Der Process : Merriam Webster uses the term Kafkaesque for events "marked by a senseless, disorienting, often surreal complexity and distortion." Beyond the literary realm it has come to mean occurrences and situations that are incomprehensibly complex, bizarre,illogical even grotesque.Kafka's corpus,though modest in number,with many incomplete works, has been considered highly original.When scurtinised in the context of various schools of thought it has been variously labeled as instances of modernism,magic realism, existentialism, absurdism, marxism,anarchism,fabulism,in various measures.Kundera( a modern Czech writer) considers him as a predecessor of Felini,Marquez,Fuentes,Rushdie.The standard and most well recognised image of his works is of a protagonist,alienated and frustrated against the modern society and its overbearing institutions.The ensuing struggle,its certain futility and the protagonist's awareness of this fact only serves to make the situation more stark and hopeless.Kafka was a pioneer of this very modernist image.
The Trial,first published in 1925,in German,is a dystopian,fragmentary(the novel was published posthumously and the chapters were somewhat incomplete and in random order)account of the life of a man named Josef K..The book follows his arrest,the eponymous and rather unconventional trial which continues all along the novel only to end with the protagonist's "assisted suicide".We are taken through an year in K's life,from his thirtieth to thiry-first birthday.The protagonist wakes up one morning to find he is being held under a trial for unexplained reasons,that he is under arrest but can go about living his normal life,that the trial will most probably end in him being pronounced guilty.The not-so-melodramatic response of the protagonist to all this is baffling and perhaps allude to the haunting realization that he was on the brink of breakdown inspite of the trial.
There is an abrupt start which launches the reader into the novels story.There is no building up in that sense.The novel begins with an accpetance of trial.“Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning” .His reaction is one of docility and outrage after initial suspicion that it was all a farce.He submits to authority even though it is dubious.The fact that he never comes to know of what he is accused of should invoke outrage in the reader and the character but it doesnt.Though some of it can be attributed to "suspension of disbelief".He engages with the law enforcing machinery and by that he lends them the authority they impose on him.
There is an ambiguity in the meaning of the text.It has some qualities of revealed truth but in general it is unresolvable and serves as a mirror for sectarian reading.On one and most obvious level it is a satire of the Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy of Kafka's times.It is also a premonition of the totalitarian regimes to come ,that Kafka never lived to see and their Orwellian ways.. The German title, Der Prozess, connotes both a "trial" and a "process".This inevitable chain of events and definite consequences that have been set in motion and cannot be brought to halt is both eerie and terror inducing.
There is a grey line of uncertainty between dream and reality and marks the book's surreal nature.Is it all happening, or is it a dream? And if it is a dream, what larger purpose does it serve? Many passages are just typical of strange dreams that come to us, say when K. is looking for the investigation place, he find the courtroom in th emost improbable of places.
K.is never bothered about finding what he is accused of. He probably simply assumes that having lived a certain number of years and being involved in a worldly job he must have done something wrong in the nature of the crime.The book asks questions about conventional wisdom on legality,crime and justice too.
Humor in the book:The struggles that K goes through are in a way fictitious.This becomes humorous when considered how people invent struggles to add "meaning" to their life.
K's demise at the end of the novel is baffling.Did he give up , or was that a final act of free will? Did he succumb to the authority or make a final deliberate escape?More literally,Is suicide a way out and if that,how moral is it?This asks question of existentialism and "absense of God".
Parables:The novel has been read as a parable containing another parable "Before the Law".The meaning and the relationship between them is open to intepertration.And in that sense the novel becomes much more than an expression of impending disaster of over-bureaucratisation.
Some short descriptions about Kafka's work that I found and liked on the internet:
1 Wikipedia quotes "Because Franz Kafka has become the poster boy for twentieth-century alienation and disoriented anxiety, his work is often introduced in the context of Kafka's own experience of alienation. A Czech in the Austro-Hungarian empire, a German-speaker among Czechs, a Jew among German-speakers, a disbeliever among Jews; alienated from his pragmatic and overbearing father, from his bureaucratic job, from the opposite sex; caught between a desire to live in literature and to live a normal bourgeois life; acutely and lucidly self-critical; physically vulnerable--Kafka nowhere found a comfortable fit."
2 Milan Kundera who is sort of a modern day Kafka himself says "Do you realize that people don't know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him? Instead of letting themselves be carried away by his unequaled imagination, they look for allegories — and come up with nothing but clichés: life is absurd (or it is not absurd), God is beyond reach (or within reach), etc. You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself."
Why should you read Kafka?I have refrained from telling the story of the novel because as such the plot isn't that intricate or layered and secondly I'd like you to read and find it out for yourself.And the lack of melodrama and the all encompassing hopelessness is something that any modern reader will be able to connect to and sympathise with.
By Ravi Prakash2007CE10449
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