Kafka’s The Trial and the Jews

The Polish Jew, writer, and artist Bruno Schulz wrote that the purpose of art is “to plumb the depths of what has no name.” That certainly describes the fiction of Franz Kafka, whom Schulz translated. Kafka attempted to fathom psychosocial forces that are visible only in their effects: agglomerations and collisions of charged human particles caught in their massive gravitational fields. The characters of his novel The Trial orbit a terrifically opaque organization: the court, whose innumerable ranks of anonymous officials apply unpublished laws to bring unspecified charges against citizens who, apart from periodic interrogations, are tried and sentenced in absentia, in secret proceedings. Yet Joseph K, The Trial’s protagonist, is the only character in the book who explicitly questions the court’s authority, and he does so only briefly.