25.1.2009
Reading Kafka can be confusing, and The Trial is perhaps, among
his works, the one which creates this effect most strongly. It has invited
speculations on many interpretative levels; prominent among them are
autobiographical, religious, psychoanalytical and other largely impalpable
readings. That there is room for all these speculations is in part what
makes it fun to engage with Kafka's work, and the texts are ambivalent
enough to guarantee that they will never come to a conclusive end.
On the other hand, there are many aspects of his work, and the novels in
particular, which merit close, down-to-earth interpretation work. One of
them is the way in which the protagonists are portrayed. Far from being
understandable only from the larger speculative framework that many seem to
take as prerequisite, we can ask questions about their personalities, the
particular way in which these personalities are presented, and the way they
develop (or fail to develop) over the course of the narrative.
In what follows I shall pursue a close reading of the first chapter of
The Trial, which I take as a personality study of the main protagonist,
Josef K.; he is, as I shall argue, displayed as a weak and faulty character
through and through. However, the resulting picture is a sharp and coherent
portrait, and made neither deliberately inconsistent nor obscure by
Kafka.
1) Lack of decisiveness and strength of will. Especially at the
beginning of the chapter the text directly demonstrates a mismatch between
what K. wants us (and the other characters) to think of him and the state
he is really in. He tries to look firm and determined, but actually he is
insecure and hesitant. At the first encounter with the guards, he enters
the next room 'slower than he wanted to' (8)[1], later on he lets himself
into an extensive eye contact with one of the guards, 'without intending
it' (13-14).
K.'s weakness shows more clearly when he gets emotional. Clearly this
is supposed to provide some energetic drive to his actions, but repeatedly
fails so - not because reason and self-control gets the upper hand again in
K., but because it simply runs out of steam against the calm composure of
the other characters: when K. yells at the guards (18), and again when he
demands to be allowed to phone his friend, the prosecutor Hasterer
(23-24).
In addition, where K. deliberates, he typically reaches the conclusion
to do nothing and just let things run their course. The long string of
instances of this pattern is opened in the first chapter, when K. presumes
that by just walking out of the room he might get rid of the whole
affair - but then decides to do nothing, preferring the 'safety of the
solution resulting from the natural course of things', as he puts it to
himself. (Never mind that there isn't the slightest indication what the
natural course of things would be, and what a solution would look like.)
As in countless later situations, we've got a lack of decisiveness here,
supported by questionable rationalization (16).
At this point, let me introduce one of the primary questions guiding my
interpretation. I have noted that there is a gap between how K. tries to
present himself and what his way of acting tells us about his real condition.
He talks firmly to the guards, but when it comes to even minor action (just
entering the next room), we learn that this firmness is just a facade. But
what does K. himself believe? Is he himself aware of his insecurity? If
that's the case, then his apparent firmness is a deliberate deception, the
facade is put up to mislead the other characters, but questionable as this
move may be, we can at least ascribe some self-awareness to K. On the other
hand, K. may be deceiving himself, he may actually think of himself as
firmly in control, not recognizing the episodes of insecurity at all, or
discounting them unconsciously. His arrogant behavior wouldn't be a
deliberate deception, but rather a symptom of his lack of self-awareness.
So the reliability of what we learn about K., in passages like the ones
quoted above is something that we have to watch closely.
At any rate, the narrator is on our side in these cases: in all the
episodes where K. is acting in a way contrary to his own decisions or
feelings, we promptly are not only told about the events that go on
objectively (in the world of the novel), but also about K.'s
subjective states. Otherwise, we wouldn't be in a position to even know of
the mismatch; insight into K.'s mind is a necessary ingredient for that.
The function of the narrator's giving us insights into K.'s feelings and
intentions is precisely to expose that mismatch. In these first passages,
there isn't yet so much unusual about that, but we will see many more
instances of the same pattern during the novel, exposing more and more of
the tensions and tears in K.'s personality.
2) Dealing with surprise. The supervisor of the guards opens the
dialogue with Josef K. by asking him whether he was 'very surprised' by the
events of the morning. This is followed by a particularly incoherent
statement from K.: he says that he certainly is surprised, but hardly
very surprised, just to correct himself a moment later, claiming
that he is indeed very surprised, but he is used to take surprises
lightly, especially this one; he justifies that attitude by referring to
his being thirty years on the world and having had to fight his way all
the time, being all on his own (20-21).
Leaving aside the somewhat pathetic tone (what does it have to do with
his age, which isn't that high anyway? - also, as we learn later in the novel,
K. isn't by far the lone wolf type as which he presents himself), this is
not cogent: while it is true that, with experience, one can become
competent in mastering difficult, even challenging situations (what K.
refers to as 'sich durchschlagen'), this has nothing in particular to do
with how one deals with unexpected situations. Unexpected situations
may be difficult to handle, not least because they characteristically leave
not much time for consideration and planning. That's why they require quick,
reliable responses, which is a talent that not everybody has, and a talent
that at any rate must be developed. But neither is every unexpected
situation hard to cope with, nor is any challenging situation unexpected.
The fact that one has successfully dealt with complicated constellations
in one's life doesn't show directly that one has the talent to deal with
surprises.
Moreover, the latter talent is based on several character traits that
Josef K. obviously hasn't. One is decisiveness, which we have seen he
lacks. Another is the ability to learn from experience, which isn't K.'s
habit, as we are told in passing (12). Even more useful would be a habit of
preparing oneself for future events: thinking about the ways things may
develop, about likely turns of events, and indeed surprises that the future
may bring. By contemplating what might happen next, and how one could react,
what the options would be and which of them one would prefer, one is to a
certain extent safeguarded against being taken by surprise. Being prepared
enables caution as well as some provisional action. But then, as it is
bluntly stated, that's what Josef K. never does: He's always tended to take
things lightly, to believe the worst only when the worst happened, to take
no precautions whatever was imminent (11). Given all this, K.'s claim to be
proficient in handling surprises is not credible.
We can note two things he decidedly doesn't do in this entire scene: he
does not keep his cool, and he never actually asks about the accusation. On
the contrary, he is clearly agitated, and uninterested in the basis of the
accusation; he's just outraged at the way the business is handled. But
later on, in the first hearing, what he claims repeatedly is the opposite:
he claims to have remained calm and asked what the accusation was. At this
point, he must be either lying, or else he must have a self-image that is
widely off the mark (53-54).
This gets us back to the reflection in paragraph 1) above. Again we find
a gap between how K. presents himself (at least to others, but possibly also
to himself) and what we learn from the insights the narrator gives us. The
interesting new constellation is that the evidence here is distributed over
several passages. K.'s action in the 'surprise'-exchange doesn't match what
we learn about his character's dispositions earlier in the chapter; K.'s
description of the exchange later in the novel doesn't match the insight
we are given by the narrator during the exchange. Again, the point of
letting us know about K.'s internal life in the passages I have quoted seems
to be to expose the difference between how he wants us to perceive him and
how we should realistically view him. Another thing that is new is that
character traits come into play, i.e. stable, long-term dispositions
to acting and feeling, whereas in section 1), we had simply to do with
episodes of acting and feeling.
(To be continued.)
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[1] All references to The Trial are made by page number
from the critical edition of Kafka's works: Franz Kafka,
Der Proceß, ed. Malcolm Pasley, Schriften. Tagebücher.
Kritische Ausgabe, eds. Jürgen Born et. al., Frankfurt a.M.:
Fischer 2002.
