By Stuart Mitchner

Franz Kafka died on June 3, 1924, a month short of his 40th birthday. The word “Kafkaesque” reportedly entered the English language in the 1940s, the earliest usage being from 1947 in the New Yorker.

The first time I actually thought “This is like Kafka” was on a cold rainy night in October 1965 when I was dropped off in Zagreb by an Iranian who was not driving so much as being driven by a brand-new VW Beetle. After registering at a tourist office where they treated bearded hitchikers like vermin, I was given an address that people on the rain-swept street said didn’t exist, which nevertheless took me to an empty bed in a large, high-ceiled room that I shared with a number of displaced-looking old men who seemed to know me.

“Holy Kafka!”

According to one of Kafka’s biographers, Frederick R. Karl, in a 1991 interview, “Kafkaesque” is “when you enter a surreal world in which all your control patterns, all your plans, the whole way in which you have configured your own behavior, begins to fall to pieces, when you find yourself against a force that does not lend itself to the way you perceive the world.”

Nothing fell to pieces that chilly, rainy night in Zagreb (if anything the pieces fell together), nor did the situation fit the dictionary definition of the K word as “having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality.” At the same time, it often seems that Kafka invented Yugoslavia, America, and the 21st century. Ask Reiner Stach why he began the last chapter of his magnificent biography with an epigraph from Jimi Hendrix (“When I die, just keep playing the records”)? And why did Maureen Dowd exclaim “Holy Kafka!” in her post-conviction-on-34-counts New York Times op ed? And why did watching a YouTube clip of Hendrix playing his feedback-driven version of the National Anthem feel like the right thing to do after the guilty verdict in the Trump hush money trial?

In the end, “Kafkaesque” is simply an irresistible word, the “Kafka” and the “esque” a match made in heaven, or hell, which is the truth I face every time I wish there were a term that does for the author of The Metamorphosis what “Shakespearean” does for Shakespeare, what Dickensian does for Dickens, Dostoevskian for Dostoevsky, and Chekhovian for Chekhov, or Wellesian for the cinema of Orson Welles — which brings me to the elephant in this Kafkaesque room: why on earth did Welles choose to film his 1962 adaptation of The Trial in Zagreb?

“Decayed Roots”

When asked “Why Zagreb?” in a BBC interview from 1962, Welles said he was looking for a setting that “had inherited something of the Austro-Hungarian empire to which Kafka reacted.” Mainly he went to Zagreb because in 1962 he couldn’t film in Czechoslovakia, where “Kafka’s writing is still banished.” Referring to the last shot of The Trial, Welles observed that Zagreb “has old streets that look very much like Prague.” On top of that “there was one scene where we needed to fit fifteen hundred desks into a single building space and there was no film studio in France or Britain that could hold fifteen hundred desks. The big industrial fair grounds that we found in Zagreb made that possible.” Thus Welles had “both that rather sleazy modern, which is a part of the style of the film, and these curious decayed roots that ran right down into the dark heart of the 19th century.”

Blowing Up K.

In the same BBC interview, Welles defended changing Kafka’s ending. After perceptively noting that the novel’s defendant and protagonist Joseph K. “seems to conspire in his own death from the beginning,” Welles says, “yes, he is murdered in the end,” and “he’s murdered in our film, … as anyone is murdered when they’re executed, but where in the book he screams, ‘like a dog,’” in the film “he laughs in their faces because they’re unable to kill him.” At this point, Welles brings in T.S. Eliot, since K. “dies with a whimper in the novel, with a bang in the film,” the bang coming when the executioners toss a load of dynamite into the quarry where Tony Perkins as K. is laughing hysterically. What Welles did, in effect, was blow up the whole already fragmented novel, a fait accompli the minute he cast in the lead role an actor best known for life as Norman Bates, the cross-dressing psychopath who stabbed Janet Leigh to death while she was in the shower washing away the tensions of a long hard Kafkaesque drive.

Comic Relief

While reading The Trial, which I did prior to watching Welles’s version on YouTube (with Spanish subtitles), I sometimes imagined Kafka’s famously uninhibited laughter echoing in a Prague film palace of the afterlife showing a Marx Brothers double bill of Duck Soup and Animal Crackers. This hallucination was inspired by the novel’s occasional nutty, perverse, knockabout sequences, notably the episode featuring the Court painter Titorelli, whose name inevitably brought to mind Chico Marx as the pun-making pianistic virtuoso Ravelli. Titorelli is willingly besieged by a manic cult of lascivious little girls, all their faces showing “a mixture of childishness and depravity,” their leader a “somewhat hunchbacked” 13-year-old “whose youth and bodily defects had done nothing to stop her being already quite depraved.” The hint of casual depravity rouses memories of the leers and bobbing eyebrows of Groucho as Rufus T. Firefly and of a horn-honking Harpo pursuing comely females in his flapping coat, which has room for everything under the slapstick sun.

The Window

Welles films the Titorelli episode as a nightmare worthy of the Cambridge Dictionary’s definition of Kafkaesque: “extremely unpleasant, frightening, and confusing.” The same could be said for what Welles does with Kafka’s ending; in fact, the short last chapter of The Trial delivers more sheer force than the film’s plethora of visual dynamics, which are remarkable and might have delighted and astonished Kafka himself, at least up to the explosion in the quarry and the grandiosely symphonic music that arrives with the closing credits.

In The Trial’s long penultimate paragraph, after being marched in lock-step through the streets to a quarry by two top-hatted executioners, K. is at their mercy, sprawled in an awkward position, his coat, jacket and vest removed, his bare back pressed against a boulder; he’s watching as the executioners hand the double-edged butcher’s knife back and forth after testing the cutting edge in the moonlight. Although he’s expected to seize the knife and plunge it into his own breast, instead he gazes around him to the top story of a house adjoining the quarry. After a flicker “as of a light going on,” a window suddenly opens and a human figure leans “abruptly far forward,” stretching both arms “still farther. Who was it? A friend? A good man? Someone who sympathized? Someone who wanted to help? Was it one person only? Or was it mankind? Was help at hand? Were there arguments in his favor that had been overlooked? Of course there must be. Logic is doubtless unshakeable, but it cannot withstand a man who wants to go on living. Where was the judge whom he had never seen? Where was the High Court to which he had never penetrated? He raised his hands and spread out all his fingers.”

At this moment the hands of “one of the partners were already at K.’s throat, while the other thrust the knife deep into his heart and turned it there twice. With failing eyes K. could still see the two of them immediately before him, cheek leaning against cheek, watching the final act. ‘Like a dog!’ he said: it was as if the shame of it must outlive him.”

In Real Time

I was finishing The Trial as the jury was reaching a verdict in the Trump trial. Even before I started the novel, I’d been avoiding television commentaries on the long-awaited real-life outcome since my wife, who had been keeping up with the coverage, was convinced that it would end with a hung jury. Until the last two chapters, Kafka’s novel had seemed to be going nowhere but into the narrative equivalent of the same thing. It was as if even the author himself had lost interest and walked away when Chapter 8 (“The Dismissal of the Lawyer”) fell off the edge of a paper cliff to land on the sentence: This chapter was never completed.

Stunned by the last two chapters of this “unfinished” novel, titled “The Cathedral” and “The End,” I walked into the next room and saw the words GUILTY ON ALL 34 COUNTS on the television screen.