Page 19 - GALIET KAFKABEL JOB, KANT AND MILTON: Omnipotence, Impotence and Rebellion IV+

Galiet & Galiet
Satan’s wager, a sinless past and a sinful present and future are entangled. Job undergoes a “trial of innocence,”51 which is really a trial of “reaction,”52 and his trial of past innocence is caused by a present judgment to test his future reaction to prove his past innocence. It is a nefarious trial of innocence and reaction to test his curse-power, and not one of purgation or future refinement, never one of justice, but one of the good eternally returning to sin’s oppressive metanarrative.
The trial metaphors and affinities in the Courts are praised by some scholars, and dimmed by others,53 but the vast consensus is that they illumine both literary glories. Many say Kafka’s compositions are primordially contemporary Job commentaries, and others exalt its parity with priestly hierarchies and the mores of Biblical Law.54 Not only are there trial and biblical analogies, but also many intriguing religious symbols, motifs, verses, ideological debates that enunciate, with little altercation, and at times, with little hesitation, that the infinite abysmal, or mise en abyme, reflects Yahweh as the Judge, Satan as the Prosecutor, Job as Josef K, the three friends as the actors, and vice-versa, beyond all other veiled, hyper-textual meanderings.
Earnest lectors, too, are summoned to witness Job’s and Josef K’s trials as if grand juries,55 as if spectators of a universal tragedy. As stupefied audiences of both Courts, equally framed as theatres,56 readers are to experience terrors and pity, and in grief and sorrow, tremble at the discordant and jarring task to pass judgment on the wrecked protagonists in a theatre of indiscernible dark. Tossed in an odyssey of daemons, light and shadows, image and truth, in empathy, they are to elucidate affairs. To spectate at Josef K’s Court is to feel chased, estranged, sieged and fenced, trapped, stripped, broken and hopeless. It is to feel impotent, and to wish to commiserate in K’s revolt and rage. It is to hear, as if one were hearing stichomythia at a distant Dionysian Odeon, the perplexing recitations of abysms and auguries mirroring Job’s Court: a process is a trial; the Judge and Yahweh: a hound; the Prosecutor and Satan: a hunter and whirlwind-hurricane; a defense: a confession; a stifling attic: a cloister and ash-heap; the law corridors: Leviathan’s Spine; the Book of Records (T46): the Book of Destruction of Revelations:57 the cathedral: the Sanhedrin, a Criminal Court; the Priest: the Prison Chaplain and Prosecuting Servant; a non-Sermon and Satan’s insidious accusation: the inculpating verdict; the Law’s Doorkeeper and Priest: a canine; and humans: maggots or dogs. It is to hear Justice is a huntress; liberty: an apparent acquittal; innocence: guilt; liberty: oppression; telos:
51 Lasine. “The Trials of Job and Kafka’s Josef K.” The German Quarterly, Vol. 63, No. 2, Focus: Jews and Germans/Jewish–German Literature (Spring, 1990), 189. Job is confident he undergoes a trial of sin. Job complains that Yahweh searches after his iniquity and ferrets out his sin. “If I sin, You stand guard over me;/You do not let me escape my guilt./If I sin, woe betide me,/Yet if I am righteous, I cannot raise my head,/Being filled with shame and sated with misery” (Job 10:14-16).
52 Lasine, Stuart. “The Trials of Job and Kafka’s Josef K.” The German Quarterly, Vol. 63, No. 2, Focus: Jews and Germans/Jewish–German Literature (Spring, 1990), 189. See also Frye, Northrop. Words with Power. Being a Second Study of the Bible and Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990. 310
53 Lasine says that some claims of affinity are muted in Suter’s work. See Suter, Rudolf. Kafkas ‘Prozeß’ im Lichte des ‘Buches Hiob.’ Europäischen Hochschulschriften 1. Vol. 169. Frankfurt a.M.: Lang, 1976. Please see Lasine, Stuart. “The Trials of Job and Kafka’s Josef K.” The German Quarterly, Vol. 63, No. 2, Focus: Jews and Germans/Jewish–German Literature (Spring, 1990), 196
54 Lasine, Stuart. “The Trials of Job and Kafka’s Josef K.” The German Quarterly, Vol. 63, No. 2, Focus: Jews and Germans/Jewish–German Literature (Spring, 1990), 187
55 Lasine, Stuart. “The Trials of Job and Kafka’s Josef K.” The German Quarterly, Vol. 63, No. 2, Focus: Jews and Germans/Jewish–German Literature (Spring, 1990), 188
56 See Sokel, Walter H. “The Programme of K’s Court: Oedipal and Existential Meanings of The Trial.” On Kafka: Semi-Centenary Perspectives. Ed. Franz Kuna. New York: Barnes, 1976. 7 as quoted in Lasine, 188. When Sokel asserts that the court functions as K’s observer and audience and that “we the readers are an extension of K’s court” (T7), he is placing the readers of Kafka in the same spectator position as Cox places the readers of the Book of Job. See Lasine Stuart. “The TrialsofJobandKafka’sJosefK.” TheGermanQuarterly,Vol.63,No.2,Focus:JewsandGermans/Jewish–GermanLiterature(Spring,1990),188
57 The Book of Destruction contrasts the Book of Life in the Book of Revelations’ Final Judgment’s chapters. —19—