‘The Trial’: The Tyranny of Ambiguity
A review of ‘The Trial’, by Franz Kafka; 1925.
The machinery of guilt begins to clank and whir before the first page is over. Joseph K., a successful if unremarkable man, wakes up to find himself accused. Accused of what? We do not know, and neither does he: the charge is a mystery, the accusers nameless. The trial itself an absurdity. Kafka’s The Trial is about the slowly crushing force of inevitability. It is a novel as much about injustice as the part we play in our own undoing.
So the tale begins with an intrusion. Joseph, living in a boarding-house, is arrested — though not restrained. Rather, he is entangled in an engimatic legal process. His attempts to navigate this shadowy legal system bring him through oppressive courts and suffocating offices, and bring him face to face with characters who speak in riddles, each one more inscrutable than the last. From the painter Titorelli, who peddles false hopes of acquittal, to the Priest, who delivers parables veiled in despair, Joseph K. meets people who seem to embody the faceless, impenetrable forces of authory—what de Tocqueville called a ‘network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd.’
Joseph K. meets people who seem to embody the faceless, impenetrable forces of authory.
Here is the grey, insidious way of bureaucracy. Drab corridors, airless attics, endless paperworks—Kafka sketches a picture that is unceasingly dull, and it is this dullness, so unthreatening on its surface, that chokes and finally strangles us. The power of the trial lies in its ambiguity. It denies Joseph K. the clarity that might allow him to fight back. His plight, for that reason, is framed both as unique and universal.
What is Kafka trying to say, if anything? That modern existence is basically absurd. Joseph K. is ensnared in an incomprehensible bureaucracy, a system so vast and opaque that it makes a fightback impossible. The more he wriggles, the more stuck he becomes. His experience mirrors the futility of rebellion against unseeable, untouchable authority. Unable to express his agency, he finds himself alienated. The city spaces in The Trial, the dimly lit chambers, long staircases and cramped apartments are charged with a kind of hostility. Even K.’s relationships lack warmth. His few connections, as with his lover Leni, are transactional. Humanity, in this labyrinth of law and regulation, is no community of shared sympathies: it is a mass of isolated individuals, each grappling with their own incomprehensible conditions.
Even K.’s relationships lack warmth. His few connections, as with his lover Leni, are transactional.
Without relief from the nightmare, we are the ones who start to guilty. The guilt is first imposed, then internalised. We start to doubt our innocence. Perhaps I am a bad person. Perhaps I have done something wrong. The trail wears K. down. And it is this, the silent, creeping surrender to the logic of a persecuting system, and to the view of his oppressors, that is the most painful blow to take. In K., Kafka paints a man who starts as a victim but, by seeing things the way it sees things, becomes an accomplice of the system out to destroy him.
The prose is spare and clinical. The dialogue, in contrast, is circular and cryptic: it mirrors the futility of K’s fate. The story stubbornly refuses to resolve itself or give us answers: it denies us the God’s-eye view with which we might make sense of K’s ordeal. This is the point. The nightmare doesn’t end. We do not get the answers we seek. No one will come to make sense of our experience, to validate our feelings that something is wrong. Like K., we as readers are made to feel alienated from events. We must endure the grim procession. If we do, then we might find ourselves reflecting with acuity on the dehumanising forces of modernity and the fragility of individual autonomy in any modern state.
It is a prophetic story. For it was published in 1925, after Kafka’s death. It foresees the grey and grinding oppression of the fascist and communist regimes, vast humourless factories in which the person is a cog in the machine. Yet we might claim that what Kafka really foresaw is the silent march of bureaucracy about which de Tocqueville warned: not the obvious insanity of fascism or communism, but the more obscure, more subtle, more complex and insidious technological and political systems whose power springs largely from how little we understand of them.
Do not expect catharsis from The Trial: expect, rather, alienation and paranoia, but also a suggestion, as in The Matrix, that there might actually be something amiss, something wrong with the world in which we live. If we have ever thought modernity might lack something crucial — that behind its eyes, so to speak, no one is home—then, Kafka suggests, might be onto something. But if we do live in a world ruled by unseen forces, the greatest tragedy, suggests Kafka, is that we learn to live with them, and become accomplices in the process.
