Classics Corner: The Trial by Franz Kafka; Existential Suspense and Horror About The Dehumanization of The Legal System By Julie Sara Porter

 

Classics Corner: The Trial by Franz Kafka; Existential Suspense and Horror About The Dehumanization of The Legal System

By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews

PopSugar Reading Challenge: A book with a great first line ("Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong, but one morning, he was arrested.")

Spoilers: Franz Kafka isn't associated with horror the way Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen King,, HP Lovecraft, or Shirley Jackson are. Most horror authors deal with characters facing monsters, either supernatural or horror, or possibly from their own tortured damaged minds. 

Kafka's horror is of a more existential kind, the kind that fills one not with jump scares or fear of the unknown. Instead it fills one with dread with how we are treated by society. Much in the same way something like 1984 or Brave New World is scary. How a society dehumanizes and destroys the people within. It turns then into insects to be stomped on, invisible and ignored, or marks on a sheet. Once a human being is deprived of their individuality or their humanity, it becomes easier to do unthinkable things to them and to treat them like lifeless automatons who only function to obey.

That is the dilemma faced by Joseph K., the protagonist in Kafka's The Trial. The opening line alone is memorable, "Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K. he knew he had done nothing wrong, but one morning, he was arrested." This already shows the mechanistic dictatorial society in which Josef lives. He can be arrested but never knows what he did nor what his crime is for. In a modern society when black people can get shot for the most minor offenses, where Latin Americans can be judged illegal and deported even though they lived here all their lives, where people are under surveillance and could be reported for having an opinion, that could be a reality.

The trial itself is completely absurd. Josef appears at the courthouse but isn't told the time or room number, so he gets lost and is reprimanded for being late. Another time he arrives,but is told that they aren't meeting that day (a phone call or more could have saved him a trip.) Each of the trial employees send him to another and none give him a decent answer about anything. It's constant nonsense disguised as legalese. He faces court clerks, witnesses, attorneys, and a cleaning lady but never appears before a judge and never learns why he has been arrested.

 Ludicrously, the trial representatives tell Josef that he can continue to go to work and attend his trial on the weekend.  Most people would take that opportunity to not go to work, or leave town since they're not in prison. But this detail reveals a lot about Josef's character. He's not in jail nor in confinement. He could leave anytime but he doesn't. He goes through the motions of work and the trial. A few time he confronts and argues with the employees, but he just follows along: a cog in the machine. There are implications that he is being watched and reported (The courthouse knows more about him than most court employees should), so there is the rampant paranoia. But they remove his freedom of choice or desire to choose another option. He is a passive participant in the demeaning system around him.

What is particularly haunting is that he is surrounded by people who have suffered or take part in the system. The two men who arrested him are flogged after it is revealed that Josef tried to bribe them. Even though the men brought him such misery, Josef feels empathy for them. Josef encounters a lawyer who proves to be no help but doesn't mind cashing the money that Josef gives him or letting his nubile assistant sleep with him. Another client has been through the legal system for five years and it's clear his sanity is on the brink of collapsing, sort of a preview of what Josef could be come.

Kafka's attacks on the legal system are very similar to those made by Charles Dickens' Bleak House. But Bleak House had a comic satire, a bit dark at times, and a sardonic wit throughout the book. The Trial is incredibly grim not just in the plot but in tone. It is not a society with an institution to mock and point out its follies. It's an institution that is bordering on insanity because the rest of society is. This is society that truly doesn't care about it's people because the people do not care about others. The people within are cold, heartless, uncaring, and sick. The Trial is a reflection on that heartlessness and mirrors that society. The existential dilemma suggests that the innocent can't exist at all. Instead they will be carried along and swept up by the inhumanity until they themselves are inhuman or are dead.

The Trial could be a thinking person's horror because it says not only about the society in the book, but the society in which the Reader lives.