Category: The Trial

The opening lines of Franz Kafka’s The Trial are one of the most chilling and memorable of all time. A well-established chief banker, Josef K. is suddenly arrested one day by unidentified agents from an unidentified organization for committing an unidentified crime. What follows is a host of absurdities: the guilt of the protagonist is assumed, he is allowed to roam free despite being ‘under arrest’, trial processes take place in shady attics and the convicted has absolutely no idea of the crime he has committed throughout the entire novel.

As with his other works such as The Castle and Metamorphosis, Kafka’s magnum opus has been subject to a variety of interpretations ranging from psychoanalytical to religious to political. Kafka was a German Jew and there is evidence that suggests that he was deeply influenced by the Anti-Semitic Trials that took place in Hungary, France, and Czechoslovakia in the late 19th century. This, combined with the tensions and rise of totalitarian states in Europe prompted Kafka to write his novel just before the outbreak of the First World War.

In the novel, Kafka states quite clearly that Josef K. lives in a society with a legal constitution, universal peace, and enforceable law. Nevertheless, he gets arrested for a crime he doesn’t know he committed and is given little to no legal assistance or context by the state. He also goes through a thoroughly unfair trial and is brutally executed in the end screaming “Like a dog!”. Franz Kafka died in 1924 and little did he know that his absurdist novel would become reality in his country barely a decade after his death.

When Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party assumed power, they promised to resurrect Germany from its defeat in the First World War and establish a Reich that would last a thousand years. The Nazis were also morbidly obsessed with eugenics and believed that their race, the Aryans, was the master human race. Other lower races, especially the Jews, had to be eliminated to ‘purify’ the human race and make them pay for the crimes they had committed against the state, which was directly responsible for the defeat of Germany in the First World War.

By the late 1940s, hundreds of thousands of Josef K.’s were met by Nazi agents at their doors and were arrested despite not having done anything wrong. Their assets were seized and they were sent to concentration camps without any trial where they faced torture and almost certain death. In other words, they died ‘like a dog’. Der Prozess had become an undeniable reality.

The Nazi Holocaust, although an extreme event, is unfortunately not an exception. Millions of Josef K.’s have died since 1945 in the USSR, Rwanda, and Armenia. All these countries had a constitution and a notion of justice in place. The Trial was most definitely Kafka’s warning about totalitarian regimes. It is fitting that he chose not to disclose the surname of the protagonist. It was his way of saying that this man could be anyone: a Jew in Nazi Germany, a Rohingya Muslim in present-day Myanmar or a Viet in Cambodia in 1975.

So far, this essay has created analogies between The Trial and historical events with the assumption that the protagonist of the story hadn’t done anything which could be considered a crime. The remainder of this essay will have a slightly different take: What if the protagonist had indeed committed ‘a crime’ and simply didn’t know he did?

By now, history has an extremely rich archive of the totalitarian states that have existed around the world. Most of these states have very similar characteristics: fervent nationalism, a powerful tyrant dictator, rampant jingoism and tendency to commit genocide of minority and disadvantaged groups.

However, there is a new kind of totalitarian state brewing. Its primary weapon is not massive armies or concentration camps but data; extensive information that it collects about its citizens from every imaginable aspect of their lives. It is unlikely that Kafka had the clairvoyance to predict data-driven totalitarian states in the 21st century but nevertheless, his book manages to serve as a chilling warning to this nouveau totalitarianism too.

In 2016, the Netflix series Black Mirror released an episode titled Nosedive. True to its theme, it features a dystopian world where people were required to rate other people based on the quality of interactions they had with them. Based on the ratings other people gave you, you would be assigned a social credit score. This score was as important as money as it determined the kind of public places you could visit, homes you could rent and neighborhoods you could live in.

On the outset, this episode may seem like science fiction but a state like this is actually taking shape in the People’s Republic of China. China announced that it was experimenting with a social credit system that could determine the kind of loans you could avail and jobs you could take. Traditionally private information such as shopping history and friendships of an individual could now be made public. The Chinese Government claimed that it was to build a system of trust but the underlying repercussions of this system are immense. This system is the first step towards total surveillance. The effects have already begun to seep through. For instance, a number of students in China were barred from admissions in schools and colleges on account of their parents’ low credit scores. The parents were apparently on a ‘national blacklist’. Josef K. had once again faced consequences without having done anything wrong and without knowing the nature of his crime.

Another interesting facet of Josef K.’s trial was his freedom of mobility. Despite being under arrest, he is allowed to roam freely and conduct his business as usual. This is because the unidentified authority that has charged him has means and tools at its disposal that allows it to identify the location of Josef K. at any given time. Many countries in the west have tools that enable them to track people’s locations and they have misused severely by authorities. For instance, authorities at a local police department in the US were found guilty of using traffic light tapes to identify cars parked outside of gay bars and blackmail the owners into revealing their sexuality to their family. China is also undertaking a project of supplying its police force with AR spectacles that would automatically identify a person. Therefore, the surveillance aspect of The Trial is not science fiction anymore; it is slowly becoming a disturbing reality.

Throughout the novel, we do not have any idea of the nature of crimes that Josef K. has committed. And neither does Josef K. himself. But can this be possible? To answer this question, this essay will devise a thought experiment that borrows elements from George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984. In 1984, there is a separate class of crime called ‘Thoughtcrime’ which is the crime of having thoughts considered ‘illegal’. The Big Brother in the novel takes elaborate steps to ensure no one is committing this crime but recent development in technology might make this process much easier.

Neuroscientists and major Software Giants are developing a technology that can directly convert thoughts to speech or text. Considering the fact that this technology will be embedded into wearable devices, this has the potential to give the provider unlimited access to our thoughts. The question, therefore, begs to be asked. What if totalitarian governments used this technology to read the thoughts of its citizens and incarcerate those that harbored thoughts that were considered dangerous? Then, we would finally have the answer to The Trial’s most burning question. Josef K. of the 21st century had harbored a thought that made it eligible to be considered as Thoughtcrime. Unbeknownst to him, this thought was recorded on his wearable device and transmitted to the Government. The Government then arrested Josef K. without giving him any explanations regarding the circumstances.

Dystopian novels have been revered as being important hallmarks of literature but we often ignore the salient warnings they give out. The Trial is no exception. Despite its ‘validation’ from history, readers will still find the piece to be absurd. But the warnings that it gives out must be taken seriously. It may not be very long before we too have agents outside our door waiting to arrest us, deny us a fair trial and execute us like dogs.

Kafka’s Trial questions the relationship of justice and the law (often capitalized in the novel as ‘the Law’). The thing about laws is that they’re supposed to be just. If there’s an unjust or an unfair law, we expect to be able to work to get the law overturned by appealing to higher principles of justice. (Consider, for example, the Civil Rights Movement. Racial segregation and discrimination were unjust; therefore we appealed to a higher principle of justice – racial equality – to eliminate those practices.)

But here’s the thing about Kafka’s vision of the Law: the Law is such an abstract ideal that it can have nothing to do with the ordinary lives of human beings. Put it this way: the idea that all human beings are equal is written into the United States’ founding documents, but do we actually have a country where everybody is equal? Would it be fair for the government to come in and mandate certain types of equality? No matter how committed you are to democratic ideals, many of us would hesitate to give up our hard-earned wages – what we consider the individual’s equally valid right to his or her own property. While the ideal that everybody is equal is just, actually putting it into practice could result in an unjust society where people’s property is unfairly taken away from them.

What makes Kafka’s novel more of an allegory, however, is that, rather than giving us a concrete political issue (like economic equality), the novel gives us just the bare struggle of one individual against an unspecified Law – not any specific law, just the Law in general. The court is just the human and bureaucratic embodiment of this Law. Just as the Law seems inhuman and unjust precisely because it is such an abstract expression of justice, the court is portrayed as equally inhuman and unjust. Thus another paradox of the Law is that it can’t just exist in abstraction; it needs the court. But the court, as a system run by human beings, inevitably corrupts the law. Kafka’s novel nicely indicates the court’s corruption through its sordid offices and its lusty judges.

But here we have yet another paradox in the Law. The first paradox is that the Law is supposed to be an expression of justice that transcends all individual human cases, but it is, in fact, unjust because it is so abstract, because it is oblivious to the individual human case. The second paradox is that the Law is an abstract ideal, but it needs the court, a concrete human system manned by human workers, to exist. The third paradox is that, even though the Law is abstract and above all human affairs, it saturates all human affairs. You just can’t escape the Law. No matter how Kafka’s hero tries to escape the court, to free himself from the court, he only finds himself dragged deeper into its web. Just like the man from the country in the parable of the Law, Kafka’s hero’s fate attests to the desolate wisdom that we are always before the Law. If we think we can exist outside or without or beyond the Law, we may be the most deluded people on the planet.

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) has been called everything from a modernist to an existentialist, a fantasy writer to a realist. His work almost stands alone as its own subgenre, and the adjective ‘Kafkaesque’ – whose meaning, like the meaning of Kafka’s work, is hard to pin down – has become well-known even to people who have never read a word of Kafka’s writing. Perhaps inevitably, he is often misinterpreted as being a gloomy and humourless writer about nightmarish scenarios, when this at best conveys only part of what he is about.

Three of Kafka’s works stand as his most representative. It depends on how we choose to approach him as to whether we favour ‘The Metamorphosis’ (his long short story, which we have analysed here, about a man who wakes one morning to discover he has been transformed into a ‘vermin’), The Castle (a quest with no end-goal – and no castle), or The Trial. But perhaps it is The Trial, most of all, that is responsible for the most prevalent meaning of the term ‘Kafkaesque’.

Before we offer an analysis of this obscure and endlessly provocative novel, here’s a brief summary of the plot of Kafka’s The Trial.

Josef K., the chief cashier in a bank, is arrested one morning by two mysterious agents. However, they refuse to tell him what crime he is accused of. He is not thrown into prison pending his trial, but allowed to carry on with his day-to-day affairs until summoned by the Committee of Affairs.

His landlady, Frau Grubach, suggests that the trial may relate to an immoral relationship with his neighbour, Fräulein Bürstner, so he goes to visit her and ends up kissing her. He then finds out that a lodger from a neighbouring room, a Fräulein Montag, has moved in with Fräulein Bürstner, and he suspects this has been done in order that Bürstner might distance herself from any involvement with Josef K.

Next, he is ordered to appear at the court in person on Sunday, though he is not informed of the date of his hearing or the precise room in which it is to take place. He eventually locates the correct room in the attic, and is informed that he’s late for the meeting. He tries to defend himself, pointing out the baselessness of the accusation against him, but this only riles the authorities further.

So he next tries to quiz the judge about the nature of his case, but the judge’s wife attempts to seduce him. The judge then takes K. on a tour of the court’s offices. Then, things take an even more bizarre turn as K. stumbles upon the two anonymous agents who arrested him at the start of the novel. They are being whipped by a man because of what K. said at the attic hearing. K., however, attempts to intercede and plea on their behalf, but the man continues to whip them.

Josef K. receives a visit from his uncle, who is concerned about the rumours surrounding K. and the trial. He introduces his nephew to Herr Huld, a lawyer who is confined to his bed and looked after by a young nurse named Leni. Leni seduces K, and when his uncle discovers that K. accepted the woman’s advances, he is annoyed by his nephew’s behaviour and thinks it will hamper his trial.

Realising that Huld is an unreliable advocate for his cause, K. seeks the help of Titorelli, the court painter. Titorelli agrees to help him, but is aware that the process is not favourable to people and Josef K. will find it difficult to get himself acquitted. K. decides to represent himself.

On his way to Huld’s to dismiss the lawyer from his case, he meets Rudi Block, another of Huld’s clients, who offers K. some advice. Block’s own case has been ongoing for five years and he has lost virtually everything in the process: money, his business, and his morals (he, too, is sexually involved with Leni).

Josef K. is tasked with accompanying an important Italian client to the city’s cathedral, where K. realises that the priest, rather than giving a general sermon, is addressing him directly. The two men discuss a famous fable (published separately as ‘Before the Law’), in which a doorman stands before a door leading to ‘the law’ but refuses a man entry. The man waits by the door until the day of his death, when he asks the doorman why nobody else has tried to gain entry. The doorman then reveals that this door was meant only for that one man, and that he is now going to shut it.

The priest thinks this fable represents Josef K.’s situation, although many people have different ideas about what the story is supposed to mean, and K. and the priest disagree over its ultimate meaning. The day before Josef K.’s thirty-first birthday, two men arrive at his apartment and lead him outside, where they stab him to death, killing him ‘like a dog’.