3 - The exploration of the modern city in The Trial

Summary

The tribulations of Josef K., the protagonist of Kafka's second novel The Trial (Der Process), revolve around the clash between the inaccessible court's unspecified accusation and K.'s insistence on his own innocence. This irresolvable conflict forces K. to embark on an exploratory journey through the 'phantasmagoria' of the modern city, a space defined by surfaces, theatrical scenarios and unreadable representations. The novel stands clearly in the tradition of modernist city narratives, where urban space supplies the location for the disappearance of the alienated individual in the lonely crowd. Situated outside 'mainstream' German culture, the Prague Kafka knew is a particularly suitable backdrop and many readers have felt they have recognised it in The Trial. The city's tragic history, marked by national and social conflicts, reached into the present of its crooked streets and impenetrable courtyards and is reflected in a literature filled with madmen, eccentrics, cripples, prostitutes, and pimps.

How does Josef K. situate himself in this unstable, shifting space? One critic has seen him, unlike Karl Rosmann in The Man who Disappeared and K. in The Castle, as neither a traveller nor a foreigner but a socially successful and ambitious urban citizen. By contrast, another maintains he is Rosmann’s close relative because he finds himself, as it were, in exile in his own hometown. Alienated, arrested by an unknown but powerful authority and fearing punishment, suffering the intrusion of the faraway court into his private sphere and finding himself expelled into some quasi-foreign territory, K. shares many predicaments with real exiles. In order to mediate between such strictly literal and self-consciously metaphorical interpretations, I want to offer a new reading of The Trial by going back once more to one of Kafka’s earliest and most insightful commentators, Walter Benjamin.