The Trial – Franz Kafka, 1925 ★★★

Welcome to my Nightmare

It is a tad perverse recommending a book you don’t enjoy reading, yet The Trial makes a worthy exception. The crazier life gets, the more relevant it becomes.

But if you happen to think surrealism is something best enjoyed in the abstract, think again. The Trial is both abstract and surreal, but in such a way to render it less dreamlike than frustrating. Even its chapter order is up in the air.

Josef K. is a bank executive who on his birthday is called upon by a couple of tight-lipped strangers. It turns out he has been accused of a crime, and whatever he says is apparently already being used against him. While they busy themselves eating K.’s breakfast and divvying up his wardrobe, these petty officials refuse to say of what K. is accused.

Says the one called Franz: “See, Willem, he admits he doesn’t know the Law and yet he claims he’s innocent.”

Comedy is not supposed to be Franz Kafka’s thing, yet The Trial is something he reportedly found quite funny. Passages like the above give a clue why this is so; in fact, dollops of inky black humor filter their way throughout the book.

Plenty of ambiguity, too; but not regarding whether K. ever did anything criminal. Indeed, the first line in the novel lays out his innocence:

Someone must have traduced Josef K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.

But if you think the rest of the book will merely follow this idea of man vs. state, you don’t know Kafka. Menacing authority figures are just the tip of the iceberg. In The Trial, everything that can go wrong does.

Josef K. (Anthony Perkins) is confronted in his apartment by strangers in the opening sequence of the 1962 adaptation of The Trial directed and co-starring Orson Welles. Welles called it his favorite film, and it's worth a look, but if anything even more frustrating than the book. Image from https://americancinemathequecalendar.com/content/the-trial-0.

Published a year after its author’s death, The Trial remains as enigmatic as the Sphinx. Where in fact does it begin? What exactly is the right order in which to read its nine chapters? My Vintage Definitive Edition paperback presents two different chapter orders, as well as several additional chapter fragments and excised passages which further muddy the waters. [As it was the first translation published in the United States, it also Anglicizes the protagonist’s first name as “Joseph.”]

According to friend and executor Max Brod, Kafka wanted his manuscript destroyed after his death. When Kafka did die, Brod was left with “a great bundle of papers” to sort out as best he could. Whatever Brod did with them, they still read like a bundle to me.

The trial is the theme but not the only plot point. K. has problems with a rival at his bank; there is a woman named Fräulein Bürstner living in his apartment building whom K. accosts persistently; and his legal troubles entangle him with a slew of people – including an obnoxious uncle; a painter who uses his court connections to compel K. into buying his paintings; and K.’s attorney, whose inaction drives K. to despair:

“When I stood alone I did nothing at all, yet it hardly bothered me; after acquiring a lawyer, on the other hand, I felt that the stage was set for something to happen, I waited with unceasing and growing expectancy for your intervention, and you did nothing whatever.”

Franz Kafka (at right) on holiday with writer friend Ernst Weiss in Denmark in 1914, around the time he was writing The Trial. Despite the novel's despairing tone, Max Brod describes Kafka as a happy writer who enjoyed sharing choice passages with his friends. Image from https://www.hithit.com/en/project/1794/kafka-on-holiday

When people talk about the nightmarish quality of The Trial, it is less being entangled by a faceless bureaucracy – as commonplace to us as renewing a driver’s license – than the way K.’s reality seems so hazy and ill-defined. People drift in and out of the narrative, grabbing onto K. with the ferocity of drowning victims only to vanish quietly and forever.

In fact, K. seems the victim not of an Orwellian Big Brother but rather a cosmic conspiracy with himself as both target and punchline.

Walking into a strange building on a whim, he discovers himself inside a courtroom where a crowd of people wait for him. Opening a closet door in his office, he discovers two men about to be whipped. The next day, he finds them still there, still waiting to be whipped.

K. enters the courtroom for his first (and only) interrogation: "I must shut the door after you, nobody else must come in." "Very sensible," said K., "but the room is surely too full already." Picture by Bill Bragg from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/319474167301413210/.

Every person he meets seems to have some secret knowledge of his case he or she is not inclined to share. All tell him it is useless to resist:

“…take my warning to heart instead, and don’t be so unyielding in future, you can’t fight against this Court, you must confess to guilt. Make your confession at the first chance you get. Until you do that, there’s no possibility of getting out of their clutches, none at all.”

Even if he gets an acquittal, which hardly ever happens, he will only be charged again.

Yet K. is never put in jail, or even formally charged, apparently because that would require disclosure of the crime. The prosecution doesn’t want to give too much away. We only see K. in a courtroom once, at a brief “interrogation” where his case vies for the court’s attention with a man and woman coupling on the floor.

Speaking out about his innocence only makes K. more of a target for judicial scorn. “…today you have flung away with your own hand all the advantages which an interrogation invariably confers on an accused man,” a magistrate tells him.

The first-edition dust jacket for Der Prozess (German for "The Trial"), as it appeared in 1925, one year after Kafka's death and some ten years after it was largely written. According to a postscript by Max Brod, Kafka gave up writing it as "his life entered another phase." Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial.

It’s a very early 20^th century work, highly expressionist and favoring mood over meaning. A whole thesis could be written just about the weird interior design. Take this improbable room at K.’s boarding house:

It was a very long narrow room with one large window. There was only enough space in it to wedge two cupboards at an angle on either side of the door, the rest of the room was completely taken up by the long dining-table, which began near the door and reached to the very window, making it almost inaccessible.

Defense attorneys work in a room with a gaping hole in the middle of the floor. They daren’t complain out of fear of antagonizing court officials. The bed in the painter’s apartment abuts a door in such a way that people can only enter and leave through it by walking on the bed, which they do even while he sleeps there.

Kafka’s ability to take recognizable situations and twist them askew is quite something to behold, whether his object is to mystify or amuse. Often he does both at the same time:

He was slim and yet well knit, he wore a closely fitting black suit, which was furnished with all sorts of pleats, pockets, buckles, and buttons, as well as a belt, like a tourist’s outfit, and in consequence looked eminently practical, though one could not quite tell what actual purpose it served.

Late in the novel, a priest relates to K. the story of an accused man who waits his life outside a door, only to be told at the end that the door was there just for him. Kafka repurposed it from his short story, "Before The Law." It also serves as prologue to the Welles film, with pinscreen illustrations such as the one above created by Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker. Image from http://www.screeningnotes.com/2015/03/kafka-law-justice-violence-film-analysis.html.

The toughest aspect for me of The Trial is the halting, formal tone in which it is written. I am not sure if this an issue of translation, or the author’s own voice, but it makes the discursive narrative even harder to follow. There seems no such thing as natural conversation:

“Well, this expectation has entirely failed of its success, even my landlady, a quite simple person – I pronounce her name in all honor, she is called Frau Grubach – even Frau Grubach has been intelligent enough to recognize that an arrest such as this is no more worth taking seriously than some wild prank committed by stray urchins at the street corners.”

Of course, this could be a device to heighten the sense of a court proceeding, which is what this is all about. But it becomes quite a weight to read.

If you think it's difficult to read in print, just imagine how it was to read in its original form. A section of The Trial in Kafka's own longhand. Image from https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/92746073546273572/.

The best part of the book for me wound up also being the most frustrating. In it, we see K. pay a final call on his attorney in order to fire him. Anyone reading this far will be completely in accord with K.’s decision. Before this he meets Block, a tradesman whose own case has brought him to fiscal ruin as well as servile dependency on K.’s attorney. K. watches Block abase himself for a while. Then the attorney starts to tell K. why firing him would be a mistake.

It’s gripping stuff, funny and demented and quite suspenseful as K. awaits some apparent revelation. What happens next? The following line: “This chapter was never completed.”

That definitely lives up to my definition of the term “Kafkaesque.” But man is it frustrating.

Title page for the first U. S. edition published in 1937 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. with illustrations by George Salter. These remain in the Vintage Definitive Edition paperback available to this day. Image from https://www.panoplybooks.com/the-trial-by-franz-kafka-george-salter-1937-1st-us-ed/.

A lot has been written about what The Trial really means. The more I read, the more I was convinced that Kafka wasn’t aiming at any specific meaning. It’s not so much about politics or religion, though these matters concerned Kafka and influence the book. Rather, I read in it a kind of absurdist parody of life, by turns harrowing and funny, and creatively nonsensical throughout.

In that light, I am not sure what to make of the finale. Abrupt, yes, but so is life for many, and hence it might not seem off point. But I was expecting more of an “a-ha” moment than I got. At least let K. have his day in court, some sort of revelation regarding his supposed crime, if not an actual dénouement. Or if there was no crime beyond simply being alive, some expression of that would have been more fulfilling.

What you get may well be enough. A lot depends on your expectations going in. One can hardly claim that The Trial, with its focus on invisible enemies and obscurely oppressive regimes, has lost any relevance in the last 100 years. If anything, it may be funnier to us than it was to Kafka, a depressing thought to go out on, but a testament to his genius, too.