I just finished Kafka’s The Trial. I have not read Kafka since high school when I read The Metamorphosis and realized that there may be some aspect of literature that was outside of my grasp. I put Kafka on the shelf in my brain like that of Camus or Voltaire or Nietzsche as well. There are some things in the world that my brain was not meant for and these sort of fellows are it. Serious, dark, and deeply intellectual in a way that I find off putting. It is find to think very serious things, but you must tell a captivating and entertaining story while you do it. Because of this challenge, I drew Kafka here in the early days of this challenge and thought for a moment that it may well be this work that derails me. I thought it would be torture to read this book and that it might blow the wind out of my sails. I thought this about the book just before the Trial as well, Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans because other than deeply religious texts, I thought I might miss something in the reading and feel it a chore to get through. Here, I actually enjoyed Trolllope’s work and now also I deeply enjoyed Kafka’s last book, The Trial. It was dark, it was difficult, it was a challenge to keep straight just exactly what was happening and how real to form it was, there is something dream-like in this text that some very strange things happen that it seems that the narrator, Joseph K. seems to struggle with their absurdity along with you.
The first moment I felt this tension was when he visits the court room that seems to be in an apartment building, sort of nondescript space and then because he is embarrassed he has to make up an excuse so he asks those that live there for a carpenter named Lutz which I loved very deeply, but then he finds the courtroom and some things happen there but he meets the woman who is having an affair with the serious student but her and her husband live in the court room when it isn’t being used as a courtroom and they have to move their furniture out of the court room before the proceedings begin. The same level of absurdity happens when K. meets the lawyer for the first time and slips off to visit with Lani, then again with Block the merchant who lives at the lawyers house, and then again when K. visits the painter – the girls who pester the painter and then as he is leaving the painters room they walk through another court room on their way out of his attic loft.
At the end of the Cathedral chapter, the priest poses a thought experiment to K. that I thought was fascinating and that is similar to the way the introduction writer describes the heart of Kafka being the law of the Pentateuch. The whole book I thought this reading was wrong headed because I didn’t see the inescapability of the law the same way as Kafka if this in fact was the lens through which I was meant to read the work. This thought experiment and the way the priest unpacks the unpacking of the thought experiment was fascinating and exactly as the introduction writer put it, that the law of the Old Testament and the Midrash and the Talmudic tradition is at the heart of Kafka’s writing.
“In front of the law there is a doorkeeper. A man from the countryside comes up to the door and asks for entry. But the doorkeeper says he can't let him in to the law right now. The man thinks about this, and then he asks if he'll be able to go in later on. 'That's possible,' says the doorkeeper, 'but not now'. The gateway to the law is open as it always is, and the doorkeeper has stepped to one side, so the man bends over to try and see in. When the doorkeeper notices this he laughs and says, 'If you're tempted give it a try, try and go in even though I say you can't. Careful though: I'm powerful. And I'm only the lowliest of all the doormen. But there's a doorkeeper for each of the rooms and each of them is more powerful than the last. It's more than I can stand just to look at the third one.' The man from the country had not expected difficulties like this, the law was supposed to be accessible for anyone at any time, he thinks, but now he looks more closely at the doorkeeper in his fur coat, sees his big hooked nose, his long thin tartar-beard, and he decides it's better to wait until he has permission to enter. The doorkeeper gives him a stool and lets him sit down to one side of the gate. He sits there for days and years. He tries to be allowed in time and again and tires the doorkeeper with his requests. The doorkeeper often questions him, asking about where he's from and many other things, but these are disinterested questions such as great men ask, and he always ends up by telling him he still can't let him in. The man had come well equipped for his journey, and uses everything, however valuable, to bribe the doorkeeper. He accepts everything, but as he does so he says, 'I'll only accept this so that you don't think there's anything you've failed to do'. Over many years, the man watches the doorkeeper almost without a break. He forgets about the other doormen, and begins to think this one is the only thing stopping him from gaining access to the law. Over the first few years he curses his unhappy condition out loud, but later, as he becomes old, he just grumbles to himself. He becomes senile, and as he has come to know even the fleas in the doorkeeper's fur collar over the years that he has been studying him he even asks them to help him and change the doorkeeper's mind. Finally his eyes grow dim, and he no longer knows whether it's really getting darker or just his eyes that are deceiving him. But he seems now to see an inextinguishable light begin to shine from the darkness behind the door. He doesn't have long to live now. Just before he dies, he brings together all his experience from all this time into one question which he has still never put to the doorkeeper. He beckons to him, as he's no longer able to raise his stiff body. The doorkeeper has to bend over deeply as the difference in their sizes has changed very much to the disadvantage of the man. 'What is it you want to know now?' asks the doorkeeper, 'You're insatiable.' 'Everyone wants access to the law,' says the man, 'how come, over all these years, no- one but me has asked to be let in?' The doorkeeper can see the man's come to his end, his hearing has faded, and so, so that he can be heard, he shouts to him: 'Nobody else could have got in this way, as this entrance was meant only for you. Now I'll go and close it'” (Kafka 127).
The thought here is that they are both bound to the law, the doorkeeper and the man from the country. The doorkeeper thought he knew something once and through tradition or fear or love, he keeps this way simply because it was he believes he owes the law or that the law exerts some power over him. The doorkeeper went inside once a long time ago, and he saw something then though he didn’t see much only two other doors and two other doorkeepers, to see the third doorkeeper though was all he needed to see, this person was of such a terrible concern that the weight of the law was understood then. The doorkeeper kept this terror and unpleasant experience with him all these many years, and this for this man was enough. The man from the country comes and he withholds nothing from this man, the door is open, he has told the man from the country everything he seems is necessary and waited for the man to make a choice. The choice never comes which is a choice in and of itself. The zealot charges in, the nihilist or the hedonist leaves, the pious though measured stay and wait. I have been all three of these things in my life, and I don’t know necessarily which is right, or is it the reveal all that matters here.
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