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Galiet & Galiet
filled with prisoner-spectators eager to inculpate and impute the very same Promethean “guilt” unto Milton, Job and Josef K as soon as dispossessed, by admonishing them to “confess.”64 Just as Milton’s blindness imputes sin on Milton’s deeds and writings,65 Job’s dispossessions impute sin on Job, and Josef K’s mysterious arrest imputes guilt on K. Thus, Milton’s pseudo-friends 3⁄4 More and the presbyters 3⁄4 counsel him to confess and defend his innocence.66 Thus, Job’s friends advise Job to repent and to turn to God’s power and justice which will restore him to a richer and fuller life (Eliphaz [5:8-7, 22:21-30], Bildad [8:1-8, 8:21-22]), Zophar [11:13-19]).67 Thus, Block and Leni counsel K to turn to the law and confess his guilt 3⁄4 this, the only chance he has to survive (T106-7, 173). The Warden, too, tells K to make no fuss about his innocence (T14), facetiously reminding K that if he does not know the Law, K cannot confess or self-proclaim he is innocent (T9).
Even if Josef K’s self-proclaimed innocence sounds a little self-centered, says Dodd, we are really pressed to tolerate the priest’s guilt-as-proven verdict. It just “does not justify the power of the Court, it simply asserts it as a brute fact: ‘Das ist richtig...aber so pflegen die Schuldigen zu reden.’”68 “If lectors think Josef K is intellectually dishonest, says Dodd, when K asks whether anyone can in general be guilty” 3⁄4 which refutes Satan’s wicked whispers to Eliphaz that stigmatize Job with guilt 3⁄4 “it is as nothing compared to the casuistry of the [priest’s] reply, which flies in the face of enlightened jurisprudence and seems calculated (on an authorial level by Kafka) to disturb the reader.”69 It more than disturbs; it terrifies. To hear the priest-prison-chaplain say, ‘Ich habe nicht Boses getan’ as sufficient proof of guilt,70 chills and horrifies.
Josef K’s innocent proclamations, when measured against his flaws and terrifying execution, perplex the scholarly debate. Some vilify them, some defend them, and others deconstruct Judaism’s guilt paradigm in Kafka’s writings and The Trial. Indeed, its theatre of paradoxes exposes myriad complexities and riddles that perplex three singular audiences erudite in moral guilt (G•Scholars), human flaw (F•Scholars), and deconstruction and paradox (D•Scholars).
G•Scholars, dominating the critical debate, impute guilt on Josef K because he is self-centered, and defend the Court as an agent for higher justice.71 To Lasine, the Court is attracted by K’s guilt for his “absolute failure to live as a personally responsible, yet social human being 3⁄4 in Biblical terms, his failure to do justice.”72 Justice in the sense of
64 Oceanus’ offspring implore Prometheus to confess his error and submit (Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, 310-15) just as the friends of Job and Josef K counsel. Prometheus refuses; it is Zeus who must relent. When the earth opens up, Prometheus plunges into tortures in the nether world, vanishing with a cry: “Indeed, now it has passed from word to deed—the earth rocks, the echoing thunder-peal from the depths rolls roaring past me; the fiery wreathed lightning-flashes flare forth, and whirlwinds toss the swirling dust; the blasts of all the winds leap forth and set in hostile array their embattled strife; the sky is confounded with the deep. Behold, this stormy turmoil advances against me visibly, sent by Zeus to frighten me. O holy mother mine, O you firmament that revolves the common light of all, you see the wrongs I suffer!” (Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, 1080 ff). Aeschylus. Prometheus Bound. Trans. By Herbert Weir Smyth. Loeb Classical Library Volumes 145 & 146. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926.
65Milton.CompletePoemsandMajorProse.Ed.ByMerrittY.Hughes. TheTenureofKingandMagistrates.Indianapolis:HackettPublishingCompany,Inc.,1957. 754
66Milton.CompletePoemsandMajorProse.Ed.ByMerrittY.Hughes. TheTenureofKingandMagistrates.Indianapolis:HackettPublishingCompany,Inc.,1957. 754
67 As extracted from The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible. An Illustrated Encyclopaedia. “Book of Job.” Ed. Arthur Buttrick and Emory Stevens Bucke. Volume III. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1962. 918-20
68 Dodd, William. Der Prozess. Scotland: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1991. 39
69 Dodd, William. Der Prozess. Scotland: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1991. 39
70 Dodd, William. Der Prozess. Scotland: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1991. 39
71 Dodd, William. Der Prozess. Scotland: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1991. 33
72 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), 195.
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