The Trial

Franz Kafka, Richard Stokes

• Publisher: Alma Classics
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780714548821
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Classiques

On his thirtieth birthday, the bank clerk Josef K. is suddenly arrested by mysterious agents for an unspecified crime. He is told that he will be set free, but must make regular appearances at a court in the attic of a tenement building while his trial proceeds. Although he never comes to know the particulars of his case, Josef K. finds his life taken over by the opaque bureaucratic procedures and is tormented by the psychological pressures exerted by his legal nightmare. Published the year after the author's death, but written ten years earlier, The Trial is the most acclaimed of Kafka's three novels, and is both a haunting meditation on freedom and the powerlessness of the individual in the face of state power, and an ominous prefiguration of the totalitarian excesses of the twentieth century.

Introduction

The publication in 1967 of Briefe an Felice (Letters to Felice) led to a reinterpretation of many of Kafka’s works, including The Trial. These letters to Felice Bauer, to whom Kafka was twice engaged, revealed the extent to which the novel represented an attempt by Kafka to solve a life crisis that was threatening not only his ability to write but his sanity. Autobiographical interpretations of any novel are notoriously unreliable, but in the case of Franz Kafka the connection between life and literature is indisputable. Both Josef K. and Kafka were valued employees in their respective professions; both were bachelors; both were outsiders, unable to integrate successfully with society. Several details in the text make it clear that the novel is set in Prague, where Kafka was living at the time of its composition; and Fräulein Bürstner’s name almost always appears as F.B. in the manuscript of The Trial – the same initials as Felice Bauer.

Kafka’s first meeting with her took place on 13th August 1912 at the house of Max Brod’s parents. Kafka wrote in his diary:

“Frl. Felice Bauer: when I arrived at Brod’s on 13. viii she was sitting at the table and looked like a servant.”

The importance of this encounter emerged just over a month later when Kafka – who had written Das Urteil (The Sentence) “at one sitting”, starting on the evening of 22nd September 1912 and finishing it on the 23rd – dedicated the story to Felice Bauer. It deals with Georg Bendemann who, having become engaged, wishes to found a family and free himself from his father’s influence – a situation which mirrored Kafka’s relationship with his own father. Marriage as a means to freedom is an important theme in Kafka’s writings and receives its most extended treatment in Brief an den Vater (1919).

Yet marriage, in Kafka’s eyes, meant that he would be compelled to renounce his calling as a writer. On 13th July he writes a contradictory passage in his diary:

“Incapable of tolerating life alone… I must be alone much of the time. My achievements are merely a result of being alone.”

This conflict – the wish to share his life with a woman and the fear of thereby jeopardizing his freedom to write – can be seen in the way he twice broke off his engagement to Felice. He first proposed to her during early June 1914 in Berlin; soon after his return to Prague, however, he confides to his diary (6th June 1914):

“Have returned from Berlin. I felt bound like a criminal – no worse than if I had been chained up in a corner and could only be visited with policemen present.”

Kafka’s fear of marriage, which he now regards as a sort of incarceration, intensifies in the following weeks; his letters to Felice become cooler; he warns her of the dangers of marriage. Realizing that he is causing her anguish, he travels to Berlin on 20th July with a close friend, Ernst Weiss, in order to meet Felice and discuss his predicament. The diary entry of 23rd July 1914 describes their discussions, his meeting with her parents and the breaking off of their engagement.

Back in Prague, he begins his life of solitude. Many of his friends and acquaintances had been called up to fight in the war, including his two brothers-in-law. His eldest sister Elly, now that her husband was at the front, moved with her children into the parental home, leaving Kafka free to live in her house. On 3rd August 1914 he writes in his diary:

“Alone at my sister’s… Utter solitude. No longed-for wife opens the door. Within a month I would have had to marry. A terrible word.”

Equally terrible, however, was the solitude. The only way to make sense of this lonely existence was through literature. Through writing. To justify the life he had chosen, it was imperative for him to write an important work. Inspiration is imminent. On 7th August 1914 he writes:

“Yesterday and today I wrote four sides, insignificant trifles…”

And on 15th August:

“I’ve been writing for a few days now, and hope it continues. I’m not yet as secure and immersed in work as I was two years ago, but my life has acquired a meaning, my regulated, empty, insane bachelor existence has acquired a justification. I can once more conduct a dialogue with myself, and no longer sit staring into an utter void. Only this way can things improve.”

The new work in question was none other than The Trial, as we learn from the diary entry for 21st August 1914:

“Began with such hopes and have suffered setbacks with all three stories, especially today. Perhaps it’s right that I should only work on the Russian story [‘Erinnerungen an die Kaldabahn’] after The Trial. With such risible hope, clearly based merely on mechanical imagination, I am starting The Trial again. – Not entirely without success.”

In the following weeks he works frenetically at the novel, and from 11th August to 1st October completes two-thirds of the work. His frenzy is mirrored in his method. He begins with the first and last chapters, then fills in the middle, working on several chapters at once, without sketches or any preliminary planning. When at the beginning of October inspiration begins to flag, he takes a week off work in an attempt to finish the novel. The events of the novel echo this creative struggle. In the chapter called “Lawyer. Manufacturer. Painter”, K. decides to compose a written petition, a defence document, but has to recognize that “the difficulties of drawing up the petition were overwhelming”. And a few lines later there is a passage that quite clearly alludes obliquely to the difficulties Kafka was encountering in finishing his novel: “Today K. no longer felt any shame, the petition had to be drafted. If he could find no time for this at the office, which was very likely, he would have to do it in his lodgings at night. And if the nights were not enough, he would have to take a holiday.” A passage from the chapter entitled “In the Cathedral” further confirms Kafka’s problems with writer’s block: “‘Are you aware that your trial is going badly?’ the priest asked. ‘That’s how it looks to me too,’ K. said. ‘I’ve tried as hard as I possibly can, but so far without success. Of course, I haven’t completed my petition yet.’” When this passage was written in November 1914, Kafka feared he would never finish the novel, and the diary bears witness to his rapidly increasing despair: “For four days now I’ve hardly worked, an hour at most and only a few lines” (21st October). The next day he confesses: “Work has come to a virtual standstill.” Five weeks later, on 30th November 1914, he has reached his nadir: “I can write no more. I have reached my end.”

His thoughts turn once more to Felice. “Toy with the idea of returning to F.” (1st November). And on 30th November he writes with withering honesty: “…I should like for the time being to win F. again. I shall definitely attempt it, provided that revulsion at myself does not prevent me.” He writes to her and arranges a meeting in January 1915. On 20th January 1915 he finishes The Trial. Two days later he meets Felice in Bodenbach on the Czech border, and although his diary entry shows the encounter was not a success (she listened passively as he read her extracts from The Trial and merely made a lukewarm request to borrow the manuscript), they renewed their engagement in July 1917, only to break it off in December of the same year. They were poles apart. Kafka complained to his diary that whereas he was determined to live for literature, Felice was more interested in “cosy accommodation, the factory, plentiful food, a heated room and sleep from 11 p.m. on’. In a letter to Max Brod, dated 17th November, he confesses that he has been a failure in his family, his profession, society, and as a lover. The final sentence of The Trial has an unmistakably autobiographical ring about it: “It was as if the shame would outlive him.”

A detailed reading of Letters to Felice and the diaries suggests that Kafka wrote the novel to justify the existence he had chosen – The Trial, in other words, represents his written defence in the trial he had in his imagination initiated against himself, and which was to consider the warring claims of literature and family life – an interpretation that becomes apparent when in the penultimate chapter, “In the Cathedral”, the priest says to K. (who has just explained the difficulties he was experiencing in “completing his petition”): “You seek too much outside help, especially from women.”

– Richard Stokes

The Trial

Arrest

Someone must have been slandering Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested. The cook, employed by his landlady Frau Grubach, who brought him his breakfast each morning at about eight o’clock, failed to appear. That had never happened before. K. waited for a while and, with his head on the pillow, looked at the old lady in the house opposite who was observing him with a quite uncharacteristic curiosity, but then, feeling both hungry and disturbed, he rang the bell. At once there was a knock at the door and a man entered whom he had never seen in the house before. He was slim and yet solidly built, he wore a closely fitting black suit which, like a traveller’s outfit, was provided with various pleats, pockets, buckles, buttons and a belt, and as a result seemed eminently practical, although its purpose remained unclear. “Who are you?” K. asked, and immediately began to sit up in bed. But the man ignored the question, as if his presence required no explanation, and merely said: “You rang?” “Tell Anna to bring me my breakfast,” said K., trying to work out through silent observation and reflection who the man could be. The man, however, did not submit to this scrutiny for long, but turned instead to the door which he opened a little in order to tell someone who was clearly standing directly behind it: “He wants Anna to bring him his breakfast.” There was a brief snigger from the adjoining room, and it was not clear from the sound whether several people might not be involved. Although the stranger could scarcely have learnt anything new from this, he now said to K., as if making an announcement: “That is not possible.” “I’ve never heard that before,” said K., who leapt out of bed and quickly pulled on his trousers. “I must find out who these people are in there, and see what explanation Frau Grubach can give for such a disturbance.” He realized at once, of course, that he should not have said this out loud, and that by doing so he had in a sense acknowledged the stranger’s right to preside over his actions, but it did not seem important to him at that moment. Still, the stranger took it in that way, for he said: “Hadn’t you better stay here?” “I have no wish to stay here nor to be addressed by you, until you tell me who you are.” “I was only trying to help,” the stranger said, and now opened the door of his own accord. The adjoining room, which K. entered more slowly than he had intended, looked at first glance almost exactly as it had done the previous evening. It was Frau Grubach’s living room, perhaps there was slightly more space than usual among all the furniture, rugs, china and photographs with which it was crammed, but it was not immediately obvious, especially as the most striking change was the presence of a man who was sitting at the open window, reading a book, from which he now looked up. “You should have stayed in your room! Didn’t Franz tell you that?” “Yes, but what do you want?” K. asked, looking from this new acquaintance to the man called Franz, who was still standing in the doorway, and then back again. Through the open window the old woman could be seen again, she had moved with truly senile curiosity to the window exactly opposite, so that she could continue to keep an eye on everything. “I wish to see Frau Grubach—” K. said, making a move to break free from the two men and leave the room, even though they were standing some distance away from him. “No,” said the man at the window, and he threw the book onto a small table and stood up. “You may not leave, you’ve been arrested.” “So it seems,” said K. “But why?” he asked. “We are not authorized to tell you. Go to your room and wait. Proceedings have already been initiated, and you will be told everything in due course. I’m doing more than I should by talking to you in such a friendly way. But I hope no one can hear except Franz, and he himself has defied regulations by being so friendly towards you. If you continue in the future to be as fortunate as you have been in your warders, you will have reason to be confident.” K. wanted to sit down, but then saw that there was no seat in the entire room, except the chair by the window. “You’ll come to realize the truth of all this,” said Franz, as he walked towards him with the other man. The latter in particular towered over K. and kept tapping him on the shoulder. Both of them examined K.’s nightshirt, and said that he would now have to wear one of much poorer quality, but that they would look after this one and the rest of his underwear which, if his case turned out well, they would return to him. “It’s better to give us these things than hand them over to the depot,” they said, “because a fair amount of theft goes on at the depot, and besides, they sell everything after a time, regardless of whether the proceedings in question have been concluded or not. And you can’t imagine how long cases like this have taken, especially recently! Of course you’d get the proceeds from the depot in the end, but firstly, they don’t amount to very much, because the price is not based on the size of the offer but on the size of the bribe, and secondly, experience shows that such proceeds dwindle, as year by year they pass from hand to hand.” K. hardly paid any attention to these remarks, he attached little importance to any rights he might have to dispose of his own things, it was much more important for him to get a clear picture of his position, but he could not even think in the presence of these men; the belly of the second warder – they could of course be no more than warders – kept prodding him in a positively friendly way, yet if he looked up, he caught sight of a face that was completely at odds with that fat body, a desiccated, bony face with a prominent nose, twisted to one side, that was conferring above his head with the other warder. What sort of people were they? What were they talking about? To which authority did they belong? K., after all, lived in a legal state, there was universal peace in the land, all the laws were upheld, who had the temerity to assault him in his own home? He had always tended to take things lightly, to believe the worst only when the worst happened, making no provision for the future, even when everything looked black and threatening. But that did not now seem to be the right approach, one could of course consider the whole thing a joke, a crude joke which for some unknown reason his colleagues at the bank were playing on him, perhaps because today was his thirtieth birthday, that was of course possible, perhaps all he had to do was laugh knowingly in the warders’ faces and they would laugh with him, perhaps they were porters picked off the street, they were not unlike porters – nonetheless, from the moment he had first seen the warder called Franz, he had been utterly determined not to surrender even the slightest advantage he might hold over these people. K. knew there was a slight risk that someone might say later that he could not take a joke, but although it was not in his nature to learn from experience, he remembered a few incidents, unimportant in themselves, when, unlike his friends, he had deliberately set out to behave recklessly without the slightest regard for possible consequences, and had suffered as a result. That was not going to happen again, not this time at any rate, if it was all a piece of play-acting, he would go along with it.

He was still free. “Excuse me,” he said, and walked quickly between the warders into his room. “He seems a reasonable fellow,” he heard one of them say behind him. Having reached his room, he quickly opened the drawer of his desk, where everything lay in perfect order, but he was so agitated that he could not at first find the identity papers he was looking for. Eventually he found his bicycle licence and was about to take this to the warders when it occurred to him that the document was too trivial, and he went on looking until he found his birth certificate. As he was going back into the next room, the door opposite opened and Frau Grubach was preparing to come in. She was only visible for a second, for as soon as she saw K. she was clearly seized with embarrassment, apologized, vanished and shut the door with the utmost care. “But please come in,” was all that K. had been able to say. But now he stood with his papers in the middle of the room, still looking at the door, which did not open again, until he was roused by a shout from the warders who were sitting at a table by the open window and devouring, as he now saw, his breakfast. “Why didn’t she come in?” he asked. “She’s not allowed to,” the tall warder said, “you’re under arrest.” “But how can I be under arrest? Especially in this manner?” “You’re at it again,” the warder said, and dipped his slice of bread and butter in the honeypot. “We don’t answer questions like that.” “You’ll have to answer them,” K. told him. “Here are my identity papers. Now show me yours, especially the warrant for my arrest.” “Good God!” the warder said, “why can’t you just accept your situation, instead of insisting on annoying us unnecessarily, we who are probably now closer to you than anyone else you know.” “It’s true, take our word for it,” said Franz, not raising the coffee cup to his lips but staring at K. with a long and no doubt meaningful yet incomprehensible look. Without wishing to, K. found himself drawn into a staring match with Franz, but at last he thumped his papers and said: “Here are my identity papers.” “What’s that got to do with anything?” the tall warder cried out. “You’re behaving worse than a child. What is it you want? Do you think you’ll get this wretched case of yours over quicker by wrangling with us, your warders, about identity papers and arrest warrants? We are lowly officials who can barely understand such documents, and our only role in your case is to guard you for ten hours a day and get paid for it. That’s all we are, but we are quite capable of understanding that the high authorities we serve, before ordering such an arrest, inform themselves in great detail about the reasons for that arrest and the person they’re arresting. There’s no possibility of a mistake. Our officials, in as much as I know them, and I know only the lowest category, never go looking for guilt in the population, but are, as the law states, attracted by guilt and must then send us warders out. That’s the law. Where could there be a mistake in that?” “I don’t know this law,” K. said. “So much the worse for you,” the warder said. “It probably only exists in your imagination,” said K., who wanted somehow to insinuate his way into his warders’ thoughts, turn them to his own advantage or accustom himself to them. But the warder merely said dismissively: “You soon will.” Franz interrupted and said: “See, Willem, he admits he doesn’t know the law, yet claims he’s innocent.” “You’re quite right, but it’s impossible to make a man like that see reason,” the other said. K. said nothing more; “Do I really have to let myself be confused,” he thought, “by the idle talk of these mere minions, for they admit themselves that’s all they are. In any case, they’re talking of things they simply don’t understand. It’s only their stupidity that gives them such confidence. A few words with someone on my own intellectual level would make everything incomparably clearer than talking interminably with these two.” He paced up and down a few times in the uncluttered part of the room, across the way he saw the old woman who had pulled a much older man to the window and was now holding him in a tight embrace; K. felt he must put an end to this farce: “Take me to your superior,” he said. “When he’s so inclined, not before,” said the warder called Willem. “And now I advise you,” he added, “to go to your room, stay calm and wait and see what they decide to do with you. We advise you not to get distracted by useless thoughts, but to pull yourself together, great demands will be made on you. We have deserved better treatment from you, considering how accommodating we’ve been, you are forgetting that, whatever else we may be, we are at least free men compared with you, that is no small advantage. Nonetheless we are prepared, if you have money, to bring you a little breakfast from the café opposite.”

K. stood still for a little while, without replying to this offer. Perhaps if he were to open the door of the adjoining room or even the door into the hall, neither of them would dare to stop him, perhaps the simplest solution would be to bring the whole matter to a head. On the other hand they might indeed grab hold of him, and once he had been knocked to the floor he would lose all the superiority which, in a sense, he still had over them. He therefore preferred the safety of whatever solution would arise in the natural course of events, and went back to his room without another word being said by either him or the warders.

He threw himself onto his bed and took from the bedside table a nice apple he had put aside the previous evening for his breakfast. It was all the breakfast he would be having now, and yet it was, as he told himself when he took his first big bite, much better than the breakfast he would have had from the filthy night café, as a favour from the warders. He felt confident and at ease, although he was missing work at the bank this morning, that would easily be excused in view of the comparatively high position he held there. Should he give the real reason? He intended to do so. If they didn’t believe him, which would be understandable in the circumstances, he could call Frau Grubach as a witness or even the two old people across the way, who were probably even now moving to the window opposite him. It surprised K., at least from the warders’ perspective, that they had forced him into the room and left him alone there, where it would be ten times easier to kill himself. At the same time he asked himself, from his own perspective, what reason he could possibly have for doing that. Because the pair of them were sitting in the next room and had intercepted his breakfast? Killing himself would have been so senseless that, even if he had wanted to, its very senselessness would have prevented...