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.