Kafka - The Trial

This time I will look at the clowning element ‘control’ by using the literature’s classical “The trial”.

Imagine yourself in a clown workshop. You are being sent away and will be called back when the others are ready. The other course participants prepare a route for you to take. It consists of some chairs, some of them sitting on it, some of them sitting on the floor and some objects. They decide together the exact path you have to walk, and what you have to do along the way. Like, you have first to walk towards the window, then turn, then walk toward that chair, bow, unbind the shoelace of the person sitting there, etc. Your cue to know if you’re are doing it right or not will be whether the other participants (representing your future audience) will be applauding or not. So you come back. You take a first step, participants applaud, you are happy, you take a second step, it’s wrong so they stop applauding, you try something different, etc. The wrong way to do the exercise (wrong in the sense that it doesn’t learn you to become a better clown) is be too focused on the end goal and suffer your way through it without showing that honestly. Because the audience feels it! You have to learn to enjoy it all the way. Even when you suffer, you can feel a bit of pleasure at the same time, in sharing you’re suffering from lack of control over the situation with the others. They can certainly rely to it when you give them a chance to. When you feel confused, share it with the other participants; that will probably be a beautiful moment. Way more important than doing it all right. You can’t do everything right for your audience right away. You have to stay sensitive to their reactions all the time; you’re not allowed to push them to like what you’re doing. The audience is in control, not you. This feeling of not being in control is the main link I draw today towards Joseph K.

Joseph K. has to find the rules of the game, he doesn’t know them, and the others seem to know. This is a clown like situation to be in. He is also a real anti-hero, the august-like underdog we can all identify with. He’s ‘incorrect’ and naïve. He plays a constant game of giving up and going on. Giving up: “all is hopeless”, going on: “but I have such a beautiful apple lying there, certainly everything is going to be alright”. This is a very clown kind of logic. The clown’s glass is neither half full (optimistic) nor half empty (pessimistic). The clown’s a silly humorist. For a clown the glass is totally empty, maybe even broken, the one moment, and shortly after it is overfull and he is so happy that he dances and spills the water leaving the glass empty again, and so on. When Joseph K.’s the August one could certainly say that the bureaucracy is playing the role of the white face here, making life hard for him. (like Bugs Bunny is doing with Daffy Duck).  A lot of cartoons, a lot of theatre pieces, a lot of books, use the principle of the White Face (high status) and the August (low status), it’s just an all over the place principle. However, in a classical clown scene the status is turned upside down at the end. It always seemed that only the August depended on the White Face, until he resists playing along, fights for dignity and refuses. Then we see how the White Face needs the August as well and that they’re equal forces, because he can’t play the boss if there’s no one to be bossy with. At the end of the book Joseph K. is being killed. Although this happens, I’d still say that his status turns around there because he says: “When I had to be killed, why like this, why like a dog!”  So he finally seems to feel some sense of dignity after all.

Nowadays, in clown workshops, usually everybody wants to play the August. Nobody seems to dare to play the bad gay, or when they do they don’t dare to enjoy it. But an August left without a White Face is not funny, for he needs the person who believes he knows everything about what’s the right way to do something, to look like the fool who doesn’t understand anything about it. The audience can tell that none of them really understands anything of course. What is that, real understanding? Maybe we should be careful to condemn too much our controlling urge, for that as well can be extremely funny, and very human as well.  The more you condemn it, the more you take it too seriously, so try to laugh about it.