Sexual Anxiety in Kafka’s Novels
In Kafka’s first novel Amerika, Karl Rossmann has already committed his first sexual act, thus the trip to the United States:
As Karl Rossmann, a poor boy of sixteen who had been packed off to America by his parents because a servant girl had seduced him and got herself a child by him� (Amerika, 3)
Pietro Citati writes of Rossmann’s character as, “the entire treasure of love, of affection, of impulses for the good, of naÃ?¯ve ideals, tender convictions and trust that ever cross men’s spirits is to be found gathered in the quiet lake of his heartâÂ?¦ He has one illusion: that the world is rational, that everything can be explained.” (Citati, 78-9) However, Rossmann’s raison d’Ã?ªtre in this picaresque novel is patience. For all his mishaps and accidental positionings – with the stoker, with Delamarche and Robinson, at the Hotel Occidental – he displays no greater virtue than that of a patience. He has been shunned from an old world, Prague which is embarrassed and ashamed of him, and punted into the new world of the United States to forge an identity without the scar and disease of his former sin committed. But Rossmann’s never fully develops. (“There are no solutions to Kafka’s works,” writes D.S. Savage, “For Kafka’s basic attitudes, abstractly derived, are of such a nature that they do not permit a direct answer.” [Savage, 357]). In New York, Rossmann is merely an agent for vision of the new world, an agent, for the most part, of comedy. Indeed, with the novel’s slapstick Punch-and-Judyisms (Rossmann’s encounter with the corpulent Brunelda; Rossmann’s conversation with the flamboyant Mack; Robinson’s “injuries” which ruin Rossmann’s job at the Hotel Occidental) America remains a frustrating enigma for hard-nosed Kafka critics who too often rely on the misapplications of the term “Kafkaesque” (the origins, arguably, first grossly overused and destructive in the documentary “The Trials of Franz Kafka” with Kurt Vonnegut narrating an interpretation of Kafka’s works as foreshadowing soothsayers for World War II). While it’s true that the case of Rossmann is similar to Joseph K.’s and Land-Surveyor K.’s, a bottomless pit of success gone spoilt and inconceivable darkness, as observed by R.O.C. Winkler:
On the liner we find that the same highly organized, incomprehensible hierarchy of officials that appears in the later novels, and it serves the same function of objectifying the individual’s sense of human society, both locally and generally, as a complex organization the nature of whose bonds he can scarcely comprehend. (Winkler, 208-9)
However, unlike either K., Rossmann’s pit is underpinned by bathos. And we can see this in the isolated sexual episode where the servant girl seduces and dismantles the witless Karl Rossmann:
And once she called him “Karl” and, while he was still dumbfounded at this unusual familiarity, led him into her room, sighing and grimacing, and locked the door. Then she flung her arms around his neck, almost choking him, and while urging him to take off her clothes, she really took off his and laid him on her bed, as if she would never give him up to anyone and would tend and cherish him to the end of time. “Oh Karl, my Karl!” she cried; it was as if her eyes were devouring him, while his eyes saw nothing at all and he felt uncomfortable in all the warm bedclothes which she seem to have piled up for him alone. Then she lay down by him and wanted some secret from him, but he could tell her none, and she showed angerâÂ?¦ shook him, listened to his heart, offered her breast that he might listen to hers in turn, but could not bring him to do it, pressed her naked belly against his body, felt with her hand between his legs, so disgustingly that his head and neck started up from the pillows, then thrust her body several times against him – it was as if she were a part of himself, and for that reason, perhaps, he was seized with a terrible feeling of yearning. And with the tears running down his cheeks he reached his own bed at last, after many entreaties from her to come again. That was all that had happenedâÂ?¦” (Amerika, 29-30)
Rossmann has had his innocence stolen, his youth molested, the germs of his manhood raped. And yet, the passage, so damaging to Rossmann in terms of his future and his unrefined interior-self ends with an ironic twist, a comic shrugging. “That was all that had happened.” It’s almost as if, in this recount, which acts as a response to his Uncle Jacob’s exaggerated “great song of it” (Amerika, 30), Rossmann must confirm the facts of the episode. Rossmann, through a rushed maturity and a shock of the new in the United States, must align facts and order to keep his universe secure. In New York, Rossmann unwittingly must learn not only a survival of environment, but a re-learning process with women, as displayed in his episodes with the bully wrestler Clara who pummels him to the floor but whom he comes to trust following her in the darkness of the corridor, with Brunelda whose obesity and stench envelopes the apartment with a kind of dangerous pansexuality that Rossmann is able to overcome, and finally with the Hotel Occidental’s doe-like Therese who sobs during his dismissal and attempts to incorporate her small resources to his benefit. Rossmann, a broken child (and consequent father) in Prague, becomes, unwittingly, something close to a man.
One formal feature that should not go unmentioned: Kafka’s prose. There is a lack of authorial corruption in the paragraph, a fluid objective movement from her desire for a secret, to her thrusting, and finally to his tears. It’s an amazing display of control, clarity, purity; the tone is as clean as a testimonial. While its ironic presentation may not achieve its full affect in this novel, Kafka exploits the objective technique, seemingly derived with clinical appreciation of law and science, with great success in the sex scenes in both The Trial and The Castle – without calling attention to itself, without an overtone of self-referential application.
In The Trial, Joseph K. represents a type of Rossmann who has grown out of his patience and timidity, and into something of a promiscuous adult whose stubborn flirtations (with FrÃ?¤ulein BÃ?¼rstner, with the court usher’s wife, and with the court attorney’s mistress Leni) worsen his chances for a favorable verdict. Wilhelm Emrich writes: “They represent three possible attitudes of woman as she relates to the court: (1) standing outside the court, (2) living in conflict with it, and (3) succumbing completely to its power.” (Emrich, 36) Though his interactions with the women never pursue further than kisses or touches they are nonetheless damagingly intimate. Each represents as a progression of his case, from ignorance of the law to explicit injury and guilt. Echoing the seduction paragraph in Amerika, that all the clothes on the servant girl’s bed seemed to have been piled there for him alone, in The Trial Kafka stretches this line further into an interesting leitmotif, exemplified in the “Before the Law” parable, or the “Cathedral” chapter of the novel, which finds the doorkeeper stating to the dying man who has spent his lifetime attempting admittance through the gate: “‘No one but you could gain admittance through this door, since this door was intended for you. I am now going to shut it.'” (The Trial, 269); if all laws are meant for Joseph K. and Joseph K. alone, then certainly all entries of seduction and all implications of sexual codes are meant for him as well. This is one of the strongest leitmotifs in the novel, and strangely, one of the most ignored.
Joseph K., after having been arrested, is suddenly seized by an unwitting impulse towards FrÃ?¤ulein BÃ?¼rstner (whose surname is derived from the German bÃ?¼rsten which translates into “brushing,” a euphemism for coitus). “He felt no special desire to see her, he could not even remember exactly how she looked, but he wanted to talk to her nowâÂ?¦” (The Trial, 30). Before enacting the impulse to see her, he mentions to the landlady about Elsa, his girlfriend – whom the audience never sees, who represents a kind of reversed “Mrs. Columbo” (tellingly, in an unfinished chapter, Joseph K. cannot remember “whether he had not absentmindedly given the coachman the address of the Court, so he called out Elsa’s address loudly.” [The Trial, 291]; the physical absence of Elsa is indicative of the entanglement between his newfound guilt and the coming faithlessness). In FrÃ?¤ulein BÃ?¼rstner’s room he insists on rearranging the furniture, and when she discovers that her photographs have been mixed up, he has an inward tantrum of jealousy: “K. nodded and silently cursed the clerk KaminerâÂ?¦” (The Trial, 32). He continues to talk with her and trust her because she, as mentioned earlier, is outside of the courts, and greatly regrets her ignorance. Suddenly, after reenacting his interrogation for her, there is a knock at the door. They are both afraid, nervous, the excitement of which seems to color Joseph K.’s libido, abandoning all thoughts of Elsa.
“I’m just coming,” K. said, rushed out, seized her, and kissed her first on the lips, then all over the face, like some thirsty animal lapping greedily at a spring of long-sought fresh water. Finally her kissed her on the neck, right on the throat, and kept his lips there for a long time. (The Trial, 38)
Afterwards, FrÃ?¤ulein BÃ?¼rstner refuses to see him and sends her friend to intercept his messages. She essentially sends him to counsel and to rehabilitate his own actions, on his own time, with his own mind; but his rational thought seems now to be distant and muddled in arrogance and righteous indignation. “As long as Joseph K. flees from himself, there exists no bridge between him and someone with whom he could be on intimate terms.” (Emrich, 36). From here on, Joseph K.’s encounters with women veer away from the clarity of innocence and truth, and into the dark, dusty, dingy interconnected surroundings of the court. As Arnold Heidsieck writes in The Intellectual Contexts of Kafka’s Fiction, “Lewd, promiscuous women are connected with and seem to exert an influence on the court system.” (Heidsieck, 151). He plummets further, to the usher’s wife, whose daily system of conflict (cheating on her husband with the student whom she vehemently dislikes) with the court justifies her existence, as soon it will with Joseph K:
And her offer of help had sounded sincere and was probably not worthlessâÂ?¦ Then some night the Examining Magistrate, after long and arduous labor on his lying reports about K., might come to the woman’s bed and find it empty. Empty because she had gone off with K., because the woman now standing in the window, that supple, voluptuous warm body under the coarse heavy, dark dress, belonged to K. and to K. alone. (The Trial, 70-1)
As his case grows more inhuman and more impenetrable, he gravitates towards Leni, the attorney’s mistress, the novel’s most impenetrable and severe woman. She is drawn to both representations of the court: The guilty and the Law. She urges him to confess to the court, but also asks to see the picture of Elsa – Joseph K.’s last evidence of innocence. He claims Elsa to be his sweetheart, yet as Leni describes her from the photograph as “tightly laced” and “rough and clumsy” (The Trial, 136), he admits, “I’ve never even looked at this photograph as fully as you have.” (The Trial, 137). Curiously, the photograph disappears altogether, neither Joseph K. nor Leni acknowledge it again; this cannot be a simple authorial oversight for a writer as clinical and precise with movements and body placements: The absence of the photograph is the ultimate dismissal of Elsa, a regrettable decision in the stink of his own guilt. Joseph K. is aroused when he hears of Leni’s physical defect.
She held up her right hand and stretched out the two middle fingers, between which the connecting web of skin reached almost to the top joint, short as the fingers wereâÂ?¦ “What a freak of nature!”âÂ?¦ Leni looked on with a kind of pride while K. in astonishment kept pulling the two fingers apart and then putting them side by side again, until at last he kissed them lightly and let them go. “Oh!” she cried at once. “You have kissed me!” She hastily scrambled up until she was kneeling openmouthed on his kneesâÂ?¦ She clasped his head to her, bent over him, and bit and kissed him on the neck, biting into the very hairs of his head. (The Trial, 137-8)
In The Call of the Daimon, Aldo Carotenuto writes of The Trial’s female players:
These women evoke an instinctive, feral, animalesque dimension. They are swamp creatures, as the strange webbed hand of Leni indicates. And yet the power of their fascination, which is contained in a mysterious promise of total comprehension, makes something like divinities of them. (Carotenuto, 57)
Inasmuch as the law is a divinity only for Joseph K., then so are the women. They are meant only for him. If not, where is Elsa? If not, why are his only infidelities with women implicit in his case? If not, why is the image of FrÃ?¤ulein BÃ?¼rstner evoked by the novel’s end, as Joseph K. is led off guilty?
“They suffered him now to lead the way, and he followed the direction taken by the girl ahead of him, not that he wanted to overtake her or to keep her in sight as long as possible, but only that he might not forget the lesson she had brought to his mind.” (The Trial, 282)
But Joseph K. has seemingly learned no lesson, or possibly a lesson too late: A recovery of the self, by the self. The venomous kiss exactly on her throat, the first taste of flesh after his arrest, predicates the hands of the executioners “at K.’s throat, while the other thrust the knife deep into his heart and turned it there twice.” (The Trial, 286)
In Kafka’s final novel, The Castle, the tone of promiscuous arrogance exhibited by Joseph K., is replaced with a more mature – but no less foreboding and damaging – version of sexual energy: This protagonist becomes engaged to the woman with whom worsens his effort of successful order. Land-Surveyor K. wanders into town (as opposed to Joseph K. who had been wandered upon by the Law) with an assignment to work for the castle; he similarly wanders into Frieda, mistress of Klamm – the highest of all officials K. sees. Much like Karl Rossmann’s servant girl, her eyes captivate K.: “A gaze of exceptional superiority.” (The Castle, 36). Unlike Rossmann, K. is taken with her presence and remarks upon every detail. “Her hands were indeed small and delicate, but they could also be called weak and expressionless.” (The Castle, 37); she flirts with him as barmaid, K. sees that her “her blouseâÂ?¦ was a thin low-cut cream-colored garment, hanging like a foreign object from her poor body.” (The Castle, 37). But like Rossmann’s servant girl, Frieda possess a hostile sexual vitality. She brandishes a whip when the patrons become loud, tells K. to look into a peephole in order to better view Klamm, but soon fills the hole with a phallic wooden stick when he should see no more, and lastly, she orders K. to hide behind the beer-soaked bar counter, and proceeds to step on his chest with her foot with zealous authority when she is questioned by the landlord.
“Come, it’s stifling down here,” they embraced each other, her small body was burning in K.’s hands; they rolled a few paces in an unconscious state from which K. repeatedly but vainly tried to rescue himself, bumped dully against Klamm’s door, and then lay in the small puddles of beer and other rubbish with which the floor was covered. Hours passed there, hours breathing together with a single heartbeat, hours in which K. constantly felt he was lost or had wandered farther into foreign lands than any human being before him, so foreign that even the air hadn’t a single component of the air in his homeland and where one would inevitable suffocate from the foreignness but where the meaningless enticements were such that one had no alternative but to go on and get even more lost. (The Castle, 41)
Their engagement seems mutually satisfying for opposite ends (he, to get closer to Klamm and the castle, she to get away); but the terms by which they set the engagement come in the form of a desperately co-dependent contract: ‘”What have you done?” he said to himself. “We are lost, the two of us lost.” “No,” said Frieda, “only I am lost, but I have won you.”‘ (The Castle, 42). And yet, with the assistants and his new fiancÃ?©e in tow as they leave the bar, K. is troubled.
Outside in the snow K. breathed somewhat more easily, this time the joy of being outside made it easier to bear the difficulties along the way; if K. had been on his own, he could have made even better progress. (The Castle, 43)
The burdens of post-coital responsibility come to bear on K. in a result more explicit and pedestrian than the cosmic punishments against Joseph K., and far more adult than the post-pubescent, episodic lessons of Karl Rossmann. Their next night in the K.’s hotel an awkwardness divides them. They do not belong together. It has been argued by Walter Sokel that K. may be the Kafka’s ultimate imposter – he has no documents for his job, his assistants and apparatus never arrive, he wanders blindly into the town. “Its theme is K’s attempt to make everyoneâÂ?¦ believe that justice is the problem and that the injustice inflicted upon him is his motive in his struggle with the castle.” (Sokel, 33); this certainly comes to bear during his next love scene with Frieda which finds them uncoordinated and embarrassed; imposters of eros, yes, and fatigued with the other in an uncultivated ennui:
They lay there, but without abandoning themselves as fully as that time at night. She sought something and he sought something, in a fury, grimacing, they sought with their heads boring into each other’s breasts; their embraces and arched bodies, far from making them forget, reminded them of their duty to keep searching, like dogs desperately pawing at the earth they pawed at each other’s bodies, and then, helpless and disappointed, in an effort to catch one last bit of happiness, their tongues occasionally ran all over each other’s faces. Only weariness made them lies still and be grateful to each other. Then the maids came up. (The Castle, 45-6)
Frieda’s eyes perhaps realized his postures: She leaves him and returns to the authentic Klamm. Her coworker Pepi, asks K., ‘”Did you ever notice that look of hers?”‘ (The Castle, 309). Once Frieda abandons K., he is finally the original boorish outsider, alone now, inaccessible even to the interiors of the self. Unlike the opportunities, albeit meager opportunities, Karl Rossmann will eventually succeed, possibly through the Oklahoma Theatre as a lift-boy; and unlike Joseph K.’s last vision where he struggles with atonement for his unquestioning impulses and infidelities through FrÃ?¤ulein BÃ?¼rstner, Land-Surveyor K’s bloody-minded self-agency fixes nothing; the glitch – the glitch with a castle official’s mistress – justifies his existence as a lonely wanderer.
