The Trial

"The concept of law is more central to life in Hong Kong than any other place I’ve worked in the world. In most democracies, the law tends to play out in the background, barely noticed or commented upon but somehow comforting, like muzak in a lift. In Hong Kong it’s in your face, from the Basic Law to the quasi-religious faith in independent judges and the rule of law. There is no better book than Franz Kafka’s The Trial to smash our illusions about the law into a thousand desolate pieces. For that reason, I probably shouldn’t recommend it. It’s a bit like advising someone to read Albert Camus’s The Plague right now. It’s not exactly solace-inducing. But it’s powerful and apt for Hong Kong today. The Trial opens with a sentence that is stark but beautiful in its minimalism: “Somebody must have laid false information against Josef K., for he was arrested one morning without having done anything wrong.” From there, Kafka traces Josef K.’s downfall as he is sucked into a faceless, merciless bureaucratic machine that is determined to destroy him. Kafka foresaw the devastating ways in which totalitarian states would turn the law into a tool for repression. That is what is happening in contemporary Hong Kong. The civil service and the law have been weaponized to enforce Beijing’s will in the city. “Through their energy, idealism and sense of sacrifice, young activists have helped bind together a wide-ranging democracy movement in a city that was previously known for its political apathy” One parable contained within The Trial relates how a man approaches “The Law” but meets a lowly gate-keeper who tells him he can’t get access to the law now. The man waits there patiently until his dying breath and, as he fades away, he asks why no one else passes through the gate. The guard replies that “this entrance was meant only for you” and proceeds to close it. It makes me think of the Basic Law and the hope many Hong Kongers placed in its supposed guarantees of democracy and human rights. I don’t think Beijing’s gatekeepers ever intended to let the people of Hong Kong gain access to these parts of the Basic Law."

"The Trial tells of the struggle of a high-ranking bank official (a status not unlike that of Kafka at his insurance institute) who is charged by a mysterious court with having committed a crime (forever unspecified) and is murdered by warders of the court in a particularly brutal and sexually charged manner. What is extraordinary is the degree of penetration the ‘novel’ has made into the legal mind as well. If you take a glance at Westlaw (the online resource for case law), it registers various trials that might have leapt from the pages of The Trial and are even acknowledged as such by erudite judges. An article by Amanda Torres quotes one Judge Edenfield on such a case where a victim had his parole revoked without an explanation: “…that not even the most skilled of counsel, finding himself in the Kafkaesque situation of being deprived of his liberty by a tribunal which will adduce no reasons for its decision, can complain concisely and clearly of his objections to such a decision… [Such a situation] leaves the prisoner no recourse but to approach the court with an attempted rebuttal of all real, feared, or imagined justifications for his confinement.” It is important to note that no final determination has ever been made or can be made as to the ‘correct’ sequence of chapters/fascicles making up The Trial. Kafka left them pell-mell, with the well-known injunction to his friend and booster Max Brod to burn them, something that, as Kafka knew, Brod would never do. Readers can enjoy the additional pleasure of constructing their own sequence in light of the hermeneutic allure projected by these texts. But this haunting work hardly needs my commendation. Since its posthumous publication in 1925, it has long exercised its fascination over the popular mind and has often reappeared as a play (by Jean-Louis Barrault and André Gide in 1947, among others) and, more than once, as an opera (by Boris Blacher and Heinz von Cramer in 1953; Philip Glass and Christopher Hampton in 2014). You’re hitting me an easy ground ball. Kafka’s comic turns have been the staple of many a desperate doctoral dissertation over the last century. I remember growing up as a nascent Kafka-scholar—but also grimly deconstructionist —with Michel Dentan’s Humour et creation littéraire dans l’oeuvre de Kafka perched on my shoulder and giving me significant taps. I’ve especially loved an observation on The Metamorphosis made by Carsten Schlingmann, a scholar I’ve never met. Kafka writes: “When Gregor’s body already projected halfway out of bed— the new method was more of a game than a struggle, he only had to keep on rocking and jerking himself along—he thought how simple everything would be if he could get some help. Two strong persons—he thought of his father and the maid—would have been completely sufficient; they would only have had to shove their arms under his arched back, in this way scoop him off the bed, bend down with their burden, and then just be careful and patient while he managed to swing himself down onto the floor, where his little legs would hopefully acquire some purpose. Well, leaving out the fact that the doors were locked, should he really call for help? In spite of all his miseries, he could not repress a smile at this thought. ” (Emphasis added) Schlingmann comments: “…the strangest smile in the history of literature.” If we think of The Trial , we will assign many of its features to a new genre: the political grotesque—a grotesquerie that is ‘abysmally’ comic. We have this rather cheerful account in Joseph Vogl’s essay on Kafka’s “political comedy”: From the terror of secret scenes of torture to childish officials, from the filth of the bureaucratic order to atavistic rituals of power runs a track of comedy that forever indicates the absence of reason, the element of the arbitrary in the execution of power and rule. However, this element of the grotesque does not merely unmask and denounce. It refers—as Foucault once pointed out—to the inevitability, the inescapability of precisely the grotesque, ridiculous, loony, or abject sides of power. Kafka’s “political grotesque” displays an unsystematic arbitrariness, which belongs to the functions of the apparatus itself. There is really no real reason why [in The Trial ] an exhausted court official at the end of the working day should occupy himself for an hour with tossing lawyers down the stairs … Such “instances” can be easily multiplied all throughout The Castle —par excellence the slapstick of K.’s discombobulated “helpers.”"

"I read this before going to Nigeria but moving there made me think about it a lot. The idea that the system always wins. What you see time and again in a country like Nigeria is that the way to prosper is to get round the system, or play the system, but to try and change it is a mammoth and mostly futile task. You have structures which could crush the most well-intentioned person and there’s this dark absurdity about how it all works. I remember a chapter where ‘K’ hears about the various options open to him in the trial he is facing for an undisclosed offence. ‘K’ can be fully acquitted, but that never happens, so he may be ‘ostensibly acquitted’, but with the possibility the charges could be reinstated in future, or the trial can be ‘indefinitely postponed’, which means the case is never formally stopped. There’s a sense of a system which always looms above you. The analogy isn’t exact, because even under Abacha Nigeria was such a large and messy place that it was hard for anyone to impose absolute, formal power but there’s a bleakly comic side to it that appealed to me. For my book I went out on a bus for a day and saw how they started with a stack of money from the fares and how it was depleted and depleted by all the bribes they had to pay. This guy was explaining to me how the money was halved, then quartered, then went down to an eighth. A packet of 33,000 naira had been reduced to 4,000. Then he paused, and added: ‘And then the police take half of that.’ The comic timing was so perfect, I just couldn’t help laughing, I started apologising, but other people then started joining in, and a great, sardonic laugh rippled around the room."

"He fully foresaw Stalin's show trials 20 years before they happened."

"when I was 12 or so I read Kafka's "The Trial," because I read somewhere that David Bowie liked it"