"The Trial" by Franz Kafka

“Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.” (C 1) Thus starts K's trial and Kafka's The Trial. It is written in colourless prose, as if taken from a legal manual, and in long paragraphs (disregarding the convention that in a conversation each individual speech is accorded a separate paragraph). It frequently deals in generalities as if it is discussing academic theories of justice, it is mostly abstract, although the setting is concrete and everyday. There are elements of unreality: it feels like an absurdly detailed dream. We are never told what K has been accused of (he himself does not know) and so all discussion of the case has to be in generalities. Nothing really happens (until the shocking ending). The whole feeling is one of alienation like a modernist work of art of a Brecht drama.  It must be exceptionally hard to write this sort of stuff for page after [page and to keep going without repeating yourself or running out of ideas.

I found it surprisingly easy to read. 

So what is it about? My naive feeling, before reviewing any of the critical literature, is that it is an extended allegory about religion. The judge is God who presides at the last judgement and before whom K must stand, not for a crime that can be articulated, but for all the things that he has done wrong in his life. This is why the courts are held in attic rooms. This is also why one needs an Advocate (a priest) although it is known that a priest cannot argue before a Judge but only plead, by virtue of knowing one of the lesser judges. This is why there is never any acquittal in this court system: no one is ever completely innocent; the best that can be hoped for is ostensible acquittal or postponement.

Alternatively, it is an allegory about disease. Kafka died from TB. One could see such a disease as arresting one arbitrarily one morning, although not imprisoning one but allowing one to go about their business, but identifiably as one who is diseased. That is why there is not acquittal, only remission. The Advocates in this case are doctors who cannot cure diseases but only try to ease the symptoms; this is why it is clear that there are advocates and there are quacks and why K. decides that in the end the Advicate he has is getting nowhere.

It is, of course, a classic work of literature. But is it any good?

It is difficult to select quotes in a work that seems to try deliberately to write as boringly as possible, in a work where the whole must be so much greater than the sum of the parts. But here are some:

• “You may object that it is not a trial at all; you are quite right, for it is only a trial if I recognize it as such.” (C 2)
• “It may happen that one sees no point in an interview, and that is the case here.” (C 4)
• “K. wished to exaggerate nothing, he knew that Fraülein Bürstner was an ordinary little typist who could not resist him for long.” (C 4)
• “His uncle was always in a hurry, for he was harassed by the disastrous idea that whenever he came to town for the day he must get through all the programme he had drawn up for himself, besides missing not a single chance of a conversation or a piece of business or an entertainment.” (C 6)
• “She was so close to him she gave out a bitter exciting odour as of pepper” (C 6)
• “One could draw up genuinely effective and convincing pleas only later on, when the separate charges and the evidence on which they were based emerged more definitely or could be guessed at from the interrogations.” (C 7)
• “It seemed to K. as though two giants of enormous size were bargaining above his head for himself.” (C 7)
• “If you have the right eye for these things, you can see that accused men are often attractive.” (C 8) This might refer to the belief that people with TB, because they were pale (?), were physically beautiful.
• “People under suspicion are better moving than at rest, since at rest they may be sitting in the balance without knowing it, being weighed together with their sins.” (C 8)
• “The Advocate’s methods ... amounted to this: that the client finally forgot the whole world and lived only in hope of toiling along this false path until the end of his case should come in sight. The client ceased to be a client and became the Advocate’s dog.” (C 8)
• “You know quite well that in these matters opinions differ so much that the confusion is impenetrable. This judge, for instance, assumes that the proceedings begin at one point, and I assume that they begin at another point.” (C 8) This sounds like the start of a debate on abortion: when does life itself begin? or, indeed, death? Would such arguments have been current in Kafka's time?
• “The scriptures are unalterable and the comments often enough merely express the commentator’s bewilderment.” (C 9)
• “‘Like a dog!’ he said: it was as if he meant the shame of it to outlive him.” (C 10)

July 2019; 250 pages

In an 'In Our Time' programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 27th November 2014 Steve Connor, Grace 2 Professor of English at the University of Cambridge, stated that Kafka's world is one of "extraordinary strangeness that can burst into everyday life but rendered with an oddly insistent levelness and muted lucidity” and that although The Trial focuses on “The Law ... as a system of deferral, a system of indirectness, it stands for all systems that don’t seem to have a centre or a purpose or a point.” He points out that nearly all of the chapters start "One day ..." and that
“we really don’t know how all of these episodes join up”; the final chapter, which was written very early in the writing process, “feels very staged and forced" and is "too conclusive” although the final words suggest there is no end.

In an 'In Our Time' programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 27th November 2014, Elizabeth Boa, Professor Emerita of German at the University of Nottingham, stated that “The characters in the Trial are not psychological studies, they have no depth”; she suggests that the characters “come to life ... through the places they are associated with." These places are on “the margins of life ... the places you forget about”, says Ritchie Robertson, Taylor Professor of the German Language and Literature at the University of Oxford on the same programme. He goes on to suggest that The Trial is about “how the victim of authority is complicit with authority ... colludes with his own oppression” and points out that Josef K never actually asks what he is charged with.