the horror of the absurd and arbitrary

SPOILER ALERT
this post may contain spoilers! read at your own risk

This was the first book of Kafka’s I had ever read. I went into it not really knowing much about it (or Kafka himself, really), but I assumed it would be Kafkaesque. Having never read one of his books, though, I didn’t know how that quality would be expressed in the plot, setting, characters, etc. In short, even though I had read and seen many books and movies that are described as being Kafkaesque, I didn’t know what to expect about Kafka’s own fictional world to which so much literature has since been compared.

Being called The Trial, I went into this book expecting perhaps a mystery thriller, a chronicle of a corrupt legal system, or maybe an account of a jury’s dilemma in a heinous crime. Even after the first chapter, however, I realized that this was going to be much more bizarre.

The main character, Josef K., awakens to find himself accused of a crime. The nature of the crime is never revealed, and the protagonist presumably never learns of it himself. The plot develops through the protagonist’s ongoing attempts to understand the nature of his own trial. At every step along the way, he finds himself neutered by the sheer absurdity of his circumstances and the so-called legal system in which he is meant to be tried. There is no big reveal, and even though you are forced to submit yourself to the absurdity and irrationality of K’s plight, you still expect that it will climax in some realization that will reveal the reasons and causes for the pervasive yet unidentifiable oppressive anxiety of K’s world. You expect that it will make sense at some point, but the realization the reader gets in the resolution of the plot is that, no, it does not make sense. You are left with a sinking, horrific sense of dread about the world. How could it be so brutal? So incomprehensibly illogical? And most frightening of all, so opaque?

It is deeply unsettling that K not only engages in his case without even knowing the nature of his charges, but also that in spite of his poignant critiques of the bizarre legal system, he more-or-less goes along with it. In fact, he doesn’t even attempt to learn what his charges are, and instead spends all of his time and energy trying to understand how the legal system works. Through K and others’ ambivalence you feel the weight of some indeterminate oppressive presence in every aspect of the world. No matter how he tries to seek reasonable ground from which he can make his case, every attempt yields only more uncertain footing. There is always knowledge withheld or out of reach, and therefore K. (and the reader) are perpetually at a disadvantage against the phantom of the establishment. The more you learn the more you realize that you are doomed; damned by the inevitability of your own ignorance. This sense of horror the story evokes is one rooted in a profound uncertainty about the world and therefore oneself.

The tone of the story, however, is not entirely dark. Kafka masterfully casts the nightmarish qualities of his world into sharp relief not through embellished and beleaguered descriptions of them (which would provide the reader with far too much certainty), but instead by juxtaposing them against comical, silly, and absurd characters and situations. The comic relief this affords is ephemeral, because ultimately these characters and situations themselves are realized to be expressions of the unsettling, dreadful irrationality that pervades every aspect of the story. The reprieve of amusement is cleverly and cruelly used to remind the reader that this irrationality is unyielding. It is not an effect of ambiguity or ignorance merely; it is reality, it is the cause.

The plot progresses through a series of absurd vignettes which may be seen as metaphorical phases of K’s “trial.” Everyone he encounters seems to not only know about his case, but it seems as if they know impossibly more about it than K does. In fact, they don’t necessarily know about K or his case specifically, but their assumed pre-knowledge suggests that the defendant or nature of the charges are irrelevant to the process of a legal trial in this world. K is forced to seek the wisdom of these chance acquaintances who are, on the one hand, often comically unqualified to advise him on any legal matter, yet on the other hand, the only source of knowledge in this absurd system. For example, at one point K is enlightened about the impossibility of ever winning a trial by a portraitist who paints vainglorious portraits of court officials. The painter explains that all judges want to be painted like the great judges of old and that only he is capable of doing that. This ironic statement is partly Kafka criticizing the vanity of the powerful (and their sycophants), but it is also a comment on its arbitrariness. The painter explains that there are secret and unknown rules to painting court officials, and simply because he is in possession of that knowledge he is able to provide an absurd yet necessary service in the legal system. The conformity to an arbitrary yet unknown standard in the painting of the portraits is itself a metaphor for this impossibly irrational, totalitarian legal system. In such a scenario, where reality is impenetrably opaque, even advantage and privilege appear to be matters of chance, and the only way to survive or get ahead is to forfeit one’s identity in favor of the assumed standard of measure. To add to the absurdity of this scene, it is dubious whether or not the painter actually possesses the esoteric knowledge of standards that he claims exist. At the end of the scene, K is forced to purchase a dozen or so dusty paintings of a nearly identical landscape that the painter pulls out from under his bed. It is a ridiculous and somewhat comical ending to the vignette, but it suggests that the painter is able to avoid conflict with the court and instead survive in a quasi-parasitic relationship with it because he has literally mastered conformity in his craft.

Unlike the painter, K refuses to conform, and instead is dedicated to exposing the absurdity of the legal system. In one sense, the book is not about the particulars of his own court case (which are never revealed!), but rather his trial of the legal system itself—his challenge of its authority and legitimacy. Given the logic of this oppressive world, he is doomed to lose. The only way to “win” is to forfeit one’s chance to win, and instead submit oneself to the perpetual and irreproachable scrutiny of the unknowable system. Such a system can never be held accountable, because it cannot be located in any institution or individual. All of Josef K’s confidants and informants are themselves gatekeepers of that impossibly opaque cult of domination. Their function is dual: obscuring the source and structure of the oppressive force and thereby perpetuating it. In conforming to and internalizing the irrationality of that system, they are able to survive and delay the mortal conclusion of that oppressive force on themselves by assuming negligible positions of power over others. In other words, the force of oppression on themselves is displaced by oppressing others. K is not righteous or virtuous in character, perhaps, but his refusal to submit to this irrationality that organizes his world is necessarily fatal. Because he does not submit or conform, he cannot diffuse the force of oppression on himself nor delay its fatal consequences. In this sense, refusing to submit to the status quo is an admission of guilt because it is a functional negation of the organizing principle of that sick world.