The Trial Blog 4

One of the most struggling things in reading this book is figuring out what “role” I’m really supposed to play. The text is confusing and strange, and I’m left feeling just as bewildered about The Trial as K. is about..  well, the trial. In that way, our first readerly role would be in the position of K. himself. We have no idea what’s going on or what the world we’re entering into is like, only that this strange arrest has been placed onto a man named Joseph K., and everyone else in the world seems to think it’s nothing out of the ordinary.

Looking at you, Frau Grubach.

The nature of this novel makes it very hard to “submit” to the text. However, the only way you can get through it is if you do just that. There is a clear parallel here with how K. must act; he resists the authority that’s telling him what to do without giving any explanation, but he has no choice but to go along with what he’s told to do. As the story progresses, K. gets more and more weary at the workings of his trial, and it starts to take a toll on him emotionally and physically— and at that point, we readers are right there along with him. Even the structure of the words on the page itself, arranged in large blocks of continuous text with little to no paragraph breaks or breaks for dialogue  (whether initially formatted that way or not) which make the pages that much more daunting and confusing. It would seem that the ideal narrative audience for this book is someone who is extremely well at adapting to this kind of offensively inaccessible language. And I’m pretty sure that person doesn’t really exist.

However, in this same vein maybe I am just having difficulty in finding a submissive readerly role that I can actually subscribe to. I went into reading this book with the advice to “let it be weird”, so I was already expecting it to be difficult to get into. This could be acting as a barrier to me; it’s easier to fall into the idea that this book is intrinsically unreachable instead of constructing the reader who can reach it. Assuming that it’s going to be impossible to be the reader the text wants me to be sort of ensures that it will be.

Me thinking about how this book essentially played us all.

Provided that’s true, the authorial audience (as in, the audience Kafka had in mind while writing this book) would have to be someone who WOULD get lost in the working of this world and the plot of this book, because we’re meant to be just as lost, exhausted, and hopeless as K. is. This book is commentating on this kind of extreme corruption, this dystopian system of unwritten rules and regulations that exploit the innocent for inconceivable reasons.

The message of this book seems to fall pretty deeply in line with the general thought of existential nihilism— as I understand it, the idea that nothing we do matters and that we’ll all be subjected to powers completely beyond our control until we die, so there’s no point in trying to change our fate because we are insignificant to the workings of the universe. Or something like that.
In the end of the novel (which by the way, Kafka never truly “finished”, which may explain some things), Joseph K. is taken away by anonymous officers of the court and brutally stabbed in the heart. He dies, alone, still searching for help and for answers. K.’s last words are a shocked exclamation about his execution; “Like a dog!’ he said: it was as if he meant the shame of it to outlive him” (211). No matter what K. did, we as readers are left with the feeling that this is the fate that would have become of him. As Amanda correctly predicted in the second blog for this book, this story absolutely did not have a happy ending for Joseph K.

As a final note, I want to bring up the question of who the strange figure is meant to be at the end of the novel, as K. is approaching his death. The narrator describes it as “a human figure, faint and insubstantial” and then goes on to ask, as if in K.’s mind, “Who was it? A friend? A good man? Someone who wanted to help?” (210). In my mind, the unidentifiable person could symbolize the reader: in the distance, potentially wishing to assist K. for we know he was wronged, but unable to do anything at all.

 

The Trial Blog 3

The Trial by Franz Kafka has been following the story of K., who is being put on the titular trial because… Well, we don’t know. I have gone through the book with my group, and one of the biggest mysteries that were left pondering is the reason of K. being put on trial in the first place. The officers just come in and tell him that he has been called to stand trial. Doesn’t explain what laws K. has broken, or even take him to prison to await it. It just happens. K. doesn’t try to fight back against this supposedly false accusation. So why would Kafka write like this? What was he trying to express? Thinking about this mystery made me realize that the Hermeneutic code was used in this book.

The Hermeneutic Code is used to propose and ultimately solve enigma’s in stories as it’s intertextual strategy. How is it being used as a strategy in this book? Well, it’s quite simple: The Trial itself is the enigma.

 

 

What I expected the Warders to be like

 

At the beginning of the book, warders arrive and tell K. that he is under arrest. When K. asks why, we expect that we’d be given a reason for this. Instead, the warders state that they “are not authorized to tell him,” (Kafka 9). Now while this could be seen as nothing out of the ordinary or something we would get an explanation to later. You would be wrong. We never get ANY explanation on why K. is sent to trial. All we do get is the first line of the first page of the story: “Someone must have been spreading slander about Josef K., for one morning he was arrested, though he had done nothing wrong.”

 

 

K. ?

I also noticed something about K. that also plays to the semic code. When he goes to the court offices, he takes a moment to note that they are airless and shabby. Why do I bring this up? Because it correlates with a trait that I took note of with our protagonist: He believes himself higher than all of this. While the constant reference to the shabby airless offices is seen most often, he makes remarks that make him look a bit pompous.  In chapter 2, he notes the building where the court was to be held “displayed on both sides houses exactly alike, tall gray apartment tenements inhabited by poor people” (Kafka 42). Would a guy who is being put on trial for a ‘crime’ he didn’t commit think like this?

 

There could be other codes that are contained within Kafka’s story, but these two are the ones that I found most prominent. As we approach the end of this book, I have a feeling that while we might not get the answers we are seeking, I do feel the conclusion will be a culmination of the two codes.

The Trial Blog 2

Me after I try to read this book.

Reading Kafka’s The Trial has been challenging and insane. It is a story about a man, K., who is under arrest and on trial for…something. I wish I could describe the book as something other than weird, but it just keeps getting weirder. Personally, I have been finding it difficult to find a way into the text. I can’t even tell if I’m experiencing the text mimetically, let alone thematically. Lots of crazy stuff happens that makes the book inaccessible in a way, not necessarily in the language, but within the plot.

Attributing a genre, or even meaning, to this text seems wrong in some way, but I can, fairly certainly, say that this is a symptom of my own resistance. I didn’t exist in 19th century Germany, but I feel confident in saying that this text isn’t realism. I almost want to call this dystopian: It features the main character trapped in a crazy, failing world where only he or she has enough sense to see what is wrong. Everyone seems to be on a different, namely worse, wavelength than K. I’d maybe even call it fantasy because I’m so far removed from this nonsense. I’m about two-thirds of the way through the book, and these are the genres I’ve settled on. However, I’m expecting an overarching, philosophical meaning will emerge by the end of the last third.

Dystopian literature exists for a laundry list of reasons, but I’ll mention just one in the context of The Trial. People live in fear. People are paranoid. People are pessimists. Sometimes, people think things are just going way too well for them. It’s only a matter of time (or is it already happening????) before it becomes a norm for innocent people to get indicted or for America’s first annual Hunger Games to air on our TV screens. Since we have to wait patiently for these things to happen, we must write about what we foresee instead. We experienced another “reason” for dystopian literature in our second book, Animal Farm: satire and social commentary.

I would argue that Syllogistic Progressive form is best for The Trial. This form is based on the “unfolding steps of an argument.” This argumentative style is how things work in a court of law, which is sort of what K’s story is about, albeit some strange kind of court of law.

This is basically what they have on K.

It is hard to give specific textual quotes of the employment of this form throughout the text, because, in one way or another, the syllogistic progressive form is being used throughout its entirety. I swear that isn’t me being lazy. But, we arrive at the text on the day that K. was arrested “without having done anything wrong” (Kafka 7). K. feels wronged. We experience K.’s interactions with various law enforcement personnel, like warders, magistrates, law-court attendants, deputies, the list goes on. Each one represents a different level in his case as it unfolds. Nearing the end of the second third of the book, the readers and K. meet a courtroom painter, who goes on to explain insider court information. He says, “The great privilege, then, of absolving from guilt our Judges do not possess, but they do have the right to take the burden of the charge off your shoulders. That is to say, when you are acquitted in this fashion the charge is lifted from your shoulders for the time being, ” (Kafka 147). What the court painter is saying is that the judge has control over the conclusion, but not much control over the premises. K. doesn’t have control over either, yet he is very fixated on the conclusion of the argument (his inevitable acquittal because he is innocent) than any of the previous steps of the arguments. This is also true for many of the law enforcement officers he’s come into contact with, as well. I found it useful to read “On Rhetoric” by Arthur Schopenhauer, where he wrote, “Let the premisses come first, and the conclusion follow. This rule, however, is seldom observed, and people go to work the reverse way, since zeal, hastiness, and dogmatic positiveness urge us to shout out the conclusion loudly and noisily at the person who adheres to the opposite error.” If K. wants to have a happy ending to his story, he needs to quit focusing on the hopeful conclusion of his story and focus on the premises that got him there. It’s like treating the symptoms of something instead of trying to fix the cause. It is counterproductive. If K. keeps going on this way, I imagine that this story will not have a very happy ending for him.

Also me while reading.

The Trial Blog 1

The Trial by Franz Kafka is a philosophical fiction novel about a man named Joseph K. who is arrested without being told any information regarding the arrest, K. is in constant demand for answers during the process of his trial.

Anthony Perkins playing K. when a stranger (Franz one of his warders), enters his bedroom.

When I first began to read this novel I came with an image of Anthony Perkins as I had viewed Orson Welles adaptation of the novel several years ago. This was a hindrance in getting the text at first, I pictured not what the text was telling me but what the film showed me, instantly producing a mimetic driven reading. Luckily I only remember the opening segment of the movie and after the first chapter it became easy to push the film out of my mind and let the text in, but as I did this another challenge made itself known. As K. kept asking questions, I too kept asking questions. Why would he be arrested without an explanation? What authority is persecuting him? Is he really innocent or is he guilty, and of what? This is what I’m reading for in the memetic, I’m distraught by the aesthetic emotion of this situation. It is hard to get past what doesn’t make sense in my mind. What I believe being arrested and on trial entails for a person doesn’t mesh with what is happening in this man’s case. This is a projection in which I’m accusing the text of being wrong which prevents me from getting the text on it’s own terms. As I tried to get the text I realized there were contradictions everywhere, that is why I constantly felt something was wrong with the text. This leads me to the premise: What happens when injustice controls humanity?

This premise is formed by the controlling and opposing values of the text. On page 16 K. says “who accuses me?” and “I demand a clear answer to these questions” in which he is rebutted by the Inspector “You are laboring under a great delusion” and furthermore explains K.’s behavior as giving an “unfavorable impression”. This negatively charged sequence reveals the context of the controlling value: Fighting injustice causes persecution.

K. being questioned by the inspector, the warders and K.’s colleagues from the bank being present. 

K. stops arguing and decides to do something sensible by calling his advocate. This action is positively charged which forms the controlling purpose: Conforming to the rules leads to approval. Immediately as he decides this the Inspector says “Certainly, but I don’t see what sense there would be in that”(pg.17). K. responds in irritation “You ask me to be sensible and you carry on in the most senseless way…” which concludes the opposing context: Obedience can subject one to manipulation and suffering (pg. 17). K. dismisses the phone call and walks over to the window seeing a crowd of people spectating his interactions with the inspector. Annoyed by the intrusion and lack of privacy he yells “Go away” which creates the opposing purpose: standing up for justice supports freedom (pg. 18).

I briefly want to approach the theory In Culler’s book The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. He addresses in chapter 9 the hierarchy between story (action and events) and Discourse (presentation and narration) of a narrative. His example of Oedipus fits nicely in correlation with this narrative. Instead of a meaning or discourse being the product of a prior event, in this case the event is the product of discourse. As Culler analyzes Oedipus he determines that the play’s action “is the revelation of this awful deed, but we are never given proof”(pg. 174). As in The Trial the audience is aware of his arrest for something he’s accused of doing, but is not given any proof to this man’s supposed guilt that is driving the narrative. Instead of being told his crime, the event, and then discourse follow in signifying meaning, we are given signification in which events proceed from. 

The Bell Jar Blog 4

As I type this blog post, my mind is weighed heavily by the book that I have finished. The Bell Jar has been following the story of Esther, who has gone from a woman who felt as if she wasn’t fitting in society into a woman who is on the path of self-destruction.

I found myself having to put down the book and pace around the room, reminding myself that this is a piece of realistic fiction, based on a life that has already passed. I wanted to help the woman. She needed help, and it felt like so few people wanted to help her. Her parents of course, but her friends. They acted as if there was nothing wrong, and they went on with their lives. It made me question how to support Esther? She needs help. What is making the problem worse?

That’s when it hit me. The sad truth of this story. The help that Esther was receiving was NOT helping, sometimes making her condition worse. Throughout the story, we see Esther going in and out of hospitals, both private and public. Going through different therapies, even electro-shock, but in the end, we always find her back ready to take her life. It’s a twisted cycle we see as she moved through her life.

There are a pair of quotes I found in chapter 15 and 20 that best describes how Esther truly feels with her mental illness.

“Wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air” (185).

“To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream” (237).

This is where the title of the book comes into play. A bell jar is used in science to contain an area while they vacuum the air out of it. Hypothetically, you can put an alarm clock in one, vacuum the air from it, and no sound would come from it. The clock is the mental illness of Esther. No matter where she is and what help she gets, she will always be trapped in her mind and will suffer for it. She will always feel alone, and THAT’S where her suicidal urges come from.

This forced me to realize that I wasn’t a part of the authorial audience that Plath was trying to pull in. I am not like the Esther and the other characters of the story who suffer the depression and suicidal thoughts. I am OUTSIDE of the bell jar. The audience that Plath wanted to bring in were people like her and Esther. Individuals who feel trapped and alone, and feel suffocated by being so alone. People who are ‘in the bell jar.’  Maybe as a way to show that they AREN’T alone. There are other people who feel like this and knowing that there are people who understand what the authorial audience is going through might be a comfort.

One could argue that Plath meant for it to be the opposite and have the authorial audience to be the ‘outsiders.’ This could be true, but I have to bring up the characters who are ‘outside’ in the story. People like the Doctors and Esther’s family end up mistreating her, even though this is how we know to help those mentally ill. It could discourage some outsiders to help. Either way, the book has opened the eyes of those outside, while giving comfort to those within at the fact they are NOT alone.

The Bell Jar 3

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath profiles Esther Greenwood’s sinking into an anxious and depressed state as she tries to make her way in the world as a young woman in the early 20th century. As we’ve seen through the first three-quarters of the book, we’ve discovered how dense and complex Esther’s story and Plath’s writing really is, so it was helpful for me, personally, to delve into intertextual codes in an attempt to explore the text on more thorough levels.

The hermeneutic code, as Silverman explains as a code that “inscribes the desire for closure and truth,” seemed like the best to tackle first for The Bell Jar (Silverman 257). Figuring out how we can apply the hermeneutic code to Plath’s novel will hopefully open up doors for other intertextual codes.

The hermeneutic code is all about breaking down a mystery into “morphemes,” which, in turn, creates a “hermeneutic sentence” (257). The Bell Jar in its entirety is a mystery, but I wanted to try to apply the hermeneutic code to Esther’s being depressed specifically. This choice is probably still a bit too generic, but there is still a lot of other stuff going on in the novel, particularly in the beginning.

I decided on this topic because many people treat Esther as if she has no reason to be depressed or as if it is a conscious choice she is making to act and feel the way she does. Backtracking a little bit, the thematization would be that Esther is kind of an odd and different girl (and everyone treats her as such). According to Silverman, the thematization “involves a quite complex operation, in which the semic code plays an important role” (258). We know that the semic code involves the repetition of things, semes, around a proper noun. Maybe it’s a bit of a stretch, but could we argue that Plath does a lot of work to prove and repeat Esther’s differences? We see it in her struggle to fit in at her job, relate to her peers, and more.

This thematization opens up the proposal of the enigma: Esther is depressed and anxious, but why? To be honest, the thematization and proposal of the enigma, at least in this story, seem to overlap a bit. The formulation of the enigma appears when we learn about some of Esther’s symptoms, like how she “hadn’t slept for fourteen nights and how [she] couldn’t read or write or swallow very well” (Plath 135). Esther is suffering through some pretty serious symptoms, yet she is still being belittled and ignored by her own doctor and mother.

Doctor Gordon prescribes Esther shock therapy as the treatment for her issue (or, a request for an answer), and “with each flash a great jolt drubbed me till I thought my bones would break and the sap fly out of me like a split plant. I wondered what terrible thing it was that I had done” (143). This scene is pretty devastating – Esther is now blaming herself for something she can’t control, and she is suffering extreme pain. It’s no surprise that this shock therapy didn’t work, failing to solve the enigma, which is called jamming in the hermeneutic morpheme. We see a snare before her shock treatment when Esther considers running, and we see a snare after the treatment when we witness Esther’s suicidal thoughts and practice for her future suicide attempt. Silverman says, “The snare represents the most intricate of the hermeneutic morphemes, and the one richest in possible variations” (Silverman 260). Esther tries to literally evade the possible answer to her problem by running away from her treatment appointment. Afterward, she considers trying to evade her enigma literally by ending her life altogether.

At this point in the novel, we haven’t quite come across the suspended or partial answers or the disclosure of the enigma. We still have another quarter of the book to go, and I have a feeling Plath will keep us on our toes until the very last page.

 

Esther needs a friend like Ferris.