The Trial

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This article is about the novel by Kafka. For other uses, see The Trial (disambiguation).
The Trial
Author Franz Kafka
Original title Der Process [sic]
Translator see individual articles
Country Austria
Language German
Genre(s) Philosophical novel, Dystopian novel
Publisher Kurt Wolff Verlag, Munich
Publication date 1925
Media type Print (Hardback & Paperback)
ISBN NA

The Trial (German: Der Process) is a novel by Franz Kafka about a character named Josef K., who awakens one morning and, for reasons never revealed, is arrested and prosecuted for an unspecified crime.

According to Kafka's friend Max Brod, the author never finished the novel and wrote in his will that it was to be destroyed. After his death, Brod went against Kafka's wishes and edited The Trial into what he felt was a coherent novel and had it published in 1925.

The Trial was filmed by director Orson Welles, starring Anthony Perkins (as Josef K.) and Romy Schneider. A more recent remake featured Kyle MacLachlan in the star role. In 1999 it was adapted for comics by Italian artist Guido Crepax.

Contents

[edit] Characters

[edit] Others

Fräulein Bürstner - A boarder in the same house as Josef K. She lets him kiss her one night, but then rebuffs his advances. She makes a brief reappearance in the novel's final pages.

Frau Grubach - The proprietress of the lodging house in which K. lives. She holds K. in high esteem.

Uncle Karl - K.'s impetuous uncle from the country, formerly his guardian. Karl insists that K. hire Herr Huld, the lawyer.

Herr Huld, the Lawyer - K.'s pompous and pretentious advocate who provides precious little in the way of action and far too much in the way of anecdote.

Leni - Herr Huld's nurse, she has feelings for Josef K. and soon becomes his lover. She shows him her webbed hand, yet another reference to the motif of the hand throughout the book. Apparently, she finds accused men extremely attractive--the fact of their indictment makes them irresistible to her.

Vice-President - K.'s unctuous rival at the Bank, only too willing to catch K. in a compromising situation.

President - Manager of the Bank. A sickly figure, whose position the Vice-President is trying to assume. Gets on well with K..

Rudi Block, the Merchant - Block is another accused man and client of Huld. His case is five years old, and he is but a shadow of the prosperous man he once was. All his time, energy, and resources are now devoted to his case. Although he has hired hack lawyers on the side, referred to as shysters, he is completely and pathetically subservient to Huld.

Titorelli, the Painter - Titorelli inherited the position of Court Painter from his father. He knows a great deal about the comings and goings of the Court's lowest level. He offers to help K., and manages to unload a few identical landscape paintings on the accused man.

[edit] Interpretations

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[edit] Bureaucracy

The Trial is both a chilling and blackly amusing tale that maintains a constant, relentless atmosphere of disorientation and quirkiness, right up to the surreal ending. Superficially the subject matter is bureaucracy: an illustration of a truly twisted yet realistic brand of law and church. However, one of the strengths of the novel is in its description of the effects of these circumstances on the life and mind of Josef K. It presents the absurdity of "normal" human nature, of acting upon one manic thought after another and chasing along with surprise after surprise, yet without direction and without result.

[edit] Humanity

When analyzing The Trial, it is useful to note that the end of the novel, the death scene, was the first part written by Kafka. K. is never told what he is on trial for, and he maintains his innocence almost to the end. Upon declaring his innocence, he is immediately questioned "innocent of what?" Is it that Josef K. is on trial for his innocence? By confessing his guilt as a human being, perhaps Josef K. could have freed himself from the proceedings. Perhaps the trial against K. was set up because he was incapable of admitting his guilt, and, by extension, his humanity. This theme of not being human, of there not being anything to point to as the "human race", is a theme that Kafka explores throughout his works, one that keeps the book fresh, prompting a questioning of the arbitrary customs and beliefs of life which can appear, in a certain light, just as bizarre as the occurrences in K's life.

[edit] Marriage and social relations

Another interpretation is offered by Kafka's diary around the time he began to write the novel. In 1914, he entered into an engagement with Felice Bauer. In a letter to Felice, he compared their nuptial to a couple who, during the terror after the French Revolution, had been tied together upon the scaffold for execution. He visited Felice in Berlin a few times during that year. On the last occasion, that of the official engagement ceremony, he notes in his diary that it was like trial-and-judgment, in which others decided upon the course his life took while he himself was kept aside. A subsequent visit to Felice involved much disputation during which he was again sidelined. Eventually, it was decided that the engagement should be broken off. Kafka described his letter of farewell written on the eve of the first World War as his "speech from the gallows." He himself, it seems, found the prospect of marriage a threat to the sustenance he received from writing. His writing was mainly done at night, a time at which he would have been expected to sleep with his wife.

In this biographical interpretation it would seem that The Trial parallels Kafka's engagement, and his entering into serious social relations. Such a reading accounts for Josef K's willingness to partake in his own execution, since it mirrors the end of the engagement; that is, the end of Kafka as a "human", as a familial member of society and an ancestor. It also accounts for the bizarre, subdued sexual tension of "The Trial", with the scattered sexual interludes reflecting his private encounters with Felice on his visits to Berlin for the aforementioned family meetings. Such an interpretation accounts for the correspondence between the book and Kafka's life at the time, though the themes explored reach beyond this superficial similarity to Kafka's broader thoughts on society, family, and writing, which must have arisen at such a cross-roads in Kafka's life. The Koanic story related by the prison chaplain, of the man waiting for admittance by a stern doorman to the Court, is especially relevant to this.

K's execution is seemingly his triumph, in that he realised the constant deferment implicit in his desire for "admittance to the Law" and instead accepted his fate without withering like the old man waiting his whole life at the door of the Court in the chaplain's story. Kafka too at this time accepted the execution or closure upon himself as a "human", deciding he would not lead the life chosen for him but one in his own strange world.

[edit] Jewish identity

Another way to interpret The Trial is to consider what Jean-Paul Sartre has to say about it in his book Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate. As the title suggests, the book relates the way Jews receive a world marred with anti-Semitism. Jewish life in such a world, Sartre argues, is similar to the way K. experienced it, and the way Kafka may have experienced it as well. According to Sartre:

"This is perhaps one of the meanings of The Trial by the Jewish Kafka. Like the hero of that novel, the Jewish person is engaged in a long trial. He does not know his judges, scarcely even his lawyers; he does not know what he is charged with, yet he knows that he is considered guilty; judgment is continually put off -- for a week, two weeks -- he takes advantage of these delays to improve his position in a thousand ways, but every precaution taken at random pushes him a little deeper into guilt. His external situation may appear brilliant, but the interminable trial invisibly wastes him away, and it happens eventually ... that men seize him, carry him off on the pretense that he has lost his case, and murder him in some vague area of the suburbs." [88, Schocken Books].[citation needed]

[edit] Human existence

Joseph K.'s guilt is the guilt of his existence. He was living his life as an ordinary man with an ordinary job until one day, in a moment of reflection, he questioned his own existence. What he felt was guilt--ambiguous, since there was no apparent answer to that question. Being a very symbolic and personal writer, Kafka used the court to represent that power of mental reflection as a medium to announce human guilt, since one's existence is put into question by the power of self-reflection.

The fact that this guilt is not obviously criminal is illustrated by K's landlady, Ms.Grubach, who is shown as a person of a simple mind. She said that, to her, this guilt is something unusual--even metaphysical--not like a guilt of a robber or a criminal, something she neither wants nor needs to understand. Kafka used her to portray the everyday people who never question nor want to question the reasons for their existence. The peculiar character of that guilt is seen when the court tells Joseph K. that he can come and go as he pleases, that he remains technically free. In other words, human freedom manifests itself through the power of reflection and questioning everything. The problem that Kafka discovered was that certain questions, once asked, can not be unasked. Therefore, Joseph K. accepts his guilt, takes it for granted, and then sets about trying to defend his case, a case that is not even clarified for him. At the same time, he also attempts to forget about it by distracting himself with women--for which all members of the court lose their minds, as in reality (i.e. passion interrupts reflection, and reason disappears temporarily).

In the end, and after refusing all help from lawyers (which represent different doctrines and philosophies found in the world, used by people to justify their existence or at least relieve themselves of guilt by postponing the moment of facing the judgement as (Rudi) Block does by having six different lawyers working on his case), Joseph K. finally refuses the church and God as well and decides to face his sentence. For Kafka, this is the ultimate resignation. In the end, there is only one thing left for a resigned man to do: to die (to the worldly hope), like a dog. [1]

[edit] Style

[edit] Parable

(Taken directly from Novels for Students: The Trial.)

Kafka intentionally set out to write parables, not just novels, about the human condition. The Trial is a parable that includes the smaller parable of the Gatekeeper. There is clearly a relationship between the two but the exact meaning of either parable is left up to the individual reader. K. and the Priest discuss the many possible readings. Both the short parable and their discussion seem to indicate that the reader is much like the man at the gate; there is a meaning in the story for everyone just as there is one gate to the Law for each person.

[edit] Relations between The Trial and Crime and Punishment

In 1983 Guillermo Sánchez Trujillo, professor of UNAULA ("Universidad Autónoma Latinoamericana" of Medellín, Colombia) undertook a research project to investigate some of the possible sources used by Kafka in writing The Trial. He dedicated twenty years of his life to the investigation, and finally in 2002 published the final results in Crimen y castigo de Franz Kafka, anatomía de El proceso ("Crime and Punishment by Franz Kafka, anatomy of The Trial"), edited by UNAULA.

At the end of his investigation, Sánchez advanced the theory that Kafka had used Crime and Punishment and other works by Fyodor Dostoevsky, as palimpsest to write his works, including The Trial. By closely comparing Crime and Punishment with The Trial, Sanchez discovered that Kafka used the first three chapters of the second part of Crime and Punishment (in the order 3, 2, 1), to write and organize The Trial.

This idea, and the role of Crime and Punishment as a "template" for Kafka's novel, was first discussed in close textual detail in the study by W. J. Dodd (now Professor of Modern German Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK), "Kafka and Dostoyevsky: the shaping of influence", Macmillan, Houndmills 1992, chapter 6, pp. 108-154. ISBN 0-333-55865-0. Dodd specifically argues that in writing The Trial Kafka was impelled by a critical response to Dostoyevsky's metaphysics, and that a comparative reading shows Kafka's novel to be a sceptic's reworking of Dostoyevsky's religious universe, with significant features of a counterfactual.

Sánchez also put forward a new theory on the correct order of the chapters of the novel -- something which has never been clear because of the confusing way Kafka had of systematizing his work. Kafka bequeathed his works to his friend Max Brod. After Kafka died, Brod started to organize and edit Kafka's works to publish them, but with The Trial Brod couldn't decipher Kafka's system, so he organized the chapters in an intuitive and arbitrary way.

The new order found in the study re-establishes the logic of the plot and fits on it the chapters that were relegated to the appendix by Brod and the editors. But the study also argues that the work A Dream, published as an independent short story, was an essential chapter of the novel.

The investigation also confirmed the autobiographic contents that Kafka put in the novel, and the identity of the real persons and the historical events that inspired some of the characters and events of the novel.

A critical edition of the novel with the new order was published in 2005 by UNAULA, containing an introduction detailing the most important points of the investigation and its results and also, side notes explaining the creative process of the author and the use of Dostoevsky's work as a palimpsest.

The UNAULA edition arranges the chapters thus:

  1. The Arrest
  2. Conversation with Frau Grubach then Fräulein Bürstner
  3. B.’s Friend
  4. Initial Inquiry
  5. In the Empty Courtroom - The Student - The Offices
  6. The Flogger
  7. To Elsa
  8. Public Prosecutor
  9. The Uncle - Leni
  10. Lawyer- Manufacturer - Painter
  11. In The Cathedral
  12. Block, the Merchant - Dismissal of the Lawyer
  13. Struggle with the Vice President
  14. The Building
  15. A Dream
  16. Journey to His Mother
  17. The End

More info see: (Spanish) [1]

[edit] Film portrayals

In the 1962 Orson Welles movie adaptation of The Trial, Josef K. is played by Anthony Perkins. Kyle MacLachlan portrays him in the 1993 version.

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/trial/characters.html

[edit] References

[edit] External links