The Trial by Franz Kafka

The Trial is one of three novels that Kafka left unfinished when he died of tuberculosis in 1924. The Castle and America are the others. Kafka left instructions to his friend Max Brod to destroy the manuscripts along with any other of his writings that hadn’t already been published. Brod explains in a postscript to the novel that he ignored Kafka’s instructions because Kafka had told Brod before he died of his intent to ask Brod to burn the unpublished writing and Brod had told Kafka that he wouldn’t do it. If Kafka had really wanted the work destroyed he could have given the task to someone else, but he didn’t. A Kafka reader also has to wrestle with the knowledge that Kafka didn’t want you to read it. Oh well.

What Kafka left, in the case of The Trial, was a collection of chapters, some complete plus several fragments. Brod ordered the chapters, including an unfinished chapter, and assigned the other fragments to an appendix. The beginning and ending chapters are clear. The order of the others can be guessed at from details like the progression of the seasons. But the chapters are rather independent from each other and could perhaps be ordered differently. In any case, the action doesn’t so much progress as just wander from one episode to another. There’s not so much a rising level of tension as a rising level of impatience. Kafka could have added more episodes or removed a few and it wouldn’t appreciably change the novel.

In fact the entire plot can be summarized in a few sentences:

On the morning of his thirtieth birthday, Joseph K. is arrested. After a brief visit with an Inspector at the boarding house where he lives, K. is released to go to work. He is summoned the following week for an interrogation, but after that, the court never contacts him again. He spends the next year living with mounting anxiety while attempting to clear his name of a charge that is never revealed to him. On the eve of his thirty-first birthday he submits to be executed (or murdered) under the rules of the law he has never understood.

Though the novel is called, The Trial (in English), there is no scene in a courtroom. K. never comes before a judge. The German title , “Der Process”, is perhaps more accurate, though it feels less threatening.

K. worries. The mysterious case against him consumes him. He has trouble concentrating on his work at the bank where he is a Senior Clerk. He admits to some friends that he is accused, others seem already to know. Most are sympathetic. Some offer to help. K.’s Uncle connects him with a lawyer. But none of the helpers actually help. The case never advances. The lawyer never submits the initial plea. None of K.’s own efforts to gain information or resolution succeed.

The novel veers between dread, paranoia and absurdity. At times the situation feels dangerous. The people who confront him in his apartment on the first day are real and are witnessed by others. Other people confirm the existence of the mysterious court and he visits offices where legal work seems to be taking place. But other sections of the novel feel as though the entire drama is taking place in K.’s troubled mind. And still other scenes inhabit an Alice-in-Wonderland space of surreal fantasy. In one episode K. visits an artist who paints portraits of court personnel and is bedeviled by girls that eavesdrop at the door. Bizarrely, the artist’s attic studio includes a door behind the artist’s bed that opens directly into the law offices. At his bank one day K. hears noises coming from a storage room and when he investigates, he discovers the two men who had come initially to his room to arrest him now being whipped by a third man as punishment for a complaint K. made about their treatment of him – a complaint K. can’t recall ever having made. The next day the men are still in the storage room, the scene unchanged, and K. slams the door on them, frightened.

It’s a novel of impotent futility against the powerful forces that besiege us. But what powerful force is Kafka meaning? Some have discerned a premonition of the totalitarian governments of Hitler or Stalin, operating with cruel and impassive bureaucracy. (Kafka wrote the novel in 1914 and 1915. It was published in 1925). Perhaps the powerful force is an inscrutable and unsatisfiable parent figure, like Kafka’s own father. Perhaps the powerful force is death, each of us confronted eventually by the awareness that merely being alive and mortal we are condemned to die.

As a minister, I couldn’t help reading an analogy to God as the powerful force whose mysterious ways and final judgment are beyond our understanding. Kafka’s descriptions of the intricate rituals and multi-level functionaries of the court reflect the church hierarchy. K. employs the help of a lawyer, who acts as a priest, communicating on K.’s behalf with the higher realms of the court. But the lawyer/priest is himself aware that he can only communicate so high and that others (saints? angels?) must take the message to the highest judge. Later, K. decides to dismiss the lawyer and handle his own case, which might be interpreted as an attempt to confront God directly as in the Protestant or Jewish traditions. In the chapter where K. considers dismissing his lawyer he meets a tradesman named Bloch, also an accused person like himself with the same lawyer. Bloch introduces specifically religious language. He says, to the lawyer, “being weighed together with their sins.” (p. 239) and “studied as closely as my poor wits allow every precept of duty, piety, and tradition.” (p. 240). Earlier in the chapter (Chapter 8) Bloch describes reading a pleading the lawyer had prepared for his case, sounding like a lay person at Mass, “Crammed with Latin in the first place, which I don’t understand” (p. 231). Later, the lawyer sympathizes with Bloch’s difficulty, saying, “these scriptures are difficult enough. I don’t believe he really understands them. They’re meant only to give him an inkling how hard the struggle is that I have to carry on in his defense.” (p. 243)

To continue the God and church analogy, the penultimate chapter takes place in a cathedral and introduces a literal clergy person, a priest who also reveals himself to be the prison chaplain for the court. The priest counsels K. and comforts him. And then he recites a parable found, “In the writings which preface the Law” (p. 267). Of course, “the law” is another name for the Torah. After his recitation he says of the parable, “I have told you the story in the very words of the scriptures.” (p. 269). Law and Scripture are thus brought explicitly together. Then the priest provides commentary on the parable just as would a minister or Rabbi.

But novels aren’t really meant to be solved; they’re meant to be experienced. In the end the mystery remains mysterious, as it must. K.s quest for understanding is futile. His mistake is letting the impossibility of answers fill him with anxiety rather than accepting the inevitability of not knowing and going on about his life. Nothing K. could do, or others could do for him, would prevent the death sentence that awaits us all. But meanwhile, we can spend our lives in fretting and waste our lives in fruitless striving with silly persons, or we can fill our days with the pleasures that surround us.