Franz Kafka

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The Trial

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Interpretations

1. The Trial is both a hilarious and chilling tale that maintains a constant, relentless atmosphere of disorientation and quirkiness, right up to the surreal ending. Superficially the subject matter is bureaucracy; an illustration of a truly twisted yet realistic brand of law, guilt and church. However, one of the strengths of the novel is in its description of the effect of these circumstances on the life and mind of Josef K. It presents the absurdity of normal human nature, of chasing along with surprise after surprise, yet without direction, and without result.
2. When analyzing The Trial, it is useful to note that the end of the novel, the death scene, was the first part written by Kafka. Josef K. is never told what he is on trial for, and he maintains his innocence almost to the end. He declares his innocence and is immediately questioned "innocent of what?" Is is that Josef K. is on trial for his innocence? For being in-(non)-human, is to be human, to be guilty? By confessing his guilt as a human being, perhaps Josef K. could have freed himself from the proceedings. Then again, was the trial against K. set up because he was incapable of admitting his guilt, and, by extension, his humanity? This theme of not being human, of there not being anything to point to as the "human race", is a theme that Kafka explores throughout his works and a theme that keeps the book fresh, prompting a questioning of the arbitrary customs and beliefs of life which can appear, in the right light, just as bizarre as the goings on in K's life.
3. Yet a fourth interpretation is offered by Kafka's diary around about the time of he began to write the novel. In 1914 he began an engagement with Felice Bauer. In a letter to Felice, he compared their nuptial to a couple who, during the terror after the French Revolution, had been tied together upon the scaffold for execution . He visited Felice in Berlin a few times during that year, and this entailed alot of too-ing and fro-ing. On the last occasion, that of the official engagement ceremony, he notes in his diary of it being like a Trial and a judgement, during which others decided upon his life's plan, and of himself being pushed aside. A subsequent visit to Felice again involved much disputation, during which, again he was merely sidelined, as the words passed over him live a knife. The engagements, it was decided, aught end. Kafka described his letter of farewell, written on the eve of World War I, as his 'speech from the gallows'. He himself, it seems, found the prospect of marriage a threat to the sustencance he received from writing. His writing was mainly done at night, a time at which he would have been expected to sleep with his wife.

In this biographical interpretation it would seem that the Trial is, the engagement, the entering into serious societal relations. Such a reading accounts for Josef K's willingness to partake in his own execution; the execution not being his death but the end of the engagement, that is, the end of the Kafka as a "human", as a familial member of society, and as an ancestor. It also accounts for the bizarre eroticism of "The Trial", the sexual interludes reflecting his private encounters with Felice during the rather public or familial meetings on the issue of their engagement that took place during his visits to Berlin.

Though, of course, such a reading may account for the promptings and correspondence between the book and Kafka's life, the themes explored reach way beyond the scope of this superficial correspondence and reach the depths of thought about society, the family, and writing, that must have arisen during such a cross-roads in Kafka's life. This is especially clear in the Koanic story, related by the prison chaplain, of the man waiting for admittance by the doorman to the court, when the priest says that 'all want to gain admittance to the law'. This admittance to the law, in Lacanian terms could be the impossible desire for the phallus, see Name of the Father. Thus K's execution is his triumph, in that he realised the constant deferment implicit in such desire and instead accepted his fate without withering like the old man waiting his whole life at the door of the court. Kafka too at this time accepted the execution or closure upon himself as a "human", he would not lead that life but that of his own strange world.
4. The (forced) passive role played by Kafka during his engagement and the unprotested interference in his relationship also allows one to interpret the end of this encounter with a women as a homoerotic or sado-erotic key to "The Trial".
5. Another way to interpret The Trial is to consider what Jean-Paul Sartre has to say about it in his book Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate. As the title suggests, the book relates the way Jews receive a world marred with anti-Semitism. That Jewish life in such a world, Sartre argues, is similar to the way Josef K experienced it, and the way Kafka may have experienced it as well. According to Sartre:

"This is perhaps one of the meanings of The Trial by the Jewish, Kafka. Like the hero of that novel, the Jewish person is engaged in a long trial. He does not know his judges, scarcely even his lawyers; he does not know what he is charged with, yet he knows that he is considered guilty; judgment is continually put off -- for a week, two weeks -- he takes advantage of these delays to improve his position in a thousand ways, but every precaution taken at random pushes him a little deeper into guilt. His external situation may appear brilliant, but the interminable trial invisibly wastes him away, and it happens sometimes, as in the novel, that men seize him, carry him off on the pretense that he has lost his case, and murder him in some vague area of the suburbs." [88, Schocken Books].

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The Castle

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