The Trial

By Seth Weidenaar

My friends, once again school has started for the year.  Due to this momentous occasion I would like to take this column in a different direction.  This is probably no matter to anyone, as no one reads this column, but I would like to address my fellow teachers of Gallup. This school year, fun could certainly be had with Franz Kafka’s novel, The Trial (1925), taken in a school context.  I do not mean that English teachers should teach The Trial. That would be very difficult, and the novel is probably inappropriate for most students in the district.   No, some employee mired in the bureaucracy and caught up with the bourgeois reality of life should send out chapters of Kafka’s The Trial in the form of inter-department memorandums or in email attachments.   This action will breathe new life into memorandums and emails, and it will also bring paranoia and confusion to the forefront as coworkers wonder why in the world they were receiving such strange forms of communication.  The text of Kafka’s work would connect to this strange feeling and everyone, even our town’s philanthropic tourists, would be wondering what is happening.

There are several parts of Kafka’s novel that will be especially thrilling for readers in this context.  The first is the driving moment of the story, on his thirtieth birthday a man named Josef K wakes up to find police officers in his apartment arresting him.  The arresting officers refuse to tell him what crime he has committed.  They finally reveal that they are a part of a larger organization that they do not fully understand, and they cannot let K become too knowledgeable about this organization, partly because they themselves do not know and partly because K is not supposed to know anything.  This is the start of Kafka’s brilliant creation of paranoia; he wants you to attempt to form an understanding about his novel, but he makes that impossible and he continues this throughout the novel.

Does this not sound like a wonderful work to read in a memorandum?  The photocopied pages would arrive in your classroom or staff mailroom in a yellow envelope, one of those really important looking ones. You would consider yourself lucky to receive such communication that arrives in such important packaging.  Upon reading, you would begin to attempt to form an understanding of K’s situation, and you will not be able to do this.  Then you will attempt to form an understanding about why it was sent to you, you will not be able to do this either.  Maybe this activity will not be completely enjoyable, but schools have a way of producing situations beyond understanding that you are probably attempting to form an understanding of anyway, so why not give this a try?

Another fitting scene from the novel is K’s speech to the court.  K’s is called to be cross-examined by the accusing court, and the cross-examination is to happen on a Sunday.  K cannot find the courtroom; he was only given the number of a large apartment building.  When he finally finds the courtroom, the examining judge rebukes him for being late.  K replies by saying that he is here in court now and the proceedings can begin.  The audience applauds and K thinks that they are applauding for him. He launches into a speech about the corrupt nature of this court system and how it is torturing his being.  The audience appears to be interested in his speech, and K continues to speak as long as he has such an interested audience.  Then he realizes that all the members of the audience are wearing identical badges, they are all a part of the corrupt system he is railing against.  When he stops speaking the judge tells him that he has thrown away any advantage he had in the case with his speech.

Again, Kafka is playing with the subject position of his novel.  K assumes that he is the subject of the situation he is in.  When everyone applauds he assumes that he is a charismatic speaker and interesting person, he assumes the people want to hear more from him.  When the audience amusedly listens to his ramblings, he assumes that they are deeply moved by his oratory, only to find out that he is not the subject after all; he is only the object of an accusation he does not understand.  You, the person reading the novel, again attempt to form an understanding about the novel’s events, only to have them change to something more bizarre.  As K finishes his speech a woman’s scream interrupts him, and she is chased by a man in the back of the courtroom.  This is hardly the decorum that is practiced in normal courtrooms, but this is Kafka’s purpose, to continue making impossible any form of understanding.  By making this impossible, any prediction about what will happen becomes equally impossible, and there are some really strange events that happen to poor K.

These are only two of the many literary situations that Kafka used to induce confusion and paranoia amongst his readers.  I did not have space to dive into explaining K’s dealings with women, or the man with the whip hiding in the closet of K’s office; if only there was more space. You will just have to trust me that this would be a semi-perfect read for someone working in a school.  Kafka sought to illuminate the impersonal and illogical bureaucratic systems that surrounded him in the early 1900s.  Perhaps we do not have impersonal or illogical bureaucratic systems surrounding us in schools (personally I have only heard stories of this, I have not experienced it), but reading The Trial would still be a great exercise for our minds, and this might be more beneficial to all our area’s teachers.  The mass paranoia would be fun, but not nearly as beneficial.