The trial

"Life, I do not understand you."
- Hjalmar Söderberg, Doctor Glas

"Life is the crummiest book I ever read. There isn't a hook, just a lot of cheap shots."
- Bad Religion, Stranger Than Fiction

"What have you done to deserve this punishment? What sins have you committed? What dark thoughts have you harboured that condemn you to wander through the universe without hope?"
- Gaius Baltar, Battlestar Galactica

"Like a dog."
- Franz Kafka, The Trial

So we know the story; Josef K awakes one day to find that he's been arrested. For what, he doesn't know. Neither do the people sent to arrest him (but not take him into custody). Neither does anyone else, nor do they seem to ask; and so the case against him proceeds, getting more and more complicated as he tries to solve his situation with the questionable help of others.

He was always inclined to take life as lightly as he could, to cross bridges when he came to them, pay no heed for the future, even when everything seemed under threat. But here that did not seem the right thing to do.

The original title, Der Prozess, ostensibly refers to the judicial process - the case against K - but also the process of learning, of discovery (or lack thereof) that he goes through. The English title, on the other hand, has a subtly different double meaning; it makes the reader (and K) expect an actual formal trial with an accused, two lawyers, a judge and a jury which of course we never get. The trial - or trials - of K begin on the first page, the entire book is both the prosecutor's and the defense attourney's legal documents.

K isn't used to the legal proceedings, he has no knowledge of the language or the customs or indeed the law itself; and so he seeks (or rather expects) help from everyone from his landlady to lawyers, priests and other accused. But none of their answers really help him. The judges and lawyers - the ones who are supposed to serve the law - are all, time and again, described as "vain." A lot of people claim to have seen others go through similar trials (processes) to K's, and they are quite happy to say that they know a lot about it, but they keep the details on them secret, stored away in drawers. And ultimately, their knowledge is useless since they're all just low-level servants and none of them know of an actual way out. As the painter points out, the hope of an accused can be put in either an acquittal, an apparent acquittal or a deferment; but the first is purely mythical, everyone's heard of it but nobody's actually seen it happen, and none of the others offer anything but a temporary reprieve, at the price of hard work and patience - and ultimately, yourself.

So these were the lawyer's methods, which K. fortunately had not been exposed to for long, to let the client forget about the whole world and leave him with nothing but the hope of reaching the end of his trial by this deluded means. He was no longer a client, he was the lawyer's dog.

I read it in German this time around, and it's interesting to note how often Kafka uses the (often difficult to translate) passive form - as in, it's not that people do things to him, but that things happen to him; the verbs don't have an agent. I don't read nearly enough fiction in German to know if this is something Kafka uses more than anyone else, but it seems to fit the feel of the story and adds yet another dimension of "the world is out to mess with you."

It's also very very funny. It's a joyless sense of humour which probably owes a lot to what's often referred to as "Jewish humour" - whatever its roots, it's the humour of the eternally shat-upon, the ones who cannot hope to win but can just stave off defeat by laughing in the face of the whole sorry deal. The laughter is the narrator's and the readers', though; there are no jokes for Josef K, our sorry protagonist (if he can even be called that), since he only realises at the very end that the joke is on him. The more absurd the situation gets, the more serious it gets. Kafka's prose is bone-dry, which just adds to the frustration and confusion of everyone claiming to know what's going on without ever telling us in so many words - you'd almost think they are all just as clueless, that the ones claiming to hold the answers are just deferring their own trials.

So what's the moral of this story? What crime is etched into Josef K's back? What, at the end, do we know about him?

- He's busy. He's 30, he's in the middle of his career (which falls apart as soon as he starts spending more time on his process). He works 12-hour days and doesn't have time for the big questions of guilt, innocence, meaning; the modern world isn't designed for people to spend their days philosophizing.

he did not know what the charge was or even what consequences it might bring, so that he had to remember every tiny action and event from the whole of his life, looking at them from all sides and checking and reconsidering them. It was also a very disheartening job. It would have been more suitable as a way of passing the long days after he had retired and become senile.

- He's arrogant. He's not really a bad guy, he's probably pretty nice in the right context (we're told he regularly hangs out with friends at a pub, but they never show up in the story). But he's just a little too convinced of his own importance, his own ability to handle everything that he comes across. He's critical of others, but he never turns that critical eye towards himself; he keeps claiming he's innocent without ever defining what he's innocent of.

- He's clueless about the law, about how the world works. And he doesn't seek to enlighten himself - it's doubtful if he can, since everyone who claims to know something ultimately has nothing to tell him that's of any use to him.

It's tempting, of course, to incorporate Kafka's own story and background into the interpretation of the story. Much has been made of the question who gets to "claim" Kafka as their own (which would probably be a very strange question to him). Born and raised in the Austro-Hungarian empire (Kakania, as Robert Musil called it in a very deliberate pun), later to live in the republic of Czechoslovakia, a secular Jew with German as his first language (and had he lived another 15 years he would have seen just how dark an irony that turned out to be). Where does he belong? What's his fate? What's anyone's?

There's nothing you can do as a group where the court's concerned. Each case is examined separately, the court is very painstaking. So there's nothing to be achieved by forming into a group, only sometimes an individual will achieve something in secret; and it's only when that's been done the others learn about it; nobody knows how it was done. So there's no sense of togetherness, you meet people now and then in the waiting rooms, but we don't talk much there. The superstitious beliefs were established a long time ago and they spread all by themselves.

(You might compare it to Vonnegut's concept of a granfalloon; a group of people who think or seem to have something crucial in common and act based on that, but the obvious traits that they share and base their togetherness on are actually completely irrelevant.)

On the other hand, one interpretation I've seen is that The Trial was written while Kafka was engaged to a much more socially active woman than he, and that it represents the trials of a socially inept person trying to relate to others without knowing the rules - which is an interesting idea about the inspiration for it, though I don't think that's all it is by a long shot.

Of course, it's also easy to say - just as it is for Metamorphosis - that The Trial is just a metaphored-up story of a young guy who's under a lot of pressure, who doesn't know what this thing called life is supposed to be, is prone to clinical depression, and eventually cracks and kills himself? K's breakdown in the attic is pretty much a description of a full-blown panic attack, after all. Or you can go to the other extreme and point out that this is Europe after the "long 19th century" (1789-1914) that started in progress and enlightenment and ended in war, depression, and the death of pretty much every old truth. The phrase "existentialism" hadn't been invented yet, but Kafka seems to have the concept down: the search for meaning in a seemingly meaningless world. After all the old world has failed, all of humanity finds itself accused of a crime it doesn't understand in a world where it doesn't know the rules.

Perhaps, and again this is just one idea, the entire novel is summed up in the parable told by the preacher towards the end: each door to the Law - each way to understanding the world - is individual. Everyone has to seek it themselves. Then again...

"Don't get me wrong," said the priest, "I'm just pointing out the different opinions about it. You shouldn't pay too much attention to people's opinions. The text cannot be altered, and the various opinions are often no more than an expression of despair over it."

And obviously, there's despair. The Trial is a frustrating work because it doesn't seem to offer any outs, it just gets worse and worse (in a good way) with no end in sight. Then again, a great novel isn't supposed to give clear answers. A great novel is supposed to ask difficult questions and force the reader to think about them. The Trial is one hell of a great novel, and oddly enough it asks its question all the more effectively by never asking it outright.

What did K do to deserve this? What is he accused of?

Nothing. Everything.