So what’s The Trial’s value to you?

There’s value in knowing that you are not alone. You might identify with the fear and frustration that Kafka depicts, and which Orson Welles adapts artfully to the big screen. The dream-like, surrealistic tone could echo your own experience of representing yourself in court when you have no formal legal training: What’s happening? How do I figure out what I need to do? When will my life be normal again?

Kafka knew all about it. You might be surprised to learn that Franz Kafka was a lawyer. He was a legal system insider, not a bewildered, unrepresented defendant driven to cynicism by a labyrinthine justice scheme designed to line lawyers’ pockets. So you might better appreciate Kafka’s harsh appraisal of it. In fact, the term “Kafkaesque” was coined to describe the experience of people being forced to deal with faceless bureaucracies, without point, without resolution, without accountability.

Also, there comes a point in the story at which Josef K. fires his lawyer and decides to represent himself.

If you are representing yourself in court and are overwhelmed with the stress of it, I caution you against taking up a broad study of Kafka’s works. Kafka was a Jewish resident of Czechoslovakia who lost several close family members to the Holocaust. As if that wasn’t enough, he contracted tuberculosis, which eventually took his life when he was only 40 years old. All this horror seems to permeate his stories. So, you might want to postpone delving into Kafka’s works until your stress eases.

Some critics question the wisdom of Kafka’s status as a great twentieth-century writer. Without going too far afield from the point of this post, here is an article from the Atlantic, which rightly points out the timing of Kafka’s writings and the rise of Sigmund Freud (double entendre unintended but, when noticed during editing, left standing).

I like this review by Roger Ebert. Ebert gives a nice summary of the “plot” (a term that applies loosely at best), and some insights into both Kafka and Welles:

Kafka published his novel in Prague in 1925; it reflected his paranoia, but it was prophetic, foreseeing Stalin’s gulag and Hitler’s Holocaust, in which innocent people wake up one morning to discover they are guilty of being themselves.

So, if a dark story won’t add to your emotional burden, I recommend The Trial. I recommend it not for lessons on how to represent yourself in court, but for the foray into an environment where you might find some comforting vindication in the story’s baffled protagonist.