The Trial
This month we’re looking at true crime, but since I start a five Sunday month with fiction, this weeks book is The Trial by Franz Kafka.
Franz Kafka was an Austrian Czech Jewish author, born in 1883 and died in 1924 just before his 41st birthday, and his name is now used to describe absurd situations, usually from which there is no escape. So when you hear someone say its Kafkaesque, it means something is senseless, disorienting, and often with menacing complexity. Surreal distortion and looming danger.
And that basically sums up The Trial, which opens with Mr. Josef K. and we are never given a last name for Josef, he’s just called K. throughout the book, but K. wakes up one morning and his usual breakfast has not been delivered to his room. After laying there for a bit, he opens the door to find two men in the outer chamber and they advise him he was under arrest. No idea what for, the charge is literally never mentioned in the book.
I would presume not murder, since after being told he was under arrest, he was allowed to go to work, which was a bank where he was chief clerk, but something bad enough that kids later in the book describe him as “an ‘orrible man!”
K. assumes it’s all lies, because he can’t think of anything he’s done that could land him in legal hot water, but it’s very confusing to him. And to me. And I dare say this is the difference between growing up American in the 20th/21st century and growing up under the Hapsburg dynasty at the end of the 19th century. In America, if they don’t tell you what you’re under arrest for and then let you go about your day like nothing unusual happened, you’d assume it was a joke, tell everyone under the sun about the prank some rando tried to play on you, and have a good laugh at the bar.
But for K. the social stigma of being placed under arrest was such that he doesn’t say a word, just quietly deals with the stress of it at home and at work. He receives a call a few days later advising him that his court case would be this coming weekend and given directions to a building where the court will be held, and it is NOT the usual courthouse. So again…American’s would be like fuck right off with that nonsense. But K., wanting to clear the air and sleep easy at night, goes to the building, assuming at 9am since that’s when courts usually happen, only to find that he was not given a room number. So he knocks on several doors until he finds the right one. And the room is PACKED with people, before whom K. gives a very impassioned speech about the absurdity of the whole situation. Which goes over like a fart in church.
And the die is cast for a very confusing story. Which, if you go to the Wikipedia page for The Trial, you’ll understand why. Kafka wrote the opening and ending chapters first, with the middle parts kind of bundled together into loose chapters, but no real indication of what order the chapters should be set in. One chapter literally ends “This chapter is left unfinished.”
Wikipedia says the story starts on the morning of K.’s 30th birthday. Not sure where they get 30th birthday from, I don’t remember seeing that anywhere in the book. The only age mentioned is the last chapter which is the evening before K’s 31st birthday. So….well we all know Wikipedia should be taken with a grain of salt.
K. makes a connection with a painter, the court artist, who says that as K. keeps asserting his innocence, none of which matters as the verdict has been pre-determined, there are three possible ways to delay things indefinitely. The first is absolute acquittal. This is out….outcome has been pre-determined, and innocence is not on the table, so absolute acquittal will not be happening. The other two options are apparent acquittal and deferral. Apparent acquittal is where friends of the judges, and here the painter offers to assist K., go around to all the judges he knows, and gets them to sign a petition basically, saying they believe K. to be innocent and so he should be acquitted. If K’s lucky, one of the judges who signs will be the judge assigned to his case. The downside to this is, since it’s not an absolute acquittal, K. could immediately be rearrested and the process will start all over again. Deferment, involves the defendant and those helping him have to keep the trial constantly in it’s earliest stages, by constantly keeping in contact with the court. This insures a verdict is never entered.
K. is basically wound tighter and tighter by the events of the book as he tries to figure out why he’s under arrest, what are the charges, and does the “court” actually have any authority over him. And throughout, people periodically approach him and ask about his trial, and he has no idea how they know about the trial, since he himself does not talk about it. His uncle introduces him to a lawyer, and eventually K. decides the lawyer is doing nothing and so he’s going to fire the lawyer, and while waiting for the lawyer K. meets one of the lawyer’s other clients, who has been under trial for 5 years at this point, and a more desperately depressed man you’ve never seen. And it’s strongly hinted that this is what K’s future looks like.
Throughout, you learn that most of the people K. interacts with are in some way connected to the court, which adds an element of “this must be why he doesn’t just leave” to the book, because where the hell would he go that’s outside the reach of the court? This must be why the book is seen as a monument to inefficient, overwhelming bureaucracies. Although really…it’s quite an efficient way to keep tabs on people. Eat your heart out Stalin…
Now, this book was published posthumously, and is very much incomplete. It does end quite abruptly with K. being led out to a field where he is summarily executed. But you never know why. You never know what the charges were. Assuming the arrest did happen on his 30th birthday, the events of the book happen over 1 year, since it was the night before his 31st birthday that he’s executed. And he is not surprised when the executioners show up, and goes with them willingly, knowing what is going to happen. The weight of the events has him being a passive participant. Not quite willing, ideally he’d have offed himself, and instead he just sits there and makes them kill him.
Now, this book is often ranked one of the 20th centuries most important literary works. But than again, so is The Great Gatsby and that book would have been grossly improved with the addition of zombies, so who knows. I found this book kind of confusing and disjointed, and the Wikipedia page explains why. He’s like the George RR Martin of the 19-teens. I mean, he began this book in 1914….and didn’t finish it before he died. But as the great Larry Correia says, “See, it’s not that hard!”
Although, to be fair to Kafka, he was writing in a literal war zone. WWI was a contending factor while he was attempting to write The Trial. And I think anyone who has sat on hold for over an hour with the IRS can agree that bureaucracies are deadly dull and stifling, and if you have to deal with them in anything like the extended fashion K. did, you too might passively await your death. “Like a dog!” which is K.’s dying thought as they stabbed and strangled him.
I don’t know, this is not going on my favorite to be read again and again pile. Read it once, make up your own mind, but for me, this is going in my donate pile.
