3 Ibid., 263.
4 Ibid.
5 Adorno, “Notes on Kafka”, 250, 270.
6 Bill Dodd, “The case for a political reading” in The Cambridge Companion to Kafka. [Edited by Julian Preece] (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 132.
7 Ibid., 133, 139-140.
8 Ibid., 134.
9 Ibid., 133.
252
jason reza jorjani
of power”.10 (This presupposes some fundamental distinction between
the Ethical and the Political, with the latter understood juristical y.) Although the country that the narrator of The Trial lives in is supposed to be in a state of universal peace on account of being wel
governed through a legal constitution,11 Klaus Mann and others in
his wake have suggested that it bears a nearly prophetic resemblance
to the Third Reich.12 The radical y anarchist implication is that any
legal order is as violently grounded on unjustifiable mob rule as the
worst of them. A sadistic band of criminals has installed itself as the government. While putting great store by decorum and symbols of
officialdom, it is at the same time so corrupt that it amuses itself by offering its victims a questionable chance to bribe and bargain their
way out of “arrests”, which are real y capricious assaults that could
come at any hour, and a means to avert “prosecutions”, which are
grotesquely comical persecutions. The women in the service of court
officials have reminded certain readers of German ladies who, even if
married, were forbidden to refuse the advances of those officers who
had distinguished themselves heroical y and went about in medal-
encrusted SS uniforms. There is a pervasive atmosphere of impending
death amidst life in the city that is the novel’s setting, a city in which many live in squalor and that, bit by bit, is revealed to be a thinly-veiled slaughterhouse that so easily accommodates the execution of
Joseph K. when it does final y happen upon him. This has seemed to
some a prevision of concentration camp conditions, which are simply
an extreme case of the inherent alienation and instrumentalization
of man at the hands of arbitrary power and his annihilation through
the same social forces that engender individuation.13 On this reading, the socio-political forces that appear to be sustaining us (from birth) are devouring us parasitical y.14
10 Ibid., 145-146.
11 Franz Kafka. The Trial. Translated by Wil a and Edwin Muir with an Introduction by Georg Steiner. (New York: Schocken Books, 1996), 4.
12 Adorno, “Notes on Kafka”, 259-260, 263.
13 Ibid., 225, 256.
14 Benjamin,
Illuminations, 114.
253
lovers of sophia
Religious interpretations of The Trial mostly consist of attempts to cast it as a modern Kabbalistic text, in other words as a work
of Jewish mysticism. It had not been ten years since Kafka’s death
(and posthumous publication of The Trial by Max Brod) before H.J.
Schoeps, Bernhard Rang, and Bernhard Groethuysen all advanced
interpretations of this kind. Walter Benjamin reviews these in his
memorial essay on Kafka, before going on to add his own layer to
the messianic mystique through his correspondence with Gerhard
Scholem.15 There has more recently been a comprehensive book-
length review of the subject by Karl Erich Grözinger.16 The latter
presents compelling evidence from Kafka’s diaries to the effect
that he was at the very least quite familiar with the folk Judaism
of Eastern Europe,17 that he had a source of information about the
Hasidic wisdom tradition through his zealously observant friend
Georg Langer,18 and, perhaps most significantly, that he had an
at times agonizingly self-conscious relationship with his Jewish
heritage.19
Those who interpret Kafka kabbalistical y all agree on the
claim that The Trial is concerned with the relationship between haggadah and halakhah – between esoteric verbal tradition and the exoterical y explicit letter of the Law. Kafka supposedly adopts
themes that developed in Judaism only beginning with medieval
Kabbalah, including the ideas: that there is not a single judgment
at the end of the world but that the divine court is always in
session;20 that there is an extensive divine hierarchy of bureaucratic complexity, in which one may get lost, mediating the relationship of
the individual with the highest Judge;21 that the lower levels of this hierarchy manifest an appearance that reflects the state of one’s own
15 Ibid., 127-128, 141-144.
16 Karl Erich Grözinger, Kafka and Kabbalah (New York: Continuum, 1994).
17 Ibid., 18-26.
18 Ibid., 29-30.
19 Ibid., 24-27.
20 Ibid., 33, 61.
21 Ibid., 62-63.
254
jason reza jorjani
consciousness (accounting for its filth and seedy disorderliness);22
that the bureaucracy is corrupt, lecherous, and open to unorthodox
means of influence;23 that without recourse to such means there is
no way to win one’s case (i.e. attain salvation) since one is always
in the wrong before the Court – especial y for thinking that one’s
own justification of one’s life would be sufficient for salvation;24 and final y, that if one loses one’s case in this lifetime it may be deferred to another (this is a late mystical Jewish conception of reincarnation known as gilgul).25
If Kafka is implicitly working within this tradition these
interpreters fail to recognize how radical y he innovates it. Benjamin has an inkling of this when he writes: “Kafka’s real genius was that
he tried something new: he sacrificed truth for… it’s haggadic
element. Kafka’s writings are… more than parables. They do not modestly lie at the feet of the doctrine, as the Haggadah lies at the
feet of the Halakah. Though apparently reduced to submission, they
unexpectedly raise a mighty paw against it.”26 Yet even Benjamin
does not go far enough. It is mistaken to see the “man from the
country” as a euphemism for someone not properly Jewish. (He
is rather one who is too grounded to suffer from “a seasickness on
dry land.”27) The man is not shut out of the door to the Law (made
only for him) because he is uninitiated into the Torah and fails to understand that divine “grace” is indispensable – as some kabbalistic
readers would have it.28 On the contrary, as we shall see, it is because he accords the Law with more authority and respect than it deserves,
and his mistake is to have waited even for permission – let alone
“grace”. The women of The Trial are also far more than all that the kabbalistic Jew can see them as: crafty “helpers” that play both sides 22 Ibid., 64-68.
23 Ibid., 36-37.
24 Ibid., 38.
25 Ibid., 47-49.
26 Benjamin,
Illuminations, 143-144.
27 Ibid., 130.
28 Grözinger, 53-54.
255
lovers of sophia
as gossipy go-betweens in the relationship between an accused man
and male officials.29
As I endeavor to make clear in what follows, in the parable
“Before The Law” that stands at the heart of The Trial, Kafka
diabolical y aims at inciting a rebellion against divine order and
natural law that is fundamental y anti-religious and at the same
time positively supern
atural. Although he does not go as far as
Adorno – who tries to claim that Kafka’s kabbalism is rationalistic
(and that Kabbalah itself is a de-mythologizing proto-rationalism),30
Benjamin also downplays Kafka’s supernaturalism31 – this, despite
the fact that he is perhaps the first to connect the Law of The Trial to the quantum upheaval in the laws of Physics.32 In my view, the
greatest merit of the profoundly mistaken religious interpretation is
that it alone takes seriously the supernatural element of The Trial (and of Kafka’s writing in general) that is reductively exorcised by
psychoanalytic interpreters and disregarded by political ones. The Trial is a transcription smuggled out of the same twilight zone that Serling later visited, and but for Max Brod, it would have been left
behind there together with Kafka.
This is something that so-called “existential” interpretations also
fail to recognize, even in the case of the most “religious” existentialists
– such as the followers of Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky, on
account of their tacit substance dualism. Existentialist thought, as
epitomized by Jean-Paul Sartre, holds that the “human” being is the
uniquely subjective being. Manufactured objects always have some
predefined essence. There could be no such thing as a knife or a table without and apart from the purpose for which it is designed.
For such objects, their essence precedes their existence.33 Perhaps
less evidently, this is also the case for any other beings who are not 29 Ibid., 77-82.
30 Adorno, “Notes on Kafka”, 268.
31 Ibid., 127.
32 Benjamin,
Illuminations, 141-143.
33 Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 20-21.
256
jason reza jorjani
capable of individuated self-determination, and are consequently
not “responsible” for their actions. Unlike various species of
animals, human beings have no “nature” that essential y defines the range of behavior of all members of the species. The brute fact of the existence of each human being precedes her interpretation of her
life and her definition of her individual character by means of her
chosen actions. It is not of our own choosing that we are “thrown”
into the world and always already find ourselves in it, and yet it is
entirely of our choosing how we respond to our existential situation.34
The only certainty is death. This translates into a reading of The Trial where the arrest is a metaphor for the moment of realization of
being thrown into the world, which compels us to justify our own
existence in the face of a certain and yet unjustifiable death sentence.
However many constraints of whatever kind there may be on
our actions, insofar as we are intelligent conscious beings we always
have some margin of choice. Not to make any given decision, to
defer it indefinitely, is also to make a choice – albeit an inauthentic one. In the eyes of an existentialist, consciousness always has latitude for action beyond the grip of passions with a material basis.35 In the context of The Trial, one could see Joseph’s evasive excuses as an expression of this inauthenticity. For Sartre, “man is condemned to
be free” in so far as he did not choose to exist, and yet he does exist and he alone is free to choose the manner in which he exists.36 We
are only what we make of our own lives in deed, not what we hope for, or what we resentful y assert could have been if things out of our control had not conspired against us to prevent us from fulfilling
our potential. In other words, Kafka’s “man from the country” was
free to walk through the door to the Law at any moment. Deference
to the authority of the guard was a divestment of his responsibility
to act decisively regarding his own case.
For the Sartrean existentialist there are no divine signs that reveal
to us what we should do in a certain situation. Even if there were signs 34 Ibid., 22-23.
35 Ibid., 29.
36 Ibid., 28-29.
257
lovers of sophia
of some sort, each person would be left to interpret them as she sees
fit.37 This could not be truer of the various ambiguous, inconclusive, inscrutable, or deliberately misleading directives issued by the court and the advice of the extra-legal officials in The Trial. Furthermore, there are no ethical truths – no absolute and eternal values – because there is no absolute and eternal consciousness to conceive of them.38
All mass ethics are an escape from personal responsibility and are in
“bad faith.” The person who understands her own existence realizes
that “everything is permitted.”39 The doorway into the Law is always
uniquely one’s own, and it can only be entered by an act of violence.
As Sartre infamously observed with respect to the Nazi occupation
of France in a widely reproduced short essay entitled “The Republic
of Silence”, life under a dictatorship where power is absolute and
unquestionable – as in The Trial – may force an individual to make more authentic and grave decisions from out of an understanding of
her own total freedom than would be possible in a mass democracy,
which allows for a ‘legitimate’ legal tyranny of the majority of society over the individual. By offering an insight into the arbitrary nature
of power, a dictatorship affords one that total freedom that one
can have only over and against a legal order whose fundamental y
unjustified character stands in stark relief.
At this point, the existential interpretation begins to converge
with the anarchistic political ones. If it were not for their tacit
materialism, the existential interpretations might also run into the
religious ones here. They would have to admit that unlike Sartre,
for whom death was a finality that bounds the finitude of human
existence, and unlike Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky for whom there
might be deliverance into some ineffably transcendent beyond – but
only through an ungrounded “leap of faith”, Kafka’s thought effaces
the distinction between the realm of the living and the underworld
of the dead. What was only a colorful allegory for Sartre in “No Exit”
is empirical y real for Kafka. The Trial presents us with a living hell 37 Ibid., 26.
38 Ibid., 27-28.
39 Ibid., 28-29.
258
jason reza jorjani
populated by “various shades of the departed.” Unification of the
existential and kabbalistic interpretations would also demand that
the kabbalists, for their part, leave faith behind and recognize in
Kafka an advocate of antinomian supernaturalism. That, however, is
precisely what they are incapable of doing, and what I intend to do.
As I develop my own interpretation of The Trial, anyone following along should now be primed to recognize both convergences
and points of divergence from the four extant frameworks of
interpretation laid out above.
2. Titorelli’s Painting
We will begin with the image that stands at the heart of The Trial, the painting in progress encountered in Titorelli’s office. Understanding
the divinity that it depicts is key to appreciating what manner of
‘Justice’ reigns in Joseph’s ordeal. Here is the passage in full:
“It is Justice,” said the painter at last. “Now I can recognize it,”
&
nbsp; said K. “There’s the bandage over the eyes, and here are the scales.
But aren’t there wings on the figure’s heels, and isn’t it flying?”
“Yes,” said the painter, “my instructions were to paint it like that;
actual y it is Justice and the goddess of Victory in one.” “Not a
very good combination, surely,” said K., smiling. “Justice must
stand quite stil , or else the scales will waver and a just verdict
will become impossible.” I had to follow my client’s instructions,”
said the painter… The sight of the picture seemed to have roused
his ardor, he rolled up his shirt-sleeves, took several crayons in
his hand, and as K. watched the delicate crayon-strokes a reddish
shadow began to grow round the head of the Judge, a shadow
which tapered off in long rays as it approached the edge of the
picture. This play of shadow bit by bit surrounded the head like
a halo or a high mark of distinction. But the figure of Justice was
left bright except for an almost imperceptible touch of shadow;
that brightness brought the figure sweeping right into the
259
lovers of sophia
foreground and it no longer suggested the goddess of Justice, or even the goddess of Victory, but looked exactly like a goddess of the Hunt in full cry.40
These might well be the most important lines in the whole of The
Trial. There is nothing arbitrary about them, despite the casual tone of this conversation between K. and Titorelli. All of the images
described have symbolic significance and are esoteric references
to ancient mythology and mysticism. Before unfolding these
significations, it is worthwhile to note that Kafka could read Greek,
and we know that he appreciated some classical literature in the
original – such as Xenophon’s story of “Heracles at the Crossroads.”41
Hartmut Binder suggests that Kafka took certain Greek models for
his own writing, and Marthe Robert claimed to have discerned in his
handling of ancient legends an underlying tension between classical
Greek and Jewish religious beliefs.42
While at first there are suggestions that the painting depicts
Dike combined with elements of Nike, there was a Greek goddess of the Hunt who was also an avenger against injustice and guarantor
Lovers of Sophia Page 32
