. He was a German-speaking Jew in Prague. There were a minority, such a minority, that they didn't count as a people when it came to voting. That's right. So they didn't have the vote?

They did have the vote. What happened was that? It was in the census, the Jews chose either to affiliate as German or as Czech. And this contributes... But they didn't have, sorry to be pretended, but they didn't have votes as Jews.

No. Right. They were not... I was about to say they were not recognized as a people. So those figures that I was giving do not include Jews as a nation because they weren't recognized. What happened then was that

the Jews in the census count which contributed towards voting and so forth, they either affiliated as, according to language supposedly, as Czech. or as German. And this contributed then to the anti-Semitic

stereotype of the Jew who just looked after their own interests and had no basic roots or loyalties. And the anti-Semitic reality as well in the empire at that time. How did the Kafka family and France, Kafka in particular, fit into this world briefly? Yes.

In Prague, a German-speaking Jew and where do you go from there? Well, Herman Kafka came from the countryside from a village. His father had been a kosher butcher, and he was a self-made man who developed a business in selling fancy goods, dry goods, haberdashery and so forth. His mother was a rather different background

from a much more prosperous family. Her father was a prosperous brewer, and her maternal grandfather had been a well-known rabbi and Talmudic scholar. So there was quite a social gap between the parents. And this contributed perhaps to some of the tensions in the household. Kafka had three sisters, especially his youngest sister,

was very important to him. And she studied agriculture, and she was also a vegetarian. And in the end, they were hoping perhaps to move to, Palestine, but Otla, this young sister, married a Christian

Joseph David. And I think one ought to mention very briefly the fate of the sisters. The two elder sisters were deported to Roach and died in the camp there. And

Otla, the youngest sister, divorced her husband, her Christian husband, and was sent to Terazine and then she agreed to go with a group children to Auschwitz. That's much later on. So let's get back to our subject, Richard Robertson, to Kafka. He started to write at quite an early age.

Can he tell us how he started to write? He ended up being a lawyer and then he went into insurance and that's where he stayed until a few years before his death because he was too ill to keep on working. That's his career. So his career is that. Now then, when did he start to write? He started to write very early in the century with the texts

which were never published until long after his death. And these are fragmentary, almost incoherent, anticipating very much the kind of magical narratives that would become more popular after the Second World War. What we call magical realism? Yes, you could certainly see that. the setting changes, characters change their identity, etc. These, however, only remain drafts.

The first book Kafka published was a collection of short sketches under the title Meditation. And these are very sharp, very focused evocations of atmosphere and emotion, but his breakthrough story was The Judgment, which you wrote in a single night in September 1912. The Metamorphosis followed shortly. and the trial dates from two years later 1914. But not published in his laughter as death in 1925. Now let's talk about the judgment. You say that's his breakthrough.

What was he breaking through to? Were these short stories published, these sketchy short stories published in his lifetime in little magazines in Prague? They were published, but the judgment was a story who he felt he'd expressed what he wanted to express in a single coherent narrative with a dramatic build-up and a climax. He says in his diary he describes the experience of writing it

how there's a great fire which everything can be consumed everything he wanted to express came out in that story. What was it that he wanted to express? Well, there is in it a young woman called Frida Brandenfeld, F.B., which are the initials also of Felice Bauer, whom Kafka just met, and to whom he soon after has became engaged, and the initials also of Freiland Bursner in the trial. Above all, the story has a recurrent Kafka situation.

A professional man who seems to be well-established in his life, doing well in business, suddenly finds his life interrupted by something unexpected, and the interruption takes the form of his old father. He goes through to the back of the flat to speak to his father. The father asks him a puzzling question, some dialogue follows, then the father who seemed old and frail jumps upright in his bed,

denounce of the son for unspecified crimes, and sentences him to death by drowning. And the son, completely under his father's spell by now, rushes out and drowns himself. So it's a fantasy about authority and punishment and guilt. And we know that Kafka's father was particularly heavy-handed, that's a light way of putting it man. Yes.

Does the trial have a plot, Steve Conner, which can be summarized in such as some signployers. Well, if you try to summarize it, you very quickly start saying, and then, and then a bit later, and then a bit later, nearly all of the chapters begin one day, as though Kafka was starting again. But the novel certainly begins in a way that Kafka liked

with a sudden eruption into an ordinary light, life of a bank official who wakes up to find two men in his apartment building who tell him that he's under arrest for a crime unspecified. He thinks it's a joke. But he's told that he's under arrest and yet free to go to the bank. So he's under arrest but not in detention. So his life thereafter will become a state of permanent arrest. thereafter. He eventually acquires a lawyer. He works with the lawyer, discusses with a lawyer

the nature of his case. Eventually tries to dispense with his lawyer. That chapter isn't complete, so we don't know if he does dispense with his lawyer. After a series of episodes in strange buildings in unexpected quarters of Prague, meeting with people who may or may not be influential officials and meeting with a number of women with whom he has some very unexpected and abrupt sexual liaisons he is

there is a final chapter that occurs a year after the first in which he has taken apparently willingly to his death by two executioners but we really don't know how all of these different episodes

join up. In a certain sense, I think that ending feels very staged and forced, almost as though Kafka had written where he wanted to get to, but he somehow never got to. It's that state of being in the middle of the trial that the novel is really characterised by. So it's a plot that you've summarised well. I think that's got about almost everything in.

But it's also been called many times Craig Raine lately in Arati and so on as really a dream. The whole thing is as the nature of a dream. This is how dreams work rather than how narrative fiction works. But we'll come back to that, I'm sure. Can we just develop this, Elizabeth Poe, a little? Can you tell us a little

about the main characters in the novel? There's Joseph Kaye to start with. He is the hero. He is the protagonist. He is the... Whatever he is. He's the middle of it. Well, Kafka there's a tag where he says no psychology ever again. And the characters

in the trial are not ecological studies. They have no depth. They are conveyed through their outer appearance, through isolated details, and Kay himself is conveyed through his responses to the sequence of characters. The characters are come to life through very much, as Steve was just saying, through the different places that they are associated with. So who are they, these other characters? So there are various groups associated with locations. The men who arrest Kay at the beginning turn out to be associated with his bank where he works

and they are indeed his inferiors, two of them. And this is peculiarly humiliating adds to the humiliation of the arrest. These two warders, France and Willem, as they are called. The name France, of course, makes you think of capital. after himself, turn up later in a crucial and horrific scene in the bank, in the lumber room in the bank, where there is an S&M theatrical punishment being carried out on fat villain who is fat, and he's about to be whipped and he has to take his trousers down. and the whipper is a blue-eyed, fresh-faced figure.

So you have this sense of the horror and also of these stereotypes. The whipper is a Germanic stereotype. So the people at the bank, the people who come to arrest him, were also working with him in the bank. Then there's the woman who is landlady. We could just pass by her for a second,

and the woman to whom he confines next door, who is a new young, modern career woman. The second, yes, that's right. The second phase of the arrest takes place in the woman's bedroom. So you move from a man's bedroom to the woman's bedroom. Freunden Bustner is her name, another an F.B. figure like Felica Bauer. And she is a young, modern woman, the new woman, perhaps.

And she's the first of a sequence of women who often point the way towards where the next stage of the trial will take place. A second such woman is the wife of the court assistant who goes through a sequence of affairs. She starts off as a bright-eyed young mother, washerwoman. Then we see her being sexually abused at the back. of a meeting up in the attic in the slums where the first interrogation happens.

She's then carried upstairs by a student and handed over to the examining magistrate. So this is an absolutely surreal sequence of sexual exchange of women among men of different hierarchical status. And there are others, but you've given us the main characters. Can I?

Well, sorry, we have to do the programme. I would really want to add the advocate, the lawyer, Hult, who is his name means grace. His maid servant, Lainey, is the most extraordinary figure in the novel, a grotesque with webbed fingers, a peppery smell, and who pecks at Josef Kha, they have a sexual scene in the back room when the men are continuing to talk

about the law in the advocate's room. So she is the ultimate dreamlike figure who morphs through different aspects of being a maid servant, a cook and then she's like a harpy

kneeling on his knees and pecking at him and inducing guilt in Yosef Kha. Thank you. Thank you very much. Sorry interrupted. You were quite right to bring that back. Richard Robertson, when I was shown you before, I didn't bring up the Felix, Phyllis Bauer, the woman with whom he had a relationship, he was engaged to three times, three times they broke it off. And she was, and after they finally broke it off, something like a day or so after he started to write the trial. Can you tell us a little about her?

Yes, certainly. She was a real-life example of the new woman who Elizabeth will be talking about. She began as a secretary in a firm making dictophones, and she eventually became part of the management. She was an immensely able, intelligent, well-read, competent woman. I saw a few days ago some specimens of her handwriting. It's a very bold, round script. Kafka admired her competence, but he was also very intimidated by it. He lived in Prague. She lived in Berlin. He met her when she was on a visit to Prague in 1912.

They corresponded. There was an immense body of letters from him to her. Hers to him don't survive. But he had very severe misgivings about getting married. There was an engagement party where he was miserable and looked at. He went with her to buy furniture and felt he was being dragged around like a criminal in chains, as he says in his diary.

Anyway, various other silly things happened. And there was a painful scene in a hotel room in Berlin, where Felice, her sister and a female friend all told Kafka how badly he'd behaved and broke off the engagement. He then went on a pre-arranged holiday and very soon after he started writing the trial initially as a kind of therapeutic exercise. And I should say that one reason why the last chapter of the trial,

the execution, feels a bit abrupt, as Steve said, is that Kafka wrote the first episode, the arrest and the sexual assault on Freylin Berthner first, then immediately afterwards wrote the end, which is the only other chapter in which Fraylin Berthner appears. He knew that his stories tended to run away with him. He knew how he wanted to end this story, so he wrote the ending and then filled in the rest.

So it's called the trial, and there's this mysterious court, which has been alluded to already. It is very mysterious, and we find it in the top of a... unlikely destitute tenement block it turns out to be riddled with pornography and goodness knows what else right can you tell us what part that plays in this book

you're right that the court is located in tenements in garrets in attics and when it intrudes into Joseph Key's working space it's in what was thought to be a disused lumber room with this terrible scene of violence

takes place. The court, in other words, is in the margins of life, is in the places that you forget about. In order to get to its supremacies, Joseph Kea has to go into urban slums, which you normally avoid. As of what the court stands for, there is one passage which

is revealing. Joseph Kea at one point looks at a picture which appears to show the goddess of justice, but she's not standing still. She's running. So her scales are not balanced. Then when you look more closely, she looks not like the goddess of justice,

but the goddess of the hunt. The suggestion is that Joseph Key is being hunted down, and he eventually is. And finally, she looks like the goddess of victory. So I think Kafka's giving the reader some help here and suggesting that the court, ostensibly concerned with justice, is in fact concerned with hunting down the culprit

and triumphing over him. Steve Connor, it's often described as a novel of alienation. I've brought up the possibility that it's a novel that can be compared with a dream. How does Kaffa create this alienation dream effect? Yes. Well, just on the dream thing, there's something very dreamlike about, but unexpected in this. When we think of something being dreamlike, we think of improbable things like the beginning of the transformation, metamorphosis, when, you know, Gregor Samsa wakes up, transformed into a huge insect.

or a piece of vermin. But actually the dreamlike character of Kafka, for the most part, consists in a strange mixture of sort of perplexity and embarrassment. How often in dreams you suddenly find yourself feeling shy or embarrassed, you've got no clothes on or not, or you have some complex task that you can't quite get to the end of, you have to keep starting again. So there are those qualities rather than the more melodramatic kind of qualities of the dream.

And it's this sense, I think, that gives that the strange, feeling of just being to the side of where you need to be is that kind of alienation where in a certain way unlike other writers of alienation who've been called Kafkaesque one might say Jean-Paul Sartre in his novel nausea there's no real explicit discussion of the condition of alienation any other novel of the in this where a character's in this predicament they might very well what on earth could be happening to me this would happen in a Dostoevsky novel so so Kay is kind of alienated from his own alienation. He doesn't have words for it.

Elizabeth. Just to give one example, in the first interrogation when he goes to the slum, he goes up into this attic and it starts off as if it were a political meeting with characters arguing left and left and the right.

It then morphs into a group of ancient old men with stiff beards and you can cut into these beards with your claws or the beards are like claws. and then at the back, the room is rather like a synagogue with a gallery round about it,

and then at the back, the bright-eyed young woman is being sexually abused. Now this is like a dream sequence of the anxieties of Yosef Kay, his sense of class guilt, you know, this left and right, then of the Jewish stereotype really of these old men with beards and this modern assimilated person, if you like, and he's actually shown to be Christian at one point, and then the sexual guilt. So although it's true what Steve's saying,

that it's all at the edge, it's at the same time also at the centre of what is going on in the world that Kay inhabits, which is a world of class differences, of abuse, of women, of ethnic, that lead to the most horrific kind of activities. And it comes across as a dream-like succession of anxiety. It's almost institutionalised abuse of women.

The prostitution was massive in most of the cities of Europe then, and very much accepted. And if I could add another dream effect, Leni herself, we heard about how the image of Justicia turned into the goddess of the hunt. Well, again, in a very dreamlike section, there is the merchant block, who is one of the accused.

The accused are all men. But he almost lives in the household of the advocate. And Lainey, at the end of this scene, holds him by his collar and drags him over so that he's kneeling in front of the advocate. and Lainey appears there as a woman who is playing the same role as this justice figure in the painting and it shows an image of men enthrall to sex subjected through the sexual drive and of women playing a role in bringing such men to accede to power.

This is all true and this is how the novel sounds when you talk about it. When you read it though, what's most disconcerting is that all of these enormities are narrated with the same kind of flatness. It's all on a level.

There's no horror. There's no scandal. It is, it is. It's like some, you know, civil service bureaucrats report on some terrible hellish set of circumstances. Richard Robertson, we're talking about a novel

that happens in urban settings. There's many different spaces. There's the first bedroom, there's the second bedroom, there's the house, there's the tenement building, there's a storage covered, and then there's the cathedral. We'll come to in one second with Steve. Can you give us your view on the way in which those urban spaces work for the novel? Kafka is very inventive with urban spaces.

Although the setting of the novel is not named, it feels quite a lot like Prague. The cathedral is quite a lot like St. Weiss's Cathedral in Prague. The working class suburbs are the places that Kafka occasionally had to visit and so forth. But what's most... On his work in insurance? Well, on one occasion, his father, who was a tyrant to many ways, abruptly dismissed all his employees in the shop.

And Kafka had to visit them in their homes and persuade them one by one to come back, which lets him practice his fluent check. but it's the domestic interiors that are most striking and often actually very comical. Everything is small and inconvenient. For example, when he goes to cathedral, he's addressed from the pulpit, not from the main pulpit,

but from a very small pulpit beside it, which appears to be made, especially for the inconvenience of the preacher. The court inhabits Garrets. A very important character we haven't mentioned yet is the court painter Tietarelli. whom Kay visits and hope of getting some advice.

He does get advice, but he can do nothing with it. Kay lives in a slum garret. Well, artists are supposed to live in garrets, that's okay. The window won't open, so it's very stuffy. His room gives directly onto the court premises, but the door that gives access to the court premises is behind his bed. And when the judge comes to see Tittorelli,

he has to come through the store and scramble over Tittorelli's bed. where the Titorrelli is in it or not. We hear also of a room that the lawyers have that has a great hole in the floor. They sit their legs dangling down. So, Cathar, actually, is quite a lot of fun with these inconvenient species.

Steve Conner, the mention has been made of a cathedral towards the end of the novel. He's supposed to be escorting a visiting client around for his insurance firm, and going to show him the cathedral. He goes to the cathedral. He seems to lose him, or deliberately loses him. And there's a priest.

who tells him a parable. Can you tell us what the parable is and what it's signify? So this chapter is like a little miz on abeam, a little interior reflection of the whole novel. And indeed there is this story that is told that Kafka had published separately, something usually called before the law, told to him by the man who identifies himself

as the prison chaplain, of a countryman who comes and seeks admission to the law. He's told by the man who's guarding the gate, of the law that he cannot let him in, but that he can wait if he wishes. And the man sits down and waits and he's never let in and he waits and waits for his entire lifetime. And at the end of his life as his senses are failing, he says to the guardian of the gate, please tell me why in all this time has nobody else sought admission to the law? And he receives the reply, because this gate was made only for you and I'm now going to close it. What then is,

happens is a kind of commentary on this, sort of, you know, a debate about whether or not the guard is in fact deceiving the man or whether the guard himself might be deceived. It's like a little kind of seminar that takes place. Elizabeth Bow, the trial census publication in 1925, after a rather slow takeoff has attracted an immense mind of attention, readership, discussion, films, operas, and so on. But a lot of interpretations, we're

Jewish, Christian, ex-essentialist, Freudian, Marxist, psychoanalytical, postmodern. Which one strikes you as being the most plausible? Oh, what a question, demanding a direct answer. Several of them strike me as being plausible.

That's the problem. I'd rather have one to start with. Well, I belong to what I had done as the last phase of Kafka reception, following upon Joseph Kaye's victim in the Cold War view of the trial as being about the persecution by political powers, you then get the loss of meaning in deconstructive. But when Kafka's manuscripts began to be really worked over, a new phase I think developed of I would call it the cultural turn

and to my mind the most convincing and exciting ways of reading Kafka have to do with the multinational polity that Kafka lived in and with the tensions that I think the court brings out The court is an earthly, worldly body which provides the structure of power relations and of oppression in this world. The law, however, is a different question. And I think one reason why the novel has attracted so much interpretation

is that these two elements, the court and the one hand offers the kind of social historical reading that I've been suggesting of the Jewish situation, the abuse of women and so forth. But the law remains the look towards a possible transcendent meaning, a post-religious hunger for transcendent meaning. So I think that you have to have both of these approaches to look both at the possible religious sense of this novel and at the socio-political look at the class society,

capitalism, the bank as the temple of capitalism and so forth. Thank you very much. Richie Robertson, following on from what Elizabeth both said, is there any sense when you read the trial that a message is being imparted to you? No, not in the sense that Kafka thought of the message beforehand, then considered how to write it. There wasn't his way at all. He only discovered what he wanted to say in the process of writing. But the trial does have many messages, and I would take from it as particularly interesting,

a message rather different what Elizabeth has talked about. I used to read it as a religious text, and there are... grounds for that, but I now see it much more as being about authority, and above all, how the victim of authority is complicit with authority. Joseph Kay tries to resist the trial, through a lot of bluster at first, but in fact, he comes under the spell of the court. He goes along with it. He loses track of his job, because every waking moment is spent thinking about his case. and when the execution has come for him, he's already there and waiting for them,

solving addressed in a black suit. So it's about how the victim of authority colludes in his own oppression. And one curious thing about it is that although he has the chance to ask why he's been arrested, what the charge against him is he never takes it. He's very easily deflected. So what suspects that if he's,

if he doesn't ask. He doesn't want to know. If he doesn't want to know, in some sense he knows already. So I think it's also a story about self-knowledge and self-deception. Can we take that on, Steve Conner? The trial was published, as I've said, two or three times a year or so after Kafka's death, against his wishes. He'd asked Max Brod, his executive to destroy it and destroy all his work. Broad, thankfully, disobeyed him.

But the change, and it's been pointed out to us by Richie early on, that the end was written very early in the writing of the book. And yet the end obviously troubles you and has troubled quite a lot of people. He is taken out to a quarry, the first outside space. We've got a quarry. And butchered, a big knife, he plunged into his heart. That's what happens. Right.

Now, why does that bother you? Well, I think it's actually just too conclusive. It's kind of cheap. It's stagy. And because the novel turned out to be about how difficult it is ever to conceive of any conclusion, let alone escape. And in fact, the last words of the novel suggests that even death isn't a proper escape.

You know, like a dog, thought Joseph Kay, as if the shame were meant to outlive him. So that there's something about going on, even in the final words. And of course, that's what's happened to the novel. It's somehow carried on and carried on in all the different revisitings of it. Elizabeth Burr.

I would say it's not so conclusive throughout sadomasochism has been a key mode of response to power relations and Kay has the choice of taking the knife and doing it to himself which would be assuming the role of the court or of accepting his guilt which he doesn't do either he doesn't plead guilty and this sense of shame I think is a quite different emotion from guilt and leaves you with lots of questions at the end. We're going to be left with lots of questions,

even though you've covered a lot of my questions extremely thoroughly. Richie, can you tell us, I'm afraid briefly, but you can do it, the influence that Kafka's had on other writers since 1925. Very extensive but also quite hard to pin down. If you want a more recent writer of fantasy, you look at Borges, who did actually translate some of Kafka's stories into, Spanish. But if I have to

choose, I would say you can find a lot of demonstrable influence of Kafka in modern South African fiction. I'm thinking of Nadine Gardimer, who responds to Kafka, and above all of J.M. Kutseer, who writes a novel called The Life and Times of Michael K.

A dreamlike narrative set in the possible future of South Africa. And with themes of oppression, victimhood, etc., clearly inspired by Kafka. And any... Elizabeth, you...

I would add to that, Beckett and Pinter, as the two big examples in English theatre. Thomas Pinch and John Banville. Plenty more, I think. And I'm afraid we have to come towards an end. Now, thank you very much to Roy Bailey

and Lauren Hall for suggesting that subject. There's hundreds more to come from your suggestions, and thanks to Richard Robertson, Elizabeth Bow, Boe, and Steve Conner. Next week we'll be talking about Zen. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Every time you tell me what you didn't do on the programme,

you can put in a pound. And that's one. That's all, take it. Three pounds a week. Those will fill up. I think a lot was covered, actually. Yeah, I think if you've... And now you're going to talk to listeners,

the three of you. Okay. which is I thank you very much I hope you enjoyed it sorry I got a bit not tested but a bit hurry up

about the percentages because they were meaningless because I didn't know the basic population I didn't mean anything I'm sorry now you've always got to move us on at the beginning you know it feels such a long time

for five minutes but you've got to go through and there was so much more to say about Judaism and Jewishness and this period I had lots of things to say about that he said this thing when he was asked about

what he thought about his Jewish and she said why should I have anything in common with Judaism who have so little in common with myself

that was trying to interest him in Zionism yeah that's right but he did become interested yes and he also ought to he did that's right one thing we forgot to mention

although you said so much with Cidumazochism Elizabeth you didn't mention that the whipper is dressed in a black leather outfit No, I mean, the leathers and the fresh face and the blue eyes and the most extraordinary figure. Well, you can tell the listeners that they'll be delighted at it.

Right. Tell them that the programme wasn't anything like as good as it should have been and you, and you're going to rectify all that with them now. Anyway, they're waiting to talk to you. And this is an unusual programme in the sense that I'm saying, good luck with the rest of what you do. I won't be with you. I have a good idea.

They talk to you. Thank you very much. There are many more Radio 4 arts and discussion programmes to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.co.com.uk slash radio 4.