'The Trial' by Franz Kafka

I have yet to come with a book as good as this one. It describes the power and alienation, nightmarish world of injustice or rather justice in injustice! A protagonist Joseph.K is accused of an unknown crime, he doesn’t recall committing. He finds himself in a bizarre situation, where, he has to defend himself, somehow stands for himself, as we know he scarcely does. He has to find answer to the following question: How? It seems to be no escape from this grotesque and bizarre world, no escape from ruthless and oppressive bureaucracy. Imagine You wake up one morning and got arrested for doing anything wrong, You await a trial, a farce, an exhibition of an empty talk. How would You act out? The punishments in an obscure prison are obituary. To understand Kafka’s work we have to go back in time and focus on his early works and themes, he is one of my favorite writers, after Joseph Conrad, so this is what I intend to do … make his works and background closer. He began to write in 1908, as a young man, he published the following collections of stories, stories devoted to himself, highly personalized and these are ‘The Trial’, ‘The Castle’, ‘America’, the second mentioned was the last he finished. Frankly, none of them are truly finished, I mean, all of them are incomplete. They move progressively towards darker, more obsessive vision of a single individual, struggling to find some sensible way of proceeding in a tingle web of uncertainty and obstruction. The world of Kafka’s world is very extraordinary, more strange every single day. It destroys and overwhelms You piece by piece, day by day, till the final destruction. In this dream-like plot ‘The Trial’ focuses on the law, it’s a law that is a kind of a system of deferral, a system of indirectness which stands for all the systems, ultimately. It doesn’t have a center, purpose and point. It stands for modern experience of bureaucracy and offices.  Kafka is trying to make sense of this other, strange, and in-comprehensive world. This is the world of no one, we do not know who is in charge of it, what the purposes are…? He was a lawyer, his work helped him in his writings. His life and historical settings influenced and irreversibly shaped him. Kafka’s world as was mentioned is a strange, inhabitable one. The empire he lived under – the Austria-Hungary started declining, the end of the Great War marked new border lines on the map of Europe, it consisted of the following nations – Slavs (45%), Germans (23%), Magyars (19%),  Jews (1.2%). Bear in mind Kafka was from Bohemia, as a Bohemian from Prague he as a Jew had to determine whether he is going to identified himself through German or Czech nationality. In 1918 Czechoslovakia is born. This mosaic of nationalities wanted to be recognized and acknowledged. In Prague the Jewish population was in majority more than 85%, whereas, the German in minority. They had a vote but only as Czechs or Germans, they didn’t have a right to vote as Jews, they were not recognized as Jews. It is important how Kafka and his family fitted in this city at that peculiar time. Let’s start from his father – Herman Kafka was a middle-class man, the butcher, he developed the business which sold fancy things, Kafka’s mother had a different background, she belonged to the prosperous family, of better origins, her father was a prosperous brewer, her grandfather, on the other hand, was a well-know Rabbi.  It can be said it was a social gap between them. He had three sisters, all of them died in the German concentration camps, the youngest one in Auschwitz.  

Kafka’s first texts were very short and incoherent. The first book was published in the form of sketches. 'The Trial' was published in 1914. In a short novel ‘The Judgment’ Kafka got what he wanted to express, a single, coherent narrative, with a dramatic build up and the climax. It had a form of a diary. In ‘The Judgment’ we meet a female with the initials F.B. – the story tells Kafka’s current situation, portrays a men, with well-established life, interrupted by something unexpected, evil. The interruption has got the form of his father, who asks him a puzzling questions, the dialogues appears, out of the sudden, the father jumps on the bed and sentencing the son to death by drowning, the son is under his father spell, he goes out and does what the father wanted, he drowns himself. It indicated three main motives of this short novel which are: authority, punishment and guilt.

‘The Trial’ has got no psychological studies, no depth – we have to focus on the characters who are conveyed through their appearance, isolation, isolated details. K himself is conveyed through his responses to the sequence of characters. The characters came to life through very much different places they are associated with. The men who arrest K at the beginning turned out, to be associated with the bank K worked before. It is very humiliating for him, this humiliation is almost unbearable. These two: Franz and Willem turns up later in a horrific scene of punishment in the bank. The theatrical punishment is carried out, Rudi Block is about to be whipped, he is about to take his trousers down and severely punished. The executioner is a blue-eyed, fresh-fists figure. We may imagine the horror, and, we see a German stereotype.

Women in the book are like a plague, You cannot get rid of them, their tentacles are everywhere. They are: Fräulein Bürstner; Fräulein Montag’ Frau Grubach; Woman in the Court; Leni. All along reading we go from the men’s bedroom to the women’s bedroom. A young Asian woman represents a generation of so-called – new women, modern, free ones, very influential, tempting, treacherous and very seductive. We encounter a woman who is someone else’s wife … she goes through a sequence of affairs and eventually we see her sexually abused; at the back of the attic – in the slums, the sequence of abuse, the sequence of examining by magistrate is absolutely surreal, this peculiar exchange of women among men of different hierarchy or status.

The last chapter of ‘The Trial’ entitled ‘The Execution' is a bit abrupt because he wrote and sold his chapters one by one, immediately. There is a part, however, we have to put a significance on … there is The Priest and His parabola. It is an interior reflection of the whole novel, we call it ‘Before the Law’ – it is told by someone who identifies himself as a chaplain, he seeks an admission to the gates of the law, when he finds it, the guardian of the gates cannot let him in; he can wait if he wishes, so he does wait, all his entire life, and when his life is about to decline, he asks the guardian of the gates:

-         ‘Please, tell me why all this time nobody else sought the admission to the law?’ The guardian replies:

-         ‘Because this gate was made only for You and now I am going to close it’.

The debate may emerge if the man was deliberately deceived or not. The reader must judge it himself. The most plausible is the motive of victimization and deception, injustice and deliberate hurt by the system of power, the law. It is an overwhelming power of politics. The loss of meaning of fair judgment is plausible; omnipresent detentions, destruction and oppression. Sadly, K never asks about the charges, it indicates self-deception, K was deceived.

Bibliography:

1.    Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature(University of Minnesota Press, 1986)

2.    William Dodd, Kafka’s Prozess (University of Glasgow, 1991)

3.    William Dodd (ed.), Kafka (Longman, 1995)

4.    Franz Kafka, John Williams (trans.) The Essential Kafka (Wordsworth Classics, 2014), which includes The Trial

5.    Franz Kafka, Mike Mitchel (trans.), The Trial (Oxford World Classics, 2009)

6.    Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice, (Penguin, 1978), especially the essay ‘Kafka’s Other Trial’ by Elias Canetti

7.    Eric Marson, Kafka’s ‘Trial’: The Case against Josef K (University of Queensland Press, 1975)

8.    Julian Preece (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Kafka (Cambridge University Press, 2002)