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glorious majesties contrast sharply with the Court’s “dirty, ridiculous, despicable, and corrupt” stench. The Court “sits in rooms in a suburb, works in a stupidly bureaucratic way,” and “is treated, in fact, as aesthetically inferior.”329 If in the Book of Job, Yahweh’s Court and divine realm is opulent, in The Trial, the Court is “petty, rough, trashy.”330 Josef K is shunned for disdaining the Court’s lack of opulence and splendor,331 and for misapprehending the fact that the most powerful occupy shabby cubicles.332 If aesthetically the beasts and the Court differ, functionally, they are as belligerent as the Court. “The intermediate courts, full of malice and poison...thrust their way bureaucratically between, and continually hinder the Good,”333 in the same manner Behemoth and Leviathan hinder order: the first is draught; the second, tempest. Without living waters, the soul faces its tempests. So it is with Justice. Without it, the soul is famished in its Paradise Lost, in its Deserts of Sinai, or in ash heaps and attics that are not stairways to dreams. Thus, Leviathan’s spine, its superb intensity constructs spiritual exile, divine absence, and man’s infinite inferiority in relation to God. Kafka, like Job’s author, “expresses incommensurability”334 and “the failure of man in the sight of God.”335 They are “two worlds which can never, never understand one another, hence the infinite separation between dumb animals and men,”336 and the “eternal misunderstanding between God and man.”337
If Yahweh commands Satan, Behemoth and Leviathan to wreck-havoc in the lives of Job and of men, the Judge commands immoral officials and the Court to radically oppose men’s decadent self-interests. In this way, Kafka deflates Yahweh, the irrational transcendental, the supreme personal being whose will is morality and immorality, blessing and despair, and whose dubious theodicy arises from sheer whim, will and woe. If Kafka deflates Yahweh, the irrational transcendental, he does not entirely deflate Plato’s God, the ideal transcendental.338 The eternal idealist and rational God of Plato’s Good, the Just and the Beautiful 3⁄4 incapable of Yahweh’s jealousy, incapable of creating evil 3⁄4 remain ever present in his memoirs. It explains the idealist, Quixotic being, the Ks of infinite Castles,whofeelestranged,exiledintheworld.339 There,inTheCastle3⁄4heremainsastrangeramongststrangers,a
desolate deserts, famine and death. See also 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. 183
329 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. 183
330 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. 183
331 Marson, Eric. Kafka’s Trial: The Case Against Josef K. St. Lucia, Queensland: U Of Queensland Press, 1975. 294
332 Scott, Len. Josef K.: Kafka’s Anti-Job. Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 2010. 11. See also Robertson, Ritchie. ‘Reading the clues: Franz Kafka, Der Proceß’, in David Midgley (ed.), The German Novel in the Twentieth Century. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993. 72. See also Kafka’s The Trial. K feels privileged in his banking surroundings. “What a position K was in, after all, compared to the judge who sat in a garret, while he himself had a large office in the bank, with a waiting room, and could look down upon the busy city square through a huge plate-glass window” (T65-6).
333 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. 184
334 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. 175
335 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. 175
336 Brod adds that this is one of the chief themes in the many animal stories in Kafka’s works. 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. 175
337 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. 175
338 Brod defends this posture many times. Kafka and Brod read some of Plato’s works. He concludes that for Kafka, Plato’s World of Ideas (176) and the Absolute exist, but that it “is so incommensurable with the life of man” (174), that “for this reason the divine world becomes for us transcendental territory” (175), and in a true sense, “strange and uncanny.” Because for Kafka, the transcendental felt strange, I argue in this paper that Josef K seeks the immanent paradise and innocence that Jesus the immanent man proclaimed, that the Kingdom of God dwells in men’s hearts. He had absolute faith, says Brod, in Truth (49). Truth to Kafka was visible everywhere “through the mesh of what we call ‘reality.’” “This explains Kafka’s deep interest in every detail, every wrinkle of this reality” (49). 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. 49, 173, 174-76
339 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. 186
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