As everyone knows, this is by Franz Kafka (1883-1924).

It was written over the period 1914-15, when Kafka was in his early thirties. It was never finished. (There's a rundown here on the relatively modest actions Kafka's friend and editor Max Brod took in order to lick it into shape.)

Published in 1925, it was the first of his novels to appear posthumously. I read it partly in the German original, and partly in the 1930s English translation by Willa and Edwin Muir.

Last year, of course, gave us plenty of Kafka. But at that point I was focusing on stories and novellas, rather than the longer pieces, the most famous of which -- such as this one -- I'd already read.

But this year brought the opportunity to revisit The Trial (last encountered when I was an undergraduate) with another of Henry Eliot's read-alongs. As always, it was highly rewarding to hear the interpretations of others.

And what scope for interpretation we have with this book... You probably know the basic plot, whether you've read the novel or not. Josef K, chief clerk at a bank, wakes up on the morning of his 30th birthday to find he has been arrested. No-one can tell him why. After an increasingly nightmarish experience of courts and lawyers and other would-be experts -- encounters in which everything becomes ever more absurd and anxiety-inducing, and nothing is ever quite what or where you expect it to be -- Josef K is executed. (For more detail, see the chapter-by-chapter summary here.)

I'm not planning to add to the vast amount of Kafka literature that's already out there. Instead, I'll just note my own reactions, and then summarize some of the wide range of interpretations that have emerged over the years.


The cover of the first German edition

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-- On a very prosaic note, I had forgotten how dense the text is (paragraphs, Herr Kafka, paragraphs...), and how sexually fraught it is.

-- I had also forgotten how truly disturbing it is... It's not just the weird topography, and the utter unpredictability of everything. It's not just the scenes of real horror (in one instance, K opens the door of a lumber room, and finds someone beating the two men who originally arrested him, allegedly because he complained about them). No, the unsettling quality emanates more from the premise of the book as a whole. You're accused. You don't know of what. There's no clear-cut way to work through the charges (whatever they are); indeed, you're told that whatever action you take, you'll never be able to shake them off. And in the end you die "like a dog". It's brutal.

-- Yet it also has its farcical, almost slapstick, elements. In fact, Kafka probably didn't intend the total overwhelm that we modern audiences (with our vast experience of totalitarianism) generally experience. Last year, I remember being quite shocked when I came across Max Brod's recollection that Kafka laughed so much when reading the first chapter aloud to friends that he kept having to stop to pull himself together... According to Robert Zaretsky: "In a conversation with Milan Kundera, Philip Roth imagined a film version of The Trial with the Marx brothers -- starring Groucho as K., of course, with Harpo and Chico playing the two guards. From stealing unannounced into Groucho’s life to stealing his food without shame, the antics and arguments of Harpo and Chico do indeed mirror those of the guards, who seem to have been recruited from the Keystone Kop Academy."

-- David Foster Wallace agrees, claiming: "For me, a signal frustration in trying to read Kafka with college students is that it is next to impossible to get them to see that Kafka is funny." It's a deeply black form of humour, though: "The really central Kafka joke [is] that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey towards home is in fact our home." I guess you have to laugh...

-- What I HAD remembered was the lucid-dream quality of the writing. Benjamin Winterhalter argues that the "plunging sense of unease" that we get from the text derives from the unnerving recognizability of his scenarios: "Although there is undoubtedly an element of the absurd in the worlds Kafka creates, his style -- unpretentious and specific, yet free from slang -- renders those worlds with such painful accuracy that they seem totally familiar while we’re in them, like deja vu or a memory of a bad dream."



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Interpretations of The Trial, as I said, are legion. Here are some of the insights:

1. Most broadly, says Roy Lotz, The Trial can be interpreted as an allegory of life. We never totally understand what our existence is all about, and ultimately we die... Stephen West, who situates Kafka as a bridge between Dostoevsky and Camus, quotes the latter as instructing us to pay attention not so much to the specifics of what Kafka is writing about, as to the sensations he evokes: "Because the way you feel when you read a Kafka novel, to Camus, is the way you feel sometimes when you confront the absurdity of the universe head on." More specifically, as Henry Eliot points out, the book can be understood as "a chilling, flickering shadow version of Kafka’s own experience as a German-speaking Jew in Prague during the First World War". (You can't help recalling Lyndsey Stonebridge's reminder that Hannah Arendt equates Kafka's writing with a "pariah's viewpoint", as K.'s nightmare experiences bear witness to those of Jews, migrants, refugees, and strangers everywhere.)

2. Others argue that The Trial is essentially a satirical exposure of the idiocies and threats of an implacable bureaucracy. (Is this why loads of people started looking up the word Kafkaesque during the covid epidemic?) According to Antony Macris, "For poststructuralist philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka pioneered the notion of a 'neo-bureaucracy' of 'corridors, of segments, a string of offices' that marked 'the transition from the old archaic imperial bureaucracy to modern bureaucracy'. They found Kafka’s world view so powerful they incorporated it into their influential theories of capitalism and schizophrenia... In Kafka’s Weltanschauung, the world itself has become irrational, arbitrary and malevolent: a machine for the production of paranoia. K.’s stance is that of someone who is trying to remain sane in a world gone mad..." However, Theodor Adorno, says West, reminds us that Kafka never wanted us to detect a single, specific meaning in his oeuvre: "Kafka’s using his work to paint a picture of a kind of general structure of domination, a social spell that people get put under, where self-justifying power structures of any type or scale eventually lose sight of what they began as... For Adorno we don't have to think of [The Trial] as a metaphor. Because this is literally what people are going through when they're living in these rationally constrictive systems." Systems and procedures develop for good reasons, but they then, as we all know, take on a life of their own, endlessly spinning off new rules and restrictions. West adds: "In the modern world we are all people trapped in little Kafka novels of our own creation -- where things that start with the best of intentions end up transforming into something that flattens your experience of the world... Opaque, self-justifying systems of power produce this same result over and over again."


A self-portrait, around 1911

3. The Trial can certainly be understood as a counter-Enlightenment novel. Within its pages, reason does not lead to truth; humanity is not continuously becoming better: "Within the ideals of the Enlightenment, The Trial suggests, there lurks the dark glow of the irrational, the persistence of a power that loves nothing but itself, a power that will destroy capriciously and without explanation." Read in the era of Trump, it somehow gathers extra layers of meaning.

4. According to Joshua McGillivray, many do see the book as foreshadowing events under Hitler, when people were punished not for what they had done, but for who they were. West sums up Hannah Arendt's interpretation: Josef K. is constantly bamboozled by new twists and turns in his case (since totalitarian systems thrive on keeping people in a situation of paranoia and uncertainty); everything Josef K. comes up against is framed as inevitable and "common sense" (just as it is with totalitarian systems); and Kafka's work gives voice to the kind of loneliness that in itself feeds totalitarianism.

5. Conversely, others argue that Josef K. IS actually guilty: "One can read Josef’s focus on trivialities as a reflection of his desire to avoid facing the real reason for his arrest... He is imprisoned not by the state but by his egocentric vanity -- his fate is only inescapable because he refuses to contemplate striving for redemption."

6. But perhaps Josef K. only THINKS he's guilty... Winterhalter notes that Hannah Arendt interprets the sense of unreality that hangs over the novel as "K.’s internalization of a vague feeling of guilt... [which] becomes the means to secure K.’s participation in a corrupt legal system".


"All the stained glass in the great window could not illumine the darkness of the wall with one solitary glimmer of light..."

7. Others (eg literary scholar Margaret Church) see the characters of The Trial not as real, but as projections of K.'s mind.

8. Others again (eg art historian Otto Karl Werckmeister) see the book as a reflection of Kafka's professional life, which saw him imposing regulations on unwilling employers, who "contested their risk classifications, disregarded their safety norms, tried to thwart plant inspections, and evade their premium payments. The department headed by Kafka was pitted against them in an adversarial relationship, no matter how conciliatory the agency’s mission was meant to be." You can see how experience of this face-off might have trickled into The Trial. Quoting Werckmeister, Winterhalter continues: "[Kafka] was 'a man who tried to live his life according to principles of humanism, ethics, even religion.' As a direct result of that experience, he learned the disturbing truth that, in the law, 'Lies are made into a universal system,' as he wrote in the penultimate chapter of The Trial. The best he could manage within the law still would be a far cry from real justice."

9. Oliver Tearle points to the religious significance that many critics have ascribed to Kafka: "If Kafka has affinities with Dickens, he can also claim descent from Dostoevsky, whose influence on The Trial he readily acknowledged. Dostoevsky’s understanding of the psychology of crime, punishment, and guilt feeds into Josef K. in Kafka’s novel, as does the Hasidic Jewish tradition of examining the nature of guilt and judgment... Here, the significance of the cathedral [which forms a whole chapter in The Trial], and Josef K.’s final conversation with the priest, become apparent. Although the priest is powerless to save Josef K. from his fate on earth, he can provide a more metaphysical and spiritual context for his understanding of guilt and acceptance." The Trial, John Banville agrees, is like a religious parable: "The [cathedral] chapter ... might be a passage from one of the more obscure books of the Bible, or a gnomic exercise out of the Talmud." (The priest, for example, relates the disturbing story that we've already encountered as the story called Before the Law...)


"Away in the distance a large triangle of candle flames flickered..."

10. Sebastian Romero points out that many feminists regard The Trial as deeply misogynistic. He, on the other hand, sees it as an exploration of power in relationships: "The way Kafka draws sexuality isn’t for sexuality’s own sake, but for the sake of these games of power that exist in the novel. Everything is always compared in relation to something else: arrestor and arrested, kisser and kissed, whipper and whipped, dominant and dominated, killer and killed. Kafka suggests that balance and equilibrium between human relations, whether this is between human to human or human to state, cannot be obtained... K.’s connections to women are usually charged with erotic desire..., and he is constantly using this desire to his advantage... If one reads The Trial as a parable for the law’s oppression over the individual, then sure, one sees K. as the victim; and if one reads The Trial as a man who got arrested for abusing women and continues to abuse women because he can’t even see that what he’s doing is wrong, then one sees these women as victims." Wolf Kittler is in no doubt that K.'s case revolves around his attack on Fraeulein Buerstner (which comes after his arrest -- but then it would in Kafka's inverted world, where cages precede birds).

11. Or perhaps the book is based on Freudian thought. Lotz again: "If I was a proper Freudian, I would say that The Trial is an expression of Kafka’s extraordinary guilt at his patricidal fantasies."

12. Henry Eliot had some interesting pointers to film interpretations, which add their own fascinating angle to certain scenes. First, there's Orson Welles's brilliantly moody black-and-white version from 1962 (with Anthony Perkins as Josef K, and William Chappell, in his only acting credit, as the artist Titorelli, whom Josef K. consults at one point for advice). Welles thought The Trial was the best film he had ever made. Alternatively, there's the BBC version of 1993 (in this one, Kyle Maclauchlin is Josef K, and Alfred Molina Titorelli). I would love to watch right through either or both -- but I probably couldn't do it in one sitting... The intensity of the book is hard enough to handle without adding visual images. And yet, argues Kittler, the visual exercised a huge influence on The Trial. Kafka was both interested in art and adept as a practitioner. He had redirected his attention wholly to writing by the time he was conceiving this book, but "caricatures, paintings, photographs, and even cinematographic techniques interrupt and divert the written word revealing hidden layers of the story... [and] his work registers -- like a seismograph -- the effects of [then] new media of data storage and transmission".


"K. went up to a small side chapel near by..., and bending over it shone his torch on the altarpiece. The errant light hovered over it like an intruder..."

13. Finally, there is the possibility that The Trial is explicable only with reference to Felice Bauer, the woman Kafka twice became engaged to, before each time backing out. But that's a BIG topic in its own right, and will need a post all to itself.

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In sum, this is a huge, huge book that has been well worth revisiting, and will repay re-revisiting once I can summon up the stomach and the stamina.