Ignoring the several (all equally convincing) claims to have found a 'code' to Kafka's writing; to therefore read The Trial 'plain' -
* Franz Kafka's 'The Trial' - the original ideas. Well - the most obvious thing of all. The sheer originality of Kafka's starting points. To come up over and over again with genuinely original ideas, and consistently startling ones, is a very rare skill indeed isn't it? Am I missing some wider knowledge? Surely most writers plough an original furrow, yes, but in some one of the many common grounds? Waiting in bed for your breakfast only to be visited by two warders who tell you that you are arrested by the authorities but you may never find out what you've 'done wrong' - that's original surely? And so is waking one morning to find yourself metamorphosed into an outsize insect. It's something that Kafka seems to do effortlessly. An elderly bachelor tormented by two bouncing celluloid balls which follow him around his small apartment; a man nearly frozen to death, riding through the air on a coal-bucket to the coal-merchant; a lady trapeze artist who never comes down.
What's interesting is that so many of Kafka's writings have one of these bizarrely original starting points; and that they are predicaments. And (nearly) every predicament is an exaggeration of a very real and a very workaday 'fix' that all people can find themselves in. A man summoned to a job and a village where, it turns out, he is not wanted; a man arrested by a state power that he can barely understand; a village doctor dragged away from dire problems at home by a call-out to a patient, and perhaps not even one in mortal danger. The underlying point, isn't it, is to reveal the unsureness of the steady foundation upon which most lives are built?
* Franz Kafka's 'The Trial' - the near normality of Kafka's world. Secondly - after the bizarre predicament is set down, it becomes clear that it and the world it's set in, are your own world. Kafka strides on, not in some fantasy world but in your world. He tries to make a bizarre predicament, real. He tries to make the world in which his predicaments happen, slightly 'off' - yet it is your world nevertheless.
Kafka always writes down predicaments. The Trial invites-in anxieties about your lack of power and its chances against the clear power that a State Body has if it turns its beady eye on you. What if officials knock on your door in the early morning and inform you that you are under arrest, but that you are free to move around also, and what if your crime is never explained to you? It is a predicament that is fanciful: but only just.
Not long after Kafka's death (and many times before his birth also) functionaries of various states did indeed knock on people's doors and make it clear that they were 'guilty' of something (being Jewish, being Aristocratic) - the important difference is that all of those unfortunates knew what they were supposedly guilty of. The Trial is something utterly different (leaving aside those tedious 'interpretations' and taking the straightforward story).
Stories that are set in the real world, but the real has sometimes been twisted just a little. In The Trial Kafka grounds his parable in rooms that are almost real, in buildings and streets that are almost real, and he populates his world with people who may not be quite real but they are close to it.
'Almost' real because where he wants to do it, he adjusts reality just a little to shout out an element of reality that he wants you to feel. In the real world you surround yourselves with walls because it is in your nature to crave privacy - in Kafka's world look at these annoying children peering through the gaps in the planks of wood that make up Titorelli's walls. In the real world perhaps you have occasion to complain about the behaviour of a couple of functionaries and perhaps in some distant fashion they will be reprimanded - look at K.'s functionaries stripped naked and being whipped in the company store-room by a meaty-armed flogger, and look how they are still there in the store-room a full day later. In the real world perhaps you wonder whether your lawyer really is thinking about your case as much as you want him to: In Kafka's world the lawyer allows the client to bunker-down in the lawyer's own house.
Kafka, sometimes, makes things hyper-real - but only a little. The places often aren't quite real, and in addition to that the people aren't really taken from observed life, rather are they more (Kafka) constructs of how people might be. The difference may only be slight but both the behaviour and the words people speak are deliberate constructs and therefore slightly 'clunky'. Particularly clunky are the words people speak and perhaps this is why the film versions of Kafka's stories do not really work. In book form you either buy into this dialogue clunkiness and relish the way it fits the fictitious world that has been created, or it pushes you away.
* Kafka's 'The Trial' - doubt and deconstruction. Thirdly - surely, Kafka is driven to question the confidence that all humans seem to have in their grasp of what's going on around them? Isn't he horrified by your bald confidence? And the doubt that he feels ought to be there in any grasp of what's going on, he tries to incontrovertibly demonstrate by deconstructing everything.
Kafka needs to point out that (despite what you might think) you can't even be sure you've 'got right' what someone is telling you; you can't even be sure that you've understood something apparently basic - what a woman feels for you; how the refusal of an offer has been taken by a senior work colleague. Though perhaps the main point of Kafka's deconstructing is to expose the complexity that is in fact 'there' even if you habitually gloss-over it.
Is there also another point to it? Is Kafka also using deconstruction to help in this work (above) of trying to normalize a slightly bizarre world? Isn't there a balancing act going on? Countering an unreal arrest and chargeless crime, there is a phone-call containing a very real deconstruction of a Court Official's problem - he wishes to explain to K. that he is going to organize a series of enquiries into K.'s case, that the first one would take place next Sunday, that these would be regular occurrences perhaps more so as time went on, that he is mindful of the need to conclude the case yet mindful also of the need for the interrogations to be thorough, although because of the strain involved they must also never last too long, Sunday had been chosen so that K. might not be disturbed in his professional work . . . And so it goes on.
Following an unreal Court housed in a garret-room, and law-books revealed to be mere books of indecent pictures, Kafka will describe a very real confusion within a man (K.) who has been sexually 'invited-in' by a woman (the washerwoman at the Court) who immediately after is going off with a rival man; and he'll describe a very real and deconstructed 'expression' that a man might wish to present to such a woman, an expression that does not betray his disappointment, and even should she read disappointment in his expression, a look that wouldn't even betray whether he could get over his disappointment easily. It is tortured and elaborate deconstruction of the supposedly simplest of things, and perhaps it is needed to ground the slightly bizarre?
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