"The court wants nothing from you."
Franz Kafka's "Before the Law," as it appears in THE TRIAL
It’s only the second issue and already I’m breaking my own rules. 1) Maybe this thing will be biweekly? 2) I’m writing to you about a novel. Sort of. These last two weeks I’ve been reading Kafka’s The Trial (1925) alongside (far, far behind) Sophia and Isabella. As I approached the end, I encountered a passage that I had seen before: the text from “Before the Law,” published during Kafka’s lifetime as part of The Country Doctor: Short Prose for my Father (1920). This parable/fable/OG flash fiction is almost too short to summarize, but I’ll try anyway. A countryman tries to gain access to the Law but is blocked by the doorkeeper. The doorkeeper is a chill, if buff, guy, who’s somehow still at the bottom of the food chain as far as guards go. Go ahead and give it a shot, he tells the countryman, and then gives this warning: the guards who follow are even more jacked. So the countryman heeds his warning, sits on the stool the guard offers him, waits, berates, ages unto death, and in his dying moments, asks, Hey, why hasn’t anyone else tried to enter? At which point the guard pulls a (potentially) fast one, asking, Why would anyone else enter a gate created specifically for you?
The mystery and frustration at the heart of the piece—and at the heart of The Trial, as I read it—is the extent to which the man allows himself to be blocked. It is his own belief in the Law that dooms him. Right? Or was he duped? Did he have any other choice but to sit on that stool and wait for death? The hashing through of these questions is one of the pleasures of encountering the parable in the context of the novel, which is itself a relentlessly absurd and shocking account of a man who undergoes a horrifically bureaucratic legal trial for who-knows-what. In the novel, the parable is delivered by a priest, who debates its meaning with the protagonist, K., all the while declaring, “You mustn’t pay too much attention to opinions. The text is immutable, and the opinions are often only an expression of despair over it.” It seems to me that Kafka is here prophesying his own fate as an impossibly cryptic author, whose ouevre, as Sontag put it in Against Interpretation, has “attracted interpreters like leeches.” So I’ll stop despairing. Go despair for yourself.
On the table
Kafka, Franz. The Trial, translated by Breon Mitchell. Schocken Books, 1998.
Kafka, Franz. “Before the Law.” Metamorphosis and Other Stories, translated by Michael Hofmann. Penguin Books, 2007.
Other recent favorites
Mary South’s “You Will Never Be Forgotten,” from the eponymous collection. Published originally here in The New Yorker.
Bud Smith’s “Violets,” from the Summer 2020 issue of The Paris Review.