The Trial

Someone must have been telling tales about Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.

Josef K. is awakened one regular morning, on his 30th birthday, expecting to be served breakfast like any other morning, only to find two men in his bedroom. He is told he is under arrest. So begins The Trial by Franz Kafka.

The Trial is an unfinished novel. It was written by Kafka in 1914, shortly following the cancellation of his engagement to his fiancée, Felice Bauer. Like the other unfinished works by Kafka, it was compiled by his longtime friend Max Brod following his death. Kafka kept a diary which gives us lots of insight into his life; from that we know that he started his work on The Trial by writing the first and last chapters first. As for the remaining chapters, some of which are unfinished, we do not actually know with 100% certainty which order Kafka intended these to go in, although the order in the Oxford World Classics edition which I read reproduces the chapters in their generally accepted order. This adds to the dreamlike quality of the novel - although there is a clue in the changing of the seasons (the novel takes place over a year, so passages about the snow or the sun, for example, give us a clue) - the fact that the chapters are largely standalone makes the experience of reading it feel disjointed and off-kilter.

I found myself feeling sympathetic for K., despite the fact that he is presented as an unlikeable character. He learns that true escape from his trial is impossible - we are told that nobody has ever fully exonerated from a trial, they are only able to delay it, or return to their lives but always under the threat of a new trial starting over again. Kafka employs a variety of allegories and symbolic devices to make his point. The court painter Titorelli, after telling him this, implores K. to buy some of his artwork in exchange for the information he has provided; all three of the canvases K. is shown look the same, a “sunset on the heath”. Kafka here is surely illustrating to the audience how the outcome looks identical regardless of which one K. chooses.

It is not difficult to connect the sense of inescapable guilt that K. has with Kafka himself. Fräulein Bürstner appears in the first chapter and seems to reappear in the final chapter of the novel (the two chapters that Kafka wrote first, immediately following his separation from his fiancée). One cannot miss that Bürstner shares the same initials as Kafka’s former partner, F.B., and appears again as K.’s trial approaches its conclusion. The Trial, read through this lens, can be interpreted as an admission of guilt from Kafka following their separation. Perhaps we could put that more strongly and say that Kafka has turned his private sense of shame into an entire judicial system which haunts K.

And what about the judicial system and the court? Well, the hints we are given about it hardly make it sound intimidating. Kafka subverts our expectations of what such a court is like: rather than sitting in a grand, imposing building, K. has to visit tenement buildings in impoverished neighbourhoods, where the court sits in tiny, cramped rooms that are stifling and suffocating. While in one of these buildings, K. spots some books which he expects to be filled with legal writings, though upon inspection they are filled with cheap pornography. Titorelli, the court painter, hosts the judges in his bedroom to paint portraits of them. To access his bedroom, they enter via a door which is behind his bed, they have to clamber over his bed to visit him. Titorelli’s paintings offer another example. In his portrait of one of the judges, the figure of Justice is combined with the Goddess of Victory, but as he works on it, K. remarks that she begins to look more like the Goddess of the Hunt. It is another small indication that this is not a court particularly interested in dispensing justice.

The same subversion appears later in the cathedral. Despite the grandeur of the building itself, the prison chaplain addresses K. from a small secondary pulpit, so cramped that K. wonders how the priest can even stand inside it, rather than from the cathedral’s grand main pulpit. It all adds up to make a mockery of the court, which of course makes you ask the question: why does K. allow this shambles of a court to hound him so much? The court can be corrupt, shabby and absurd; K. recognises all this, and yet allows his life to be corrupted by it. He spends the novel looking for the crime that might explain his guilt. I believe Kafka is saying there isn’t one: K.’s internalised guilt came first, and he is brought to ruin by it. Despite that, we know no more about K.’s supposed crime at the end of the book than at the start of it. There are plenty of loose ends, threads that are left hanging, and contradictions in The Trial, but they somehow feel completely at home in Kafka’s strange and suffocating world.