m_w@inkwell.socialA disturbing book where nothing much happens
Franz Kafka’s book The Trial has wide influence and spawned the term Kafkaesque, often meaning impenetrable administration. The following discusses themes from the plot. In early twentieth century Prague, the central character of the book Joseph K. is thrown into an absurd parall
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Franz Kafka’s book The Trial has wide influence and spawned the term Kafkaesque, often meaning impenetrable administration. The following discusses themes from the plot.
In early twentieth century Prague, the central character of the book Joseph K. is thrown into an absurd parallel reality.
The world of the book resembles Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland in that there are strange characters that do bizarre things. The basic story is that despite being in a country where there are laws and norms, K.’s mundane life as a bank employee is upended by a sudden legal accusation.
The problem is that nobody can or is willing to tell him what exactly he is being accused of. He learns that the system is deliberately confusing; the location of the court is hard to find, none of the court officials know what they are doing and his defence lawyer is only allowed in the court because he has personal connections with the court officials. At several points in the story some of the strange characters he meets encourage K. to write a confession to anything he can think of which may or may not include the thing he is accused of and may or may not make any difference.
There are resonances with various other classic books. Like Joseph Heller’s characters in Catch-22, K. is caught in a pincer where he cannot do A because of B and cannot do B because of A. Like the prisoners of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, K. is passed around by judicial characters who have no interest in him other than as an administrative problem to solve. Eventually he is marched away to execution, never having even had a pretence of a proper trial nor any explanation of what he had done.
In the postscripts we are told, intriguingly, that the novel was never completed, that there is uncertainty about the correct order of the chapters and that Kafka left instructions that it should be burned after his death. So in a strange way the novel has become part of the Western literary canon quite against the expressed will of the author.
For me, I think, the disturbing questions the novel raises are about the extent to which there are alternative realities in addition to the one we perceive. It seems like a twisted conspiracy to talk of a legal system as opaque as the one Kafka writes about within a society that everyone imagines have certain rights until then suddenly discover that they have none. And yet like some piece of abstract, absurdist artwork there seems to be fragments of something that speaks to our condition.
Is the novel asking whether our desires for freedom and democracy are tempered by the lived reality when one gets on the wrong end of it? That “democratic norms” not only can be dashed when they are inconvenient to powerful people, they may even barely exist at all. Whilst looking pretty on the surface, maybe it is all a rotten maggoty mass below.