Kafka and Kierkegaard: The Absurd Metaphysical Paradox in the Tragedy of The Trial
In Either/Or, Søren Kierkegaard describes the genre of tragedy as a conflict between the guilt of the individual and the substantial determinants. Through narrative, it shows the ethical struggles that arise when the philosophical perspectives of free will and determinism are bashed together in analysis. The belief in free will, or metaphysical libertarianism, assumes that each individual has agency, or can act in accordance with one’s own will. Determinism, on the other hand, asserts that every event is necessitated by its causes and conditions; every action, even if appearing to be in accordance with the will of the individual, is fundamentally determined by what we often call “fate.” This philosophical discourse for hundreds of years has provided reasons for how free will and determinism explain the human condition. But, as Kierkegaard touches on, literary tragedy allows us to explore the debate through the form of a highly detailed, nuanced narrative.
One of the main critiques of determinism is that it doesn’t quite work normatively; we live our lives under the assumption that we have agency. Our social institutions, most of all our justice system, relies on the assumption that we as individuals are in control of our actions, are responsible for them, and can be guilty for them. Franz Kafka’s modernist tragedy The Trial illuminates this specific avenue of the debate; it’s the story of a man who is prosecuted by an unreachable force for a crime unrevealed, neither to him nor the audience. Throughout the process, he climbs a never-ending staircase to try to defend himself against his increasingly-apparent doomed nature of his trial. In my reading, I will argue how The Trial paradoxically exemplifies the Kierkegaardian view of ancient and modern tragedy through the existentialist concept of the absurd, exploring the paradox of assumed guilt within an intrinsically deterministic narrative.
To further explain Kierkegaard’s aesthetic idea of the tragedy, particularly the modern tragedy, I must first define the ancient tragedy. It is easy to recognize in the examples that he gives: Oedipus Rex and Antigone. In the former, the events of the play are partially caused by the individual but are even more so determined by other forces, namely fate. As told in the prophecy at the beginning of the play, Oedipus fulfills the destined actions of killing his father and marrying his mother in accordance with his ignorant will. Kierkegaard explains that the shame and the guilt of his sins are hard to separate. Despite the inevitability of the events in the play, Oedipus assumes responsibility for them in his shame, gouging his eyes out after discovering what he had done. The audience member finds himself torn between acknowledging Oedipus’s guilt and sympathizing with his submission to an unlucky, brutal fate. The modern tragedy transgresses this model of tragedy by assigning all causal responsibility for the tragic events to the individual’s own agency. This is where The Trial becomes relevant.
The Nature of the Law with a Capital ‘L’
Right from the beginning, Josef K., our protagonist, is assigned the guilt of his crime (and therefore the consequences of his trial) by two agents knocking on his door. But just as he is arrested, one of the agents introduces the presence of a substantial determinant:
‘There’s been no mistake. After all, our department, as far as I know, and I know only the lowest level, doesn’t seek out guilt among the general population, but, as the Law states, is attracted by guilt and has to send us guards out. That’s the Law. What mistake could there be?’ ‘I don’t know that law,’ said K. ‘All the worse for you,’ said the guard. ‘It probably exists only in your heads,’ said K.; (The Trial, pages 8-9).
Even from the start, the way that this premise is set up blurs the lines between ancient and modern tragedy by blurring the lines between free agency and determinism. The Law, with a capital ‘L’, is understood to be referring to the justice system in the story. But how it is spoken of is important here. It is divine-like in how its presence is oppressive but remote. It is superior but felt in the exercising of the inferior. It is omniscient but incomprehensible in its nature. It’s almost as if it is Fate (or God); the Law is set up as a prime determinant in the chain of events that follow from K.’s arrest. But in this same moment, guilt, or culpability, is placed upon him, though what underlies the guilt is left undisclosed.
Not only is there no revealed evidence for the crime, but the court is also left to linger in the margins throughout the rest of the trial. K. is left to continue his everyday life, though the procedures of the trial gradually occupy more and more of his attention. The bureaucratic participants and offices of the Law are scattered in the nooks and crannies of working-class neighborhoods. The court painter, a man that K. visits seeking some strings to be pulled in his favor, works in a tiny office that serves as another man’s bedroom. The painter is well-connected to many of the judges of the court, but despite his acquaintance with them, there is little he can do to influence the outcomes. All he does is give K. a better picture of how the system works—or doesn’t. Sentencing, for example, almost always leads to a guilty sentence, but the severity of the punishment varies. The painter very well might represent the artist under a prophetic sort of light, not unlike the Oracle of Delphi in Oedipus. Instead of describing fate, though, the painter describes the options that stem from this foundational cause of being prosecuted, the results uncertain due to the limited knowledge of the other determinants involved. Despite the speculative nature of the painter’s counsel, what is made more apparently determined for K. is the realization that he is doomed to a guilty sentence and to be punished. This is another instance where the trial seems to be both determined and dependent on the actions of the individual. K. is expected to do all he can to play the game the best that he can by jumping through the increasingly absurd hoops of getting a competent lawyer and making a good impression on the judge and the jury to improve his odds, but the further he gets into the process, the more we realize how grim it really is for him. Just as he gives up even trying to find out what the crime he is being accused of is, the audience gives up as well. It seems pointless to speculate if he even is guilty; it appears predetermined that he is.
Submission to Shame
No matter how determined K.’s life seems to be, it is a life in the possession of guilt (though he never directly feels guilty). Another man accused, one of his lawyer’s other clients named Block, more openly and passionately expresses this guilt. Because of a trial lasting over five years, he is rendered near-penniless. In fact, he sleeps in the maid’s room of the lawyer’s office. Before the lawyer and in front of K., Block kneels and crawls around on all fours, like a dog, and begs the lawyer for more assistance. Expressing no embarrassment in his self-degrading behavior (and the degrading treatment from the lawyer), he behaves in a passionate, animalistic way. Block is a character that is a glimpse into the future for K., should his trial continue for too long. Block has accepted his guilt to the point where he has embodied shame in the way he is perceived and perceives himself. Shame is an emotional response to the burden of guilt. As Kierkegaard explains, it is the pain at the end of the modern tragedy. In the ancient tragedy, which is the truly tragic form in contrast to the modern tragedy according to Kierkegaard, the individual is aware that the events were determined and ashamed based on that knowledge alone—making the events resemble ancient tragedy despite its temporal modernity. Hence, Oedipus gouges his eyes out as sight (into the future) leads him down the chain of causes and effects that oppress him by the end. In the modern tragedy, however, where the individual is assigned all of the causal power in guilt, the shame is felt as much more painful and much less tragic. Block in this story is the example of the shame based not on tragic circumstances, but on his own personal wretchedness that he has so grotesquely taken to identify with. Paradoxically, however, Block has also accepted his determined conviction in the trial. He is aware of his impending doom, but he does all he can to defer it, despite his awareness of his own powerlessness in his situation, resulting in subservience to his lawyer. Though he is in an unyielding state of humiliating pain, he prefers waiting in limbo before the Law. In K.’s case, ultimately, he is slaughtered by the court by the end of the story. The last line of the story is interesting: “it seemed as though the shame was to outlive him” (The Trial, 231). He is squashed by fate, and his shame lives on in the judgments remaining in other people’s memories of him.
The Tragic Absurd in Reality
The Trial is often referred to by the French existentialists as a perfect example of the absurd. In their philosophical context, the absurd is the result of an anxious understanding of the meaninglessness of the world around the individual. Everything lacks apparent purpose and is unintelligible to our minds. In existentialist philosophy, absurdism follows from the randomness and “nothingness” of the universe, the same foundation that the existentialists use to support their belief in free will. But in The Trial, the absurdity is sourced from the substantial determinants. It is found in the forced procedure of chores that K. is submitted to. Going to the bureaucratic offices, finding a lawyer, talking to members of the court, and meeting with those rumored to be of help to him are all motions he must go through just to preserve the hope of a “not guilty” verdict. Though his prosecution is apparently a response to his exercise of free will in his crime, and therefore his assigned guilt, as I explained before, the way that his crime is treated is paradoxically also a substantial determinant. Even regarding the absurd aspect of the novel, the philosophical paradox of the seemingly compatibilist world of The Trial can’t be avoided in this discussion.
What I am suggesting here is that when discussing morality and judgment, while aware of the seemingly unavoidable presence of substantial determinants (and so the suggestion of determinism), the assignment of guilt and responsibility seems absurd. If everything is determined, including our own will and actions, what responsibility and therefore blame can we even possess? What the modern tragedy works to do, according to Kierkegaard, is to remove the deterministic influence from the story to preserve a more sensible moral system, but Kierkegaard argues that the tragic element fails. It fails because it ignores the obvious, that substantial determinants are present in reality. Reality is a tragic paradox. The end of The Trial, I believe, shows us how to cope with this inescapable compatibilism.
After the Trial
Near the end of the story, the parable titled “Before the Law,” a short story which Kafka published before writing The Trial, is told by the priest in the cathedral that K. finds himself inside of. In the parable, a man who seeks the Law finds himself before a door and a doorkeeper. He asks to enter, but the doorkeeper denies him and tells him “it’s possible . . . but not now.” He is just one doorkeeper before a series of even more powerful doorkeepers. The man decides to wait until the door opens for him:
‘Over the many years, the man observes the doorkeeper almost incessantly. He forgets the other doorkeepers and this first one seems to him the only obstacle to his admittance to the Law. He curses his unhappy fate, loudly grumbling to himself. He turns childish, and since he has come to know even the fleas in the doorkeeper’s collar over his years of study, he asks the fleas too to help him change the doorkeepers’ mind. Finally his eyes grow dim and he no longer knows whether it’s really getting darker around him or if his eyes are merely deceiving him. And yet in the darkness he now sees a radiance that streams forth inextinguishably from the door of the Law. He doesn’t have much longer to live now. Before he dies, everything he has experienced over the years coalesces in his mind into a single question he has never asked the doorkeeper… “everyone strives to reach the Law,” says the man, “how does it happen, then, that in all these years no one but me has requested admittance.”The doorkeeper sees that the man is nearing his end, and in order to reach his failing hearing, he roars at him: “No one else could gain admittance here, because this entrance was meant solely for you. I’m going to shut it now.’” (The Trial, pages 216-217).
While I doubt that this is the message of the parable intended by Kafka, I do see the tragedy in this parable. The man awaiting entry to the Law is about a man awaiting his fate. His last act of agency was surrender to his personal Fate, and it turned out to be fulfilled at his dying moment. Choosing to spend his life at the door was his access to the Law; he was fated to do so, according to the doorkeeper. I believe that this parable is about how we have no choice but to live our lives as if we have agency. No matter what we do, it is fated, but if we let ourselves wait at the door, the dead-end to devoted belief in determinism, we are no different than the man in the parable. We must not seek the Law or Fate; perhaps we must act in the modern way (in the sense of Kierkegaard’s modern tragedy) and allow ourselves to assume free agency. Kierkegaard successfully argues for how the modern tragedy fails in this respect, but that’s precisely what we want. We don’t want to live in a successful tragedy.
In all of the moral absurdity of determinism and all of the metaphysical paradoxes arising from tragedy, I hope that I have shown how we take the assumption of freedom for granted. Reality has defended culpability just as Kierkegaard’s modern tragedy does: by throwing out any acknowledgement of the substantial determinants that are really behind the chain of events in our lives. Kafka’s The Trial is an exciting thought experiment, and I have noticed that many people can relate to the absurdity that it presents without really being able to pinpoint why it makes them feel that way. I think many of us, or at least myself, notice the feeling of life pulling us into a certain direction. We can surrender to the strong current of motions we go through and plead guilty, or we can declare ourselves not guilty and kick our limbs, dead in the water. But by choosing the latter, we also have to pretend as if the water is calm and still. Could we, at least, be somewhat conscious of our “playing along” in that fantasy, though?