Kafka: The Trial – Analysis, Part 2

Although in many ways Kafka-like, K. is the very opposite of Kafka in lacking his obstinate belief in the presence of ‘something indestructible’ in himself: the novel is what it was intended to be, a proof ex negativo of Kafka’s need to cling to that fundamental belief in the face of every adversity. Josef K. is totally unable to accept Kant’s three regulative ideals or necessary, unprovable beliefs (God, freedom, and immortality), to which the Priest refers in the words ‘there is no need to accept everything as true; some things simply have to be accepted as necessary.’ Josef K., unable to accept the idea of such necessary fictions, calls them by that other word for a fiction, a lie. His attitude towards religion, or superstition, as he would call it, is very much that of Shelley in his essay on the Devil. Since the Gothic novel tests the limits of these beliefs by means of their perversion,¹ Kafka can again be said to be operating within the Gothic convention.

1 – See Marshall Brown, ‘A Philosophical View of the Gothic Novel’, Studies in Romanticism, 26 (1987) 275-301

It is ultimately because he cannot live with himself that Josef K. condemns himself, but he does so in what might be called a conventionally Gothic way, condemning himself for his excess. The words of his confession, ‘I always wanted to grab as much of the world as possible, and for no very laudable reason, either’, may be compared with the confession made by Schedoni, in Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian (III, ch. 7) to his confessor: ‘I have been through life the slave of my passions, and they have led me into horrible excesses’. As Marshall Brown has said, Typically romantic gothic novels devote far more space to the thoughts and feelings of the victim and (often) of the persecuting demon than to the mechanisms of punishment and torment. What would be left of a man, these novels ask, if all human society were stripped away, all customary perceptions, all the expected regularity of cause and effect? They ask, in other words, what man is in himself, when deprived of all the external supports that channel ordinary experience. What resources, if any, does the mind retain in isolation? What is the nature of pure consciousness?¹ If Josef K. could have answered, he would have said that ‘pure consciousness’ in this sense is hell. Within a generation hell will be declared to be the others, but at this stage it is one’s self.

1 – Marshall Brown, ‘A Philosophical View of the Gothic Novel’, Studies in Romanticism, 26 (1987) 280

Orson Welles, The Trial, Franz Kafka

Brown’s meticulous analysis is peculiarly relevant to Kafka’s K.-novels, where victim and persecuting demon are one and the same. As the victim of the demon of self, Josef K. exists in the limbo of which Brown proceeds to say that The greatest intensity of despair comes where the victim is released into a limbo, uprooted and driven out into a world seemingly beyond space and time.¹ K. lives in just such a limbo, beyond space (for there is only the prison of the mind) and time (there is no real change, for the more things change, the more they are the same), which is symbolized in the Rumpelkammer (lumber room; figuratively, limbo)² a further Gothic locus.³ He therefore comes to know ‘all the impotent agony of an incarcerated mind’, ‘the agony of consciousness’⁴ of a Melmoth.

1 – Marshall Brown, ‘A Philosophical View of the Gothic Novel’, Studies in Romanticism, 26 (1987) 285

2 – Both limbo and lumber have the connotation of prison.

3 – Compare Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest with its static (timeless) scene like a child’s nightmare come true.

4 –  Maturin, Melmoth, I, 87f.

Orson Welles, The Trial, Franz Kafka

Orson Welles, The Trial, Franz Kafka

As the reification of the sense of guilt that he drags around with him like the proverbial block, the Court and its labyrinthine workings are, in accordance with Kant’s paradigm, to be found wherever K. goes. The metaphor, which was clearly in Kafka’s mind (hence Block), is more than a literalization of the verb verschleppen: it continues the legal metaphor (jemanden vor den Richter schleppen means ‘to haul someone up before a judge’) and at the same time points back to the ultimate origin of Josef K.’s condition in the form of the Fall suffered by his precursor, for (ver)schleppen also means much the same as spedieren, which takes the reader back via Onkel Jakob’s Speditionsgeschäft to Karl Rossmann’s expulsion from a state if not of innocence, then certainly of ignorance.

Orson Welles, The Trial, Franz Kafka

The whole Gothic rigmarole of the so-called Court, that farrago of fantasy and logic worthy of Wonderland, is, as Block rightly says, ‘beyond reason’. It shows that, in Emily Dickinson’s words, One need not be a Chamber /to be haunted / One need not be a House / The brain has corridors / surpassing / Material Place.¹ There is, however, more to the Court than the human brain’s ability to torment itself. The Court and the Law it claims to serve are presented as a diabolical patriarchal system, hence the figures of the bearded patriarchs in the front row of the courtroom, because Kafka’s own sense of guilt, which is what is being explored here, took the specific form of a sense of guilt vis-à-vis his father, who prided himself on being a ‘sworn expert witness’, and on his supposedly ‘orthodox’ Jewish faith, in which he was in reality, as his son stressed, a law unto himself. The bearded patriarchs are, however, more than father-figures. They will surely put most readers in mind of the Inquisition, particularly when Josef K., like Vivaldi in The Italian, is visited by two men dressed in black, who are reminiscent of its agents. The ‘interrogation chamber’ and the ‘great organization’ at work behind the court point to the Inquisition, and in the context the ‘Rumpelkammer’ points to the Folterkammer (torture chamber) in which the Inquisition broke its victim’s body and spirit. In referring (in ch. 3) to ‘red-hot pincers’, one of the Inquisition’s favourite instruments of torture, used in witchcraft (heresy) interrogations and in the ghastly preliminaries to executions, Kafka makes explicit the allusion to one of the most villainous documents composed before the twentieth century, the notorious Malleus Maleficarum of 1486. If Kant’s account of the workings of the conscience explains the legal fiction on which The Trial is based, the Malleus Maleficarum shows that Josef K.’s ‘diabolical’ guilt has a whole further dimension, to which we now turn.

1 – ‘Ghosts’, Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson (New York: Gramercy Books, 1982) 208

Orson Welles, The Trial, Franz Kafka

The spelling of the word Proceß gives it a doubly alien, unexpected look, taking its meaning so far away from the civil/criminal ‘trial’ implied by the normal modern spelling Prozeß that ‘Trial’ becomes a mistranslation (it should be Process, which, especially in Scots English, discloses all the relevant meanings). Instead of the older spelling of Process, Kafka uses the spelling, Proceß, that was the preferred one in 1910, but which is, historically speaking, a transitional and indeed bastard form. To modern eyes the word should be either Prozeß or (until the end of the nineteenth century) Process. The form of the word which Kafka uses is thus both historically and orthographically correct and yet at the same time, especially when seen in retrospect, something of an anomaly, a medieval (Gothic) form alienated by being given that final ß. Kafka could have used the modern form, Prozeß, which was also available (as spelling of second choice) in 1910, but has preferred not to do so, presumably because as a then new-fangled spelling it would have lacked the (Gothic) connotation(s) that he valued. He evidently thought long and carefully about the meanings of the word and those he wished to foreground, including the historical connotation that is slowly revealed, and on the processes, proceedings and procedures involved, all implied in his title.

Orson Welles, The Trial, Franz Kafka

It was in August 1913, a matter of months before beginning work on the novel, that he read Gustav Roskoff’s Geschichte des Teufels (History of the Devil). For him the revelation was not so much what Roskoff writes about the Devil/devils, with much of which he was already sufficiently familiar, as what he writes, at such length, about the Malleus Maleficarum or Hexenhammer (Hammer of Witchcraft), which showed the power of contemporary belief in the Devil in that those who denied it were deemed heretics. The word ‘Proceß’ denotes something remarkably like the ‘Process of Justice’ described in the Third Part of the Malleus Maleficarum, that is, ‘A process of justice, how it should be conducted, and the method of pronouncing sentence’.¹ What is in question in this novel seems to be an imaginary process of justice, based on a conflation of Kant’s metaphorical court of justice or ‘supernatural assize’ with the process described in the Malleus Maleficarum.

1 – Malleus Maleficarum, tr. M. Summers (London: The Pushkin Press, 1948), 194-275. All quotations refer to this edition.

Orson Welles, The Trial, Franz Kafka

In this process-at-law the Judge is Conscience, the offence ‘heresy’, and the penalty death. By ‘heresy’ is meant failure to observe the religion of the father, for a heretic is ‘one who follows new and false opinions’ and heresy ‘a form of infidelity’,¹ as a result of subjection to devils, from which Kafka believed himself, and showed Josef K., to suffer. The vicious, diabolocentric ethos of the Old Testament, on which that of the Inquisition was based, had no time for so-called ‘dreamers of dreams’,² meaning heretics, who, it was thought, should be put to death. Erich Heller wrote more specifically, with reference to The Castle, and in the context of an overly religious interpretation of that novel, that K. is a kind of Pelagius believing that he ‘can if he ought’, yet living in a relentlessly predestined world. This situation produces a theology very much after the model of Gnostic and Manichaean beliefs. The castle of Kafka’s novel is, as it were, the heavily fortified garrison of a company of Gnostic demons, successfully holding an advanced position against the manoeuvres of an impatient soul. The correspondence between the spiritual structure of The Castle and the view of the world systematized into Gnostic and Manichaean dogma is striking.³ It is tempting to think in such terms, particularly if The Trial in part involves Kafka condemning himself for his heresy; after all, does not Amalia in The Castle, in rejecting the world of physical reality, appear to be a true representative of the ‘Manichaean disposition’? However, the fact remains, as Heller himself went on to acknowledge, that ‘There is no reason to assume that Kafka had any special knowledge of these ancient heresies’.

1 – Malleus Maleficarum, 198f.

2 – Deut. XIII 5-11

3 – Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind (Cambridge: Bowes & Bowes, 1952), 175, 177

Orson Welles, The Trial, Franz Kafka

On the other hand there is every reason to think that the concept of ‘heresy’ had, for Kafka, ironic quotation marks about it, and that it simply denoted departure from the dogmatic world-view of his father, who, like the Jewish Yahweh, and like Klamm in The Castle, was as it were God and Devil in one. What the father thought of as his own ‘orthodoxy’ was in reality, according to his son, hide-bound, pig-headed dogmatism, peculiar to himself: he believed what he believed because it was himself who believed it. In doing so, he was believing in himself. All this means, in the context of The Trial, that the whole imaginary ‘process of justice’ is a ‘legal fiction’, a term (corresponding to what Schopenhauer calls Kant’s ‘judicial form’), from which Kafka surely drew general inspiration in planning the novel, which is used repeatedly in the Malleus Maleficarum. It was to the witch-hunt as described in the Hammer of Witchcraft that Kafka was slyly alluding when he made Josef K. refer to ‘this court which consists almost entirely of woman-hunters’. This time Kafka deliberately uses the literal term Frauenjäger, rather than the more usual but, in the present context, less telling, figurative term Schürzenjäger, which is, however, taken literally when Titorelli ‘chased after her, grabbing her by the skirt’. In saying that the Court consists almost entirely of woman-hunters, Kafka is, in his literal, tongue-in-cheek way, identifying the court with the one whose diabolical procedures are described in the Malleus Maleficarum.

Orson Welles, The Trial, Franz Kafka

Like the Court, the Inquisition was attracted to guilt (in the form of heresy), which it sought out and destroyed. Even suspicion of heresy resulted in immediate arrest. The particular process to which Josef K. sees himself being subjected is the second of the three methods of initiating a Process in the Malleus Maleficarum: by denunciation or calumniation (‘one person denounces another without producing any proof; very little proof is required since it takes very little argument to expose a person’s guilt’. Although I translated the word ‘verleumden’ in the first line of the novel as ‘to take a person’s name in vain’, it can equally well mean ‘to denounce or calumniate’. This is the procedure attributed to the Inquisition in earlier Gothic novels: ‘You know an enemy has nothing to do but lay an accusation of heresy against any unfortunate and innocent individual, and the victim expires in horrible tortures, or lingers the wretched remnant of his life in dark and solitary cells’.¹

1 – Percy Bysshe Shelley, Zastrozzi and St Irvyne, ed. Stephen Behrendt (Oxford University Press, 1986) 81

Orson Welles, The Trial, Franz Kafka

For the most part those accused of witchcraft¹ deny their guilt, which ‘engenders a greater suspicion than if they were to answer that they left it to a superior judgment to decide whether there were guilt present or not’,² which is precisely the Priest’s argument when he counters K.’s protestations of innocence with the words ‘that’s what the guilty always say.’ The Third Part of the Malleus Maleficarum arguably gave Kafka nothing less than an historical model and analogue for the working of the ‘law’ in The Trial and In the Penal Colony, in both of which there is no more question of a not guilty verdict than there was in virtually all witchcraft trials. If he hadn’t already got it, it also gave him the charge. The Criminalcodex of the Malleus Maleficarum is full of concepts that are relevant to Josef K.’s ‘case’, including superstition, member of the court, and confession; if the accused wishes to defend herself,³ a lawyer is appointed, whose job it is to conduct the accused’s case ‘as well as may be, but not to the detriment of justice.’⁴

1 – The Malleus Maleficarum simply says ‘witches’, which proves my point.

2 – Malleus Maleficarum

3 – Or himself, for the text mostly uses the masculine.

4 – G. Roskoff, Geschichte des Teufels, 2 vols. (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1869) II, 273

Orson Welles, The Trial, Franz Kafka

The three possible outcomes listed by Titorelli are reminiscent of the ‘three methods of procedure provided by the law’ and, more especially, of the ‘three kinds of sentence’¹ in witchcraft (heresy) trials. The parallel, already close, becomes even closer when in the Malleus Maleficarum the Judge or Inquisitor is enjoined never to acquit, but merely to suspend proceedings temporarily: Let care be taken not to put anywhere in the sentence that the accused is innocent or immune, but that the case against him was not legally proved; for if after a little time he should again be brought to trial, and it should be legally proved, he can, notwithstanding the previous sentence of absolution, then be condemned. Clearly ‘real acquittal’ was no more available to those accused of witchcraft than it is to Josef K. What is provided for in each case, by the same kind of legalistic double-think, is precisely the ‘temporary acquittal’ or ‘delaying tactics’ of Titorelli’s exegesis. Even the principle underlying the Malleus Maleficarum, and indeed the Vehmgerichte and the Inquisition as such, is applicable to Josef K.: ‘once the accused confesses, he has judged himself.’ The sentence is carried out immediately: Josef K.’s execution will follow directly upon his confession, which Kafka, with characteristic logic and irony, has him make on the way to execution.

1 – Malleus Maleficarum

2 – Roskoff, II, 344

Orson Welles, The Trial, Franz Kafka

It is difficult to overestimate the significance from Kafka’s point of view of Roskoff s analysis of the phenomenon with which subjection to the Devil was long associated, witchcraft. Kafka’s definition of women as ‘snares waiting to drag man down into the merely finite’¹ not only coincides with the view of woman as ‘the mainspring of sensuality’, which underlay the persecution of women for witchcraft, the procedures for which were codified in the Malleus Maleficarum; it almost certainly derives from the Malleus Maleficarum itself, in Part I (Question 6) of which the idea of woman as a snare is analysed,² and the conclusion reached that women are ‘a snare set by demons’ for men.³ Kafka’s definition of woman is doubly disturbing, but also doubly revealing, because it means that he was seeing her both as ‘unclean’⁴ and as witch, she-devil or instrumentum diaboli. On the other hand, it was his own sense of ‘uncleanness’, and his sense of persecution, that led him to identify with the witch. The disturbing similes used in The Trial  in relation to Fraulein Bürstner (‘Scrubber’ exactly conveys the ambiguity in English) and Leni—the pungent smell and the webbed hands—are reminiscent of the odor diabolicum and the stigma diabolicum respectively. No less striking is the way in which Josef K., taking leave of Fraulein Bürstner, kissed her first on the lips, then all over the face, like some thirsty animal lapping greedily at a spring of longed-for fresh water. Finally he kissed her on the neck, right on the throat, and kept his lips there for a long time, because it points to vampirism, and therefore to the ‘cannibalism’ of which Kafka accused himself, this being projected on to Josef K. The present vampiric kiss prefigures another, when Leni later kisses Josef K.

1 – Gustave Janouch, Gespräche mit Kafka (Frankfurt: Fischer Bücherei, 1962) 123

2 – Malleus Maleficarum. No one reading Roskoff’s account of the Malleus Maleficarum could doubt the truth of Janouch’s account in this respect.

3 – Quoted from Michael Kunze, Highroad to the Stake, tr. W. E. Yuill (University of Chicago Press, 1987), 344

4 – Cf. the extraordinary diary-entry for 14 August 1913, in which he wrote that ‘To live as ascetically as possible, more ascetically than a bachelor, is the only way in which I could endure marriage’.

Orson Welles, The Trial, Franz Kafka

Kafka knew from Roskoff¹ about the ways in which supposed witches were tortured, and given that the way in which her hands are described identifies Leni as a vampire and hence a witch, her webbed hands may put the reader in mind of the popular Hexenprobe (manner in which supposed witches were put to the test) of ‘swimming’. Kafka knew that being drowned in a river² was, in effect, one of the penalties for witchcraft, and that it was commonplace for parents to condemn their children to death by implicating them in the witchcraft of which they were themselves accused.

1 – G. Roskoff, Geschichte des Teufels, 2 vols (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1869; repr. Nördlingen: Greno, 1987) II, 276-283

2 – Cf. the fate of Georg Bendemann in ‘The Judgment’, who is likewise guilty of disobedience, heresy in the present context.

3 –  Again, cf. ‘The Judgment’, for the son’s values are no more those of the father than the father’s are those of the son.

Orson Welles, The Trial, Franz Kafka

The Inquisition’s procedures, as codified in the Malleus Maleficarum, presented Kafka with a model for the workings of the Law: the principle on which his Penal Colony operates, that ‘guilt is always beyond doubt’, is precisely that of the Hammer of Witchcraft, which so ordered the trial that the accused persons had virtually no chance of being acquitted, for if they did not plead guilty at the outset, they were ‘put to the question’ (tortured) until they did. This is, in effect, the truth to which Josef K. is led by Titorelli. The artist tells him that In the codex of the Law it is laid down that the innocent shall be acquitted. Now, my experience is diametrically opposed to that. I have not met with a single case of definite acquittal, which is equally applicable to the Criminalcodex of the Malleus Maleficarum. If ever there was a trial of which it was true to say that ‘Becoming involved in such a case means losing it before it has even begun’ (The Trial, ch. 6), it was the trial for witchcraft as heresy.¹ The very different contexts do not affect the ominous logic and the process of attrition which ends in the acceptance of guilt not because it is present, but because there is no alternative: I am, therefore I am guilty; being guilty, I must no longer be. In his punitive fantasies Kafka therefore seems to be equating the victims of the Law with those of the Inquisition and to be identifying with the Witch, who was, like himself, the ‘scapegoat of humanity’, believed to be able to change human beings into animals, as he himself did in The Metamorphosis and elsewhere. In the background, of course, is the idea of writing as ‘service to the Devil’: I write, therefore I am guilty.

1 – Cf Josef K.’s view of faith as superstition in which, as in The Trial, the court, after employing ‘all the machinery of the law’ (ch. 6), ‘conjures up, out of nothing at all, a great fabric of guilt’ (ch. 7).

Orson Welles, The Trial, Franz Kafka

Kafka’s reference to red-hot pincers, which probably reflects his reading of Roskoff, stands out because of the characteristic wording—the man cried out as if K. had gripped him with red-hot pincers rather than with two fingers—which means that in a real, symbolic sense this is what happens, so that Kafka is visualizing himself being tortured, in the person of the student, for his lack of allegiance to his father’s values and for the ‘dissolute behaviour’ of which his father disapproved. An earlier detail in the same chapter (ch. 3) of the novel probably derives indirectly from Roskoff’s account of witchcraft trials and the tortures involved: the court-attendant (K. as he is not, but should be) has a dream in which the student (K. as he is) is held down, just above floor level, his arms stretched out, his fingers spread, his bandy legs forced into a circle, and splashes of blood all around. The fact that this dream prefigures K.’s death confirms that it is for his heresy that he (K.) is condemned and is throttled,¹ while at the same time being ritually stabbed in the heart, a detail which is explained presently. For an illustration of the torture to which the student is subjected one would have to turn to early books on witchcraft; Kafka’s description suggests that he envisaged the student being broken on the wheel. The student represents the ‘dissolute behaviour’ of Josef K., who is obliged to study the law throughout the novel; he is accordingly seen as a monster of lechery.

1 – In the ‘civilized’, Northern countries of Europe witches were normally garrotted before being burned.

Orson Welles, The Trial, Franz Kafka

The machinery of ‘justice’ of the endlessly hierarchical court system finds its appropriate instrument and symbol in the torture-machine with its ‘bed’ to which the victim is strapped in ‘In the Penal Colony’. On one level this is a reference to the day-bed in the ‘penal colony’ of his parents’ apartment on which Kafka spent so much time, but there is more to it than that. The Malleus Maleficarum spoke of ‘engines of torture’, and Schopenhauer remarked that it was salutary to regard the world ‘as a place of penance, a penal institution, as it were, a penal colony’.¹ Indeed, Schopenhauer regarded the world as ‘the product of our guilt’² and humanity as that which ought not to exist since it does so only as a result of sexual indulgence and therefore, in his Buddhistic-ascetic world view, of transgression. This may well be deemed the ultimate Gothic transgression.

1 – Schopenhauer, SW, V, 328

2 – Ibid.

Orson Welles, The Trial, Franz Kafka

Also associated with the Court are five further Gothic motifs: darkness, the labyrinth, confined spaces, the locked room, and the desolate landscape. Darkness and the fog of self-obfuscation accompany K. wherever he goes, and are invariably associated with the Court. The streets to and from the Court are as dark and labyrinthine as the workings of the Court and therefore of the shifty, evasive mind which Josef K. finds increasingly burdensome until finally the almost impenetrable darkness in the Cathedral gives way to ‘black night’ as the full extent of his folly is revealed. It is, however, above all in the most tellingly Gothic symbolism of the novel, that of claustrophobically confined space, that the oppressiveness of his dawning sense of guilt is externalized from the second chapter onwards. The ceiling of the courtroom is so low that those in the gallery need cushions to protect their heads, and the lumber room has a similarly low ceiling; K. is crushed against the Examining Magistrate’s table; Titorelli’s studio, Huld’s room, and the side-chapel in the Cathedral are likewise as small and cramped as the grave for which Josef K. is all the time heading. The impression created is as unambiguous as it is Gothic.

Orson Welles, The Trial, Franz Kafka

The lumber room combines the motifs of claustrophobically confined space and the locked room with overdetermined dream-symbolism. Josef K. is both the man with the lash and his victim in this remarkably Gothic scene, which gains in dramatic impact from being static, like a child’s nightmare that will not go away. This literal tableau shows Josef K. envisaging himself being ‘put to the question’, and accordingly represents his increasing awareness of the infinite danger lurking within what had once seemed familiar and safe. However, the scene represents more than a renewed ‘awakening’ and a renewed ‘arrest’, for in German Rumpelkammer (‘lumber room’) has the secondary meaning of ‘limbo’, appropriate in that Josef K., who has been living in a kind of limbo with the threat of further arrest hanging over him, is about to begin facing up to the fact that his life is threatening to become a hell; Chapter 5 is the halfway stage in the process. The door of the symbolic torture chamber does not need to open for a third time because once it has opened and shut for the second time, Josef K. has resolved to take his case seriously, though without, as yet, realizing the implications of doing so. Realizing that he has a case to answer is the first step in a process that will end in ritual execution.

Orson Welles, The Trial, Franz Kafka

The wasteland scene that the artist Titorelli paints obsessively (another static tableau, it depicts two stunted trees standing far apart in dark grass, with, in the background, a many-hued sunset) is a pastiche of the typical Gothic landscape, ‘desolate, alienating and full of menace’,¹ with the important difference that the sublime,² present in the awesome mountains of Gothic à la Radcliffe and referenced on the last page of Kafka’s previous novel, is here absent; the colourful sunset has Spenglerian rather than Burkean/Kantian undertones, being less an enigmatic reminder of sublimity than a pointer to the Decline of the West. These ‘Heidelandschaften’ (there is a pun in German: they are heathen [godless] landscapes as well as heathscapes) are pictures of alienation; the two trees are the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life, compare aphorism 83, which applies to Josef K.’s guilt: We are guilty not only because we have eaten of the tree of knowledge, but also because we have not eaten of the tree of life. The condition in which we find ourselves is sinful, irrespective of any actual guilt as such. Other landscapes and urban landscapes in the K.-novels are for the most part no less desolately ‘Gothic’ than these god-forsaken ‘heath[en]scapes’, portraying a terra incognita, the very opposite of the hortus occlusus or paradise, although the idea of occlusion loses its otherwise ideal connotation in the Gothic context.

1 – Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996) 2

2 – In the eighteenth century the sublime was considered a reflection of the divine.

Orson Welles, The Trial, Franz Kafka

The Cathedral in The Trial is the natural successor to the ruined abbeys of Gothic convention and is of a symbolic piece with them. It too may be said to be ‘symbolic of demonic space where the ritual of man’s servitude to lawless power is performed’;¹ indeed, these words of a contemporary critic amount to a paraphrase of the dismissive words spoken by Josef K. to the Priest: ‘A lie is turned into a universal principle’. K. approaches the Cathedral as a work of art, that is, as a place without a numinous religious centre and as such a spatial symbol of his own lack of belief. For him it is in effect a picturesque ruin representing the superstition of the past, so that his attitude towards it is much the same as the attitude of the early Gothic novelists to the ruined abbeys that were one of their preferred loci, but with the difference that Josef K.’s target is Judaeo-Christian faith, and beyond it the nature of religious faith as such, whereas theirs was often merely the inquisitional and other excesses of the Catholic church, the Church of England of the time being too pickled in port to be a danger to anyone but itself.

1 – Alok Balla, The Cartographers of Hell (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1991) 80

Orson Welles, The Trial, Franz Kafka

The long knife derives from the metaphor das lange Messer führen (‘to brag’, literally ‘to wield the long knife’), which has been taken literally, and accordingly represents Josef K.’s damnable pride. It is also, in symbolic terms, the knife which Kafka enjoyed imagining being twisted in his heart.¹ The hesitation about who is to do the deed is, of course, pure theatre, for like all the figures in the novel, these two gentlemen (‘second-rate actors’, Kafka teases the reader by calling them) are projections of Josef K. himself. In symbolic terms he therefore kills himself, or rather, since this is a symbolic novel, he punishes himself by envisioning this happening, but lives on to struggle again in The Castle, hence the neatly folded clothes. That Josef K. is throttled and stabbed in the heart, with the knife ritually turned twice, shows that he is being punished not only for his heresy, but, also and more specifically, for his vampirism, in other words, for his lechery.

1 –Diary, 2 Nov. 1911

Orson Welles, The Trial, Franz Kafka

There are two alternative endings which, though rejected by Kafka, probably as being less powerful and less challenging than the actual ending, put this in perspective. In the first the condemned man (whom one assumes to be ‘Josef K.’) is stabbed to death by the executioner either in his prison cell or in his own room;¹ there is no need for anyone else to be present at this ultimate Gothic coup de théâtre. The other, official alternative ending of the novel, entitled (and published separately as) ‘A Dream’, is pure Gothic nightmare. Beginning ‘Josef K. was dreaming’, this version goes on: ‘It was a fine day and K. had decided to go for a walk, but no sooner had he taken two steps than he was already at the cemetery.’ There he finds two men standing beside a newly dug grave supporting a headstone; as soon as Josef K. appears, they plant the headstone, whereupon a third figure appears, an ‘artist’ who is not named but who is highly reminiscent of Titorelli. After this artist has inscribed ‘Here lies’ on the headstone, there is an embarrassing pause. Moved by the artist’s obvious embarrassment after he has written ‘J’, Josef K. jumps into the grave, his name appears on the headstone, and—he wakes up. Gothic, after all, is fantasy, even when the fantasy is deadly serious. In its way this is as striking an ending as the one Kafka finally adopted, and is more revealing (this may be the reason for its rejection) in that it reminds the reader that the whole process has been a dream. In the event Kafka evidently preferred to complete the circle of the novel on a more enigmatic note.

1 – Diary, 20/22 July 1916

Orson Welles, The Trial, Franz Kafka

RICHARD JONATHAN, ‘MARA, MARIETTA: A LOVE STORY IN 77 BEDROOMS’  —  READ THE FIRST CHAPTER

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KAFKA: THE TRIAL – ANALYSIS – PART 1

KAFKA: THE CASTLE – ANALYSIS

KAFKA: AMERIKA – ANALYSIS – PART 1

THE STRUCTURE OF FRANZ KAFKA’S FICTION – THE LIFE CYCLE OF A KAFKA CHARACTER – PART 1

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