FR 1090 ASPECTS OF MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE IN TRANSLATION

Week 4 Lecture and discussion session: Franz Kafka, “Before the Law”

This was written in the autumn of 1914 as chapter 9 of Kafka’s posthumously published novel The Trial. It was published separately as a story in its own right in a Berlin publishing house’s “Almanach of New Writing” in 1915. One of its key narrative functions in the novel is to correct Josef K’s illusions about the court.

Translation note: Vor dem Gesetz – this itself is ambiguous: vor can mean ‘in front of’, both temporally and spatially ‘before’, or ‘in the presence of’ – as in the German vor Gott stehen, to stand before God, and also has German connotations of ‘outside’ – the German vor der Tür means outside the door (waiting to be let in, or left standing outside) – clearly relevant for this story. It is a place of potential, like a threshold, between exclusion from the presence, and gaining admission to the presence.

[In medieval (pre-Enlightenment) hermeneutics,] “a text could be read at two or more levels of sense, with the four senses of the Holy Scriptures – literal, allegorical, moral and anagogical. There are many texts that display a double level of sense: for instance parables and fairy tales. Certainly one can naively read [a] fable … as a simple report of an altercation between two animal – but to drop the moral sense of the tale would be an example of poor interpretation. […] It is a waste of time to read Finnegan’s Wake and miss its patchwork of ultraviolet allusion to the whole of human culture….They are not really reading what Joyce wrote.”

Umberto Eco, in Mouse or Rat? Translation as negotiation (2003)

Double coding- when intertextual reference to another context or text changes the sense of a quoted situation or sentence.

Various possible interpretations follow. These are not to be read as gospel or scriptures, nor to be reproduced in an essay. They are offered merely as a stimulus for further thought.

1.Religious

A religious approach might see Before the Law as a parable of man’s craving for acceptance by Heaven, the after-life, paradise, utopia, salvation, or whatever term is used to describe the time after death. According to (all?) religions, this transient world, the world of the here and now, is a conduit, a transition to the next world, an obstacle to be overcome en route to salvation in the next, a form of rite of passage. Kafka’s characters can be read as frustrated by the minutiae of this life, obsessed by trivia, suffocated by the everyday. Accordingly we are sustained in our dealings with the here and now by our vision of salvation in the next world. That is our reward. By gradually losing his eyesight, the man from the country loses his vision, his faith. Faith is a two-way process. It is sustained only as long as the possibility of its reciprocation, in the near or distant future, is sustained. The meaning, the faith the man from the country craves, and spends his whole life searching for, is never granted to him. The man from the country has faith in authority, ‘other’, but never in himself. When the door-keeper reveals that “this door was intended only for you” is he implying that the man from the country never asked the right question? Is this why the man from the country made no progress?

The doorkeeper might be seen in religious terms as the guardian of the mystery (divine presence / law). The law was given to Moses eg as an interpreter and intermediary for the people, but only he was chosen to stand in the presence of the lawgiver. In medieval christianity, the scriptures were the preserve of those who could read Latin, and the ordinary (country?) people depended for their access to the scriptures, moral guidance and divine revelation (enlightenment) upon those initiated in the mystery (of scriptural interpretation). Until the Bible was translated into the vernacular (Luther / the Reformation), no direct access was possible, no ‘individual’ or independent faith could be achieved (just blind faith or accepted authority). This kind of spiritual impotence and illiteracy, and lack of self-determination is conveyed parabolically here.

2.A Philosophical approach

A philosophical approach might read Before the Law as a parable of man’s aimless drifting in a universe devoid of meaning or purpose. The man from the country appears to have only goal in life that provides him with his rationale, his raison d’être, and that isto gain access to the Law.

  • Why does he want access to the Law? We are not told, other than that he feels it is his right to gain access to the Law.
  • Is he ritually insisting on a right for no specific reason, simply because he believes he ought to?
  • Is he expecting others to grant him what he should take the trouble to find out for himself? Does the fact that the gate was only intended for him (do we all have our own gates?) mean that each of us individually has to define autonomously what is appropriate for us and cease looking to others, to collectivist ideologies (Christianity, Islam, Marxism etc. etc.), to provide us with definitions and answers.

This is reminiscent of Existentialism, which holds that each individual is unique, and therefore needs unique answers to his or her unique problems. The man from the country believes in the rightness of the authority that confronts him, focuses exclusively on finding ways of appeasing the authorities, takes at face value what the door-keeper tells him, acts unquestioningly, meekly accepts authority, and above all never asks the right questions, and never challenges authority, and ends up sacrificing his whole life. If he had asked the right questions, at least he would have been aware of other possibilities. But would it have helped him gain access to the Law?

3.A Sociological approach

The man from the country comes up to the city to seek justice. Before the Law could be read as demonstrating the hollowness of society’s claims to be egalitarian, democratic and fair. (“The Law [..]. should be accessible to all men at all times.”) The door is a mere ornament, a token of a democratic order that is proclaimed but not enacted.

Given Kafka’s own experience of working as an assessor for an Insurance company, it is possible to read Before the Law as demonstrating the impotence of the individual when confronted by a hierarchical and authoritarian bureaucracy, a form of industrial organisation that was an inevitable by-product of industrialisation in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century western Europe.

The first authoritative study of bureaucracy was published by the early 20th century German sociologist Max Weber (see attached sheet for details). For Weber bureaucracy is characterised by an inherent paradox: It is deliberately constructed on rational, supra-personal principles which transcend individual control, so should operate smoothly regardless of the whims of particular individuals who happen to be running it at any given time. But, when an individual, outsider or insider, tries to gain access to a bureaucracy, s/he is unable to make sense of it, or get sense from it. The rationality which is its constructing principle conspires to defy rational understanding. Is there anyone who understands exactly how a bureaucracy works; who has an overview of it; who can get it to yield truth? Is the man from the country representative of all those who vainly seek to gain access to anonymous, amorphous organisations?

Related issues, arising from Josef K and Priest’s discussion:

In The Trial Joseph K is offered three choices for the resolution of his trial:

  1. Genuine acquittal (which, according to the painter, no-one has ever achieved in the history of the Law)
  2. Ostensible acquittal (ostensible, but not real, but in all probability sufficient to make a decent life possible)
  3. Postponement (which means his case would in all probability never come to court). K opts for the one choice he is told he cannot achieve (Genuine acquittal).

Is Joseph K arrogant for thinking he can have what no-one before him has ever had? The man from the country opts for postponement of the decision. Unlike Joseph K. he is prepared to wait and bide his time. But neither approach works. Joseph K., the “all or nothing” man, acquiesces in his own murder (at the end of the novel, ‘dying like a dog’), and the man from the country, Mr. Patience, gets nowhere either.

  • What do we make of a priest who appears to go against the purpose of his religious calling to say: never mind truth, necessity will suffice (“it is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary”.) Viz. conclusion to his and Joseph K.’s discussion of the text?
  • What do we make of the assertion: “[the door-keeper] is a servant of the Law, he belongs to the Law, and as such is set beyond human judgement”? [my italics] (Chapter 9, 3rd para from end). How can a servant of the law be beyond human judgement?
  • Might the nature of the discussion and the apparent unavailability of right and wrong answers serve as a role model to us as would-be interpreters of Kafka’s scriptures? Remember both writing and scripture (as in Holy Scriptures) are rendered in German by Schrift.
  • Roy Pascal has written that “Kafka’s stories are open parables”: Think of biblical parables. Why are they told? Is there such a thing as an open parable? Is that not a contradiction in terms?
  • W.H.Auden (in The Guilty Vicarage) sees The Trial as a perverted detective story. Kafka subverts the basic premise of a thriller or detective story, namely that with sufficiently carefully application of logical analysis, the truth, and therefore guilt and innocence, will emerge triumphant. Kafka’s writing not only fails to conform to the genre, it suggests that the search for truth is ultimately in vain. Joseph K in The Trial begins by assuming innocence and ends by affirming guilt, his own guilt
  • Does the apparent pessimism of Kafka’s texts means they do not speak to us; that we cannot relate to them?

Other ideas raised by the text and its discussion in the novel for further consideration:

PERCEPTION === DELUSION (“you’re deluding yourself about the Court”, other possible translation of the prelude to the text in the main novel.)

WHAT IS THE LAW? Legal ? Spiritual? Transcendent?

COMMUNICATION - asking the wrong questions, at the wrong time, so not getting the right answer (disjuncture of dialogue with authority figure)

TEXTS AND SCRIPTURES parable? DIDACTIC MORAL? (Maybe there is none, or it depends what you make of it)

===INTERPRETATION

=== COMMENTARY/COMMENTATORS

===MEANING/ SENSE

LOGIC/ARGUMENT/PREMISES === CONTRADICTIONS

ABSOLUTES & RELATIVES === TIME, SPACE, SIZE

FREEDOM/ CHOICE/ FREE WILL AUTONOMY/ FATE ? (FAITH!)

=== DUTY & RESPONSIBILITY

TRUTH V NECESSITY

KNOWLEDGE = POWER?

AUTHORITY, DEFERENCE, OBEDIENCE, ACQUIESCENCE === PERMISSION

LAW

  • AS A CODIFIED SYSTEM TO FACILITATE SOCIAL RELATIONS
  • AS A PSYCHOLOGICAL SYSTEM (INHIBITIONS, BLOCKS, OBSTACLES TO PROGRESS VIA SELF DISCOVERY)
  • AS TRANSCENDENCE OF LIMITATIONS

=== JUSTICE (injustice)

FRUSTRATION (OF MAN FROM COUNTRY, OF DOORKEEPER, OF READER)

FUTILITY = OF GAINING ACCESS TO THE LAW, OF ATTEMPTS TO MAKE SENSE OF NARRATIVE?

A e-copy of the BftL text, and other Kafka texts can be found under

FR 1090 ASPECTS OF MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE IN TRANSLATION

Franz Kafka

Max Weber on bureaucracy

Max Weber is one of the most influential users of the word ‘bureaucracy’ in its social science sense. He is well-known for his study of bureaucratization of society; many aspects of modern public administration go back to him; a classic, hierarchically organized civil service of the continental type is — if basically mistakenly — called "Weberian civil service".

However, contrary to popular belief, "bureaucracy" was an English word before Weber; the Oxford English Dictionary cites usage in several different years between 1818 and 1860, prior to Weber's birth in 1864.

Weber described the ideal type bureaucracy in positive terms, considering it to be a more rational and efficient form of organization than the alternatives that preceded it, which he characterized as charismatic domination and traditional domination. According to his terminology, bureaucracy is part of legal domination. However, he also emphasized that bureaucracy becomes inefficient when a decision must be adopted to an individual case.

According to Weber, the attributes of modern bureaucracy include its impersonality, concentration of the means of administration, a leveling effect on social and economic differences and implementation of a system of authority that is practically indestructible.

Weber's analysis of bureaucracy concerns:

  • the historical and administrative reasons for the process of bureaucratization (especially in Western civilisation)
  • the impact of the rule of law upon the functioning of bureaucratic organisations
  • the typical personal orientation and occupational position of a bureaucratic officials as a status group
  • the most important attributes and consequences of bureaucracy in the modern world

A bureaucratic organization is governed by the following principles:

  • official business is conducted on a continuous basis
  • official business is conducted with strict accordance to the following rules: the duty of each official to do certain types of work is delimited in terms of impersonal criteria
  • the official is given the authority necessary to carry out his assigned functions
  • the means of coercion at his disposal are strictly limited and conditions of their use strictly defined
  • every official's responsibilities and authority are part of a vertical hierarchy of authority, with respective rights of supervision and appeal
  • officials do not own the resources necessary for the performance of their assigned functions but are accountable for their use of these resources
  • official and private business and income are strictly separated
  • offices cannot be appropriated by their incumbents (inherited, sold, etc.)
  • official business is conducted on the basis of written documents

A bureaucratic official:

  • is personally free and appointed to his position on the basis of conduct
  • exercises the authority delegated to him in accordance with impersonal rules, and his loyalty is enlisted on behalf of the faithful execution of his official duties
  • appointment and job placement are dependent upon his technical qualifications
  • administrative work is a full-time occupation
  • work is rewarded by a regular salary and prospects of advancement in a lifetime career
  • An official must exercise his judgment and his skills, but his duty is to place these at the service of a higher authority; ultimately he is responsible only for the impartial execution of assigned tasks and must sacrifice his personal judgment if it runs counter to his official duties.

Weber's work has been continued by many, like Robert Michels with his Iron Law of Oligarchy.

As Max Weber himself noted, in reality no ideal type organisation can exist. Thus the real bureaucracy will be less optimal and effective than his ideal model. Each of Weber's seven principles can degenerate:

  • Vertical hierarchy of authority can became chaotic, some offices can be omitted in the decision making process, there may be conflicts of competence;
  • Competences can be unclear and used contrary to the spirit of the law; sometimes a decision itself may be considered more important than its effect;
  • Nepotism, corruption, political infighting and other degenerations can counter the rule of impersonality and can create a recrutation and promotion system not based on meritocracy but rather on oligarchy;
  • Officials can try to avoid responsibility and seek anonymity by avoiding documentation of their procedures (or creating extreme amounts of chaotic, confusing documents)
  • Even a non-degenerated bureaucracy can be affected by common problems:
  • Overspecialisation, making individual officials not aware of larger consequences of their actions
  • Rigidity and inertia of procedures, making decision-making slow or even impossible when facing some unusual case, and similarly delaying change, evolution and adaptation of old procedures to new circumstances;
  • A phenomenon of group thinking - zealotry, loyalty and lack of critical thinking regarding the organisation which is perfect and always correct by definition, making the organisation unable to change and realise its own mistakes and limitations;
  • Disregard for dissenting opinions, even when such views suit the available data better than the opinion of the majority;

A phenomenon of Catch-22 (named after Joseph Heller’s novel) : as bureaucracy creates more and more rules and procedures, their complexity rises and coordination diminishes, facilitating creation of contradictory rules (i.e. to be released from militart service you have to be declared insane, but anyone wanting not to fight in a war is by definition not insane).

Bureaucracy does not allow people to use common sense, as everything must be as is written by the law. For example: a particular person cannot be convicted even if they are clearly guilty of a crime, simply because the law does not accept the evidence given against them.

In the most common examples bureaucracy can lead to the treatment of individual human beings as impersonal objects. This process is satirized in Franz Kafka's novel The Trial.

Source:

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1905.

Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, New York, Bedminster Press, 1968.