The Trial
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The Trial book cover |
This article is about the novel by Kafka. For other uses, see The Trial (disambiguation).The Trial (German
Der Prozeß) is a novel by
Franz Kafka about a character named
Joseph K.(Josef K.), who awakens one morning and, for reasons never revealed, is arrested and subjected to the rigours of the judicial process for an unspecified crime.
Like Kafka's other novels,
The Trial was left unfinished at his death, and was never intended to be published. Its manuscript was rescued by his friend
Max Brod. It was first published in
German in
1925 as
Der Prozeß.
The Trial has been filmed by the director
Orson Welles, with
Anthony Perkins (as Josef K.) and
Romy Schneider. A more recent
remake featured
Kyle MacLachlan in the same role. In
1999 it was adapted for comics by the
Italian artist
Guido Crepax.
The Arrest - Conversation with Frau Grubach then Fräulein Bürstner
On the morning of his thirtieth birthday, a junior bank manager, Josef K., who lives in lodgings, is unexpectedly arrested by two unidentified agents for an unspecified crime. The agents do not name the authority for which they are acting. He is not taken away, but left at home to await instructions from the Interrogation Commission.
K's landlady, Frau Grubach tries to console Josef but unintentionally offends him by speculating that perhaps the arrest was related to an illicit relationship with Fräulein Bürstner, K's neighbor. Josef visits Fräulein Bürstner to discuss his plight, but ends up kissing her - belatedly fulfilling the landlady's speculation. This is an early indication that Josef is no longer in control of his fate.
First Interrogation
K is instructed to appear at a local court, but the time of the trial is not specified. He then assumes that this court, like most, will open at nine. Upon arriving around ten, having gotten lost for an hour, he is told he is an hour late. As the interrogation begins, he is asked an ill-informed question, which he uses as the basis for his attack on the preceding events and the general competence of the court. As he leaves, the Examining Magistrate tells K that "...today you have flung away with your own hand all the advantages which an interrogation invariably confers on an accused man."
In the Empty Interrogation Chamber - The Student - The Offices
Josef K tries to visit the Examining Magistrate, but finds only the Law-Court Attendant's wife. Looking at the Magistrate's books, he finds that they are not law books, but pornography. The woman tries to seduce him. As Josef resolves to succumb to the woman as an act of defiance against the Court, a law student appears and, after an argument with Josef, carries the woman off in his arms.
Josef later spots the Attendant, who complains about his wife's wantonness and offers Josef a tour of the court offices. There are many other defendants waiting hopelessly for information on their cases. Josef struggles to cope with the "dull and heavy...hardly breathable" air, and almost faints. To his shame, he has to be carried out of the court by two officials.
Fräulein Bürstner's Friend
Josef returns home to find Fräulein Montag, a lodger from another room, moving in with Fräulein Bürstner. He suspects that this is to prevent him from pursuing his affair with the latter woman. Yet another lodger, Captain Lanz, appears to be in league with Montag.
The Whipper
Later, in a store room at his own bank, Josef K discovers the two agents who arrested him being whipped by a superior. This surreal event appears to have been staged for his viewing, either to simply frighten him, or to demonstrate the seriousness in which the court views incompetence and corruption. The next day he returns to the store room and is shocked to find everything as he left it, including the Whipper and the two agents.
K.'s Uncle - Leni
Josef K is visited by his influential uncle, who by coincidence is a friend of the Clerk of the Court. The uncle is, or appears to be, distressed by Josef's predicament and is at first sympathetic, but becomes concerned that K is underestimating the seriousness of the case. The uncle introduces Josef K to an Advocate, who is attended by Leni, a nurse. K visits Leni, whilst his uncle is talking with the Advocate and the Chief Clerk of the Court, much to his uncle's anger, and to the detriment of his case.
Advocate - Manufacturer - Painter
K visits the advocate and finds him to be a capricious and unhelpful character. K returns to his bank but finds that his colleagues are trying to undermine him.
Josef K is advised by one of his bank clients to visit Titorelli, a painter, for advice. Titorelli has no official connections, yet seems to have a deep understanding of the process. He explains: "You see, everything belongs to the Court." He sets out what K's options are, but the consequences of all of them are unpleasant. The laborious requirements of these options, and the limited outlook that they offer, lead the reader to lose hope for Josef K.
The Commercial Traveller - Dismissal of the Advocate
Josef K decides to take control of his own destiny and visits his advocate with the intention of dismissing him. At the advocate's office he meets a downtrodden individual, Block, a client who offers K some insight from a client's perspective. Block's case has continued for five years, yet he appears to have been virtually enslaved by his dependence on the advocate's unpredictable advice. This experience further poisons K's opinion of his advocate, and K is bemused as to why his advocate would think that seeing such a client, in such a state, could change his mind.
In The Cathedral
K has to show an important client from Italy around the Cathedral. The client doesn't show, but just as K is leaving the Cathedral, the priest calls out K's name, although K has never known the priest. The priest works for the court, and tells K a fable, (which has been published separately as
Before the Law) that is meant to explain his situation, but instead causes confusion, and implies that K's fate is hopeless.
Before the Law begins as a parable, then continues with several pages of interpretation between the Priest and Josef K. The gravity of the priest's words prepares the reader for an unpleasant ending. This chapter was left unfinished by the author.
The End
On the last day of Josef K's thirtieth year, two men arrive to execute him. He offers little resistance, suggesting that he has realised this as being inevitable for some time. They lead him to a quarry where he is expected to kill himself, but he cannot. The two men then execute him. His last words describe his own death: "Like a dog!"
#
The Trial is both a hilarious and chilling 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, guilt and church. However, one of the strengths of the novel is in its description of the effect of these circumstances on the life and mind of Josef K. It presents the absurdity of normal human nature, of chasing along with surprise after surprise, yet without direction, and without result. # 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. Josef K. is never told what he is on trial for, and he maintains his innocence almost to the end. He declares his innocence and is immediately questioned "innocent of what?" Is it that Josef K. is on trial for his innocence? For being in-(non)-human, is to be human, to be guilty? By confessing his guilt as a human being, perhaps Josef K. could have freed himself from the proceedings. Then again, was the trial against K. 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 and a theme that keeps the book fresh, prompting a questioning of the arbitrary customs and beliefs of life which can appear, in the right light, just as bizarre as the goings on in K's life.# A third interpretation is offered by
Kafka's diary around about the time of he began to write the novel. In 1914 he began 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, and this entailed a lot of to-ing and fro-ing. On the last occasion, that of the official engagement ceremony, he notes in his diary of it being like a
Trial and a judgement, during which others decided upon his life's plan, and of himself being pushed aside. A subsequent visit to Felice again involved much disputation, during which, again he was merely sidelined, as the words passed over him live a knife. The engagements, it was decided, aught end. Kafka described his letter of farewell, written on the eve of World War I, 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 is, the engagement, the entering into serious societal relations. Such a reading accounts for Josef K's willingness to partake in his own execution; the execution not being his death but the end of the engagement, that is, the end of the Kafka as a "human", as a familial member of society, and as an ancestor. It also accounts for the bizarre eroticism of "The Trial", the sexual interludes reflecting his private encounters with Felice during the rather public or familial meetings on the issue of their engagement that took place during his visits to Berlin.
Though, of course, such a reading may account for the promptings and correspondence between the book and Kafka's life, the themes explored reach way beyond the scope of this superficial correspondence and reach the depths of thought about society, the family, and writing, that must have arisen during such a cross-roads in Kafka's life. This is especially clear in the
Koanic story, related by the prison chaplain, of the man waiting for admittance by the doorman to the court, when the priest says that 'all want to gain admittance to the law'. This admittance to the law, in
Lacanian terms could be the impossible desire for the phallus, see
Name of the Father. Thus K's execution is his triumph, in that he realised the constant deferment implicit in such desire and instead accepted his fate without withering like the old man waiting his whole life at the door of the court. Kafka too at this time accepted the execution or closure upon himself as a "human", he would not lead that life but that of his own strange world.# The (forced) passive role played by Kafka during his engagement and the unprotested interference in his relationship also allows one to interpret the end of this encounter with a women as a homoerotic or sado-erotic key to "The Trial".# 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. That Jewish life in such a world, Sartre argues, is similar to the way Josef 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 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 sometimes, as in the novel, 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].
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. 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 reestablishes 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 the palimpsest of Dostoevsky's works.
The UNAULA edition arranges the chapters thusly:# The Arrest# Conversation with Frau Grubach then Fräulein Bürstner# B.'s Friend# Initial Inquiry# In the Empty Courtroom - The Student - The Offices# The Flogger# To Elsa# Public Prosecutor# The Uncle - Leni# Lawyer- Manufacturer - Painter# In The Cathedral# Block, the Merchant - Dismissal of the Lawyer# Struggle with the Vice President # The Building# A Dream# Journey to His Mother # The End
More info see: [
1]
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Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics, ISBN 0-14-018113-X
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The Trial: A Study Guide* Freely available at
DigBib.Org (German version, text, pdf, html)
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The Trial movie at liketelevision.com*
The Trial 1993 Version at
IMDB*
The Trial 1962 Welles Version at
IMDB*
Critic Edition in Spanish in UNAULA*
Critic Edition in Spanish
