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The Trialby Franz Kafka Overview/Reviewcourtesy of an unknown book reviewer and site."...Turning to The Trial, we have what is perhaps the only really ‘complete’ novel that Kafka ever wrote. As some of you may know, the notorious ‘ending’ of The Castle was the beginning of another sentence. The fact that that book did not ‘end’ in a conventional sense, at least for me, does not even register as a negative. I mention the relative ‘completeness’ of The Trial because it seems that if one were [to] recommend a novel by Kafka to the uninitiated, The Trial would be the best one to begin with; only after this novel, I think, would my remarks about the fact of the ‘incomplete’ nature of The Castle be understandable. Now although there are significant overlaps in both the structure and the mood of the two books, The Trial is perhaps the less abstract of the two. This is partly due to its ‘completeness’, but it is also due to the setting of the narrative within the political-legal system of the world of the novel. At least on the surface, the characters inhabit a world of domesticity, habits, streets and buildings, familiar structures and the reliable predictability of everyday life. Despite the fact that the novel begins with the protagonist, Joseph K., being arrested by agents of the Law and subjected to an unusual interrogation, these activities are still taking place in a familiar environment. In The Castle, however, the protagonist (just called ‘K’) is a foreigner to the snowbound village and cannot rely upon any of his usual devices to help himself. This becomes true of The Trial once the novel progresses, where K. is forced to enter into strange and claustrophobic hideaways, apartments and offices, but these new and unfamiliar locales are only arrived at as a result of K’s investigations. Once he had been shocked out of his previous life of complacency and narrow-minded industriousness by the event of his arrest, the mission to uncover and reveal the truth of his case and the nature of the accusation that has been leveled against him requires him to enter into the world beneath the surface of his previous life. In the tradition of mystery novels, The Trial is structured around the discovery or revelation of something and the resultant process of unraveling the multiple layers that have been erected around the truth behind the initial revelation. In standard murder-mystery novels, the discovery of a murder leads the protagonist to the gradual discovery of the truth of the case through the successive uncovering and sorting together of the partial clues that are accumulated along the way. The endings of such novels are almost invariably centred upon the total, unifying vision of the protagonist -- through their eyes and with the sophistication of their intellect they are able to link all of the preceding clues into a grand schema representing the truth of the crime. No loose ends, not a single thread remains left over. The Trial, however, does not begin with the discovery of a crime or even with an implicit claim that a crime has been committed. No, the event that triggers this mystery novel is the event of the arrest itself. K is unable to determine what he is being arrested for, only that he is being arrested and presumably accused as well. This reversal of the standard model of the mystery genre becomes the one unifying theme of the narrative, for K’s subsequent attempts to learn more about his case lead him into even deeper and darker regions of his world. K’s steadfast refusal to accept the accusation leveled against him by the agents of the Law is the motivating factor behind his quest to discover the truth. The first evidence of this comes from the first agents that K. encounters on the first morning: when pressed to answer questions regarding K’s case and the nature of the accusation for which he has been arrested, the invariable response is a confession of ignorance, dutiful ignorance (‘These gentlemen and I are of minor importance to your case, indeed we know almost nothing about it…You are under arrest, that’s true, I don’t know more than that.’). If this ignorance, or more precisely, if this partial understanding was merely a version of these agents being lackeys of the State (‘We are on a need-to-know basis’, etc.), then there may in fact be some substance to the totalitarian interpretation. However, with each new encounter that K. has further within the workings of the Law, the partial understanding and comprehension of the operations of the Law by these other agents and witnesses becomes the defining feature of all involved. No one is in a position to provide a grand summary of all that is involved in K’s case. If it were a vision of the madness of totalitarianism and unchecked bureaucracy, then this would at least be some sort of explanation and would hold out hope for an almost Oprah-like sentiment of ‘closure’ (but some ground could possibly be gained by a comparison between this novel and the madness documented in The Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn). It is probably unnecessary to point out that there are other aspects of The Trial which do not fit so easily within this interpretation. ... Kafka was the champion of the Humanities. I reaffirm my claim because only in the world of the Humanities are such ambiguities not symptoms of failure or of sloppy work, but of the ever-present duty to continually re-attend those things that we slide over without ever pausing to consider. In the case of The Trial, if questions about the nature of justice, the nature of authority, of living without the hope of eventual redemption, and the futility of pursuing the Transcendent at a cost to the present are left lingering in your mind long after reading Herr Franz, then his work here is done. ..." |