Trial

Franz Kafka

Description

On his thirtieth birthday, the bank clerk Josef K. is suddenly arrested by mysterious agents for an unspecified crime. He is told that he will be set free, but must make regular appearances at a court in the attic of a tenement building while his trial proceeds. Although he never comes to know the particulars of his case, Josef K. finds his life taken over by the opaque bureaucratic procedures and is tormented by the psychological pressures exerted by his legal nightmare.Published the year after the author's death, but written ten years earlier, The Trial is the most acclaimed of Kafka's three novels, and is both a haunting meditation on freedom and the powerlessness of the individual in the face of state power, and an ominous prefiguration of the totalitarian excesses of the twentieth century.

Sujets

• Short story

Informations

• Publié par: Alma Books
• Date de parution: 09 mai 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780714548821
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

The Trial
Franz Kafka
Translated by Richard Stokes


ALMA CLASSICS


alma classics an imprint of
Alma BOOKS Ltd 3 Castle Yard Richmond Surrey TW10 6TF United Kingdom www.almaclassics.com
The Trial first published in German in 1925 This translation first published by Hesperus Press Ltd in 2005 This revised edition first published by Alma Classics in 2018
Translation and Introduction © Richard Stokes, 2005, 2018
Cover design: Will Dady
Printed in the United Kingdom by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
isbn : 978-1-84749-719-2
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.


Contents
Introduction
The Trial


Introduction
The publication in 1967 of Briefe an Felice ( Letters to Felice ) led to a reinterpretation of many of Kafka’s works, including The Trial . These letters to Felice Bauer, to whom Kafka was twice engaged, revealed the extent to which the novel represented an attempt by Kafka to solve a life crisis that was threatening not only his ability to write but his sanity. Autobiographical interpretations of any novel are notoriously unreliable, but in the case of Franz Kafka the connection between life and literature is indisputable. Both Josef K. and Kafka were valued employees in their respective professions; both were bachelors; both were outsiders, unable to integrate successfully with society. Several details in the text make it clear that the novel is set in Prague, where Kafka was living at the time of its composition; and Fräulein Bürstner’s name almost always appears as F.B. in the manuscript of The Trial – the same initials as Felice Bauer.
Kafka’s first meeting with her took place on 13th August 1912 at the house of Max Brod’s parents. Kafka wrote in his diary:
“Frl. Felice Bauer: when I arrived at Brod’s on 13. viii she was sitting at the table and looked like a servant.”
The importance of this encounter emerged just over a month later when Kafka – who had written Das Urteil ( The Sentence ) “at one sitting”, starting on the evening of 22nd September 1912 and finishing it on the 23rd – dedicated the story to Felice Bauer. It deals with Georg Bendemann who, having become engaged, wishes to found a family and free himself from his father’s influence – a situation which mirrored Kafka’s relationship with his own father. Marriage as a means to freedom is an important theme in Kafka’s writings and receives its most extended treatment in Brief an den Vater (1919).
Yet marriage, in Kafka’s eyes, meant that he would be compelled to renounce his calling as a writer. On 13th July he writes a contradictory passage in his diary:
“Incapable of tolerating life alone… I must be alone much of the time. My achievements are merely a result of being alone.”
This conflict – the wish to share his life with a woman and the fear of thereby jeopardizing his freedom to write – can be seen in the way he twice broke off his engagement to Felice. He first proposed to her during early June 1914 in Berlin; soon after his return to Prague, however, he confides to his diary (6th June 1914):
“Have returned from Berlin. I felt bound like a criminal – no worse than if I had been chained up in a corner and could only be visited with policemen present.”
Kafka’s fear of marriage, which he now regards as a sort of incarceration, intensifies in the following weeks; his letters to Felice become cooler; he warns her of the dangers of marriage. Realizing that he is causing her anguish, he travels to Berlin on 20th July with a close friend, Ernst Weiss, in order to meet Felice and discuss his predicament. The diary entry of 23rd July 1914 describes their discussions, his meeting with her parents and the breaking off of their engagement.
Back in Prague, he begins his life of solitude. Many of his friends and acquaintances had been called up to fight in the war, including his two brothers-in-law. His eldest sister Elly, now that her husband was at the front, moved with her children into the parental home, leaving Kafka free to live in her house. On 3rd August 1914 he writes in his diary:
“Alone at my sister’s… Utter solitude. No longed-for wife opens the door. Within a month I would have had to marry. A terrible word.”
Equally terrible, however, was the solitude. The only way to make sense of this lonely existence was through literature. Through writing. To justify the life he had chosen, it was imperative for him to write an important work. Inspiration is imminent. On 7th August 1914 he writes:
“Yesterday and today I wrote four sides, insignificant trifles…”
And on 15th August:
“I’ve been writing for a few days now, and hope it continues. I’m not yet as secure and immersed in work as I was two years ago, but my life has acquired a meaning, my regulated, empty, insane bachelor existence has acquired a justification. I can once more conduct a dialogue with myself, and no longer sit staring into an utter void. Only this way can things improve.”
The new work in question was none other than The Trial , as we learn from the diary entry for 21st August 1914:
“Began with such hopes and have suffered setbacks with all three stories, especially today. Perhaps it’s right that I should only work on the Russian story [‘Erinnerungen an die Kaldabahn’] after The Trial . With such risible hope, clearly based merely on mechanical imagination, I am starting The Trial again. – Not entirely without success.”
In the following weeks he works frenetically at the novel, and from 11th August to 1st October completes two-thirds of the work. His frenzy is mirrored in his method. He begins with the first and last chapters, then fills in the middle, working on several chapters at once, without sketches or any preliminary planning. When at the beginning of October inspiration begins to flag, he takes a week off work in an attempt to finish the novel. The events of the novel echo this creative struggle. In the chapter called “Lawyer. Manufacturer. Painter”, K. decides to compose a written petition, a defence document, but has to recognize that “the difficulties of drawing up the petition were overwhelming”. And a few lines later there is a passage that quite clearly alludes obliquely to the difficulties Kafka was encountering in finishing his novel: “Today K. no longer felt any shame, the petition had to be drafted. If he could find no time for this at the office, which was very likely, he would have to do it in his lodgings at night. And if the nights were not enough, he would have to take a holiday.” A passage from the chapter entitled “In the Cathedral” further confirms Kafka’s problems with writer’s block: “‘Are you aware that your trial is going badly?’ the priest asked. ‘That’s how it looks to me too,’ K. said. ‘I’ve tried as hard as I possibly can, but so far without success. Of course, I haven’t completed my petition yet.’” When this passage was written in November 1914, Kafka feared he would never finish the novel, and the diary bears witness to his rapidly increasing despair: “For four days now I’ve hardly worked, an hour at most and only a few lines” (21st October). The next day he confesses: “Work has come to a virtual standstill.” Five weeks later, on 30th November 1914, he has reached his nadir: “I can write no more. I have reached my end.”
His thoughts turn once more to Felice. “Toy with the idea of returning to F.” (1st November). And on 30th November he writes with withering honesty: “…I should like for the time being to win F. again. I shall definitely attempt it, provided that revulsion at myself does not prevent me.” He writes to her and arranges a meeting in January 1915. On 20th January 1915 he finishes The Trial . Two days later he meets Felice in Bodenbach on the Czech border, and although his diary entry shows the encounter was not a success (she listened passively as he read her extracts from The Trial and merely made a lukewarm request to borrow the manuscript), they renewed their engagement in July 1917, only to break it off in December of the same year. They were poles apart. Kafka complained to his diary that whereas he was determined to live for literature, Felice was more interested in “cosy accommodation, the factory, plentiful food, a heated room and sleep from 11 p.m. on’. In a letter to Max Brod, dated 17th November, he confesses that he has been a failure in his family, his profession, society, and as a lover. The final sentence of The Trial has an unmistakably autobiographical ring about it: “It was as if the shame would outlive him.”
A detailed reading of Letters to Felice and the diaries suggests that Kafka wrote the novel to justify the existence he had chosen – The Trial , in other words, represents his written defence in the trial he had in his imagination initiated against himself, and which was to consider the warring claims of literature and family life – an interpretation that becomes apparent when in the penultimate chapter, “In the Cathedral”, the priest says to K. (who has just explained the difficulties he was experiencing in “completing his petition”): “You seek too much outside help, especially from women.”
– Richard Stokes


The Trial


Arrest
S omeone must have been slandering Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested. The cook, employed by his landlady Frau Grubach, who brought him his breakfast each morning at about eight o’clock, failed to appear. That had never happened before. K. waited for a