Concerning Kafka and Wilde

The other day I  reread The Trial by Franz Kafka and then read, for the first time, De Profundis by Oscar Wilde. The two works couldn't be more different. The Trial is a kind of metaphysical psychodrama, the tale of a man arrested for a crime that if he committed he has forgotten, and is concerned with his struggles against the massive, infinitely tiered judicial bureaucracy which has him in its vice-like grip, is inexorable in its presumption of his guilt, but which nevertheless has the capacity to find him innocent if it wants  – although it  seemingly never exercises this power with respect to any of the many defendants in its clutches. At the end of the book, when the protagonist, Joseph K, is at last executed, he still doesn't know what  he has supposedly done wrong.  De Profundis is the long letter Oscar Wilde wrote to his erstwhile lover 'Bosie' while imprisoned in Reading Gaol, to which he had be sent for 'gross indecency' – that is, for sexual acts with a man not amounting to sodomy. The version I read (the abridged version) describes his suffering in prison, his hope that having been purified in the crucible of jail he will be able to embark on a 'vita nova' both artistically and emotionally, and includes a long discussion of Jesus in which Wilde approaches the life and character of Christ as though Christ were an aesthetic figure, someone 'standing in symbolic relation to his culture and age' - a status he also confers upon himself. The version of De Profundis I read is the bowdlerized version, not the complete version that was first published in the 'sixties. This of course affects my understanding of Wilde. Although I am no Wilde expert, I hope this does not disqualify me from providing an unusual reading of Wilde's life, one that may run counter to the accepted narrative. In this post I intend to talk about The Trial and then about Wilde's court cases - although the two topics may seem quite different, perhaps the reader may be able to intuit subterranean connections between the two.

The Trial has been one my favorite books since I was a teenager, perhaps because it theme of unspecified guilt resonated with me. Kafka sets up the situation of the book in the first sentence: "Somebody must have made a false accusation against Joseph K. for he was arrested one morning without having done anything wrong." The court proceedings initiated against K. are peculiar – not only because K. is never informed of the charges laid against him but because he is never imprisoned. Rather he is allowed to continue living at his lodging house and to carry on performing his duties as a senior administrator in a large bank. As the book goes on, the reader realizes that the court proceedings are truly interminable, that the definitive court case will never occur. K is present when a fellow defendant, one who has been struggling against the system for five years, is told by his advocate that "his case has not begun yet, that the bell which signals the beginning of a case has not even been rung yet". The sentence seems eternally postponed. Given this, the reader may wonder if K.'s best course of action should be simply to ignore the fact that he has been accused and arrested, pretend that the trial is not occurring and carry on with his life as before. Unfortunately, K. is incapable of doing this. The unknown accusation hangs over his head like some obscure prophecy. As the book progresses, one observes a deterioration in both K.'s self-confidence and his ability to function at work and at home. Thoughts of his case occupy his mind more and more until he can think of nothing else.  For K., all the world is a prison. When K. encounters the prison chaplain in the city cathedral towards the end of the book, the latter tells K. "You misunderstand the facts […] Judgement does not come suddenly; the proceedings gradually merge into the judgement." It is also the prison chaplain who delivers perhaps the most beautiful line in the book. "Why should I want anything of you? The court asks nothing of you. It receives you when you come and it releases you when you go."

The word Kafka-esque has entered the English language as term that connotes "having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre or illogical quality" (Miriam-Webster). The word is associated with bureaucracies and totalitarian states.  Something that often goes unremarked about The Trial though, something usually unassociated with Kafka, is the amount of sex he hints at in the novel; it goes unremarked perhaps because the sex is always implied rather than explicit, always occurs off-camera. Early on, for instance, K. talks with his fellow lodger, Fraulein Burstner, in her room to apologize for some disorder created there as the result of his arrest that morning. He senses that his presence in her room could be viewed as improper, so K. tries to reassure Burstner in the most bizarre way possible.

1. "… I'll agree to any of your suggestions on how to explain our presence here together, as long as its tolerably plausible, and I guarantee to persuade Frau Grubach to believe our explanation, not only ostensibly but actually and really to believe it. You don't have to consider me at all. If you want it spread around that I have assaulted you, that's what Grau Grubach will be told, and she'll believe it without losing her faith in me, she's so very attached to me.' Fraulein Burstner looked down at the floor in silence, a little dejected. 'Why shouldn't Frau Grubach believe I've assaulted you?' K. added. He was looking at her hair with its parting, her reddish hair bunched out at the bottom and firmly held..."

At the end of the scene, at the door of her room, K. succumbs to his desire for Fruanlein Burstner. K. "dashed forward, seized her , and kissed her on the mouth and then all over her face like a thirsty animal who scours with his tongue the surface of a spring he has found at last. Finally her kissed her on the neck, on her throat, and lingered there with his lips." Obviously the thought of sexually assaulting Burstner has been present in his mind during his earlier conversation with her but, although he has surrendered to his appetite, K. feels no shame about it. This is significant - K. has no sense that his advances towards women might be viewed as morally wrong.  The relationship with Fraulein Burstner ends there and she does not reappear at any point later in novel, but K. does embark on relationships with other women, including a clandestine affair with his advocate's house-maid Leni (a relationship initiated by the woman this time). K.'s attitude towards sex is bifurcated, perhaps even hypocritical. He contemns the court, saying that it is "composed almost exclusively of lechers" but never considers how his own actions towards women might seem to others. Yet if he is guilty of anything, this is it. His crime is his sexual desire for women. 

It is at this point that I would like to turn to Wilde because if, as The Trial implies, K. is guilty of the crime of sexually desiring women, Wilde was tried and convicted for  allegedly having sex with men. I should note as I alway try to do, my sources. My understanding pf Wilde is based on the bowdlerized version of De Profundis that I read recently and the little I have gleaned about his life from his Wikipedia page. Of course, one should always take everything in Wikipedia with a grain of salt. It seems incontrovertible though that, in 1891, Wilde met a young man, Lord Alfred Douglas, and formed a close friendship with him. Alfred's father, the Marquess of Queensberry (the man who invented the modern rules of boxing and, it seems, something of a brute and a thug) disapproved of the relationship; at one time threatening Wilde in a restaurant saying "I do not say that you are it, but you look it, and pose at it, which is just as bad. And if I catch you and my son again in any public restaurant I will thrash you." The next year, 1895, the Marques left a card at Wilde's club, saying "For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite" [sic]. Because this amounted to a charge of sodomy, Wilde made the fatal decision to sue the Marquess for Libel and Queensberry was arrested.

The way libel cases work is that the defendant has to prove his allegation true and that there is "public benefit" in making the accusation publicly. Queensberry hired an army of lawyers and private detectives to dig up dirt on Wilde, a team that produced evidence that Wilde had regularly fraternized with the London homosexual demi-monde, a society that included male prostitutes, transvestites and blackmailers. Many witnesses were coerced into testifying against Wilde: the situation was such that Wilde was forced to say, meekly, in court "I am the prosecutor in this case." A courtroom exchange between Wilde and the defense lawyer Carson is illuminating. Carson asked Wilde if he had ever kissed a particular servant boy. Wilde replied "Oh, dear no. He was a particularly plain boy – unfortunately ugly – I pitied him for it." Carson repeatedly pressed Wilde as to why the boy's looks were relevant. Wilde lost his composure for the first time, saying "You sting me and insult me and try to unnerve me; and at times one says things flippantly when one ought to speak more seriously."

One has to wonder, was Wilde perhaps not telling the truth? I think Wilde responded to the allegation by making a joke of it because the allegation itself was a joke. And anyway… why should the ability to recognize that someone of the same sex is good-looking or not constitute evidence of homosexuality? Objectively, many men are capable of noticing that Ryan Gosling, to take a random example, is a handsome man. If the capacity to observe that someone of the same sex is or is not good-looking, half the people in the world would have to identify themselves as homosexual. I have repeatedly throughout my life been complimented for my looks by men and, although it still makes me uncomfortable, it seems wrongheaded to assume that all these men are all in the closet.

As for the libel trial, the court found in favor of Queensberry, that Wilde was in truth 'posing as a sodomite' and later in 1895, Wilde was himself arrested, for 'gross indecency', and a second trial was held, this time with Wilde as the defendant. During the trial, Wilde was asked about "the love that dare not speak its name" - a phrase Wilde had coined in an essay about Shakespeare, and I think his reply worth discussing. I quote Wilde's answer in full.

1. ""The love that dare not speak its name" in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy. and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art, like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as "the love that dare not speak its name" and on that account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an older and a younger man, when the older man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That this should be so, the world does not understand. The world mocks at it, and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it."

In my essay on Star Wars, I said in passing that I believe that love and sex are two different things. The love that Wilde is describing in his testimony is a love completely uncompromised by sexual desire, an intellectual or spiritual love, agape or philia rather than eros. In the contemporary era, sexuality is often construed as being defined by one's choice of love- this is wrong. Sexuality is about sex, about physical desire, not love. And this is what Wilde, constrained by the taboos of his age and perhaps by the universal lack of the necessary vocabulary to describe such subjects, couldn't say. Parents love their children but don't want to fuck them, and soldiers in a war can love each other without wanting to screw each other. Wilde may have loved Douglas (among other men in his life) but it does not necessarily follow that he wanted to perform indecent acts with them.

In other words, I am arguing that Wilde may not actually have been gay, that he was innocent of the charge laid against him. I know that seems bizarre but the possibility is worth considering. Perhaps Wilde's crime was simply that he was an aesthete or dandy who was careless when picking friends. (When he was younger, Wilde had said "I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china"). It seems possible that Wilde was the victim of mass hysteria and a witch hunt - such moments of collective insanity happen even today.  In the parts of De Profundis that I read, Wilde pertinaciously maintains that the bulk of the accusations made against him were untrue. And if, in the parts of De Profundis that I haven't read, he does offer some qualified confession, I wonder if this confession might have been false. Apparently the two sections are written in two quite different styles.

When found guilty, Wilde was sentenced to two years in prison, the maximum allowable for this type of crime. Despite his hopes for a new life, he died penniless and broken in exile in France in 1900. Wilde suffered dreadfully in prison. These days Wilde is considered a hero of the Gay movement, as though he were an early campaigner for Gay rights, but this simply wasn't the case. He was (I think I should mention this) married with two children at the time his life fell apart. And he never came out as Gay – an impossibility at the time, at any rate, not only for legal reasons, but because the Victorians literally lacked the required concept. 

Of course, I could be wrong about  all this. Sometimes I am something controversial to get people thinking.  Whatever the facts of the matter, when one looks at Wilde's trials from a modern perspective, one feels a great injustice was performed against him. I leave the last words to Kafka.

1. 'But I am not guilty,' K. said. 'It's a mistake. How can a human being ever be guilty? We are all human beings here after all, each the same as each other.' 'That is right," said the priest, 'but everyone who is guilty always talks like that.'

Luke Skywalker, Prince of Denmark

In the last post, as seemed appropriate for the Christmas season, I opined that The Force Awakens was an enormous turkey. Although it may make me sound like a grinch, I’ll say it again; The Force Awakens is a giant turkey. The original trilogy was mythic, even archetypal; the new sequel is simply a sequence of action scenes glued together by allusions to the original movies, references that feel gratuitous because they are based on coincidences and lack grounding in any kind of believable universe. The Force Awakens is a film about nostalgia, a film in search of an earlier era in filmmaking. Even the villain is motivated by nostalgia: he wants to return the days of the Empire and emulate his maternal grandfather Darth Vader. He is no new villain, simply a more enfeebled shadow of the original archenemy. By making a film that not only panders to nostalgia but is narratively-driven by nostalgia, the filmmakers have created a truly self-reflexive film – rather than going beyond the originals to make something new, they have made a film about the search for the original films, for the period of lost innocence represented by the first trilogy. The narrative they have created embodies this retreat. The Force Awakens, in its exploitation of the power of nostalgia, is an exercise in cowardice rather than true creativity.

The original films were something different. Lucas created something original. At the same time, he drew extensively from mythic archetypes to refashion old myths for a new era. The idea of the Force is indebted to Plotinus’s notion of the World Soul and Jung’s theory of the Collective Unconsciousness. More than this, the original films are very Freudian. The light sabres, for instance, are surely phallic symbols. You don’t believe me? In the Star Wars parody Space Balls by Mel Brooks (in which the Force is re-termed the Schwartz) at the point when Lone Star squares off against the evil Dark Helmet and they kindle their light sabres, Dark Helmet tells Lone Star, “I see your Schwartz is bigger than mine”. This is definitely a dick joke. In A New Hope, the Death Star is like a giant evil female breast and the Tie Fighters seeking to destroy it are like sperm vying to fertilize an ovum. Sometimes destruction is a form of creation. By trying to tap into a universal unconscious symbolism, Lucas sought to create a work that would resonate at many psychological levels simultaneously, something Abrams utterly failed to do in The Force Awakens.

In this post I am going to interpret the original Star Wars movies with respect to a very important kind of ‘myth’, the Oedipal complex. This has surely been done before but, if so, I haven’t read about it. I hope in interpreting the films this way to show the depth of Lucas’s (probably instinctive) understanding of human nature.

The Oedipal complex is the fundamental myth or developmental narrative described or invented by Sigmund Freud early in the 20^th Century. According to Freud, some time during psychosexual development, male children enter into a rivalrous relationship with their fathers for possession of their mothers, a conflict that creates in boys a fear known as castration anxiety. The successful resolution of the Oedipal complex involves an identification by the boy with his father and an internalisation of the moral laws that the Father represents. This complex is central to Freudian psychoanalysis. I feel it important to point out by the way that, according to Freud, the Oedipal phase occurs between the ages of 3 and 6 – not, as one might expect, at puberty. Despite their youth, Freud was inflexible in contending that the feeling young children have towards their mothers is a sexual desire, a view that perhaps explains why the adjective Freudian is virtually a dirty word today.

Personally, I disagree with Freud, as I disagree with him about many other things, when he proposes that the Oedipal complex is based on sexual desire. A mistake I believe Freud often makes is the conflating of love with sex. I believe love and sex are two separate things. Nevertheless, something like the Oedipal complex surely underlies the three original Star Wars films – Luke is at war with his father and the trilogy arguably resonates with the young men who first saw it because it spoke to their own ambivalent feelings toward their dads.

The Oedipal drama does not manifest itself straight away. In the first Star Wars, A New Hope, Luke is simply a farm-boy on a desert planet, plucked from obscurity to become an accidental hero in the war between good and evil. In this first film, nothing suggests that Darth Vader has any special connection to Luke and the pair do not battle directly. It is the second film that begins to suggest that Luke has a unique destiny, that he is no accidental hero. He is strong in the Force and his fate is to become a Jedi like his father before him. He trains under Yoda on the planet Dagobah and while there experiences something like a dream in which he fights Vader and decapitates him. Vader’s helmet visor disappears to reveal Luke’s face. This moment is a foreshadowing not only of the end of this film but of the end of The Return of the Jedi as well, both occasions when Luke and his father battle each other.

How is a boy supposed to resolve his Oedipal feelings towards his father when his father is evil and it is impossible to identify with him? In the second and third films of the trilogy, the Oedipal complex descends around Luke like fate. At the end of The Empire Strikes Back, Vader and Luke fight and Vader removes both Luke’s light-sabre and hand. This is a castration anxiety made brutally palpable. Vader reveals that he is Luke’s father (a surprise to both Luke and audience) and says, “Join me and together we can rule the galaxy as father and son”. Luke screams out, “I will never join you!” and chooses instead to fall into the abyss. Luke’s reaction is understandable. He has been put into an impossible situation. Either he fights his father and risks castration or death, or he chooses to identity with his father and goes over to the Dark Side.

Luke is in a double bind and, in this respect, he is like Hamlet in Shakespeare’s eponymous play. In Shakespeare’s story, Hamlet is solemnly enjoined by the ghost of father to take bloody revenge on the usurper Claudius. Unfortunately, Claudius is Hamlet’s uncle and now husband to Hamlet’s mother Gertrude. To obey his spectral father’s command, Hamlet must symbolically kill a type of father figure. He is caught in the vice of fate. No wonder he dithers and procrastinates, contemplating suicide rather than face the consequences of patricide. To kill Claudius is anyway simply another form of self-murder. Luke is very much like Hamlet here, except that Luke is far more active, not indecisive as Hamlet is. Both nevertheless are trapped by similar dilemmas.

Alert readers of my argument may believe they have spotted a flaw in it. If the original Star Wars trilogy is a dramatization of the Oedipal complex, where is Luke’s mother in all this? Who are Vader and Luke fighting over? True, Luke has no mother in these films – but he has a sister, Leia. In The Return of the Jedi, Luke learns from Yoda and the ghost of Obiwan Kinobe that Leia is his sister and later, on the third moon of Endor, reveals this to her. During much of the three films, Luke has been in love with Leia – and now this passion has been revealed to be incestuous. In the sense that it is an incestuous love, it stands as a metonym for a son’s incestuous love for his mother; in this way as well, the Oedipal complex descends around Luke like fate. It is perhaps not surprising that Luke’s most violent onslaught on his father at the end of the film is provoked by Vader sensing that Luke has a sister and suggesting that he convert her to the Dark Side instead.

Luke, Leia and Han, for much of the time, form a love-triangle. This conflict is only fully resolved at the end of the last movie when Leia reassures Han about her feelings towards him, telling him that Luke is (only) her brother, and she and Han kiss. The possibility of incestuous relations has been finally foreclosed; the natural order of legitimate, non-incestuous relationships finally established. Familial love has been successfully discriminated from erotic love. The love triangle between the three characters relates to the Oedipal complex in complex ways: at one level, from Luke’s point of view, Han stands for his father, Leia for his mother; at another level, from Leia’s point of view, Luke is her father and Han her beau, a father substitute. It is a sign that the Oedipal complex has been successful resolved that normal, natural loving relationships can be recognized.

But the resolution of the Oedipal complex does not occur on the third moon of Endor but in the depths of the Death Star. For the second time Vader and Luke fight but this time the fight is different – Luke now has a good chance of winning. The ghost of Obiwan had told Luke that he must fight Vader again (as the ghost of Hamlet senior told Hamlet that he must take revenge on Claudius) and now that ultimate battle is taking place. The evil Emperor encourages the fight, enjoining Luke to give into his hate. Luke is once again caught in a double bind – this time, it is a choice between destroying his father and going over to the Dark Side, or dying and allowing the Light Side to lose. In a moment of weakness, he attacks Vader ferociously, cutting off Vader’s hand. Luke’s own artificial hand turns into Vader’s glove. Luke changes his mind, turning off the light sabre. He chooses to let himself die rather than usurp his father’s position as the Emperor’s right-hand man. Perhaps a person may escape the Oedipal complex by symbolically or actually killing his father but this, as the film suggests, is far from being the best way out. Death is preferable. The Emperor attempts to dispatch Luke with psionic lightning – but this is still better for Luke than going over to the Dark Side. By killing his father, Luke would have done so (and I leave it to the reader to imagine what the Dark Side represents in terms of psychosexual development).

The best resolution of the Oedipal complex is for the son to identify with the father (and in this way diminish the rivalry between the two). Luke is unable to identify with his father because Luke is one of the Good Guys and Vader is the leader of the forces of Evil. Morality runs against the grain of familial relationships in the Star Wars universe. Either Luke must buckle – or Vader must. In the end, it is the father who turns apostate, deciding to save his son and destroy the Emperor instead. Vader picks up Emperor Palpatine and throws him down the well. The son redeems the father and Vader comes over to the Light Side. Although many critics at the time it was released disparaged the end of the film in which Vader removes his helmet, I think it is fitting, at this point, for Luke and Annakin to see each other face to face. The father’s decision to identify with the son has freed Luke of his Oedipal Complex.

I don’t know if the notion that the Oedipal complex is a universal aspect of the human condition has merit or not, but the supposition that it does certainly helps elucidate the Star Wars films. Suppose for a moment that the theory is true. No son can completely identify with the father. There are always points of difference. Every boy’s father is Darth Vader to some extent and, to this same extent, the original Star Wars continues to resonate. (I myself am a socialist and have a neo-conservative for a father; this is why the films appeal to me.) It is because father-son conflict is a constant that gives Star Wars its enduring appeal. An appeal I hope remains despite the efforts of Abrams and co to trash the franchise.