The Trial Kafka Vk
Glynis Waughtal
The Trial (German: Der Process)[A] is a novel written by Franz Kafka in 1914 and 1915 and published posthumously on 26 April 1925. One of his best-known works, it tells the story of Josef K., a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader. Heavily influenced by Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, Kafka even went so far as to call Dostoevsky a blood relative.[1] Like Kafka's two other novels, The Castle and Amerika, The Trial was never completed, although it does include a chapter which appears to bring the story to an intentionally abrupt ending.
After Kafka's death in 1924 his friend and literary executor Max Brod edited the text for publication by Verlag Die Schmiede. The original manuscript is held at the Museum of Modern Literature, Marbach am Neckar, Germany. The first English-language translation, by Willa and Edwin Muir, was published in 1937.[2] In 1999, the book was listed in Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century and as No. 2 of the Best German Novels of the Twentieth Century.
Kafka drafted the opening sentence of The Trial in August 1914, and continued work on the novel throughout 1915. This was an unusually productive period for Kafka, despite the outbreak of World War I, which significantly increased the pressures of his day job as an insurance agent.[3]
Having begun by writing the opening and concluding sections of the novel, Kafka worked on the intervening scenes in a haphazard manner, using several different notebooks simultaneously. His friend Max Brod, knowing Kafka's habit of destroying his own work, eventually took the manuscript into safekeeping. This manuscript consisted of 161 loose pages torn from notebooks, which Kafka had bundled together into chapters. The order of the chapters was not made clear to Brod, nor was he told which parts were complete and which unfinished. Following Kafka's death in 1924, Brod edited the work and assembled it into a novel to the best of his ability. Further editorial work has been done by later scholars, but Kafka's final vision for The Trial remains unknown.[3]
On the morning of his thirtieth birthday, Josef K., the chief clerk of a bank, is unexpectedly arrested by two agents from an unidentified agency for an unspecified crime. The agents discuss the situation with Josef in the unoccupied room of his fellow lodger Frulein Brstner, in the unexplained presence of three junior clerks from Josef's bank. Josef is not imprisoned, but left free to go about his business. His landlady, Frau Grubach, tries to console Josef about the trial. He visits Brstner to explain the events, and then harasses her by kissing her without consent.
Josef finds that Frulein Montag, a lodger from another room, has moved in with Frulein Brstner. He suspects that this is a coy manoeuvre meant to distance him from Brstner, and resolves that she will eventually fall for his charms.
Josef is invited to appear at the court's address the coming Sunday, without being told the time or location. After a period of exploration he finds the court in the attic of a dilapidated working-class tenement block, at the back of a young washerwoman's home. Josef is rebuked for his lateness and mistaken for a house painter rather than a bank clerk. He arouses the assembly's hostility after a passionate plea about the absurdity of the trial and the falseness of the accusation, despite still not knowing the charges. The proceedings are interrupted by a man sexually assaulting the washerwoman in a corner. Josef notices that all the assembly members are wearing pins on their lapels which he interprets as signifying their membership of a secret organisation.
The following Sunday Josef goes to the courtroom again, but the court is not in session. The washerwoman gives him information about the process and attempts to seduce him before a law student, the man who assaulted her the previous week, takes her away, claiming her to be his mistress. The woman's husband, a court usher, then takes Josef on a tour of the court offices, which ends after Josef becomes extremely weak in the presence of other court officials and defendants.
One evening, in a storage room at his own bank, Josef discovers the two agents who arrested him being whipped for soliciting bribes from Josef, which he had complained about at court. Josef tries to argue with the flogger, saying that the men need not be whipped, but the flogger cannot be swayed. The next day he returns to the storage room and is shocked to find everything as he had found it the day before, including the whipper and the two agents.
Josef is visited by his uncle Karl, who lives in the country. Worried by the rumors about his nephew, Karl introduces Josef to Herr Huld, a sickly and bedridden lawyer tended to by Leni, a young woman who shows an immediate attraction to Josef. During a conversation between Karl and Huld about Josef's case, Leni calls Josef away for a sexual encounter. Afterwards, Josef meets his angry uncle outside, who claims that Josef's lack of respect for the advocate, by leaving the meeting and romantically engaging with the woman who is apparently Huld's mistress, has hurt his case.
Josef has become increasingly preoccupied by his case, to the detriment of his work. He has further meetings with Huld, and continues to engage in discreet trysts with Leni, but the advocate's work appears to be having no effect on the proceedings. At the bank, one of Josef's clients recommends he seek the advice of Titorelli, the court's official painter. Titorelli outlines the options he can help Josef pursue: indefinite postponement of the process, or a temporary acquittal that could at any point result in re-arrest. Unequivocal acquittal is not a viable option.
Suspicious of the advocate's motives and the apparent lack of progress, Josef finally decides to dismiss Huld and take control of matters himself. Upon arriving at Huld's office, he meets a downtrodden merchant, Rudi Block, who offers Josef some insight from a fellow defendant's perspective. Block's case has continued for five years and he has gone from being a successful businessman to being almost bankrupt and is virtually enslaved by his dependence on the lawyer and Leni, with whom he appears to be sexually involved. The lawyer mocks Block in front of Josef for his dog-like subservience. This experience further poisons Josef's opinion of his lawyer.
Josef is put in charge of accompanying an important Italian client to the city's cathedral, but the client never meets him there. While inside the cathedral, a priest calls Josef by name and tells him a fable (which was published earlier as "Before the Law") that is meant to explain his situation. The priest tells Josef that the parable is an ancient text of the court, and many generations of court officials have interpreted it differently.
On the eve of Josef's thirty-first birthday, two men arrive at his apartment. The three walk through the city, and Josef catches a brief glimpse of Frulein Brstner. They arrive at a small quarry outside the city, and the men kill Josef, stabbing him in the heart with a butcher's knife while strangling him. Josef summarizes his situation with his last words: "Like a dog!"
I was once involved in a project to persuade Orson Welles to record a commentary track for "Citizen Kane." Seemed like a good idea, but not to the Great One, who rumbled that he had made a great many films other than "Kane" and was tired of talking about it.
One he might have talked about was "The Trial" (1963), his version of the Franz Kafka story about a man accused of--something, he knows not what. It starred Anthony Perkins in his squirmy post- "Psycho" mode, it had a baroque visual style, and it was one of the few times, after "Kane," when Welles was able to get his vision onto the screen intact. For years, the negative of the film was thought to be lost, but then it was rediscovered, restored and plays at the Film Center this weekend.
The world of the movie is like a nightmare, with its hero popping from one surrealistic situation to another. Water towers open into file rooms, a woman does laundry while through the door a trial is under way, and huge trunks are dragged across empty landscapes and then back again. The black-and-white photography shows Welles' love of shadows, extreme camera angles and spectacular sets. He shot it mostly inside the Gare d'Orsay in Paris, which, after it closed as a train station and before it was reborn as a museum, offered vast spaces; the office where Joseph K works consists of rows of desks and typists extending almost to infinity, like a similar scene in the silent film "The Crowd." Kafka published his novel in Prague in 1925; it reflected his own paranoia, but it was prophetic, foreseeing Stalin's gulag and Hitler's Holocaust, in which innocent people wake up one morning to discover they are guilty of being themselves. It is a tribute to his vision that the word "Kafkaesque" has, like "Catch-22," moved beyond the work to describe things we all see in the world.
Anthony Perkins was a good choice to play Joseph K, the bureaucrat who awakens to find strange men in his room, men who treat him as a suspect and yet give him no information. Perkins could turn in an instant from ingratiating smarminess to anger, from supplication to indignation, his voice barking out ultimatums and then suddenly going high pitched and stuttery. Watch his body language as he goes into his confiding mode, hitching closer to other characters, buddy-style, looking forward to neat secrets.
The film follows his attempts to discover what he is charged with, and how he can defend himself. Every Freudian slip is used against him (he refers to a "pornograph player" and a man in a black suit carefully notes that down). He finds himself in a courtroom where the audience is cued by secret signs from the judge. He petitions the court's official portrait painter, who claims he can fix cases and obtain a "provisional acquittal." And in the longest sequence, he visits the cavernous home of the Advocate, played by Welles as an ominous sybarite who spends much of his time in bed, smoking cigars and being tended by his mistress (Romy Schneider).
c80f0f1006