‘A hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning’: the synthetic nature of confusion in Kafka’s The Trial

The last judgement is the youngest day, and it is a day surpassing all days. Not that judgement is reserved for the end of time. On the contrary, justice won’t wait; it is to be done at every instant, to be realized all the time, and studied also (it is to be learned). Every just act (are there any?) makes of its day the last day or – as Kafka said – the very last: a day no longer situated in the ordinary succession of days but one that makes of the most commonplace ordinary, the extraordinary.

-The Writing of the Disaster, Maurice Blanchot

Approaching Kafka’s novels with an absolute lack of foreknowledge is becoming increasingly difficult; to read Kafka is to have expectations, either of his work or of the man. His name has been transformed into an adjective universally descriptive of a certain kind of literary artistry, the ‘Kafkaesque’, a word which instantly contains within itself ideas of literature in which ‘clarity and enveloping murk’ collide.¹ Perhaps for these reasons, George Steiner states that ‘the thought that there is anything fresh to be said of Franz Kafka’s The Trial is implausible’, noting that first time readers of the novel find themselves feeling a sense of overwhelming familiarity with its shape and structure.² Nevertheless, critical interpretations of this ‘inexhaustible text’ continue to proliferate, suggesting that the process of reading the novel is in itself an act of cyclical and never ending interpretation. The Trial is a product of ‘the most obscure lucidity in the history of literature, a phenomenon that, like a word one has on the tip of one’s tongue, perpetually attracts and at the same time repels the search for what it is and means.’ ³ This multiplicity of interpretative possibilities is reflective of one of the novel’s main thematic concerns: the quest for understanding a multitude of hidden meanings. Kafka’s work is ‘a literature that contains within itself its own undoing’, both dealing with and signifying the endless quest of literature to find or give voice to a semblance of truth in the human experience.⁴

The Trial chronicles the disintegration of one man’s sense of security as provided by the rhythms and routines of daily life. The story of Joseph K. is the story of the pervasive corruption of familiarity, in which all that which is held to be real and unalterable is suddenly revealed to be transitory and ultimately irrelevant. Thematically, the idea develops within K.’s inability to comprehend the truth; structurally, the unconnected chapters and fragmented events of the text heighten the sense of paralyzing immobility one feels during the search; finally, on a narrative level, the refusal of the plot to develop coherently both reflects and activates the reader’s aesthetic incomprehension. The text moves the concept of the trial as mystery to the foreground by allowing the protagonist’s thoughts to endlessly dwell on it while simultaneously disallowing any action or movement to develop in relation to the predicament. Instead of portraying the struggle K. faces in relation to the main dilemma, the text constantly presents an endless list of digressions which relate to it on a merely superficial level. On the level of textual coherence, none of the main events of The Trial are about K.’s trial. His visit to the Painter, his frustration with the Assistant Manager, his dealings with his fellow tenants; none of them directly involve what we imagine to be the main plot. In some way or another, K.’s mission repeatedly circles back upon itself, leaving both the protagonist and the reader out of the loop. Frank Kermode postulates that this is because the novel’s main way of working is through ‘an uninterpretable radiance’, in which mystery upon mystery combine so that understanding is ultimately impossible.⁵ The Trial is thus a novel that is structured on the premise that chaos can be ‘manufactured’ and embedded within the very structures of the world on several levels, reflecting both the struggle of the human mind with itself and its external context.

On a surface level, this duality results in a dynamic of conflict between the ‘real’ and ‘manufactured’ confusion, forcing us to question to what extent K.’s situation is imagined or constructed by his psyche and which parts of the text accurately reflect the situation objectively. For most of the duration of The Trial, Joseph K. appears to hover between a reality external to himself (manifested in the Law Courts and the Bank) and his own private preoccupations (such as his moral dilemmas when dealing with Fraulein Burstner and his affections for the elusive Elsa).The narrative technique employed in The Trial allows for the two to overlap into one another, giving the illusion of disorder in a text which essentially thrives on portraying systematic schemes and social hierarchies. Heller traces the way in which Joseph K., along with the reader, is ‘persistently frustrated in his search for a rational explanation’ and by the end of the novel ‘effectively learns that he cannot understand.’ ⁶ The reader is at least as alienated in relation to the text as Joseph K. is in relation to the court. K.’s failure to penetrate the inner workings of the Law reflect the aesthetic experience offered by The Trial, that of the inability of imposing a logical pattern. Both the protagonist and the reader thus ‘play a nightmarish game of interpretation as the narrative progresses, always harboring its secret and only allowing for those glimpses of illumination that blind’ ⁷ us to the possibility of aesthetic unity. Thrown into an endless list of meetings with minor characters and distracting events, The Trial‘s aesthetic may be best understood to thrive on the absence of a focaliser, forcing the reader to adopt a ‘wandering viewpoint’ to move through the text, gaining and discarding information based on what the text seems to indicate as important. This relationship between what Wolfgang Iser identifies as retention and protension adds yet another dynamic to the labyrinth of The Trial.⁸ This manufacturing of confusion is one of the main weapons of Kafka’s social critique of oppressive and confusing represented bureaucracy, represented by the thick and heavy air of the legal offices, which make it almost impossible to breathe, as described by the Usher:

The sun burns down on the roof and the hot wood makes the air so thick and heavy. It makes this place rather unsuitable for offices, whatever other advantages it might offer. But the air is almost impossible to breathe on days when there’s a lot of business, and that’s almost every day.

This description, in itself typical of Kafka’s narrative style, highlights nothing of the extraordinary or absurd with which The Trial is often connected. Much of the novel transpires in quasi-identical sets of corridors, waiting rooms, offices, and bedrooms, all of them normal and familiar locations, fixtures of daily routines. These settings are described as ‘oppressive’, and ‘uncomfortable’ and serve to trap K. on yet another level: the spatial. His confused wanderings about the Law Court offices overtly parallel his stumbling relationships with those around him and his limited understanding of the accusations being brought against him. By focusing on the oppressive nature of urban living, Kafka renders a world in which the normal appears to be increasingly fractured, illogical and unnatural. The houses, banks, law courts, and churches are always described with a naturalistic affinity towards atmospheric detail; the language employed is spare and would traditionally be described as realism. The locations are often limited to a highly normal network of offices, in which a faceless mass of workers and officials operate. The ‘magical’ quality of this realism asserts itself in Kafka’s manipulation of situation itself and how it relates to the reality of the world known to the reader. Throughout the novel, this technique is used repeatedly to juxtapose what one might call daily existence against a sense of mystery. In order to bring out his aesthetic of manufactured confusion in the novel, Kafka inserts the unexplainable neatly into ‘the real’ world of bureaucracies and institutions; K.’s encounter with the Whipper torturing the Warders in his bank is an evident manifestation of this technique. Since the inexplicable is described in the same level tone as ‘the real’, it is transformed into the ‘surreal’, in which reality and the dreamworld seem to blend together. From the very first sentence, the flow of narrative is engulfed in unresolved enigmas as well as partial answers, snares, and delays that are deliberately activated in the course of the novel as part of its aesthetic.

The urban world in The Trial becomes both empty of meaning and teeming with the unexpected yet hidden layers of a revelation that never comes. The labyrinthine forces conspiring against K. are, of essence, tangibly artificial and man-made, created by people to rule people. The systems that are in place to uphold them are rigidly human and familiar and conspire to give a sense of place that is supposed to be normal. In The Trial, a bed is always a bed in functional terms; yet the text always serves to uncover an ulterior aspect to the seemingly fixed materiality of things. The court painter, Titorelli’s bed, for instance, frustratingly blocks the only other exit available from his rented and cramped studio apartment. This situation is hardly supernatural; it seems to arise logically out of the spatial situation available, yet it resonates of hidden layers of meaning on several levels. This transition from a world of quiet order to a world of chaotic oppression in Kafka’s novels is ‘invariably set in motion by a disturbance of some kind’ which in The Trial occurs at the very opening of the novel, when Joseph K. is arrested in bed with no further explanation. After this event, throughout the novel, K.’s unquestioning belief in the social order he is surrounded with is thrown into confusion by his inability to comprehend the alien and surreal quality of the Law which suddenly shackles him, prompting his faith in all the institutions of life to crumble until nothing is left but a lurid acceptance of an inevitable fate. The disturbing event is allowed to resonate throughout the entire novel, ‘setting in motion all that must inevitably follow.’ For K., now, none of the familiar events and places ever conjure a sense of coherent meaning again; rather, everything slides along at a frenetic pace so that the obvious human quality of it all is glossed over into a series of seemingly unchangeable facts. This interpretation of the novel’s structure allows for little room for a reading in which free will ultimately asserts itself. The implication here is that The Trial is an exploration of causality, of action and effect, making the ‘work as a whole the sum of countless variations on this one formal theme’.⁹ Yet if the text is a series of chain reactions, and there is nothing to explain what created the ‘disturbing event’ in the first place, it is replaced by an essential hollowness within the novel. This sense of emptiness therefore manufactures much of the resultant confusion throughout the text. The absolute absence of explanation as to what K.’s crime might be thus inverts the function of this ordered structure and transforms the process of the trial into a mystery in its most essential sense: the unresolved, never answered question:

The ultimate end of the juridical regulation is to produce judgment; but judgment aims neither to punish not to extol, nether to establish justice nor to prove the truth. Judgment is in itself the end and this, it has been said, constitutes its mystery, the mystery of the trial.¹⁰

The idea of the ‘uncanny’ which is associated with the text, however, is not located solely externally to K. It is also within him; in the sense of an invisible force opposing his every move. His reactions to it subvert the sense of order and manufacture confusion. Even accounting for the absurdity of his situation, however, Joseph K. is not a likable character. The text continually presents K. as a mundane human being; a meticulous and ordered man who lives life to the letter. Although he harbours illusions of grandeur and importance, K.’s is slowly revealed – to the reader, and to himself – to have no real power over the events which befall him. K.’s inability to understand the nature of his predicament – or perhaps his refusal to do so – reveals his essentially limited perspective on life. Although K.’s efforts to gain understanding about the situation seem to be proactive, since he visits the offices of the law courts more than once and travels around the oppressive city visiting potential leads, in truth his actions towards his supposed goal are all crippled by his incessant need to get back to his interrupted life. K.’s method of dealing with the mystery of the case is essentially a lethargic one: although he talks of doing actions such as dismissing the Lawyer, they never translate into tangible movement or take a significant amount of time to do so. Rather than actually gathering his energies and channeling them in movement as he is advised to do; K. is shown dithering and wasting time. As his case proceeds (or rather, doesn’t) he becomes increasingly disconnected from the reality around him, as he spends an increasing number of hours simply staring out of his office window:

He went over to the window, sat down on the ledge beside it, held firmly on to the handle and looked down onto the square outside. The snow was still falling, the weather still had not brightened up at all.

He remained a long time sitting in this way, not knowing what it actually was that made him so anxious, only occasionally did he glance, slightly startled, over his shoulder at the door to the outer room where, mistakenly, he thought he’d heard some noise. No-one came, and that made him feel calmer, he went over to the wash stand, rinsed his face with cold water and, his head somewhat clearer, went back to his place by the window.¹¹

This scene repeats itself several times over the course of the text, and is central to understanding K.’s positioning himself in relation to what he perceives to be an external challenge to be overcome. However, as more time passes without any visible progress, he is  ‘no longer able to get the thought of the trial out his head. ‘ K. is shown to be a helpless man who succumbs to anxiety, and through him, the reader can see the condition of modern humanity. Joseph K. thus epitomises the ultimate form of the synthetic aspect of the novel. His life has been molded by artificial forces both within and external to himself into a repetitive pattern, which when challenged mutates into the horror of ‘the trial.’  His life is one based on monotony and the repetition of the daily cycle of work, out of which he is unable to function correctly. Confronted with a sense of malevolent and incomprehensible destiny, the protagonist of The Trial is unable to completely disconnect from his understanding of humanity, law, and order; and is finally damned for it.

Joseph K.’s death at the very end of the novel mirrors his rude awakening at its beginning. While in one he had been yanked out of a structured system only to find himself enmeshed in a more complex one, his death signifies his absurd realisation that since ‘logic is doubtless unshakeable’; he must have overlooked some arguments in favour of his case. In both situations, a previous state of assumption must be shed in order for a new one to take its place. In this sense, the reader too must ‘die’, at the end of the novel in order to appreciate the text, in line with Vladimir Nabokov’s judgment that the ideal reader is an ‘an active and creative reader (and) is a re-reader.’ ¹² The Trial both creates and requires this kind of reader: as Camus states, ‘the whole of Kafka’s art consists in compelling the reader to re-read him’.¹³ Kafka’s unfinished, mysterious The Trial seems to look towards both a textual and interpretative infinity, in which re-readings, and interpretations will continue to be constructed for years.

Endnotes

¹ Chris Power, ‘A Brief Survey of the Short Story, Part 13: Franz Kafka’ in The Guardian <http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/jan/06/kafka-short-story> [accessed 1 February 2010].

² George Steiner, ‘Introduction’ to The Trial (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1992), p. ii.

³ Eric Heller, ‘The Trial’ in Franz Kafka (New York: Viking Press, 1974) pp. 71-97.

⁴ Natalie Lam, ‘Reaching for the Axe: Kafka and the Language of Power,’ in Boston University <https://www.bu.edu/cas/writing/docs/wrjournal1lam.pdf> [accessed 1 February 2010].

⁵ Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979).

⁶ Lam, p. 13.

⁷ Heller, cited in Harold Bloom (ed.) Alienation, p.175.

⁸ Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980).

⁹ Martin Walser, ‘On Kafka’s Novels’, in The World of Franz Kafka, ed. by J. P. Stern, trans. by Allan Blunden (London: George Weidenfeld and Nicolson Limited, 1980), pp. 87-101.

¹⁰ Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 2002).

¹¹ Franz Kafka, The Trial (New York: Viking Penguin, 1987).

¹² Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, ed. by Fredson Bowers (California: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980).

¹³ Albert Camus, ‘Hope and Absurdity’, in The Kafka Problem, ed. by Angel Flores (New York: Gordian Press, 1963).

Works Cited

Agamben, G., Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 2002)

Camus, A., ‘Hope and Absurdity,’ in The Kafka Problem, ed. by Angel Flores (New York: Gordian Press, 1963)

Heller, E., ‘The Trial’ in Franz Kafka (New York: Viking Press, 1974)

Iser, W., The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980)

Kermode, F., The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979)

Lam, N., ‘Reaching for the Axe: Kafka and the Language of Power,’ <https://www.bu.edu/cas/writing/docs/wrjournal1lam.pdf> [accessed 1 February 2010]

Nabokov, V., Lectures on Literature, ed. by Fredson Bowers (California: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980)

Power, C., ‘A Brief Survey of the Short Story, Part 13: Franz Kafka’ <http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/jan/06/kafka-short-story> [accessed 1 February 2010]

Steiner, G., Introduction to ‘The Trial’ (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1992)

Walser, M., ‘On Kafka’s Novels’, in The World of Franz Kafka, ed. by J. P. Stern, trans. by Allan Blunden (London: George Weidenfeld and Nicolson Limited, 1980)

Be Sociable, Share!

•