Introduction to The Trial
Kafka’s literary output comprises three unfinished novels, a short play, the novella The Metamorphosis, and an assortment of stories, many of which are only a few pages long. Nonetheless, his fiction has been translated into over forty languages and has sold millions of copies, with “Kafkaesque” even featuring in standard dictionaries. On the centenary of his death last year, the exhibition “Kafka: Making of an Icon” opened at the Weston Library in Oxford, and displayed the original manuscripts of Amerika and The Castle. Yet it is The Trial, which was first published (posthumously) in German one hundred years ago, that most perfectly demonstrates why his work remains powerful and influential today.
The Trial begins with protagonist Josef K. being greeted one morning by two strangers who declare that he is under arrest for an unspecified crime. He is not, however, imprisoned, but rather left suspended in a surreal limbo, where he can continue his everyday life, but finds himself shadowed by the threat of impending punishment from a largely unseen, but seemingly vast and all-powerful legal system. His meticulously ordered life becomes an incomprehensible hellscape: he attends a court hearing located in a block of slum housing, but sees the initially sympathetic assembly turn on him when he condemns the absurdity of his conviction; he enters a lumber room at his workplace to discover the warders who arrested him being brutally whipped; and he meets a once-wealthy merchant whose own trial has reduced him to impoverishment and semi-enslavement to his lawyer. Josef’s predicament is explained to him by the painter Titorelli, who tells him that exoneration is impossible – the most he can hope for is either the indefinite deferral of the proceedings, or else his temporal acquittal, with the ever-present possibility that the trial will restart at any point hanging over him. He is consequently trapped in a nightmarish psychological prison and becomes increasingly embedded in a struggle to maintain control over his existence.
Tyranny and entrapment
The novel is akin to a Rorschach test: its ambiguity provokes the reader to creatively participate in the book by forming their own interpretation. What stood out to me on my first reading is that throughout The Trial, Josef never asks anyone what crime he is supposedly guilty of having committed. One possible interpretation of this peculiar silence is that Josef knows he has been arrested not because of his actions, but because of who he is. Not only does this explain the inescapable nature of his predicament – as nothing can shield him from punishment for his very identity – but it also means that the book’s events eerily foreshadow the history of Germany 20 years after it was first published. In particular, the public dehumanisation of minority groups is reflected in Josef’s treatment by others – crucially, both his work supervisor and his landlady refuse to shake hands with him soon after he is arrested.
Later, when talking to a priest, his claim that “We’re all human, every single one of us” is met with a chilling response: “That is correct, but that’s the way guilty people talk.” All Josef’s actions are accordingly interpreted by his prosecutors as further evidence of his culpability. Take the court hearing scene: after hearing the crowd initially applaud his riposte to the judge, he is emboldened to attack the court’s corruption and the unprofessional behaviour of the agents who arrested him. Flustered by the audience’s subsequent silence in response to his oratory, Josef desperately heightens his denunciations to a crescendo, before ultimately dimly recognising that his initial glib certainty that the crowd supported him was misplaced: he notices “the gleam of badges…on their coat collars. They all had these badges, as far as could be seen.” The nightmarish scene culminates with his realisation that those judging him are partisans, each committed to finding him guilty regardless of what he says; the early clapping was in response to statements irrelevant to his guilt or innocence, and may even have been wilfully deceptive, designed to lure him into a false sense of security and encourage him to reveal his true feelings about the court system.
Later, when Josef starts to leave Titorelli’s room, he is offered a painting called “Sunset Over the Heath”, and then two ostensibly identical “companion pieces”. These gifts serve as a metaphor for Josef’s fate – he appears to have several options in how he deals with the court, but ultimately, its judgment, and his fate, is predetermined. He tries to distract himself to delay the inevitable, spending extensive periods of time listening to his lawyer, Huld, lecture him on the workings of the law and on his progress in composing a first submission to the court in Josef’s defense. But as the nature of the accusation remains uncertain, neither of them knows what information might be relevant, and in any case, Huld admits that the court often fails to even read the written materials handed in by defendants. Josef is therefore reduced to redundant procrastination simply because he can do nothing to escape his tragic fate.
A just sentence?
Another interpretation of The Trial, however, promoted by the critic Eric Marson, contradicts this: one can read Josef’s focus on trivialities as a reflection of his desire to avoid facing the real reason for his arrest. Even when he meets the court’s “information-giver” who, he is reassured, “knows the answers to all the questions”, Josef refrains from inquiring into the nature of the crime of which he has been accused or considering the possibility that he might have done something that warrants punishment. Thus, he is imprisoned not by the state but by his egocentric vanity – his fate is only inescapable because he refuses to contemplate striving for redemption.
The morning when Josef awakens in the novel’s first chapter is later revealed to be his thirtieth birthday; before the agents arrest him, he notices an old woman across the street, watching him with a “quite unusual curiosity”. In one of the unfinished fragments of the book, we learn that Josef has not met his widowed mother for years, despite promising to visit her every birthday; she is slowly going blind, and likely made her only son swear to a small annual time-commitment to ensure that she sees him a few more times before her sight disappears. Selfishly, Josef doesn’t even realise his failure to fulfil his obligation until nearly a year later: the old woman may therefore be a symbol of his conscience, which tries to move his focus from outrage at the agents’ disruption of his routine to recognition of his guilt. Later, Josef also fails to remember the birthday of his cousin Erna – his self-absorbed indifference to her wellbeing means she resorts to waiting for nearly an hour at his workplace to try and see him.
Josef also mistreats and exploits the women in his life: on the day of his arrest, he enters his neighbour Fräulein Bürstner’s room late at night to apologise for the brief entry of the agents into her accommodation, but doesn’t leave after she repeatedly stresses her tiredness and ultimately forcibly kisses her. Later, he responds to the demands of Leni, his lawyer Huld’s carer, but only in order to question her about the court’s judge, even admitting to himself that he is “enlisting women helpers” (whilst ironically ignoring the most important information she provides: “you’re obstinate and can’t be persuaded.”) He even reduces his landlady to tears despite her efforts to mollify him – his only aim when interacting with others is to improve his status, and so he is unashamedly cruel to those less rich and powerful than himself.
The legal system itself is quasi-divine: it is omniscient – the priest who defends the court has a mysterious knowledge of Josef’s identity; omnipresent – representatives are even found in the bank where Josef works; incomprehensible; and both transcendent – Titorelli tells Josef that the highest judges will never be seen by either of them – and immanent – the court chamber that Josef visits is located in a working-class housing block. The justice system can therefore be read as a supernatural institution which assesses souls under the eternal law rather than as an earthly one that reviews citizens under civil law. In such an order, Josef is a sinner who cannot recognise his depraved state, who consequently is inevitably punished for his wickedness, despite divine efforts to force him to consider his culpability and avert him from self-destruction.
Conclusion
Contrasting interpretations each appear to explain some of the novel’s haunting events, whilst leaving others inscrutable. The Trial remains pertinent because it portrays a multitude of timeless themes and experiences, with existential despair, totalitarianism, guilt and self-deception prominent amongst them. Crucially, however, the book’s enigmatic and elusive nature, which compels readers to actively enter into the creation of the narrative themselves, is part of what has made it so endlessly fascinating since its first publication.