A Litmus Test

The other day, I read my post "Concerning Kafka and Wilde" at an Open Mike in town, one I go to every month. I went overtime but it still seemed to go down quite well. I thought I would relate an anecdote about it. Afterwards the event organizer came outside where I was having a cigarette and asked me, "So, are you arguing that Wilde was a non-practicing homosexual?" My mate, who was there with me and has a sharp wit, said instantly, "There's no such thing as a non-practicing homosexual. If they stop practicing they lose the knack." I should say that the organizer was a female and my mate was a male, because these things matter.

Jokes like this are a kind of Litmus Test. Straight people, at least smart straight people, find them funny; gay people, most of them, find them borderline offensive I think (and probably not without reason). Yet humor is the most powerful way of fighting prejudice and breaking down barriers between people. Humor is one of the best weapons one can wield in the war against stupidity and ignorance and hate. That's why it is unsurprising that almost comedians are left-wing.

I remember years ago, when writing about Mark Twain, I felt compelled to devise a whole theory of humor. I may write about it in a future post.

A Messed Up Story

I have accidentally deleted this post. Perhaps the universe doesn't want me to tell my story. Hopefully, I will be able to find a copy somewhere and repost it. Or see if it is possible to write it again at some later time. I hope a few people out there read what I wrote before it vanished.

The gist of it was this... Bad record keeping is endemic within the Mental Health System. It seems like a small thing but it can be a very significant thing indeed. If someone such as me who is committed to the search for truth is the victim of lies it can drive him (or her) mad. I know it sounds like a familiar complaint - people diagnosed schizophrenic often say they have been 'misdiagnosed' or mistreated and people assume that they are unreliable. But it does frequently occur. As a result no only people be made 'unwell' but it can also lead to such things as hospitalization on false grounds or in forcing people to take medication who have actually recovered.

I know this complaint may make me sound mad. Because I have somehow deleted the previous post, I can only make vague claims without being able to back them up. Sometimes I feel I am fighting a war not only against the Mental Health System but against the entire world. When I was genuinely very ill in 2009 and the beginning of 2010, I was imaginary friends with Jon Stewart. I used to have whole conversations with him in my my head. I remember his final episode last year. His last speech to camera was about "bullshit". He was talking about written records: was talking about reports that were full of falsehoods, about how people talk bullshit all the time. About how people lie all the time. I can't remember precisely his final harangue to camera but it is worth searching for on the net.

I find the fact that I have deleted my last post profoundly depressing. It makes me feel that the truth about my situation and others who have been or are in the situation I was in and am still in is something people don't want to know, or aren't allowed to know - as though fate or God is against us. I don't know if I will be able to rewrite what I wrote the day before yesterday. I don't know if I will ever be able to tell my own story. Life can be very cruel and the victims of crimes are often just footnotes in history.

Perhaps I will go back to writing about narrative theory. We'll see what happens.

Some More Thoughts about Kafka

In the previous post I discussed Kafka's work The Trial and contrasted it with the real trials of Oscar Wilde – an odd juxtaposition I concede but also I hope thought-provoking. I feel though that there is very much more to say about Kafka and so, in today's post, I want to discuss The Trial  in greater depth and from a different angle. The Trial is perhaps one of the most profound masterpieces of world literature; there is so much that can still be said about it; it is practically inexhaustible in the way a parable from the Gospels or the Kaballah is inexhaustible. I won't exhaust The Trial in this post but it may possible to draw a little fresh water from the well.

The fundamental question The Trial asks the reader is simply this: Is Joseph K. innocent or guilty? As a teenager, when I first read the novel, I never doubted for a moment that K. was innocent. Yes, he is executed at the end, but I felt this final consummation reflected more on the corruption or mendacity of the system than on K.'s moral character. It was the Court, I felt, that had committed the actual crime, a crime against K. The Trial is told from K's perspective after all and he is unwavering in his assertion of innocence (although there are some occasional hints of a guilty conscience at times – I'll talk about these later). Certainly, if K. has indeed committed a crime, he cannot himself remember it. And no one ever tells him what he is supposed to have done. So, by the end of the book, the reader is faced with a choice. Is K. truly innocent or is he genuinely guilty of a crime, a crime that he has somehow forgotten?

Recently I read an extended rumination by Walter Benjamin on Kafka. Benjamin approvingly quotes Willy Haas: "The object of the trial, indeed the real hero of this incredible book, is forgetting, whose main characteristic is the forgetting of itself…. Here it has actually become a mute figure in the shape of the accused man, a figure of the most striking intensity." It may perhaps be a distortion of these critics' intent to query this, but it feels to me that these critics are siding with the Court against K., are sanctioning the idea that accusations are always justified, that K.'s final fate must be deserved. The novel is kind of a Rorschach test; one's opinions of it reflect one's basic attitude toward humanity and human nature. Is the world just or unjust? If it is just, K.'s treatment is deserved; if he is innocent, though, the world is fundamentally unjust. Should we side with K. or against him? Prominent court cases as much as novels divide opinion in this way. Is Chris Cairns genuinely innocent? David Bain? OJ Simpson? Our judgments of others tend to rebound more on ourselves than on those we censure.

If K. has committed a crime that he has forgotten, few clues appear that can tell us was what it was. In the previous post, I argued that if K. is guilty of anything, it is his desire for women. There is a problem with this gloss however. The court officials are themselves at least as lecherous as K – an example being the wife of the court bailiff that K. meets a week after his initial hearing, a woman who is not only having an affair with a law student but is regularly carried off by him to engage in trysts with the examining magistrate. Incompetence, licentiousness and vanity are rife within the courts and perhaps the court officials emblematize the shadow side of K.s personality, the part he suppresses or subdues. Yet the question remains. Why should K. be singled out for prosecution when the court officials themselves are immune? The case against him seems arbitrary.

Yet there are indeed the faintest hints of a guilty conscience. Early on, K. is unable to find the chamber in which his preliminary hearing is to be held and reassures himself in the following way.

  In the end he went up the first stairs after all and turned over in his mind the remark made by the       warder Willem to the effect that the court is drawn to guilt – from which it must follow that the             investigation chamber must be on the staircase K. had chosen at random.

When rereading the novel recently, this passage leaped out at me. I had overlooked it as a teenager. Is it a Freudian slip? Could K. have momentarily admitted some kind of culpability for something, if only to himself? And if so, of what is he guilty? The strenuous lengths to which K. goes in trying to prove his innocence could be the convulsions of a self-tortured soul. Or it could be that an accusation of wrongdoing is socially and psychologically equivalent in its repercussions to having actually committed the crime itself.

Those readers who think K. has committed a crime and forgotten it perhaps feel that people only experience guilt if they genuinely have done something wrong and have something to hide. That there is no smoke without fire. This is not true. 'Neurotic guilt complex' can be described as the feeling that one has done something wrong in the immemorial past, something that can no longer be recalled. It is associated with childhood trauma and can be established in a child's psyche without any factual justification. Neurotic guilt complex segues into paranoia because it is impossible to draw a sharp line between the feeling that one has done something wrong and the feeling that others think one has done something wrong. I knew a girl once who, when somewhat psychotic, decided that people in the world were blaming her for the 2011 Christchurch earthquakes. Was she feeling misplaced guilt when she decided this, or paranoia? In 2007, I decided I was personally responsible for the All Blacks' loss against France in the Rugby World Cup because I hadn't watched it on TV -this I'm sure was neurotic guilt rather than paranoia because I never at the time considered what others might think.  When I was seven my parents divorced and I thought I was somehow to blame- all I can remember for sure about this time now was that my catchphrase then was "It's not fair!" Is there such a thing as authentic guilt? This is the territory The Trial explores, the space between private and public conceptions of sin.

Somewhat sporadically in this blog I have been endeavoring to present a new theory of literature, a theory that proposes that a work of fiction is a rhetorical argument in favor of a 'thesis' and an 'antithesis'. (I have talked about this in more depth in the Preamble and in Applying Predicate Calculus to Literature). Perhaps the thesis of The Trial is "No one in K.'s situation can be found innocent" and the antithesis is "Some people in K.'s situation can indeed be acquitted." The Trial exposes the limitations of my theory; it is impossible to sum up the novel in a pair of contradictory propositions. What do we mean by "K.'s situation"? And what do we mean by "guilt" and "innocence"? It is tempting to say that The Trial is at heart concerned with Original Sin (an odd suggestion because Kafka was Jewish, not Catholic) but that would be to ignore the issue of why some people in the world of The Trial are accused and others are not. Perhaps, in Kafka's world, everyone is guilty and so an accusation is by itself sufficient to prove guilt in the eyes of others. Or perhaps we can side with K. when he claims that everyone in the world is innocent because they are human- a claim that makes K. seem almost messianic, Christ-like. Perhaps, in The Trial, all humanity stands accused and it is for the reader to make the final judgement.

I think it likely that Kafka himself suffered from a 'neurotic guilt complex'. I don't know if he suffered trauma as a child but it is well established that he had an implacable and overbearing father. The essence of Kafka's genius is that he fashioned a powerful metaphysical statement from an abnormal perspective on the world. Alongside David Foster Wallace he is one of my favorite authors and he still resonates with me today.