BOOKS
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are not yet available to us. Must we not, therefore, as Kafka says himself
in some connection, "guard against large generalizations?"
Meanwhile,
The Trial
is scarcely less remarkable than
The Castle.
Shorter, more limited in scope, playing more insistently on one note, it
addressesitself to its bizarre routine with the same relentless energy; and
the tone, ingenuous and rather humdrum as before, invokes once again
the characteristic irony. Both novels are based on fable-like conceptions;
but while the scene of
The Castle
was a feudal manor with certain in-
congruously modem features,
The Trial
occurs in a 20th century city
where the fabulous confronts the familiar, the grim functionaries of the
invisible powers rub shoulders with the contemporary police, the Law
exists side by side with the law, and Joseph K., the accused, receives in
a modern rooming-house the summons from the supernatural courts. It
is not from these juxtapositions, however, that
The Trial
derives its
peculiar poignancy, but from the fact that it deals with the most acute
problem of Kafka's world, the problem of justice.
The Castle
centered around the efforts of the hero (also named K.:
a transparent substitute for the first person) to establish himself in a
strange community, headed by an arbitrary and exacting caste of officials
who lived, almost unseen but universally felt, in the Citadel. The hero's
successor failure depended on whether, with all his individualistic habits
of thought and action, he could adjust himself to the metaphysical sen-
timents of community and obedience that prevailed in the village. It was
the major question of the book whether such an adjustment was finally
possible.
The Castle
has been described as a.n allegory of grace, with K.
standing for individual man and the village for the divine community to
which man aspires.
The Castle
staff, depicted as a modem municipal
bureaucracy, but of course incongrously complex, topheavy and mysteri-
ous,represented the divine order as it must appear to human beings, with
their limited understanding.
Now grace, to keep for the present to theological terms, is a con-
dition, a state of being. It includes an acceptance of the ways of divine
justice. But justice, taken by itself, is a process, and as a theme for
literature it would seem to imply a special treatment: a tragic treat-
ment, first of all, since divine justice cannot by its nature be brought
into line with human ideas of justice; and second, a treatment that un-
derscores the factor of conflict as against the slow, accretive, adjustive,
factor involved in the coming into a state of grace. So it happens that,
while the K. of
The Castle
was always trying to reach the powers, try-
ing for an audience and failing to get one; in
The Trial,
the powers
themselvesconfront the man. And the relationship is incomparably more
violent and immediate. Are the powers any more comprehensible for
their immediacy? No-indeed,
from the moment that K. receives the
summons till the moment when he dies with a knife in his heart, he
never discovers the nature of-the charges against him. And his ignorance
isof the essence of the situation, for according to the traditional, which is
also the Kafkian, view, divine justice is something apparently blind and
inscrutable. Its moreover haphazard and partial appearances achieve a
superb dramatization in the farcical First Interrogation scene, where
the spectators seem to be offering a divided front to K.'s appeals, only to
merge before the end into a single hostile mass. The oppressiveness of
the judicial process appears both in the actual sufferings of K. and in
