“There can be no doubt that all the activities of this court, and therefore my own arrest and today’s investigation, are backed by a large organisation. An organisation that not only employs corrupt guards, foolish supervisors, and examing magistrates who are at best minor officials, but which also supports a high-ranking judiciary with its inevitable vast retinue of attendants, clerks, police, and other auxiliaries, perhaps even – I am not afraid to use the word – executioners. And what is the purpose of this organization, gentlemen? It is to arrest innocent individuals and to institute meaningless and for the most part – as in my case – fruitless proceedings against them. If the whole system is as senseless as this, how could the whole body of officials avoid being grossly corrupt?”

Joseph K. wakes up one morning to find himself under arrest by two incompetent guards who refuse to tell him the reason for his arrest. So begins an investigation into a nameless crime that preoccupies him for the rest of the novel as he tries to go about his daily life in the bank and visits his advocate (a lawyer) and other sundry individuals (such as a painter and a woman sleeping with a judge) to help in his mysterious case. All of this slowly breaks down his mental stability, and leads to him willingly following two executioners to his death.

Kafka’s novel is an incomplete novel. It has an ending, but the second to last chapter skips from him talking to a priest (who is really the court chaplain) about his case to his thirty first birthday when the executioners from the court show up in his room to presumably fulfill his sentencing of the death penalty for unrevealed crime. We never witness how his case progresses in between the two chapters. Between the two chapters, he must experience an actual trial and receive sentencing, but we never get to watch the expected courtroom drama unfold. The impending trial looms throughout the novel like a menacing force, but this obvious point of climax is conspicuously absent from the plot. The only trials that appear in the plot is the investigation and preliminary hearings and references to judges talking about his case, but otherwise the story focuses strongly on Joseph K’s emotional reaction and psychological response, while trying to negotiate his everyday life. In a way the absence of an outright trial scene works to make the court that much more menacing. I still feel, however, a chapter with the actual trial between the second to last and final chapter would have been more satisfying.  But perhaps that is the point: we are not supposed to be satisfied.

On the surface this is a novel about the corruption and inefficiency of bureaucracy. We witness guards who steal and extort from their charges, while offering a friendly smile and useless advice. We have judges who sleep with the wives of lower court aides. We have lower magistrates whose decisions can and are often reversed on a whim by higher officials. We have a system where a defendants cannot even get basic information about their case, such as why they are even being investigated in the first place. We have advocates who transform their clients into prostrating sniveling worms with just the faintest hint that they might have received crucial information about their client’s case. However. beyond this surface reading there is a deeper allegorical dimension to the novel.

As I already noted, we never find out why Joseph K is on trial. As the back of my book asks, “Is he perhaps on trail for his innocence? Could he have freed himself from the proceedings by confessing his guilt as a human being? Has the trial been set up because he is incapable of admitting his guilt, and hence his humanity?”  Joseph K is not a particularly nice person. He is arrogant, untrusting, dismissive of others and intimate relationships, and  a womanizer. We are told he has a relationship with a woman named Erna and its implied that they are close to being engaged, but this woman never appears in the narrative, except “offscreen.” Meanwhile, Joseph sleeps with his advocates’ maid, passionately kisses his next door neighbor, Fraulein Burstner, when he visits her for reasons related to the trial, and competes with a magistrate for the wife of a court clerk., all while supposedly in a long-term relationship with this other absent woman.  The trial brings out his worst animal instincts; in a way the trial itself is his test and we see the true side of Joseph K. His reaction to the trial is what the reader and the magistrates themselves primarily investigate. Joseph K’s poor decisions with women, and outright betrayal of the woman who wants to marry him, imply that despite his pleas that he is innocent of any crime, he is not truly innocent in his soul. These behaviors hint at the Christian theological concept of Original Sin. No one is innocent, everyone is guilty of some crime.

The court, too, has symbolic resonance. It extends its tentacles throughout society. Almost everyone Joseph K. meets from the lowliest painter in his studio to a priest in church is working for the court in some capacity or another. The court then represents modern society, a deep twisting labyrinth of corruption in which modern man is trapped. They never take Joseph K. to prison when he is put under arrest because society itself is the prison. He cannot escape the court because the court is all around him. The court is society itself. As Joseph K.’s uncle points out, the family honor is at stake in his trial, which suggests society itself is judging him.

Joseph’s inability to access the court documents or basically any information about his case also has symbolic overtones. Individuals in society have become jaded and disassociated from their own laws and government, and by extension, with themselves. If the court encompasses all of society, it also exists above and beyond society, so that even members of the court themselves can barely control it as suggested by the fact that lower magistrates that acquit a defendant can easily and usually have their decisions overturned by magistrates higher up in the hierarchy. As I have already suggested, if the trial has any effect on Joseph K., besides the obvious paranoia, obsession, and fear of the future that it brings with it, then it allows him to become closer with his true self (even if that self is not a particularly good human being).

To be honest this is a very different novel than what I expected. I thought this novel would be more along the lines of the scene in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four where Winston Smith finds himself in the government’s reeducation prison, but extended to the size of a small novel. I didn’t expect him to be under arrest, but ultimately free to roam around society and go about his daily life, with the occasional court-related nuisance. But ultimately I enjoyed the work  for what it is.

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