The Trial, by Franz Kafka

“It is Justice,” said the painter at last. “Now I can recognize it.” said K. “There’s the bandage over the eyes, and here are the scales. But aren’t there wings on the figure’s heels, and isn’t it flying?” “Yes” said the painter, “My instructions were to paint it like that. Actually, it is Justice and the goddess of Victory in one.”

This book took me totally by surprise. It is an account of a man referred to only by the name “Joseph K.” who is arrested under questionable circumstances. We aren’t given the name of the country where Joseph K. lives, but it appears to have a terrible legal system. The author avers on Page 4: “K. lived in a country with a legal constitution, there was universal peace, all the laws were in force.”

Joseph K. is at home, not yet out of his bedroom when two plain-clothed men barge in without a warrant and declare him under arrest. K. is still in his nightshirt and the men tell him that he will have to wear a less fancy shirt now because they will take charge of the one he is wearing as well as the rest of his underwear. The men proceed to eat K.'s breakfast, later offering to bring him a meal from a cafe across the street provided that K. supplies the money for it.

Background

It’s worth pointing out here that this book was written in 1915. It was not a time of universal peace. On the other hand, this book, which describes a legal system about as totalitarian as one can imagine, was scribed before the rise of Mussolini, of Hitler, of Stalin and Mao. Whereas George Orwell’s 1984 was written as an explicit warning against a totalitarian state after one existed, Franz Kafka, who died in 1924, knew no such world.

What, then, is this book about?

Totalitarianism, perhaps. How could Franz Kafka know about totalitarianism in 1915? He appears to see it in the human psychology around him, in the micro-nature of society. Its possibility lurks in the everyday world of human affairs. Much as Vaclav Havel, living in Prague behind the Iron Curtain, would deconstruct the logic of totalitarianism in his 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless'', Kafka built up such a society from first principles in The Trial at the beginning of the century long before Communism took hold in the land.

What are these first principles from which Kafka builds up a totalitarian world? In The Trial, the key ingredients appear to be:  

1. Disrespect for Privacy

2. Pervasive Incompetence, Stupidity and Childishness

3. A Compulsive Sense of Duty

4. Obsession with Official Certitude

Anyway, back to the story...

K. is arrested on his 30th birthday. Until the arrest, his life seems to have been going OK. He is the Chief Clerk at a bank, a position which he is proud to have achieved, and with ambitions to rise higher. He lives in a boarding-house, which appears to be a normal arrangement for a bachelor living in his time and place. His existence sounds a bit dreary, actually, although he seems rather content with his lot:

That spring K. had been accustomed to pass his evenings in this way: after work whenever possible—he was usually in his office until nine—he would take a short walk, alone or with some of his colleagues, and then go to a beer hall, where until eleven he sat at a table patronized mostly by elderly men. But there were exceptions to this routine, when, for instance, the Manager of the Bank, who highly valued his diligence and reliability, invited him for a drive or for dinner at his villa. And once a week K. visited a girl called Elsa, who was on duty all night till early morning as a waitress in a cabaret and during the day received her visitors in bed.  

What makes K.’s arrest so strange is:

1. The men who arrest him cannot say why they are arresting him. They are merely following instructions from above.

2. Although he is informed that he has been arrested, K. is never literally arrested. He is entirely free to come and go as he pleases.

A day or two after his arrest, K is informed by phone that he is to attend an inquiry on the following Sunday. It is in an unfamiliar tenement slum in the suburbs. K. struggles to figure out in which apartment the inquiry is to be held and goes door to door asking after an invented friend named “Lanz'' in order to avoid the embarrassment of his situation. Finally, he enters an apartment where a young woman simply waves him through and finds himself in a crowded room where he is told he is an hour late. The inquiry begins thusly:

“Well then, ” said the Examining Magistrate, turning over the leaves and addressing K.         with an air of authority, “you are a house painter?”

“No.” said K., “I’m the chief clerk of a large Bank.” This answer evoked such a hearty outburst of laughter that K. had to laugh too. People doubled up with their hands on their knees and shook as if in spasms of coughing. There were even a few guffaws from the gallery. “This question of yours, Sir, about my being a house painter—or rather, not a question, you simply made a statement—is typical of the whole character of this trial that is being foisted on me. 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. But for the moment I do recognize it, on grounds of compassion, as it were. One can’t regard it except with compassion, if one is to regard it at all. I do not say that your procedure is contemptible, but I should like to present that epithet to you for your private consumption.”

K. lashes out in indignation at The Court throughout his oration, which comes to an end when the woman who had led him into the room enters and quickly falls to the floor with a young man in an amorous embrace. The audience of The Court becomes more interested with this scene than in the court proceedings, which come to a chaotic end. As K. heads for the exit through the frenzied crowd, the Examining Magistrate says:

”Today you have flung away with your own hand all the advantages which an interrogation invariably confers on an accused man.” To which K. shouts: ”You scoundrels, I’ll spare you future interrogations.”

The atmosphere in The Trial is that of a dream, or, more precisely: a nightmare. Like Alice in Wonderland, proportions loom larger than life in one moment and smaller in the next, yet there is a through-line of verisimilitude that prevents this from being a work of outright surrealism. The mechanics of this weird universe seem unreasonable yet, upon inspection, turn out to be held together by an iron web of reason. The hyperbolic shifts in apparent proportions are a product of psychology not a violation of physics. The effect feels a bit like what in visual art is called chiaroscuro, which uses bold lighting contrasts to create a dramatic, mysterious mood. Often, not far from focus, someone lurks in a nearby shadow.    

Following the ruthless logic of dreams, in every sentence K.’s concerns of the moment take center stage. We are eternally stuck in the present. We don’t know what happens to other characters when K. is not around. We only see the world through his eyes, this narrow world of work and constant concern broken only by the occasional and unexpected—sometimes shocking—romantic interlude. There is no time for reflection on the past, no backdrop to K.’s existence. Does he have friends? We don’t know. What were his school-years like? We don’t know. What happened to his parents? We don’t know. We are informed he was raised by his uncle but only at the very moment he appears in K.’s office at the bank.

The Lecherous Mr. K.

Despite the atmosphere of dream, this work is probably closer to Cubism than Surrealism. K.’s present life is fully visible yet out of proportion as compared to the wide-awake perspective one would expect in a realistic novel. From the beginning there is an outsized concern with work and the Official bureaucratic world (words like “The Law” and “The Court” are capitalized throughout the book), and K.’s personal life gets shoved in awkwardly at the margins. It’s like one of those maps where each geographical unit’s proportions are adjusted by population density. For instance, as a thirty-year-old bachelor, one might expect K. to have a lively romantic life, and he does—yet his love-life occurs entirely in fleeting moments. He goes from full absorption with his work or his legal case to desperate passion the moment a woman catches his attention. I don’t think the point is that he’s a horndog but that his personal life is getting nearly squeezed out of the frame. As an example, when K. meets with Fraulein Burstner, his neighbor across the hall, the night after his arrest in an attempt to apologize that her room was used to conduct his interrogation, K. becomes rapidly libidinous:

“Now go, leave me to myself, I need more than ever to be left in peace. The few minutes you begged for have stretched to half an hour and more.”

K. clasped her hand and then her wrist. “But you aren’t angry with me?” he asked.

She shook his hand off and answered: “No, no, I’m never angry with anybody.”

He felt for her wrist again, she let him take it this time and so led him to the door. He was firmly resolved to leave. But at the door he stopped as if he had not expected to find a door there. Fraulein Burstner seized this moment to free herself, open the door, and slip into the entrance hall, where she whispered: “Now, please do come!”

I’m just coming,” K. said, rushed out, seized her, and kissed her first on the lips, then all over the face, like some thirsty animal lapping greedily at a spring of long-sought fresh water. Finally he kissed her on the neck, right on the throat, and kept his lips there for a long time.

Back in his own room, K. reflects approvingly over his actions, but when he tries to establish a meeting to speak with Fraulein Burstner again by sending her letters, she rebuffs.

Arrest? What Arrest?

Because he thought it so absurd, K. might have forgotten about his arrest entirely were it not for his Uncle Karl paying him a visit from the country. K.’s uncle has heard about his legal case and one day barges into K.’s office at the bank while he is in a meeting with a client. Once K. admits that he is the subject of a criminal case, his uncle explodes on him:

“And you sit there coolly with a criminal case hanging round your neck?” cried his uncle, his voice growing louder and louder.

         “The cooler I am, the better in the end,” said K. wearily.

”Joseph, my dear Joseph, think of yourself, think of your relatives, think of our good name. You have been a credit to us until now, you can’t become a family disgrace.”

Uncle Karl convinces K. that he must leave work that very moment and visit his old lawyer friend, Huld, to engage him over his case. They arrive at eight o’clock in the evening; Huld lies sick in bed recovering from his latest heart-attack due to strain from overwork. Nevertheless when he discovers that K. wants to hire him, he is energized over the prospect of taking the case. Huld has heard much about it from his friends at The Court; it is a fascinating case, just the sort he would love to work on. Meanwhile, K. is distracted by the lawyer’s nurse, Leni. She catches his eye, he finds an excuse to step away and spend time with her in the lawyer’s office. Before the night is over, they make love on the office floor. Once he recovers his senses, K. realizes that several hours have passed and his uncle is already waiting for him outside in the car, mortified by his nephew’s behavior before his old friend.

The Loss of Privacy

Considering he is allowed to run loose in the world, in what sense is K. under arrest? K. himself does not seem to know. The whole matter of his trial strikes him as preposterous, and, at least for a while, not worth taking seriously. K. is inclined to even forget the matter completely and perhaps would were it not for those meddling people who pester him to take the matter gravely. K.’s world is claustrophobic, overrun with busybodies. He is overcome by the thick indoor atmosphere on several occasions to the point of feeling physically unwell. Everyone is either standing a bit too close, suddenly appearing in the room, touching him, or otherwise observing him with inappropriate interest. Even in his own bedroom, others enter at will. If he is not literally under arrest by a legal system, he has become a prisoner in the sense that he has entirely lost his privacy. The legal arrest precipitates this loss of privacy, but his warders are ordinary members of society who rob him of his psychological freedom through incessant prying eyes and officious demeanors.  

Pervasive Incompetence, Stupidity and Childishness

Throughout the work, there is the sense that everything that happens is a joke. A comedic line runs through the novel, but it is humor twisted into horror. K.’s arrest is a mistake, the men who arrest him behave clownishly; the judges and magistrates are full of petty cares, vindictiveness and childish interests. For example, when K. returns to The Court’s office the week after the first hearing, it turns out not to be in session that day, and he learns that the woman who had waved him through (K. soon lusts after her) and who ended the first hearing with her erotic tussle on the floor, lives with her husband in that very apartment. K. convinces her to allow him to look at the books the Examining Magistrate had been leafing through during the hearing. The first book contains an “indecent picture” of a naked couple on a sofa, and the second book is titled: How Grete Was Plagued by Her Husband Hans.

Duty, Logic

At one point K.’s lawyer explains how things in The Court work with the following story held as representative:

“An old official, a well-meaning, quiet man, had a difficult case in hand which had been greatly complicated by the lawyer’s petitions, and he had studied it continuously for a whole day and night—the officials were really more conscientious than anyone else. Well, toward morning, after twenty-four hours of work with probably very little result, he went to the entrance door, hid himself behind it, and flung down the stairs every lawyer who tried to enter. The lawyers gathered down below on the landing and took counsel on what they should do; on the one hand they had no real claim to be admitted and consequently could hardly take any legal action against the official, and also, as already mentioned, they had to guard against antagonizing the body of officials. But on the other hand every day they spent away from the Court was a day lost to them, and so a great deal depended on their getting in. At last they all agreed that the best thing to do was to tire out the old gentleman. One lawyer after another was sent rushing upstairs to offer the greatest possible show of passive resistance and let himself be thrown down again into the arms of his colleagues.”

It is silly yet logical.

What’s So Funny About Peace, Love, Crime and Punishment?

Basically, when K. endeavors to take his case seriously he is confronted by a world that seems to be joking with him all over again. This sense that a horrible joke is being played is key to the nightmare-fabric of the Kafkan universe. To whom does the butt of a joke turn for an appeal?

We all know that this is sometimes how life presents itself. If you are at a restaurant and the waiter slips and spills a tray of drinks onto your head, your colleagues at the table will laugh. Your friends—the same people who would rush to your defense if someone had intentionally assaulted you—will find it utterly hilarious that you have been hurt and humiliated by a klutzy waiter. The horror of comedy is that it robs the victim of her pathos.

The absurdity and silliness of the book forces me to imagine the cast of Monty Python playing the characters during K.’s arrest:

The night table beside Fraulein Burstner’s bed had been pushed into the middle of the floor to serve as a desk, and the Inspector was sitting behind it. He had crossed his legs, and one arm was resting on the back of the chair.

(John Cleese as The Inspector): “Joseph K.?” K. nodded. “You are presumably very much surprised by the events of this morning?”

(Terry Jones as K.) Certainly. Certainly I am surprised, but I am by no means much surprised.”

Inspector: “Not very much surprised?”

K.: “Perhaps you misunderstand me. I mean” --K. stopped and looked round him for a chair. “I suppose I may sit down?”

Inspector: “It’s not usual.”

K: “I mean that I am very much surprised, of course, but when one has lived for thirty years in this world and had to fight one’s way through it, as I have had to do, one becomes hardened to surprises and doesn’t take them too seriously. Particularly the one this morning.”

Inspector: “Why particularly the one this morning?”

K. “I won’t say that I regard the whole thing as a joke, for the preparations that have been made seem too elaborate for that. The whole staff of the boarding-house would have to be involved as well as all you people, and that would be past a joke. So I don’t say that it’s a joke.”

Inspector: “Quite right.”

K. “The real question is, who accuses me? What authority is conducting these proceedings? Are you officers of the law? None of you has a uniform, unless your suit is to be considered a uniform, but it’s more like a tourist’s outfit. I demand a clear answer to these questions, and I feel sure that after an explanation we shall be able to part from each other on the best of terms.”

Inspector: (Flinging the matchbox he had been playing with down on the table.) “You are laboring under a great delusion. These gentlemen here and myself have no standing whatsoever in this affair of yours, indeed we know hardly anything about it. We might wear the most official uniforms and your case would not be a penny the worse. I can’t even confirm that you are charged with an offense, or rather I don’t know whether you are. You are under arrest, but more than that I don’t  know. Perhaps the warders have given you a different impression, but what can one expect, they are only irresponsible gossips.”

As K. rises to match the mood of a criminal arrest, wishing to speak with officers of the law, to confront his accusers and challenge their accusations, he is met with lines that evoke (for me, at least) a 1970s BBC laugh track.

While I’m on it, this novel also has me in mind of the famous Python sketch in which Michael Palin pays to have an argument with John Cleese. There is a moment during the sketch when Cleese announces that the time is up and Palin will have to pay more if he wants the argument to continue. After Palin’s continued arguing that the time isn’t up is met by Cleese’s silence, he finally hands over some more money. Pocketing the cash Cleese repeats that Palin will have to pay for him to continue the argument, to which Palin argues that he just paid. Cleese replies “No, you didn’t”. It continues:

Palin: “Ah ha! Well if I didn’t pay, why are you arguing? Got you!”

Cleese: “No, you haven’t.”

Palin: “Yes, I have. If you are arguing, I must have paid.”

Cleese: “Not necessarily. I could be arguing in my spare time.”

It is a fair point! It works because everyone has both an official and an unofficial side to them. You are at work or not at work. You are acting in some official capacity or not. You are either playing some role in life in anger or not. Perhaps you are just doing what you are doing in your spare time (like reading or writing this). In the sketch, Cleese’s character, whose official job is to argue with people, can logically argue that he is arguing in an unofficial capacity. Likewise, Kafka toys with this strange binary of modern existence: The Official and The Unofficial. It isn’t clear to K. from the start whether the men arresting him are actual officers of the court or mere porters who work on the corner having one over on him because it is his birthday. Things are hardly clarified when The Inspector, not dressed in any uniform, uses K.’s neighbor’s bedroom to conduct questioning. Nor even when K. goes to the initial inquest, which is held in a slum in the back room of a tenement building apartment. K. keeps asking himself: how can this be serious?

This humor manifested as horror impedes K.’s efforts to address his adversary head-on. K., a competent professional, becomes caught in the web of others’ immaturity and stupidity. And, unlike Michael Palin, he has no one to argue with. The lawyers and magistrates won’t tell him anything useful about his case. The Court is impossible to get through, an endless labyrinth of petty hierarchies, formal rules and unofficial customs. There is no further hearing to attend, no literal trial to prepare for. He wants to fight with all he has, but all he has is himself.

Eventually, K., the reasonable, rational man, decides to investigate himself. He examines his entire life “down to the smallest detail” in search of his guilt. He has been told that “Guilt is not to be doubted.” This self-search for guilt becomes self-fulfilling, not in the sense that K. finds any guilt in his actions but rather in the sense that he assumes the pose of a guilty man. His former air of superiority in the face of bureaucratic stupidity, his indignance, his pride, his confidence, all deflate. His real sin, as it were, as a rational person, is the need for things to make sense. Like a psychotic banging his head against a wall to be convinced of its reality, he needs to assure himself that his guilt has a cause.

Conclusion: The Real Horror of It All

A college roommate once asserted to me that humor is “The juxtaposition of the incongruous.” I hold that humor is more complicated than that, that it is a many-faceted jewel, and that the funniest jokes are the least explicable. But I will allow that in The Trial much of the humor is derived from the juxtaposition of the incongruous. It is incongruent that a poor painter should have more influence over the course of a criminal case than a legal scholar, that court offices should reside in the attics of tenement buildings, and that a magistrate leafs through porn during a legal hearing.

The biggest incongruence in the novel is that K.'s very existence doesn’t reconcile with the reality of The Court, whose workings are as incomprehensible as an alien intelligence. This juxtaposition pits individual reality against bureaucratic reality.

One hypothesis that explains away the absurdity is that K. never interacts with the true legal system but rather some shadow legal system. The “cops”, who don’t wear badges and dress in plain clothes, the magistrates, whose offices reside in dilapidated tenement apartments, and all the supposed Court workers who live in the tenement attics are not part of the true legal system. That is how K. interprets things upon first contact with his arresting officers, whom he takes for mere street-corner peddlers trying to put him on as a joke.

Another possibility is that the legal system K. confronts, however shabby in appearance, is true reality. Whereas The Court at first seems like a mere shadow of the real world, in fact it is K. in the flesh who is a shadow. All that matters is his legal file. The Law—made for Man—rules according to its own designs.