The Trial by Franz Kafka

(Please keep in mind that this is an unfinished novel published posthumously and seemingly against the wishes of the author. Though his asking his friend to burn all his unfinished works may have been a joke because he probably asked the one friend least likely to do it. But that's a debate I don't know enough about to have.)

I keep coming back to Kafka’s impenetrableness, in my mind, with a reflection that I spent the whole novel thinking, "What's this all about?", and, “No person would react that way!” I’m not thinking of any single way that a character reacts—except possibly for the Lawyer’s maid, though even she seems a caricature of people I know—but rather in two actions that characters complete, in a row. These actions do not line up to. For instance, K is meeting with the manufacturer at the bank, and suddenly his actions, mood, character changes so drastically that there seems no thread tying him and earlier him together. This, of course, could be due to a point Kafka is trying to make. But I couldn’t tell because I found too few clues in here as to what Kafka is on about. So, what clues did I find?

• Religion. Kafka’s religion is unstated, but he deals with religious themes and things that ape religion in ways that assure religion is never far from the page. The closing sacrificial scene, the priest’s scene, the penitent waiting rooms, the kissing of the lawyer’s hand—these things are so reminiscent of religious experiences, religious acts, that religion is ever on the tongue of this novel. And the clearest analogy to religion in the novel is the court system.


• Court. The main theme on-page is either Joe K’s psychology, or the court system, which adheres to no known court system—or so say the experts. Is Kafka taking the piss out of the court system?
  —Yes, probably. Yet at the same time, he is taking the piss out of justice, and laws, only as they are implemented by humans. Kafka's objections, except for one example in the conversation with the priest, seem to be about laws and court systems that reflect little of the Socratic sense of justice and personal rights. These impenetrable, uncommunicative, and unrealistic systems are what give the book its dystopian mood. This vast, nebulous, unknowable, and oppressive court system is unrealistic, but may ape aspects of legal systems that are tenable.
  —But maybe the courts are a metaphor for something. And if so, the merchant at the lawyer’s office seems to give a clue that it may be a metaphor for sociability, some egalitarianistic pun on courtly behavior. Society requires a sort of game, or performance, for one to not be considered crazy. So does this court system.

• Theater. And that performative aspect is huge here. By the time I got to the final scene in the quarry with the sacrificial altar stone, I thought we would at last get a scene with no audience. But somebody throws a window open to watch from a distance. Every scene has an audience, even if that audience is sometimes just K. And K consistently refers to theater terminology to try and interpret his perceptions. The theater of life, of living in a city, like in the fragment of him on the divan, provides an energetic undercurrent for the novel.


• Sex. The lawyer’s maid has a fine figure and is attracted to all of the defendants; Elsa is K’s unseen regular squeeze; Fräulein Bürstner and K seem to share something more than a kiss, at least some underlying sexual tension exists there; the woman whose husband is the court usher tells K he can do anything he wants to her. Yet K gets more good advice, instead of just promises of advice, from the painter, who is surrounded by girls.

• Business. K’s personal business is always getting in the way of his professional business as CFO of a bank. And on this aspect of the court, K’s arrest provides both opportunity and impediment. Opportunity comes in the form of contacts with the prosecutor and the painter, while he worries that his arrest and trial are taking too much time away from his professional life. He works late often, and is seen to be in the office early, and is praised for his organizational skills at work—this is clearly an important aspect of K’s being.

So, it seems that Kafka is accusing government of inherent evil, or a lack of conscientiousness. For example, in the court itself, the idea that the accused could even know the accusation against them is ridiculous. But not just the government, the whole of the society because both are indistinguishable in areas. Yet, it seems that Kafka is content as a writer to offer pithy phrases like, “They're talking about things of which they don't have the slightest understanding, anyway. It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves.” He writes these wonderful phrases, and some truly memorable scenes, instead of sharpening his overall point or indictment. It seems that he might be full of himself: too sure that readers will pick up on what he’s after to actually put in enough clues. I feel that K’s psychology and impenetrable actions detract from the overall pointedness of the novel by confusing the issues being discussed and even how they are being discussed. How much of this is due to its unfinished nature, I don't know.

But I also appreciate the open-endedness of it all as much as I am annoyed by it. I don’t want to be spoon fed. Sure, maybe a little more given to the reader would have been profitable. I get the sense that the reader’s perception of events differs from the narrator’s, which differs from K’s. And this confusion reigns in the reading of this novel. But this confusion is probably the point of the novel! The court is after all affecting K in the same way. And what a mood and scene set by Kafka, where the reader is right there with K, feeling frustrated and annoyed, yet reading on because of the wonderful writing and scenes. Kafka creates and sustains such a poignant mood that, for all his impenetrableness, I found the book easy to finish and well worth reading. Sure, with something like the Metamorphosis, or In the Penal Colony, I come away with a much better idea of Kafka’s point, so I'm more likely to recommend those. But for fans of Kafka, this is a can't miss novel.