The Trial by Franz Kafka

 

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• The Blurb...

A terrifying psychological trip into the life of one Joseph K., an ordinary man who wakes up one day to find himself accused of a crime he did not commit, a crime whose nature is never revealed to him. Once arrested, he is released, but must report to court on a regular basis--an event that proves maddening, as nothing is ever resolved. As he grows more uncertain of his fate, his personal life--including work at a bank and his relations with his landlady and a young woman who lives next door--becomes increasingly unpredictable. As K. tries to gain control, he succeeds only in accelerating his own excruciating downward spiral.

• Our Review...

Probably Kafka's most famous novel. I'll be honest, I was looking forward to reading this one as part of the 52 book club challenge under the prompt an author "everyone" has read except you. Click here for link.  But it's just that it was a bit of a slog. It's just well a bit dull and monotonous. 

And I get it I really do. His writing created the adjective "Kafaesque."  It's about how we are all ground down by the deadly excrement of capitalism, namely bureaucracy. It takes a little bit of you away at every frustrating, mundane encounter. As Hannah Arendt famously called it "Tyranny without a tyrant." It's as much in effect today as when Kafka was describing 100 yrs ago. Red tape must have been relatively new then. It feels much worse today. Two coincidences put me in mind of Kafka this week. Firstly my wife's efforts to attempt to get an appointment with a doctor. This involved numerous phone calls, 46 people in a phone cue, auto responses, call backs etc. Secondly this week we saw Mr Bates and the Post Office. Horrific and heartbreaking and in many ways very similar to Kafka's trial.

How can you get a reader to feel the nameless banality of sitting, waiting, being accused of a crime but not knowing what crime, when it occured or against whom. Then living with it everyday, jumping through hoops never making progress in an endless loop. Perhaps you can only deliver it if the writing is mundane, non-signfigant and endlessly looping.

I think there are two parts to this novel. Part A It does an outstanding job in understanding the nature of over-bureaucracy and the crushing insignificance we can feel when we come up against it.

However to achieve part A, Part B, the narrative, has to make one feel as if nothing is happening and everything is repetitive. I don't think I'll be looking for any Kafka anytime soon.

• Selected Quotes...

Our authorities as far as I know, and I only know the lowest grades, don’t go out looking for guilt among the public; it’s the guilt that draws them out, like it says in the law, and they have to send us police officers out. That’s the law. Where d’you think there’d be any mistake there?” “I don’t know this law,” said K. “So much the worse for you, then,” said the policeman. “It’s probably exists only in your heads,” said K.,

he admits he doesn’t know the law and at the same time insists he’s innocent.”

an organisation that employs policemen who can be bribed, oafish supervisors and judges of whom nothing better can be said than that they are not as arrogant as some others. This organisation even maintains a high-level judiciary along with its train of countless servants, scribes, policemen and all the other assistance that it needs, perhaps even executioners and torturers—I’m not afraid of using those words. And what, gentlemen, is the purpose of this enormous organisation. Its purpose is to arrest innocent people and wage pointless prosecutions against them

In fact, defence is not really allowed under the law, it’s only tolerated,

He thought of the flies that tear their legs off struggling to get free of the flypaper.

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• About the Author...

Franz Kafka (July 3, 1883 – June 3, 1924) was one of the major German language novelists and short story writers of the twentieth century, whose unique body of writing—much of it incomplete and published posthumously despite his wish that it be destroyed—has become iconic in Western literature.

His most famous pieces of writing include his short story Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis) and his two novels, Der Prozess (The Trial) and the unfinished novel Das Schloß (The Castle). Kafka's work expresses the essential absurdity of modern society, especially the impersonal nature of bureaucracy and capitalism. The individual in Kafka's texts is alone and at odds with the society around him, which seems to operate in a secretive manner that the individual cannot understand. Kafka's world is one in which God is dead and the individual is "on trial," as the name of his most famous novel suggests. It is a world devoid of meaning or purpose other than to clear one's name of the nebulous sense of guilt that pervades the atmosphere. The adjective "Kafkaesque" has come into common use to denote mundane yet absurd and surreal circumstances of the kind commonly found in Kafka's work.

Kafka's work represents an extreme example of the modern concern with the individual's place in society. As modernity displaced people from traditional society's fixed meanings and family networks, Kafka exposes the emptiness and even perniciousness of a world in which meaning is not only absent, but malevolent toward the individual. Lacking a transcendent source of value, society is not a hospitable place and meaning is menacing.

from newworldencyclopedia.org