![]() For Werckmeister, this fantastical reading of Kafka’s life was best captured in Steven Soderbergh’s movie Kafka, which casts Jeremy Irons as “Kafka the brooding office clerk turned underworld agent”-a device that Werckmeister calls “Kafka 007” (after, of course, the James Bond franchise). Writing in Critical Inquiry, however, the art historian Otto Karl Werckmeister charged that many Kafka interpreters, including Arendt, were engaging with a politicized fantasy of what Kafka represents, rather than with the real Kafka. ![]() Jeremy Irons in Steven Soderbergh’s Kafka (1991). ![]() In fact, she suggests, it makes as much sense to assume that “the characters are projections of K.’s mind.” Likewise, the literary scholar Keith Fort remarked in an article in The Sewanee Review that it’s “the nightmarish quality of unreality that has made Kafka’s name synonymous with any unreal, mysterious force which operates against man.” In other words, this type of unreality has become so closely associated with Kafka that the best word to describe it is, circularly, Kafkaesque. According to Church, this unsteady temporality implies that most of what happens in The Trial isn’t real-or isn’t fully real, at any rate. The literary scholar Margaret Church expanded on these psychological themes in an article in Twentieth Century Literature, pointing to “the dreamlike quality of time values and the assumption of an interior time” employed throughout The Trial. In other words, Arendt reads The Trial as a kind of controlled descent into madness and corruption, ending in a violent exaggeration of the knowledge that nobody’s perfect. This in turn leads him into confusion, into mistaking the organized and wicked evil of the world surrounding him for some necessary expression of that general guiltiness… And since K., a busy bank employee, has never had time to ponder such generalities, he is induced to explore certain unfamiliar regions of his ego. This feeling, of course, is based in the last instance on the fact that no man is free from guilt. That all-pervasive guilt becomes the means to secure K.’s participation in a corrupt legal system. ![]() The philosopher Hannah Arendt, for instance, wrote in her well-known essay on Kafka: “In spite of the confirmation of more recent times that Kafka’s nightmare of a world was a real possibility whose actuality surpassed even the atrocities he describes, we still experience in reading his novels and stories a very definite feeling of unreality.” For Arendt, this impression of unreality derives from K.’s internalization of a vague feeling of guilt. Many commentators on The Trial have observed a sense of unreality in the novel, a feeling that something is somehow “off” that hangs like a fog over Kafka’s plotline. In fact, Kafka hints at the narrator’s ignorance at the very beginning: “Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.” Why the conjecture about what “must have” happened unless the narrator, who relates the story in the past tense, doesn’t know? That ignorance sets up the humor: During certain particularly insane moments in K.’s journey, the frustration of not knowing why he’s enduring it all becomes unbearable, at which point there’s no choice but to laugh. But with every sentence the reader takes in, it feels increasingly likely that the reason for K.’s arrest will remain a mystery.Īs The Trial follows its tragic path deeper into K.’s insular, menacing, and sexualized world, it gradually becomes clear that the answer was never forthcoming. By withholding knowledge from the protagonist and the reader, Kafka dangles the promise that all will be revealed in the end. As the novelist David Foster Wallace noted in his essay “ Laughing with Kafka,” this is Kafka’s whole schtick, and it’s what makes him so funny. Kafka’s restrained prose-the secret ingredient that makes this story about a bank clerk navigating bureaucracy into an electrifying page-turner-trades on a kind of dramatic irony. As Kafka puts it in the second-to-last chapter, “The Cathedral:” “the proceedings gradually merge into the judgment.” Eventually his accusers decide he must be guilty, and he is summarily executed. ![]() navigates a labyrinthine network of bureaucratic traps-a dark parody of the legal system-he keeps doing things that make him look guilty. is arrested, but can’t seem to find out what he’s accused of. In Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial, first published in 1925, a year after its author’s death, Josef K. The icon indicates free access to the linked research on JSTOR. ![]()
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