[...] Kafka, after all, is a writer who doesn't waylay you. He invades subtly, slowly. I imagine that at the time I wanted and expected a more straightforward statement of existentialist alienation. Yet there was very little of that in Kafka. This was not a world of metaphysical grandstanding but a seedy, cramped burrow, whose ruling affect is not heroic alienation but creeping embarrassment. Physical force plays almost no role in Kafka's fictions - it is the ever-present possibility of social shaming that is the motive force of his winding non-plots.

Remember the pitiful scenes in The Trial when K, looking for the court in an office block, knocks in turn on each door, making the pathetic excuse that he is a 'house painter'? Kafka's genius consists in banalizing the absurdity of this: surprisingly, against all our expectations, it is indeed the case that K's hearing is taking place in one of the appartments in the building. Of course it is. And why is he late? The more absurd K thinks things are, the more embarrassed he becomes for failing to understand 'the ways' of the Court or of the Castle. The bureaucratic convolutions appear ridiculous and frustrating to him, but that is because he 'has not understood' yet. Witness the comedy of the opening scenes of The Castle, which are less an anticipation of totalitarianism than of call centres, in which K is told that the telephones 'function like musical instruments'. What kind of an idiot is he, if when he phones someone's desk, he expects them to answer? Is he so wet behind the ears?

It's not for nothing that Alan Bennett, the laureate of embarrassment, is an ardent admirer of Kafka. Both Bennett and Kafka understand that, no matter how absurd their rituals, pronunciations, clothes might appear to be, the ruling class are unembarrassable; that is not because there is a special code which only they understand - there is no code, precisely - but that whatever they do is alright, because it is THEM doing it. Conversely, if you are not of the 'in-crowd' nothing you can do could EVER be right; you are a priori guilty.