Page 37 - GALIET KAFKABEL JOB, KANT AND MILTON: Omnipotence, Impotence and Rebellion IV+

Galiet & Galiet
If the priest’s kindness endorses the Court’s benevolence, K’s rage articulates the Court’s tyranny.172 Josef K is not the only defendant that knows something is perverse and awry with the Court. Block’s experiences concur with Josef K’s. The exhausting trial distracts (T173-74). Petitions are scholarly, insubstantial and lead nowhere (T174-79). Vindictive lawyers, rarely available, demand subjugation (T173, 182).173 Superstitious defendants delude themselves (T175). Other citizens 3⁄4 Frau Grubach, his Uncle Karl and Leni 3⁄4 warn him. Frau Grubach’s opines the trial appears to be a ‘scholarly’ and incomprehensible maze (T23). Before their visit to Huld, Karl warns K that if a trial is lost, the Court’s power crosses citizens off (T94). Leni knows K cannot defend himself against the Court (T106). And all of these claims come to pass. In a bureaucratic court, petitions go nowhere, and appear scholarly. In an oppressive court, no one is heard or acquitted. In an unmerciful Court, K is crossed off. If the Moral Court were genuinely benevolent, it would not criminalize and legislate capital punishment. Yet The Trial’s Court has “arrest...interrogation, arguments for the prosecution and the defense, the hiring of an advocate, and all the trappings of a criminal justice system, including, finally, execution.”174 Thus, The Trial’s Court, contrary to Lasine’s argument, is oppressive, bureaucratic, and is representative of absolute injustice. It is oppressive in its inaccessibility, concealment of charges, and denial of rights; bureaucratic in its infinite paperwork; and representative of absolute injustice in its arbitrariness, and in Josef K’s brutal manslaughter. As overwhelming Josef K’s guilt might be, even if the Court were moral and right, “we must find our sense of justice and of pity,” says Dodd, “affronted by this ending.”175 The alleged offense, ‘unspecified and unproved to an enlightened mind’176 is brutal murder,177 vicious in its ‘horrendous execution,’178 intolerable in its arbitrary arrest,179 and ‘more than a dubious justice.’180 Job’s Court is equally corrupt. It is arbitrary and oppressive in its trial, bureaucratic in Job’s confessions of innocence, and representative of absolute injustice in Job’s merciless dispossessions, Yahweh’s domineering speeches, and apparent restoration.
Kafka’s denouement of The Trial confronts our sense of justice and of pity. Brod argues Kafka stood and defended above all else pity 3⁄4 “pity for mankind that finds it so hard a task to do what is right.”181 Pity 3⁄4 not as “the fulminating excommunication of the ‘theology of the crisis,’ which knows exactly where mankind has gone wrong,” but pity as “half-smiling,” and “half-weeping.”182 If to Lasine and GŸScholars, Josef K is guilty because he fails morally to act according to Old Testament Laws because he neglects them, just as he neglects to complete his petition, and to responsibly heed the Court’s demands, they misunderstand Kafka’s argument. When Josef K retorts to the priest, “we are all human after all” (T213), he weeps for pity. When Josef K, Everyman, fails to attain soaring moral standards, humanism weeps for the very misericordia Josef K and Job inmostly desire. It is to conjugate humanity’s and Josef K’s inmost longing with Job’s imploration, “Have pity on me, O my friends, have pity, for the hand of God has struck me, why do you persecute me like God, and are not satisfied with my flesh?” (19:21-22). If
172 Dodd, William. Der Prozess. Scotland: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1991. 41
173 The lawyer-client contract, one of dominion, emulates Yahweh’s covenant with Israel, and Suzerain overlord treatises with vassals exchanging protection for absolute obedience
174 Dodd, William. Der Prozess. Scotland: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1991. 21 175 Dodd, William. Der Prozess. Scotland: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1991. 23. 176 Dodd, William. Der Prozess. Scotland: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1991. 41 177 Dodd, William. Der Prozess. Scotland: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1991. 38 178 Dodd, William. Der Prozess. Scotland: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1991. 41 179 Jaffe, Adrian. The Process of Kafka’s Trial. Michigan: Michigan State University Press, 1967. 24
180 Politzer, Heinz. Franz Kafka. Parable and Paradox. New York: Cornell University Press, 1962. 63
181 Brod, Max. Franz Kafka. A Biography. Trans. By G. Humphreys Roberts (Chapter I to VII) and by Richard Winston (Chapter VIII). New York, Schocken Books, 1937. 180
182 Brod, Max. Franz Kafka. A Biography. Trans. By G. Humphreys Roberts (Chapter I to VII) and by Richard Winston (Chapter VIII). New York, Schocken Books, 1937. 180
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