Franz Kafka, The Trial

We had a lively discussion of Kafka’s The Trial (in German, Der Prozess) in our Ex Libris book group. I mention the German, because a “process” is what Josef K. endures, not an conventional trial in the American sense. Is this process a metaphor for bureaucracy, for illness, for death? We reacted strongly to K’s nightmare as he moved from dream-like episode to dream-like episode, experiencing all the varieties of bewilderment and fear.

I would like to take the nightmare as a given and look at the character of Josef K. He is a man under stress, but what is he like when he is not? He seems to be a buttoned-up type who works hard, rations his pleasures and thinks well of himself. His arrest at home, before, breakfast, is a violation of his sense of propriety:

At the bank, for instance, I’m always prepared, nothing like this could ever happen to me there; I have my own assistant, the office phone and and my outside line stand before me on the desk, people are constantly coming in, clients and officers; but even more importantly, I’m always involved in my work, and so I have my wits about me; it would be a positive pleasure to confront a situation like this at my office.

When his uncle visits him, K reflects that although his family background was helpful, he has achieved his position in life on his own. He feels superior to the underlings at the court.

If he stayed home and led his normal life he was infinitely superior to any of these people, and could kick any one of them out of his path.

Imagine that instead of a successful bank officer, K is a lowly clerk or an unemployed idler on the street. We might then feel less horror at his situation, accused of an unstated offense and wandering in the maze of the process. As Aristotle knew, tragedy requires the downfall of the illustrious. K is more pathetic than tragic because, in his own eyes, he is illustrious, yet he never quite convinces us. Right or wrong, high or low, perceptive or deluded, Kafka is saying that it doesn’t matter — the process will get you.

The Cosmogonic Cycle

I took a break after reading Part I of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (See my comments). The first part of that book explored the adventures of the hero, as told in myths and folk tales. Part II, The Cosmogonic Cycle, looked formidable, so I put it aside.

It’s not so tough after all. Where did we come from? Where are we going? Who are “we”? We are the universe, we are our society or tribe, we are ourselves as individuals. All are created from nothingness and return to nothingness. Even to say nothingness is to imply a something that is not nothing, a categorization that is a product of our minds, not of an underlying reality of which we cannot have direct knowledge. We cannot know the reality but we may sometimes experience it, mystics through meditation or prayer and the rest of us through the metaphors of myth.

This is a big assignment for myth, but Campbell does not hesitate to make it.

Mythology has been interpreted by the modern intellect as a primitive, fumbling effort to  explain the world of nature (Frazer); as a production of poetical fantasy from prehistoric times, misunderstood by succeeding ages (Muller); … as a group dream, symptomatic of archetypal urges within the depths of the human psyche (Jung); … and as God’s Revelation to His children (the Church). Mythology is all of these.

He goes on to say that we live in a time when many of the old myths has failed to serve us and we need to create new ones.

The lines of communication between the conscious and the unconscious zones of the human psyche have all been cut, and we have been split into two.

Campbell wrote those lines in 1949, following on a great war, recognizing that the human psyche was in trouble. Sixty years later, the trouble continues and I wonder what Campbell would make of those who cling today to various cruel fundamentalisms in their effort to heal the spirit.