Must We All Be Josef K.?

In The Visible and The Invisible, his unfinished manuscript published posthumously eight years after his early death in 1961, the French existential phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty offers a formulation of human existence that reads like it were a note in the margins torn from the page of a Kafka novel he had been reading. “One,” so Merleau-Ponty says, “can first think starting from the pure negative. One shows that I, who question myself about being, am nothing. With this statement, one circumscribes an anti-nature, which is me: I am what has no nature; I am nothing.” This anti-essentialist definition of human existence, this definition that denies being human any essence, or any nature, by which it might be said to be defined, immediately calls to mind Jean-Paul Sartre’s earlier famous motto from Existentialism Is a Humanism—“existence precedes essence.” That Kafka served as an inspiration not only to Merleau-Ponty and Sartre but to Heidegger and Camus also, who read and considered his account of the human condition when devising their own is a fact as unsurprising as it is verifiable. At the conclusion to Man Seen from the Outside, the fifth in a series of seven lectures broadcast on French national radio in 1948, Merleau-Ponty mentions Kafka by name and references the latter’s short stories, The Metamorphosis and Investigations of a Dog. He finds in the Czech writer’s fiction a profound recognition of the body’s gestural sense and power of expression. Interestingly, for this reason, he does not read Kafka as maintaining “that all is absurd,” but rather “of using humor to prepare the ground for those rare and precious moments at which human beings come to recognize, to find, one another.” Far from being a thinker of absurdity, alienation, isolation, and despair, here Kafka is interpreted instead as being the exponent of human connection and solidarity—in a word, dare it be said, of meaning.

Among the many possible illustrations of Kafka’s interest in such meaning, for one, consider the inspector in The Trial who first informs Josef K. of his arrest. Through the voice of the inspector, Kafka highlights explicitly the perceived world’s meaning, a sense received, circulated, and instituted by the body’s gestural expression. As the inspector says to K., “And don’t make such a fuss about how innocent you feel; it disturbs the otherwise not unfavorable impression you make. And you should talk less in general; almost everything you’ve said up to now could have been inferred from your behavior, even if you’d said only a few words, and it wasn’t terribly favorable to you in any case.” A few pages earlier, Kafka had described Franz the guard “staring at K. with a long and no doubt meaningful, but incomprehensible, look.” Attention again is drawn to this mode of human expressiveness with one of the three bank clerks present for the arrest, Kaminer, whose permanent grin, “an annoying smile produced by a chronic muscular twitch” which makes it impossible for him to smile deliberately, Kafka repeatedly references during the description of the arrest scene. The clerk’s smile, in fact, is the subject of the chapter’s final sentence that draws the bizarre arrest drama to a close. Josef K., who wants to make conversation with the clerks on the way to work in the cab after his arrest, is recorded as thinking how “common decency, unfortunately, forbade” making a joke about Kaminer and his grin. And yet, although Merleau-Ponty undoubtedly is correct that Kafka’s view of the world is deeply human, since it takes seriously the meaning of the manifest image, as opposed to the scientistic image that would dismiss such everyday meaning as merely illusory, there remains a sense in which, for all the meaning it does acknowledge (facial expressions, vocal intonations, bodily gestures, along with all of the normative depth and complexity of daily social life), a crisis of meaning is at stake in Kafka’s portrayal of the human condition nonetheless.

At the heart of this everyday world of perception’s meaning lies the threat of a deeper meaninglessness of the absurd. Sartre expresses the worry at issue through a striking image—nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being like a worm. Merleau-Ponty himself alludes to this potential meaninglessness stalking human life when, as we have seen, he characterizes each of us as a being having no nature and thus being nothing. For, if, as Sartre would put it, our having no essence entails that we are “condemned to freedom,” which is to say, responsible for determining by our actions what it will mean to be who we are, the question remains whether that very task of becoming whatever it is we, in turn, will to become itself matters—if there is no such thing as human nature, no imago Dei because God is dead, and thus we were thrown into a universe that came from nowhere, went to nowhere, and without a sufficient ground for its coherence, would not human existence be superfluous?

In her essay, “Franz Kafka: A Revaluation,” published in the Partisan Review in 1944 on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of Kafka’s death, Hannah Arendt contends that this crisis of meaning is characteristically modern. Kafka, in turn, is the novelist par excellence (to say modern novelist would be redundant since the novel itself is an inherently modern genre) because he expresses this better than anyone else. The problem of existence, the question of what the meaning of existence is, or whether indeed it has any meaning, guides his novelistic treatments of the human experience. His are philosophical if for no other reason than they grapple with the philosophical problem—the problem of the meaning of being, or, more to the point, the problem of the meaning of our own being.

Today, then, on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of Kafka’s death, what is to be learned from The Trial? Someone might reasonably wonder whether anything more can be said about a text of which so much has already been said. As Arendt observed, even already in the 40s, it is a work “about which a small library of interpretations has been published.” Adding yet another interpretation to the shelves threatens to become an exercise as tedious as it is otiose. If, however, great works of literature never cease to give us more to understand, taking another look at Kafka’s first novel can be forgiven. Without further ado, thus, we now turn to the text.

The whole story, thematically construed, is presented embryonically in the novel’s opening scene, in which K. is arrested in his bedroom before work by two guards and an inspector. The first notable thing to observe concerning the arrest is that, in a fundamental sense, it isn’t an arrest at all, at least not one that bears any immediate resemblance to an arrest with which we are familiar in the course of ordinary life.

The men in question who come to K.’s room at Frau Grubach’s boardinghouse aren’t municipal policemen. They wear no uniforms or badges. They carry no arrest warrant. They themselves don’t know the presumed offense with which K. is being charged. Nor do they satisfactorily identify the precise organization for which they work, other than to say that they’ve been dispatched by higher authorities in light of K.’s having violated what they term the “Law.” Shocked to find these mysterious and invasive men in his room, he asks himself,

“What sort of men were they? What were they talking about? What office did they represent? After all, K. lived in a state governed by law, there was universal peace, all statutes were in force; who dared assault him in his own lodgings?”

The entire scene, in a way, is a farce, of course, as K. himself notes aloud throughout the initial proceedings (he questions whether it is all just a “joke” being played on him by his colleagues at the bank). Yet, K. will come no closer to finding answers to these initial questions by the end of his ordeal than he did at the start. Everything begins and ends in maddening obscurity.

‘Who are you?’ asked K., and immediately sat halfway up in bed. But the man ignored the question, as if his presence would have to be accepted, and merely said in turn: ‘You rang?’ ‘Anna’s to bring me breakfast,’ K. said, scrutinizing him silently for a moment, trying to figure out who he might be. But the man didn’t submit to his inspection for long, turning instead to the door and opening it a little in order to tell someone who was apparently standing just behind it: ‘He wants Anna to bring him breakfast.’ A short burst of laughter came from the adjoining room; it was hard to tell whether more than one person had joined in.

As translator Breon Mitchell notes in his English introduction, The Trial is a story that begins as a farce yet ends as a tragedy. What makes it farcical, in no small part, is its deliberate theatricality. Everyone, including very often K. himself, is seen to be playing a role, yet always in such a way that the relative degree of reasonableness or sensibleness exhibited in their actions takes place within an overarching situation for which there is never any underlying explanation. The actions of K. and others, which exemplify their own manner of superficial sense, drift as clumps of kelp atop a sea of nonsense. Why things are as they are is never justified or explained. Like actors thrust onto a stage without time to prepare, they manage their way through a series of improvised scenes without anyone ever ultimately being in charge, without anyone ever being in a position to clarify what exactly the whole production is really about, or whom, if anyone at all, is in fact directing. This is why K. from the outset will be driven by the futile, albeit understandable, need to make sense of what he calls “the situation”—a situation, however, that never comes into focus. By the end of the process (the novel’s title in the original German is Der Process), there is no more clarity about why he has been arrested, or by whom, than here when he is “assaulted” in bed in his room.

When we appreciate that what K. in the The Trial will in turn undergo is clearly an allegory for the ordeal of life as such, that what befalls him is ultimately a tragedy, no matter how admittedly farcical, comes into view. There is no exit from the stage of life but by death, a death which itself will no more bring the situation to any rational closure than has the unfolding series of ridiculous events preceding it. As all the atheistic existentialists after Kafka will contend, human existence is a kind of performance, a drama, in which we all continue to participate even if we, at a certain level, all understand that is all that it is—play-acting. (Sartre’s famous example of the café waiter who is playing at being a waiter is a case in point.) The stage of life, hence, is the theater of the absurd.

The arrest, in part, accordingly signifies the moment in which K. is summoned to face this uncanny and anxiety-inducing fact squarely—he has been born into the world without choosing to be, thrown into an existence that will never make sense, no matter how intensely he struggles to make sense of it. For this reason, K.’s arrest is an event signifying the moment that he is summoned to take responsibility for his own existence—in short, to face the fact that because there is no ultimate answer to who he is or ought to be, and nobody else is in a position to answer that question for him, he is responsible for making sense of his own life, even if that very attempt at sense-making is bound to be frustrated (the whole thing bears a resemblance to the so-called “midlife crisis,” which fits nicely with the fact that Kafka chooses K.’s thirtieth birthday for the day of the arrest). To be condemned to freedom is to be condemned to the absurd.

And just as Josef K. will be unable to make any sense of his own arrest, which is to say, of his own life, so too we are unable to make sense of our own, insofar as we are in the same situation as K. himself. In reading the account of K.’s ordeal, we await some reasonable conclusion, some rational solution that will lend intelligibility and clarity to what everything has been all about. No such explanation is forthcoming; the story’s plot unfolds without an end that lends the story coherence as a whole. It simply ends. Kafka wants us to realize, and accept, that ours is K.’s situation—our existence, our trial, our ordeal of life, makes no more sense than does the exaggerated ridiculousness of K.’s own life circumstances. It begins, goes on for a while, then terminates. (In a way, the literary technique that Kafka employs, by which the reader is intended to identify with the protagonist, is similar to what film noir does in inviting the audience to identify with the detective. However, unlike in most film noir, where there is some hope, at least in principle, that the detective will solve the case and make sense of things, here we are meant to learn that there is no answer to what has happened or why. Existence is at once farcical and tragic because we can’t help but interrogate being in the search for an answer to life’s meaning even if we come to recognize that there is no such answer.) That K.’s own trial, then, his own ordeal, ends without any rational conclusion suggests that this must be the case for everyone’s life as well.

(One reason that The Trial counts as a philosophical novel is that it aims to tell us something about how things are for everyone. Arendt is on to this when she notes that Kafka is interested in describing the essence of things. His short story “A Common Confusion,” for instance, is not really just about that one particular confusing event but about the nature of confusion as such, about the essence of confusing events in general. Arendt says, “This impression of exaggeration, however, disappears entirely if we consider the story as what it actually is: not the report of a confusing event, but the model of confusion itself.” Just as “A Common Confusion” does not simply report one confusing incident but instead models confusing events, so too The Trial does not merely recount an absurd series of episodes in one man’s life but rather models the nature of existence’s absurdity as such.)

If we, for the moment, put aside the crucial question that we will come to later regarding who these men who barge in to arrest K. exactly are, and what the nature of the shadow outfit for which they work may be (we will come to the question of the Illuminati or Deep State in this essay’s third part), and instead for now merely understand their roles in the world of K.’s fictional universe as being a metaphor for some feature of the life that we all, in fact, do inhabit outside of the text, who then are they, and what do they represent?

A careful reader of this opening arrest scene is bound to notice the incessant recurrence of doors and doorways. (This is our first clue from Kafka of who the mysterious men are exactly.) Door imagery, as it happens, appears almost twenty times in the first chapter alone. Kafka’s description of interior space and the actions of the characters are for a symbolic reason situated in terms of doors and doorways. The scene begins with a “knock at the door”; K. and others are said to have “opened the door”; a guard “stopped in the doorway”; someone is described “closing the door”; at one point in the proceedings, there is mention of “double doors already thrown open”; later, everyone is said now to be “gathered in a small area by the door”; characters “pass through the two open doors”; finally, after emerging from his boardinghouse after the arrest to go to work at the bank, K. is said to notice “the door of the building across the way.” What lies behind this choice of imagery?

If we recall Merleau-Ponty’s original suggestion that Kafka is to be understood as a thinker who recognizes and aims to thematize the role of bodily gesture and expressiveness in human life, then perhaps the imagery is meant to highlight the shifting depths of interpersonal connection among the characters, as well as the fluctuations in K.’s own psychological state, as it vacillates between a mood of solidarity, on the one hand, and then complete isolation and alienation, on the other. So, too, the door imagery would then be a metaphorical representation of availability, of whether others are “open” or “closed” to K. In a similar vein, this normative dimension of human connection and availability also involves the dimension of authority, of who is (or is not) in a position to give (or deny) K. access to what it is he is seeking, above all, an explanation for the reason of his own trial. But it is not just that the guards and the inspector barge into K.’s life through the door, invading his private space, and in turn control where he is to sit, or where and when he is allowed to move (as they tell him eventually, he in fact is not being “held” permanently, but is free to go on with ordinary life as he pleases despite the arrest). The constant shuttling to-and-fro of the characters within interior space, not only in the opening scene in the boardinghouse but throughout the novel’s other later locations also, this moving from one room to another, is symbolic of K.’s existential questioning, his wrestling with the problem of the meaning of his own being. And just as there is no end to that questioning so long as he is alive, so too there is no end, no rest, no final terminus of place, either. There is only the perpetual changing of space, depending on circumstances. As the other guard, Willem, tells K.,

‘You can’t leave, you’re being held.’ ‘So it appears,’ said K. ‘But why?’ ‘We weren’t sent to tell you that. Go to your room and wait. Proceedings are under way, and you’ll learn everything in due course. I’m exceeding my instructions by talking to you in such a friendly way. But I hope no one hears except Franz, and he’s being friendly too, although it’s against all regulations.’

Except K. never learns everything in due course. Frankly, he learns nothing at all, save perhaps that there was never anything to learn. And like K. himself in his room, we too, so Kafka suggests, are meant to recognize the labyrinthian maze that is existence, and thus its claustrophobia as well. (Orson Welles’s 1962 film adaptation brings this out startingly through the oppressive and uncanny black-and-white mise-en-scène, even if, as a whole, it otherwise fails to come close to matching Kafka’s original.)

K.’s arrest on his thirtieth birthday, hence, is an allegory for the ordeal of birth, of assuming the burden of existence in virtue of having been born, of being called to take responsibility for that existence, and of doing so in light of having been made aware of the sheer contingency of everything, including the everyday norms and practices that until this realization had appeared to be divine law—absolute, necessary, unquestionable. K., however, comes to see that in fact there is no reason—no ground—for why things must be as they are. They just happen to be as they are—and that is it. Furthermore, nobody else is in any better position than K. to explain—much less justify—why things are as they are. In the last analysis, everyone is as helpless as others to make sense of the shared normative order under which they all labor. There is the tyranny of social convention, expectation, and sanction—in short, what in Division One of Heidegger’s Being and Time is termed das Man (the “they” or the “one”).

That Merleau-Ponty is not the only existential phenomenologist to whom Kafka can be insightfully compared is little wonder. In his philosophical fiction, Kafka attempts to work out the question of the meaning of our being. Anyone familiar with Heidegger’s phenomenology of being is sure to recognize the parallel. Dasein (Heidegger’s technical term of art for the being each of us is) is said to be the being with a pre-ontological understanding of being. Dasein is the being whose very own mode of being is regulated by an understanding of being in general—our individual mode of being, our way of existence, is such that the meaning of our own being is at issue, or at stake, in being who we are, and in trying to be who we are. When aiming to bring to light the essential and necessary structures of being-in-the-world, Heidegger accordingly highlights a constellation of phenomena of theological origin— “fallenness,” “thrownness,” “conscience,” and “guilt.” When these phenomena are “purified” of what Heidegger takes to be their traditional theological veneer, their core existential significance is revealed. (The two best books on the subject of this phenomenological “deconstruction” or “demythologization” of theological categories are Ryan Coyne’s Heidegger’s Confessions: The Remains of Saint Augustine in Being and Time and Beyond and Adam J. Graves’s The Phenomenology of Revelation in Heidegger, Marion, and Ricœur.) Kafka’s story of K.’s quest to make sense of his existential condition is, in this respect, philosophy by other means, in this case fiction. Readers of Heidegger, such as Barnard College Professor of Philosophy Taylor Carman, have accordingly noticed the family resemblance between Heidegger’s philosophical articulation of being-in-the-world and Kafka’s literary sketch of it. Carman says,

 

The factical that of Dasein’s existence is its thrownness into the world, which
is disclosed not by understanding but by attunement. More specifically,
Heidegger says, to be thrown into the world is to be thrown into what he calls
“being guilty” (Schuldigsein), which does not mean being culpable or in debt, but
rather being fundamentally accountable or responsible. Existential guilt is thus
essentially enigmatic: it means “being the (null) ground of a nullity” (das
(nichtige) Grund-sein einer Nichtigkeit) (SZ 285). Three distinct ideas are contained
in that phrase. First, I am defined by a nothing or “nullity”: inevitably there is
something that I am not. Second, my not being what I am not is not owing to
anything other than myself: I am the reason (Grund) for it. Third, although I am
the ground or reason for my not being what I am not, I am not a positive ground
of any kind – neither a physical cause nor a rational ground that might explain
the negativity of my being. As a ground, I am a nonground, a null ground. Like
Joseph K. in Kafka’s Trial, my “guilt” consists precisely in my being the formal
locus of an accountability that I must assume, even if I do so by vehemently
protesting my innocence a priori, as Joseph K. (foolishly) does. But my status as a
null or nonground cannot be spelled out, rationalized, and either confirmed or
disconfirmed. My existential guilt is my being given over to, or thrown into,
having to take over my existence, to assume it, to live it, though it must remain
at its core indeterminate and perpetually unfinished (11).

 

“Trials like this last so long,” the guard tells K. They last so long, of course, simply because life itself is the trial—so long as we exist, we are thrown into an enigmatic situation in which we struggle to make sense of who we are here, and why we are here. So long as there is more time, so long as we exist, we are put in question by being—by the question of what it means to be at all. And yet, for Kafka and Heidegger, there is no answer to that question. K.’s own trial consists in a series of failed attempts to answer it. Each time an answer appears to materialize, K. only comes to learn that he has once again failed to do so much as to pose the question properly. Every time that he thinks he has found a way of answering it, of solving the riddle, of decoding the enigma that is his life, he comes to find that what he had thought should count as an answer does not. The “situation,” which is to say the trial, will last the whole duration of his entire existence, for his existence, the question of its meaning, is itself the ordeal.

The novel is the story of a man who has been entirely denuded, stripped of anything that had previously been thought to define and determine him. We encounter a man who is destitute and laid bare. After the guards seize K.’s undergarments, for instance, K. responds indifferently to this egregious violation of his private property. “It was much more important to him to gain some clarity about his situation,” as Kafka writes. K. understands that the situation in which he has found himself nullifies the ordinary significance he had once thought mattered essentially. He sees now that his things—his property—don’t matter. Yet what he refuses to accept about that situation (from the moment of his arrest until he is finally executed) is that just as his possessions are incapable of defining who he is and resolving the enigma of existence, nothing about the everyday world of being a banker can do so. From beginning to end, K. will never cease clinging in desperation, at least in part, to the illusion that something or someone other than he himself will deliver him from the situation. That the trial can be brought to an end, that it was not an inescapable consequence of his being a being for whom the meaning of that very being is at issue—this is K.’s delusion. Everything he does from start to finish becomes just a way of trying to avoid this fact squarely.

“In his room, he yanked open the drawers of his desk at once; everything lay there in perfect order, but at first, in his agitation, he couldn’t find the one thing he was looking for: his identification papers. Finally, he found his bicycle license and was about to take that to the guards, but then it seemed too insignificant a document, and he kept on looking until he found his birth certificate […] ‘Here are my papers, now show me yours, starting with the arrest warrant.’”

This is K.’s existential denial. Paperwork counts for nothing. The guards do not come with a warrant. Such an external formality is neither here nor there. And so too K.’s own papers are useless.

“‘Good heavens!’ said the guard, ‘you just can’t accept your situation.’”

“‘Here are my identification papers,’” K. still insists.

“‘So what?’” replies the guard.

Everyone involved in K.’s trial—not only the initial guards, but also the officials throughout the various court proceedings, the clerks, his uncle Karl, his attorney Huld, Huld’s nurse Leni, Huld’s other client Block, the assistant manager and rival at the bank, his landlady Frau Grubach, his neighbor Fräulein Bürstner, Titorelli the painter, the priest, and above all the doorkeeper—is powerless to resolve his trial, because his trial just is the ordeal of how he will respond to the burden of this freedom. The freedom does not underly an external “situation” that can in turn be worked out in the world and brought to a resolution—rather, it is a condition that K. must perpetually work out for himself alone so long as he lives. Consequently, those to whom he would turn for help only serve as oppressors, insofar as their inability to provide him what he wants, relief from his freedom, only reinforces the very freedom of his that he wishes to evade. They are constant reminders of his being condemned to freedom, of the fact that there is no exit from his own responsibility.

Such freedom is not first just a matter of action. It is also a matter of perception of how we choose to interpret the situation in which we find ourselves. How, then, should K. view his arrest? It is up to him alone. As we read, “He could treat the whole thing as a joke, a crude joke his colleagues at the bank were playing on him for some unknown reason, perhaps because today was his thirtieth birthday, that was certainly possible, perhaps all he had to do was laugh in the guards’ faces and they would laugh with him.” Or again: “If this was a farce,” he thinks, “he was going to play along.” But when K. contemplates deciding to treat the entire scenario as a joke, he quickly succumbs to the social pressure to proceed compliantly as if eventually the situation will resolve itself. Ultimately, it is his concern for how he will be judged by others in response to the situation that dictates how he responds. “He had decided firmly that this time he wouldn’t let even the slightest advantage he might have over these people slip through his fingers.” K. struggles to find what he perceives to be the upper hand over others in a social game while simultaneously ceding control to them for that very reason. Even his most intimate thoughts about what to do amid his own trial are dictated by others: “There was a slight risk someone might say later that he hadn’t been able to take a joke.” The dark humor of the situation, of course, is that K. will be led to his death because he is unwilling to risk what, by comparison, should be considered nothing—in the end, fear of mockery and disapproval from others seals his self-incurred fate.

“‘How can I be under arrest? And in this manner?’”

We are in a position to see the answer to K.’s own question, one to which he himself chooses to remain willfully blind. K. exists—and simply in virtue of being alive, he is condemned to make sense of what it means to be thrown into a world that does not answer why he exists or what exactly he is supposed to do in light of that fundamental indeterminability. The others to whom he repeatedly turns for answers are thus of no help.

‘We’re lowly employees who can barely make our way through such documents and whose only role in your affair is to stand guard over you ten hours a day and get paid for it. That’s all we are, but we’re smart enough to realize that before ordering such an arrest, the higher authorities who employ us inform themselves in great detail about the person they’re arresting and the grounds for the arrest. There’s been no mistake. After all, our department, as far as I know, and 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?’

Existence itself is a problem because, insofar as there is no human nature or human essence, the question concerning the meaning of our very existence determines our indeterminate condition. We can’t help but continue asking it because it is fundamental to our being-in-the-world that we find ourselves always already put in question. And yet, there is no answer to the question that we are. Contrary, then, to Merleau-Ponty’s claim that Kafka is not an author for whom “all is absurd,” he is indeed. What, after all, could be more absurd a “situation” than to be a being for whom the very meaning of that being is in question but for which there is no answer? Thrown without reason or explanation into a time that leads to death, we remain enigmas to ourselves. Such is Kafka’s existential anti-rationalism.

If, then, we are to resist The Trial’s own conclusion that we are all Josef. K, exiled on the shores of the absurd, it will be necessary to find a way to read Kafka against Kafka.

 

References

 

Carman, Taylor. “Existentialism as Anti-Rationalism.” Forthcoming in Markus Gabriel’s New Realism. J. Voosholz & O. Bueno, eds. Springer, Synthese Library Book Series.

Kafka, Franz. The Trial. Translated and with a preface by Breon Mitchell. New York: Schocken Books, 1998.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by Alphonso Lingis and edited by Claude Lefort. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The World of Perception. Translated by Oliver Davis. New York: Routledge, 2004.