Not
everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth
reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique
classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.
“THE TRIAL” by Franz Kafka (DER PROZESS written in 1914-15; first
published, posthumously, in German in 1925; Willa and Edwin Muir’s English
translation first published in 1935; many other translations since)
Some time ago on
this blog I made a “Something Old” out of Franz
Kafka’s Metamorphosis [look it up on
the index at right]. I made the case then that the novella Metamorphosis, the longest of Kafka’s
works to be published in his lifetime [1883-1924] was the most perfect of his
works. After all, said I, it was a work of incredible concision and concentrated
meaning, which he had given to the publisher in a finished state; whereas the
three full-length novels for which he is as well known (The Trial, The Castle, America) were left unfinished and
unrevised at his death. The possibility is that, had he lived, he might have
polished them up somewhat. They are, all three of them, open to the charge that
they repeat things in a way they might not have done had Kafka trimmed and
edited them. As is well known, Kafka’s instructions to his friend Max Brod were
that his unpublished works be destroyed when he died. Fortunately for us, Max
Brod ignored Kafka’s request.
I stand by this
view. I still regard Metamorphosis as
his best work. But when I re-read The
Trial recently, I had to admit that its repetitions are part of its
nightmarish power. I also re-read the “Epilogue” that Max Brod contributed to
the edition of Willa and Edwin Muir’s translation [the first translation into
English] that sits on my shelf. Brod boasted that “nearly everything of Kafka’s that was published in his lifetime was
rescued from him by dint of persuasion and guile on my part.” This implies
that even Metamorphosis may not have
been as “finished” as Kafka wanted, though I find this hard to believe. As a
non-specialist, I am also aware that some of the very many biographies of Kafka
that have now been published cast aspersions on Brod’s truthfulness about some
matters and his suppression of some details of Kafka’s life.
A literary
executor is not always the most reliable witness.
Anyway, as I
say, I recently gave The Trial
another go. I did so after having seen three adaptations of it. There was Orson
Welles’ [modernised] 1962 film version of the novel, starring Anthony Perkins
as Josef K. and Jeanne Moreau as Fraulein Burstner. There is, in my DVD
collection, the solid and very literal 1993 film rendition of the story,
scripted by Harold Pinter and starring Kyle MacLachlan as Josef K., Anthony
Hopkins as The Priest and Juliet Stevenson as Fraulein Burstner. And – seen by
me back in 2008 – there was a very good stage adaptation by the Auckland
playwright Dean Parker, performed by an Auckland theatre company. I can forego
my usual bitchings about adaptations by noting that all were very worthwhile,
though Welles’ film now seems very dated.
I will not try
my usual dodge of synopsising this well-known tale. Josef K., for no clear
reason, is arrested and put through the fear of being suspected by the state.
Or, as the opening sentence warns, “Someone
must have been telling lies about Josef K. for without having done anything
wrong he was arrested one fine morning”. But I will note that as I re-read
it, I feared my mind might be overwhelmed by images from all the adaptations I
had seen. This proved not to be the case. The novel itself has very many
details that no adaptation has touched, and its style is the very opposite of
the type of ominous gothic or film noir stylings
that the film renditions give. Despite
the bizarre and irrational nature of the story, the tone (like that of Metamorphosis) is doggedly
matter-of-fact.
I have to see it
as a dream novel. There are all those
intensely visualised settings in improbable places – the court room or the
Advocate’s home in a slummy setting; the transformation from Titorelli’s studio
to the Palace of Justice. As in a dream, things converge and coalesce in ways
that defy waking reality.
I attach much
significance to the fact that it is Josef K’s. 30th birthday when he
is arrested, and the eve of his 31st when he is taken off to be
killed. It also seems significant that Josef K. at first thinks that those who
have come to arrest him are practical jokers and, one year later, that those
who have come to kill him look like cheap actors. This is a story spun from inside Josef K’s psyche and sparked by
the existential fact of his age. Is not 30 (the age Kafka was when he wrote The Trial) when people first begin to
wonder anxiously what they have done with their lives or what they should be
doing? I believe that, decoded, we are getting the story of a man who is self-accused and aware that others are
merely playing a role in the theatre
of his mind. Practical jokers. Cheap actors.
I will not go
here into John Banville’s theory that the story is really a psycho-drama about
Kafka’s on-again off-again relationship with his fiancée. That would reduce it
to no more than psychiatrist’s notes.
Of course there
is some validity to seeing the story as a premonition of totalitarianism.
(Don’t we tend to use the term “Kafkaesque” to mean the terrible, anonymous
power of the state bearing down upon the individual?) We are encouraged in this
interpretation by the fact of Kafka’s Jewishness, and by our knowledge that,
twenty years after his death, members of his family died in Nazi death camps.
But I am not sure that totalitarianism, as we now understand it, was Kafka’s
intended target. The law which he depicts is daunting and irrational, never
laying a clear criminal charge against Josef K. and never offering any clear
path to a resolution. But compared with later totalitarianism, it is relatively
benign. After his “arrest”, Josef K. is free to go about his business. Though
there are the torturers-in-the-cupboard, and Josef K’s eventual murder, the
satire that is offered could be valid even for an open society. It has most to
do with the “law’s delay”, as satirised by Dickens in Bleak House.
Continuing in
the vein of finding satire, it is possible to neatly divide The Trial into satire on police (the
arresters), the law (the Advocate and Examining Magistrate), art (Titorelli)
and religion (The Priest) as inadequate in explaining the human condition.
Titorelli’s explanation that one can never be acquitted of a charge is the
directest attack on the law as a human institution. I also wonder if the
Priest’s complex glossing of his own enigmatic parable isn’t intended to
ridicule over-ingenious biblical commentaries, midrash etc.
Yet, as I say,
this is largely a tale from inside the head of the self-accused Josef K. who,
even though he does not know what he is charged with, finds himself burdened
with a sense of guilt anyway. Of course one can get lost in the badlands of
Kafka biography and wonder whether the tale expresses fear of anti-Semitism,
even if there is no reference to Jewishness in the book, or whether it
expresses the isolation of German-speaking Kafka in Czech Prague. But I think
the sexual element is more essential, with the landlady Frau Grubach and the
tenant Fraulein Burstner and the Advocate’s mistress Leni and all the girls
crowding Titorelli’s door. Josef K. rages silently with unfulfilled desire. (Of
Fraulein Burstner, he “rushed out, seized
her, and kissed her first on the lips, then all over the face, like some
thirsty animal lapping greedily at a spring of long-sought fresh water” –
end of Chapter One).
This is one of those waking dreams in which we
have to justify our most private life in front of a court of law – except that
there is no real trial and death is arbitrary. In this respect, maybe it is
about God after all.
Let us not
forget Kafka’s deadpan humour, as when Joseph K’s landlady worries about her
house being respectable and Josef K. retorts Groucho-esquely “Respectable! If you want to keep your house
respectable you’d have to begin by giving me notice.” (Chapter One). Let us
not forget the foretaste of “I was only obeying orders!” when the one of the
arresters who wields a whip says to Joseph K’s objections “What you say sounds reasonable enough, but I refuse to be bribed. I am
here to whip people, and whip them I shall.” (Chapter Five). And, in case
we forget the scary and louring element, let us not forget Josef K’s suggestion
that Titorelli’s painting of Justice “no
longer suggested the goddess of Justice, or even the Goddess of Victory, but
looked exactly a Goddess of the Hunt in full cry.” (Chapter Seven)
Like all good
art, it is complex, resists a simple formula and, at least on a second reading,
is not as flawed by its inconsistencies as I thought it was the first time I
read it.
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