I decided to finally read Franz Kafka’s book The Trial. I’ve heard of this book throughout my life. There is even an affect named after it: Kafkaesque. This is when a process makes no sense but takes on a life of its own. Having experienced this many times in my own life, I’ve developed my own business philosophy: the process exists to serve us, we do not exist to serve the process.
I won’t comment much about the book itself; I want to explore the system. The Trial is a story about a man named Joseph K. It often just describes him as K. K is about 30 years old and is Chief Financial Officer at a bank. It begins in his boarding house where people show up in the morning telling him he is under arrest. They keep him detained in his room. He talks with the guards. Then somebody shows up to interrogate him and when that is complete, they release him to go to work late.
Through the rest of the book, we get details about the system, but at no point do we learn what the charge is. K encounters people who are part of the system or confidants of it. He encounters people who are also going through trials. His uncle encourages him to get a lawyer and knows a lawyer who works through this system. He even encounters a priest who serves this system as prison chaplain.
The mysterious court system has offices in the attic of an apartment building and holds hearings in the apartments of employees. There are higher courts also, although K never makes it out of the lower court. His verdict is rendered at the end of the book but I won’t spoil it.
I can’t say I enjoyed the book or that I will read more of Kafka’s works. Kafka was a secular Jew living in Prague. He died in 1925 with The Trial unfinished. At the end of the book, they include some incomplete chapters as fragments. I read them hoping for more context, but the only interesting thing was a chapter where K refused to go to any more events related to his trial.
At a 21st Century American, while reading the book I kept wanting to scream “What is the charge?” We are never told. K never asks. That blows my mind. But having spent my life within large organizations, I’ve seen where people just endure a non-sensical system because “that’s the way things have always been” rather than question ‘Why the Hell do we do things this way?” I’ve found asking that question makes people uncomfortable. Some even get offended. That may be why Kafka never lets either the reader or Joseph K. ask the obvious question “What is this court and where does its legitimacy come from?”. That omission is so deliberate that I suspect it’s the point.
I don’t know what Kafka wanted me to get from this book, but I take it as an example of bureaucratic systems that have lives of their own and trap people within them. As an example: Years ago I tried to change my employer life insurance beneficiary after getting remarried. The office repeatedly rejected the same form for trivial reasons: a crease, an ink smudge, even an updated revision date. The purpose of the process was to change a beneficiary, yet the process itself became the object being protected. It wasn’t serving the mission anymore. The mission had become serving the paperwork.
Or consider the military. The flag officer says “I want everybody assembled at 1200.” The senior officer says “Get everybody here by 1130.” By the time the order gets to the lower NCO, you’re showing up at 0400 and sitting around for 8 hours because each layer of the chain of command builds another layer of cushion into the schedule.
Reading The Trial left me with one question that extends far beyond the novel: What systems in my own life have I stopped questioning simply because everyone around me accepts them? Every organization needs procedures. The danger begins when the procedure forgets its purpose. The process exists to serve people. People do not exist to serve the process.
The best stories are based on the Hero’s Journey frequently referenced to Joseph Campbell. There is no Hero’s Journey in The Trial. Joseph K. does not experience growth. He learns nothing. Sometimes this can be a useful way to write a book. In the book “Options” by Fake Steve Jobs (Dan Lyons), the Steve Jobs caricature doesn’t experience growth or learn anything, but that was by design. Why would a parody of such an iconic character need to learn anything? But in life, and in literature reflective of life, growth is part of the process. We all grow, however unintentionally. I used to facetiously set a single “New Year’s Resolution” every year: I resolve to keep doing everything the exact same way I did it last year. I know it was impossible to keep because through the process of growth, things would change over the course of the year.
Final thought: perhaps we should take The Trial as an example of dystopia. K. is never given a charge because he has come under the attention of a mindless system that is going to put the screws to him no matter what. What systems in our lives perform the same way?
If you’re interested in The Trial, you can buy it from my affiliate link below:
