4.3.2009
When reading The Trial, a fundamental interpretative decision must
be made. Part of what makes that novel special is a strange and somehow
distorted view of its reality. If fiction can achieve that, our job as
interpreters is to analyze how it can achieve it, by what means it
does so. (Another task for us is to explain why fiction's achieving
this would be significant; but this is not my concern in this posting.)
In our analysis, we have to decide between two general strategies with
respect to where we locate the strange experiences conveyed by the text.
We can see them either in a mismatch between the objective world of
the novel and the lead character's subjective experience of that objective
world, or we can see them in the difference between the particular fictional
world constructed by Kafka and the real world (that is, our world, as we
experience it).
In what follows, I shall argue that the first strategy is generally
mistaken, and is particularly unattractive in its psychological variety,
i.e. the view that the main character, Josef K., is prone to delusions and
that the strange features of the novel have to be taken as a consequence
of his distorted mental states. I have said in the beginning that we have
to make a decision: the novel itself does not conclusively rule out either
of the strategies, therefore it is our responsibility to determine which
of them to follow. I think there are several good reasons not to opt for
the first strategy. This leaves us with the second strategy, i.e. the view
that the characteristics of The Trial are best explained from the
particular way the reality of the novel is constructed (as compared to
actual reality). However, there seems to be a certain tendency towards the
first strategy; I'll leave it to a later posting to investigate elements
in Kafka's style which encourage that tendency. (I also won't say much about
exactly how we might follow the second strategy; this is too large a topic
for now.)
1) The events of the plot obviously take place in a fictional
world that is markedly different from what we experience in the real world.
This difference permeates several layers of reality: what is described
sometimes far exceeds physiological plausibility (such as a person carrying
another person on one arm while running up a staircase, 85-87[1]), runs
bluntly counter to expectations resulting from social conventions (as
exemplified by the guards eating K.'s breakfast and the supervisor of the
guards requisitioning Fräulein Bürstner's room for the arrest, 13,
19-20), and even introduces surreal elements (like the apparent recurrence
of events as if it were the rerun of a TV program, 117). In addition, Kafka
uses techniques of perspective, like obscuration, distortion and ambiguity,
to mislead the reader's imagination, score punch lines, or simply create an
atmosphere of surprise and frustration.
There is a tendency to account for the unique experience resulting from
all this in a particular interpretative move: ascribing everything that is
strange and puzzling to the configuration of Josef K.'s subjectivity. On
this view, we are looking at a world that is fundamentally similar our own
real world (or at any rate, our own real world at Kafka's time and location,
that is, a European city in the 1920s) — but we look at it through the
eyes of an easily deluded, possibly mentally deranged individual, someone
unable to tell apart what actually is going on around him and what
imagination, hallucination or even schizophrenic symptoms lead him to
believe.
This view is questionable: first of all, there is no direct ascription of
any mental disorder to the main character. The interpretation would have to
rest on taking the events and views related in the narrative as symptomatic,
but it is hard to tell what would justify treating this symptomatic evidence
as conclusive.
It is also unsatisfactory for reasons of axiology. If all the novel has
to say to us is how the world may look like from a mentally deranged mind's
perspective, we would have to wonder what makes it special as a work of
literature. If, in contrast, the work artfully exposes, via a specially
crafted fictional world, a deeper insight into the human condition, it
would speak to us about something that actually concerns us (each of us).
Moreover, taking the novel to explore the viewpoint of a dysfunctional
subjectivity would also introduce, by implication, an external standard that
doesn't seem to be appropriate: the novel would have to be evaluated for
consistency with the findings of psychopathological research. In other words:
with ongoing development of such research we learn more accurately how
the world may look like for people with mental disorders, and we might find
that Kafka's novel is far off the mark — so scientific progress would
ultimately invalidate part of its artistic value. This is of course
absurd.
So it is better to conclude that the novel does not portray a
subjectively distorted view of the actual world, but rather a fictional
world that is far removed in many respects from it (and is thus more akin
to the world of, say, fairy tales or science fiction movies). Looking at it
this way, we can ask how this strange fictional world is constructed by
Kafka's particular narrative techniques and his use of language, and we can
search more directly for ways in which it can convey insights to us about
ourselves and our general condition.
2) The question, as I have put it at the beginning of this posting,
is whether the borders between the normal and the phantastic should be
taken to run within the novel, or whether they have to be located
between fiction and reality. As I have mentioned, the novel itself
does not settle this question directly. Neither does it explicitly ascribe
a distorted subjectivity to the lead character, nor does it directly rule
out such an interpretation. It is up to us to decide (and it would be
helpful in much of the discussion of Kafka's work if it would be made
explicit as a decision, instead of just being taken for granted, as it
happens often enough).
As I have argued, there are good reasons to insist on drawing the line not
within the fictional structure (thus creating an additional layer of
unreality in the fictional world, a fiction-in-fiction, or more accurately,
a delusion-in-fiction), but outside it. As a consequence, what happens to
Josef K. really happens to him in the world of the novel, in the same
way in which horses really talk in a fairy tale, or people are
really 'beamed' through space in science fiction movies. The
characters in the fairy tale or in the science fiction movie don't imagine
or hallucinate the horse talking or people being beamed through space. It
actually happens (in that world). There is in these cases no gap between
reality and unreality — although of course there is that gap between us
(as readers or viewers) and the characters.
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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.
