Wednesday, October 10, 2007

KAFKA, THE TRIAL

THE TRIAL

The German title, Der Prozess, means ‘the law-suit’ or ‘the leagal procedure’. It is also the German medical term for tuberculosis.

The Arrest: The actuality of the arrest is undermined by the fact that he can follow the normal routine. His warders do not know whether he is charged with any offense at all. Is K guilty?

A particular human predicament inviting the interference of some impersonal powers is evoked by the term ‘guilt’.

Frau Gruback’s comment on the arrest: ‘it gives me the feeling of something very learned, it gives me the feeling of something abstract which I don’t understand, but which I don’t need to understand either.’

There will be no other arrests, merely the consequences of the first. The event is something of a miraculous spectacle, attracting the attention of an elderly couple in a window opposite his room. They are hoping for a redemptive effect on their own life.

By being arrested, K has met not with disaster, but with the possibility of ‘happiness’, being granted the special privilege of establishing communication with powers transcending the sphere of ordinary life.

K’s response: When the warder enters his room, he assumes the pose – ‘half raising himself in bed’ – snake-like movement showing threat and fear – which shows unconscious guilt and the knowledge that he has the right to defend himself. First he pretends that it is a practical joke. Then he produces his legal papers. A sadness befalls the warders when K shows signs of incomprehension – the kind of sadness Christ is said to have suffered in the face of uncomprehending crowds.

Thus the novel is a partial (if not systematic) revaluation of the doctrines of salvation offered by the Old and New Testaments. When the warders deprive him of his breakfast, he eats an apple for breakfast. Having eaten from ‘the tree of knowledge’, he comes to realize that he is not securely anchored in the established normality of his life.

The special privilege granted to K is that the Law puts in an appearance on his 30th birthday, the significant watershed in his life. Is he prepared to take up the challenge?

The problem is: Can we reach those powers which so authoritatively stretch out a helping hand towards us, and, can these powers themselves ever quite reach us? Do the powers have any real existence?

The Trial testifies to the reality of a natural and a supernatural world. But the two are unable to meet. K discovers, in the course of his encounter with the Law, a level of consciousness different from the one he is normally accustomed to.

The two levels of consciousness:

When K is talking to the warders, Frau Grubach almost enters the room, but he is unable to ask her in. He cannot bring someone from his normal life into contact with officials from the court. Again, during his interview with the Inspector, he unaware of the three employees from the bank. When they are brought to his notice by the Inspector, he forgets all about the officials. That is, the incompatibility of these characters results from his inability to incorporate them both into his consciousness at the same time. That manifests his double consciousness. The world of the court is prevented from taking hold of us by our normal routine. Further, it must be remembered that the Law does not seek out its victims but is attracted by their own sense of guilt. What K finds in the other world is determined by his own attitude towards it.

Why was he arrested and tried and killed? The reason for his arrest is a totally subjective guilt. If he didn’t feel guilty, he would not be arrested.

( ‘Someone’ telling lies about him is perhaps K himself, who in feeling guilty, has wrongfully accused himself.

Sex: erotic feelings as temporary substitute for more spiritual concerns.

The first investigation is not in K’s room, but in Fraulein Burstner’s room. She has already been an object of his erotic fantasies. The Magistrate calls him ‘Zimmermaler’ – ie. ‘room painter’—he has decorated her room with erotic fantasies.

Fraulein Burstner wants to learn Law. She wants to incorporate successfully the other world into her consciousness. But K will rebel and fall back on his narrow bourgeois way of life and thinking. Shortly before the end, he realizes that he could have done better by following Fraulein Burstner, or a woman like her.

First Interrogation:

The practices, even the locality of Law, are far removed from anything he is used to. In deciding to go at 9, he is sticking to his routine life. NOT ONLY K, BUT A WHOLE MODE OF LIFE IS ON TRIAL. The people he meets on the way know nothing about punctuality, cleanliness etc., but they do what is needed, like washing, cooking etc. and they are doing all these things at the same time; an integrated life. They leave their doors wide open: thus what he encounters here is a life uncontaminated by rational structures.

When K is about to score final victory by distorting the events of the morning, he is distracted by the incident of the washer woman. Here is a clear contrast to K’s sex life. While sex has become routine in his life, the sexual involvements of the Law-Court staff are based on genuine attraction. His dizziness at the time of leaving is a reflection of the crumbling edifice of his ‘unarrested’ life.

BEFORE THE LAW: the parable

Could the man have done anything at all to secure his entry into the Law? No. The parable does not allow any moralizing; it confirms the incompatibility between the Law and human consciousness.

It is impossible to reason with the Law in the open. ‘The Trial’ is the trial of language and human consciousness, not of anything K has or has not done.

THE ENDING: Kafka wrote in his diary that his creative efforts were ‘not’ made ‘in order to live quietly, but rather in order to be able to die quietly’. This is how K dies.

They kill him because he has not enough strength to seize the knife himself. To the very end, the Law will not do what K does not want to do himself.

K’s end is both one of the most violent and one of the most peaceful deaths in literature. It is peaceful, because it gives him an insight into the Law’s nature; it is violent, because of the frustration at the Law’s and K’s attempts at communication. Here, Kafka’s attitude is nihilistic. The death, however peaceful, is without meaning.

But against this background of the collapse of all higher meaning, the image of man shines the more brightly. Eg. The last scene where the human figure at the open window stretches out both hands. This is the modern gesture of spiritual hope – like the medieval man kneeling before the altar.

SECTION –I-

I. the opening sentence – matter of fact, yet curiously resonant – thus a huge, exhausting and tragic parable of the human condition is introduced.

  1. gnawing away of a fatal disease?
  2. neurosis worsening into self-destructive psychosis?
  3. struggle with original sin?

The whole novel is a detailed realistic description of a nightmarish unreality.

Joseph K, a bank clerk, is arrested on the morning of his thirtieth birthday. The two warders cannot or will not tell him why he has been arrested. They simply stand guard over him until the Inspector calls for him. Their job is to make him doubt his innocence, his security, his assurance. They have arrested him in more ways than one. The nevous collapse is under way. Paralysis of the will has set in. A healthy man would have beeen able to free himself. Joseph K was healthy until this began to happen to him. Perhaps he was preconditioned for the persecution to operate.

K is interviewed by the Inspector in the room of Fraulein Burstner. Later he is allowed to go to his bank. He is merely under arrest, not to be taken into custody. That evening he waits up for Fraulein Burstner to apologize for having disturbed her room. For reasons he does not himself understand, he kisses her. Is this an attempt to establish his innocence by this futile sexual attack? Is he arrested in his sexual development? ( ie. not grown up sexually even at 30!). May be, he is trying to prove that he is sexually adult, that the charge is groundless. If it is so, he does not succeed. He is powerless to stop the process of self-condemnation.

SECTION 2

The following weekend, K is summoned to a preliminary enquiry. He has great difficulty in finding the court room. He pretends that he is looking for ‘a joiner called Lanz’. Enventually, a young woman in a fifth floor room washing children’s clothes in a tub gestures him through to an inner room.

He has located the court by accident or by instinct. The court itself is part of the instinctive process and has no independent existence. He had been addressed by them as a house painter, but the fact that he was not a house painter seemed irrelevant to the court. Their indifference goads him into a long and sarcastic speech. But it has no effect on them. On one level, he is enjoying the trial, he is a figure of some importance to these proceedings, whereas at his bank he is a somewhat insignificant clerk.

His speech is interrupted by loud squeals from the back of the court room. One of the officials has grabbed the woman who had earlier directed him. This sensual outburst pricks the vanity of his speech as though it were a toy balloon.

SECTION 3: by now, K is deeply involved in the legal process. Although he receives no summons for the following Sunday, he goes to the court and finds no one but the washerwoman there. Her husband is the Law-Court attendant. She allows K to look at the ‘law books’ in the empty court. The first two turn out to be pornography and cheap fiction. She offers to help him, as the Examining Magistrate is attracted to her. Their talk is interrupted by a law student who carries her off to the Magistrate. Her husband (the attendant) appears and takes K on a tour of the court’s offices. In a waiting room, he meets several other accused men.

When he is shown round the court K finds the atmosphere so stifling that he faints, and has to be helped outside. In the outside world of the bank and of daily business, he feels well. But his values are overthrown by the court. Even the Clerk of Enquiries who helps him to leave the premises is a disturbing figure in that he is unable to acknowledge the seriousness of speech. He is said to mean well, but in truth he means nothing. He is caught in the court as in a dream. He cannot wake up without the help of the clerk. Even within this dream world, K behaves as if he were neurotically in the grip of a dream within the dream. He is beginning to lose his grip even on the outer reality. His gaze is increasingly an introspective one.

If only he could, with sufficient vehemence or love, see something in the external world, something, something outside his condition, it is possible that he would be saved. But the chances of his looking meaningfully at the world are lessening day by day. Already he is guiltier, or less innocent, than when he was arrested.

SECTION 4

K finds a crippled gril, Fraulein Montag, moving in to share Fraulein Burstner’s room. She conveys a message to K from Fraulein Burstner refusing him an interview he had apparently asked for. The landlady’s nephew, Captain Lanz, is also involved with Fraulein Montag in some way.

What K expected from her is not clear. Not sexual comfort, not confirmation of his lack of guilt. Simply some kind of help towards recognizing a reality other than his own. His behaviour, in the comparative security of his own lodgings, is much firmer than it is elsewhere. By asserting himself in his domestic surroundings, he was somehow building up a wall of resistance to the shadowy world of the law court which seemed only to exist, but then very forcibly, at weekends.

SECTION 5: The whipper.

K is about to leave the bank one evening when he hears groans from a store room. He is appalled to see the two warders about to be beaten by a third man. He tries to bribe the Whipper to let them off. As the strokes and screams begin, K rushes out to the corridor, afraid that the bank staff will hear. He looks into the store room the following evening, and to his horror the scene is as it was before. This time he shuts the door in great haste, and orders his junior clerks to clear the store room.

When K tells the Whipper that he would never have complained about the warders had he known they would be punished, he is told that that makes no difference. They would have been punished in any case.

But really it is K himself who wants to punish the warders, who is ready to experience the same sadistic fantasy over and over again.

Hitherto, the world of the law court had not infringed upon K’s day-to-day world of the bank. They remain two separate layers of consciousness. But now, behind a harmless store room door in the bank, the court has set up its punishment chamber. The threat of the court is eating into his ordered daily world. Simply by opening a door, he finds his safe and solid reality to be nothing more than a thin veneer. The remaining shreds of his innocence are being stripped from him.

K’s bribe fails, just as good works in the daytime would fail, because they are motivated by guilt or fear. The human condition cannot be improved, it can only be suffered. Man has no choice. Whatever is, is just.

SECTION 6

K’s uncle who lives in the country has heard about the case and comes to town to assist his nephew. He takes K to an old friend, an Advocate who might be able to help. The Advocate already knows something of the affairs. He has another visitor with him, the Chief Clerk of the Court. But K disgraces himself by leaving the room to search out the Advocate’s nurse, Leni, and flirts with her.

The uncle’s concern is only with the possibility of family scandal. The Advocate’s interest is purely professional. K, on the other hand, widens his areas of guilt by becoming involved with Leni. He runs the risk of forfeiting the goodwill of the three old men. But he is incapable of acting differently.

Leni’s attempts to make K renounce his fiancée Elsa. He carries a photo of Elsa, but shows no great concern for her. None of his relationships with women last very long. Leni gives him her key so he can come whenever he wants to. When he leaves the house his uncle scolds him for his open flirting. He is so immersed in his psychosis that he does not even reply. He is by now riddled with guilt. Nevertheless, he has not abandoned the idea of innocence. The Advocate’s advice is meaningless. K learns that there is no way of finding out the exact nature of the charge.

SECTION 7

His work at the bank suffers. Faced with interviewing a client, he finds himself neurotically unable to concentrate. When the Deputy Manager takes him off his hands, he can only stare out of the window in agonized indecision. On his way out, noticing the distraction of K, the client confides that he knows something of K’s case. He advises K to meet a disreputable man, a painter named TITORELLI, who knows several judges. Abandoning all his bank work, K rushes to meet him. Titorelli, who has painted several portraits of the judges, feels he can get K acquitted – not by pleading a case, but by using his influence. He mentions three kinds of acquittal:

1. Definite acquittal: it has never been known to happen. ie. No man is completely innocent.

2. Ostensible acquittal: this allows the defendant to continue to live his life under the constant threat of new arrests.

3. Postponement: this allows one to defer payment of punishment in the temporal world.

SECTION 8

K decides to take the case out of the hands of the Advocate, after meeting a fellow client of the Advocate, a commercial traveler named Block, whose life is ruined by his slavish dependence upon the Advocate. His trial has become the one thing he lives for. Existence is centered around the problem of his guilt. He is becoming a religious fanatic. K fears the same fate for himself.

SECTION 9

K has been given the job of showing one of the bank’s clients the art treasure in the cathedral. The Italian fails to turn up. In the empty cathedral K finds a priest about to ascend into the pulpit. He is about to leave when the priest calls him. The priest is also the prison chaplain. He informs K that he has been found guilty. He tells a parable about a door keeper who stands guard before the Law. His concern is with God; his view point is even more remote from K’s than is that of the court.

Nothing more is to be said. One awaits the end.

SECTION 10

On the evening before his 31st birthday exactly one year after his initial arrest, two men arrive at K’s lodgings. He is sitting quietly in an arm chair, dressed in black. Taking K out into the street, they grip his arms forcibly and march him off. K thinks they pass Fraulein Burstner, or at least a woman who resembles her.

When they reach a deserted quarry outside the town, the two men remove K’s coat and shirt. They lay him on the ground, his head on a rock, and producing a double-edged butcher’s knife, they make it clear that K himself is to guide the knife into his breast. But this responsibility he silently insists on leaving to them. At the last moment, a window somewhere is flung up. It is the last proud flicker of hope, and the knife is already turning in his heart. ‘Like a dog’, murmurs K, as he dies.

K had spent a year searching for a guiltless life, a meaningful life. He has found only a meaningless death. It is a tale told by an idiot.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Lucky Nugget Casino Site: Best Casino - ChoGiocasino
Looking for the deccasino best online casino site? Choose from more than 200 exciting games from the best 바카라 providers in the 카지노사이트 world!

aalamnagao said...

MNCD - Casino - Dr. MCD
Discover and 경기도 출장안마 benefit 경상남도 출장안마 from 이천 출장마사지 MGM Grand Rewards for your stay, plus 동해 출장안마 offers, promotions, and 사천 출장마사지 more at MGM Grand Casino. MGM Grand  Rating: 4 · ‎1,762 reviews