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a “virtue that puts another’s good ahead of one’s own.”73 Josef K is self-centered. He focuses on his own advantage (T125). “From this perspective, the Court is a sensitive moral agency designed to give K the opportunity to undergo a moral metamorphosis; it is neither an oppressive, bureaucratic organization nor even a representative of strict, absolute justice without mercy.”74
Others, disquieted, if not repulsed by K’s butchery, disagree.
F•Scholars are a little more prudent, less quick to point “the you...” and accuse. They hesitate to participate in the guilt game Kafka’s works vehemently criticize. Surely, K is Everyman and K’s maxim is the maxim of the century’s ‘das Negative meiner Zeit,’ the negativity of his time.75 Jews were physically assaulted and “vilified as ‘bedbugs,’ ‘dogs,’ ‘apes,’ and ‘rats’”76 — so Josef K’s question, “How can anyone in general be guilty?” (T213), politically or metaphysically, is a fabulous universal inquiry, worthy of examination. In our moral endeavors we all fail, and are often riddled with this or that guilt, and this or that need to confess it somehow to oneself, or to someone else to expiate it 3⁄4 a very Old Testament thing 3⁄4 a deep intuition of trespass and hubris, projected and internalized through divine moral laws or absolute moral principles. So we empathize deeply with Josef K’s innocuous defense, for more than once, in our dreary dilemmas and moral failures, we all have at one point or other joined Josef K and retorted to divine or mortal accusers, “we are all human after all” (T213).
In this moral twilight, F•Scholars insist that K may be morally flawed yet he is not guilty, that the Court, in its jurisprudence, is a travesty of justice,77 that the trial is “an incomprehensible injustice,”78 and that his execution is an “inexorable punishment.”79
D•Scholars, chilled by the Court’s guilt ideology, suspect it, rebel and deconstruct it. They ruminate on Josef K’s query, “How can anyone be in general guilty?”80 and de-compose, in Derridean enthusiasm, Rousseau’s idyllic trace to innocence.81 Thus, D•Scholars endeavor to banish the accuse-guilt-punish game Job and Josef K vehemently
73 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.
74 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. See also Lasine’s footnote 48. “Contrast Marson (“This is a grim utopia where the absolute law is always successful in the hunt” [16]) and Robertson (“The Court is the limited embodiment of absolute justice” [107]; “Absolute justice, being absolute, can make no concession to human frailty” [120]).” Kafka, Franz. Der Prozeß. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1950.
75Anderson, Mark. Reading Kafka. Prague, Politics, and the Fin de Siècle. “Introduction.” Ed. Mark Anderson. New York: Schocken Books, 1989. 5. Please see Anderson’s footnote 3 in page 267, “I have vigorously absorbed the negative element of the age in which I live, an age that is, of course, very close to me, which I have no right ever to fight against, but as it were a right to represent” (DF 99). Moreover, “for an entire generation of early readers marked by the experience of the Second World War, National Socialism, and the Holocaust, Kafka’s work could not be separated from what came after it: for them, Josef K’s arrest at the beginning of The Trial (written in 1914) was not a fantastic event on the order of Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis, but a prophetic anticipation of the fate awaiting Hitler’s victims...His was a prophetic, visionary relation to an event that would soon overshadow all others... it is a teleological and eschatological view...it exemplified the negativity of modern Europe...the fate of European Jewry and Western Culture as a whole...It is for this reason that Auden could claim for Kafka the same symbolic relation to his age that Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe had for theirs: in 1945 we were all pariahs like Josef K or Gregor Samsa, exposed to the terrifying and absurd injustice ‘of this most unhappy age.’”
76 Anderson, Mark. Reading Kafka. Prague, Politics, and the Fin de Siècle. “Introduction.” Ed. Mark Anderson. New York: Schocken Books, 1989. 9
77 Dodd, William. Der Prozess. Scotland: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1991. 33
78 Bloom, Harold. Franz Kafka’s The Trial. Modern Critical Interpretations. See Blanchot, Maurice. The Work’s Space and Its Demand. New York: Chelsea House
Publishers, 1987. 27
79 Bloom, Harold. Franz Kafka’s The Trial. Modern Critical Interpretations. See Blanchot, Maurice. The Work’s Space and Its Demand. New York: Chelsea House
Publishers, 1987. 27
80 This refers to K’s response to the priest-prison chaplain verdict that his guilt is assumed proved (T213).
81 Rousseau’s trace to a lost innocence exemplifies his yearning to return to a natural, idyllic state of simplicity, innocence and grace. Rousseau is
Romanticism’s green fuse. In the state of nature, man is good, happy, free, innocent, and there is “no question of him being virtuous.” Man, “the noble savage,” feels natural pity, and is kind and generous. To romantic Rousseau, civilization and the desire to excel and to own property creates inequalities, corrupting and imprisoning man. Derrida’s notion of presence is nurtured from many of the ideas of Rousseau including Rousseau’s notion in his Confessions that writing is a dangerous supplement to speech. A Discourse on Inequality. Trans. By Maurice Cranston. New York: Penguin Books, 1984. 44-9
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