On the Trial

Kafka’s The Trial is a great novel, and it really resonates with me. It seems incomplete — my edition has a series of fragmented chapters at the end that could add to it without being required — and it’s undeniably existentialist, the networks and mechanisms of control that pervade the characters’ lives utterly palpable. Nothing makes sense to anyone, though they all pretend it does. The crux of the whole thing, the overarching message, seems to be in the Parable of the Law in the penultimate chapter. The door was open to the man the whole time, but he wouldn’t go through it because of the doorkeeper’s presence; the doorkeeper only told him he couldn’t enter right now, and that mere statement was a control mechanism keeping the established order in place. The man from the country could have said “fuck it” and walked through. Neither K. nor the priest seriously asks why he didn’t — they quibble over personalities, who is deceiving whom, how the law works — but the man could have literally just entered the Law.

That quibbling reminds me of my own life, whether “out there” or inside my own head. There are endless discussions and thoughts about why I do or don’t do what I want, a constant pressure to explain, to justify, to defend — as if my whole life were on trial. But I could just do the things. Did you catch the “as if” in that last sentence? Kafka uses a ton of them, to hilarious effect; Kafka is funny, and he makes a mockery of us all. I’ll end with a final quote:

‘No,’ said the priest, ‘you don’t have to consider everything true, you just have to consider it necessary.’ ‘A depressing opinion,’ said K. ‘Lies are made into universal systems.’