Abstract
In this chapter, we explore the levels of imprisonment in Franz Kafka’s The Trial. These levels include legal arrest, social containment and humiliation, and linguistic entrapment. Our chapter then traces the modernist narrative dream-structure of the novel in order to tease out thematic issues of guilt and innocence. The novel presents its drama in clearly defined domains: the bank, the law, the family, and so on. The tragic action and trajectory of the novel offer an analysis of some key features of modern victimhood. In this respect, the novel as a whole analyzes the modern scapegoat, and does so in terms of victimage within institutional and bureaucratic contexts.
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Notes
Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision (London: Allen and Unwin, 1961), 354.
This was a world with a felt sense of decline, witnessed in the extraordinary flowering of the small group of Secessionist painters (Klimt, Schiele) whose ornamental sense was accompanied by a more or less strong sense of inner decay (Klimt’s elaborate tableaux may have been beautiful, but some, such as his Judith painting, had ghoulish dimensions; Schiele’s images are confronting, even today). Vienna was also home to psychoanalysis, in the work of Sigmund Freud, whose pages drip not just with a negative view of human motivations, but also, with images of cities from past times (his lines on archaeology are particularly striking in this respect, as are his accounts of the buried city of Rome). These images are not presented for their own sake, but rather to show how civilization is itself a veneer, how histories lie buried literally beneath our feet—and also, within our psyches—see Sigmund Freud, “Civilisation and its Discontents,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 23. (London: Hogart, 1964), 69.
See for instance, Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, trans. E. Wilkins and E. Kaiser (London: Picador, 1979), 306–16.
Franz Stanzel, A Theory of Narrative, trans C. Godsche (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
Ronald Speirs and Beatrice Sandberg, Franz Kafka (London: Macmillan, 1997), 68.
Eric Marson, Kafka’s Trial: the Case Against Josef K. (St Lucia: University of Queensland, 1975), 45–46.
J.P. Stern has compared the court in The Trial with those in the Third Reich. (J.P. Stern, “The Law of The Trial,”, On Kafka: Semi-Centenary Perspectives, ed. Franz Kuna [London: Elek Books, 1976], 29–35.)
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien (London: Penguin, 1955), 116.
Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: New York Review of Books, 2001), 216.
If it were simply a matter of formal stylistic or syntactic homologies it would at least get us beyond the often facile psychoanalytic adumbrations of Kafka’s work—of tying the often repeated motifs of his novels and short stories to his family drama, particularly his fraught relationship with his father (for instance, Derek Jones and Graham Handley The Modern World: Ten Great Writers [London: Channel Four Publications, 1988], 22.
Anthony Storr Dynamics of Creation [London: Penguin, 1972], 76–80.) For different reasons, Dostoevsky has been subject to the same kind of hermeneutic taming—by making either the characters or the author himself some kind of paradigmatic case study of psychopathology. Although offering putative “explanations” of the literary object, such theoretical ruses act only to distance this work, and perhaps our implication in it. It might be worth considering what René Girard has said—that Dostoevsky might provide a more adequate account of so-called psychoanalytic phenomena than Freud can offer with regard to Dostoevsky’s novels.
Christopher Fleming, René Girard: Violence and Mimesis [Cambridge: Polity, 2004], 12–16 and 32–40.) As suggestive as Scholem’s comments are, he develops them no further—and despite Benjamin’s positive reaction to Scholem’s letter, his own development of the religious themes in Kafka’s work owe more to the Kabbalah and the concepts (and literature) of “Aggadah” and “Halakhah”—of Talmudic, Midrash, and legal sources respectively—than straightforwardly biblical ones. (Cf. Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, 221.) Even Camus talks of Kafka’s novels as “a theology in action.” (Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 114.)
Stuart Lasine, “The Trials of Job and Kafka’s Josef K.,” The German Quarterly 63.2 (1990): 187.
René Girard, Job: The Victim of His People, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987), 127.
Walter Benjamin, “Letter to G. Scholem, 1938,”, Correspondence, Vol II (Paris: Aubier, 1980), 248. Weber often uses the image of bureaucracy as a kind of “machine.” (Max Weber, Protestant Ethic, 121; Economy and Society lix.) Camus argues that many of Kafka’s characters are “inspired automata.” (Camus, 118.)
Martin Parker, “Organisational Gothic,” Culture and Organization, 11.1 (2005): 159–60.
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, ed. Peter Baehr, trans. Gordon C. Wells (London: Penguin, 2002), 121; and Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 289.
Malcolm Warner, “Kafka, Weber and Organization Theory,” Human Relations 60.7 (2007): 1025.
Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans. A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), 115; From Max Weber, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 293–94.
Richard Heinemann, “Kafka’s Oath of Service: ‘Der Bau’ and the Dialectic of Bureaucratic Mind,” PMLA 111.2 (1996): 256.
Max Weber, From Max Weber, ed. and trans. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 299.
P. Lassman, “The Rule of Men Over Men: Politics, Power and Legitimation,” ed. S. Turner, in The Cambridge Companion to Weber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 91.
Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts (New York: Harper Collins, 1995), 227.
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© 2011 A. Kiarina Kordela and Dimitris Vardoulakis
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Fleming, C., O’Carroll, J. (2011). Delusions of Agency: Kafka, Imprisonment, and Modern Victimhood. In: Kordela, A.K., Vardoulakis, D. (eds) Freedom and Confinement in Modernity. Studies in European Culture and History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118959_3
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