. . . man muß das Geständnis machen. Machen Sie doch bei nächster Gelegenheit das Geständnis. Erst dann ist die Möglichkeit zu entschlüpfen gegeben, erst dann.1
. . . all you can do is confess. Confess the first chance you get. That's the only chance you have to escape, the only one.2
(Leni's advice to Josef K. in Der Proceß)
There is a goal, but no way; what we call the way is only wavering.3
(Great Wall, 283)
Happy Birthday, Jacques! This essay is testimony not only to a friendship between us that goes back to the 1960s, and not only to the enormous importance your work in general has had for me, but more specifically to what I have learned from you about Kafka (especially in the magisterial "Devant la loi"), about speech acts, and, as the reader of this essay will discover, about narrative theory, about the "acolytic" relation of narrator to character, as in Kafka's Der Proceß.
I must begin with a confession. I do not think I understand Kafka's Der Proceß. I am not even sure it is understandable. By "understanding" I mean achieving a full, totalizing, rational, logical accounting for all The Trial's features and details according to some unifying hermeneutical principle of interpretation. Confronting The Trial, I feel more than a little like the man from the country in "Before the Law," the parable the priest tells in the chapter of The Trial called "In the Cathedral." I stand before the text of The Trial. The door is open inviting me to enter the text and understand it, and the door is meant for me. The Trial makes a specific demand on me to read and understand it. For some reason, however, access is forbidden, and I may die before figuring out the law that governs this strange work. Reading The Trial again and again in order to write this essay, after many years since last reading it, I am struck once more primarily by that strangeness. The Trial is a truly strange work.
Many strange features could be identified, but out of impatience4 (another name for which is lack of time) I choose rather to measure The Trial's uncanniness by one measuring yard: its use of speech acts. When I first thought of writing this essay I planned, more or less as a blind hypothesis, to investigate performative language in The Trial. Remembering the spectacular example of a "felicitous" performative utterance (felicitous at least in the Austinian in the sense of doing its work efficiently) at the end of Kafka's first great story, "The Judgment," I assumed that The Trial, which after all deals with a supposedly criminal case, would have a complex integument of legal speech acts. The reader will remember that Georg's father, in "The Judgment" declares, "I sentence you now to death by drowning," and Georg promptly goes out and drowns himself. One can see, I guess, why Kafka and his friends laughed until the tears ran down their faces when Kafka read this story aloud to them. Surely, I thought, without thinking too carefully about it, there must be parallel examples in The Trial.
The realm of lawyers, the law, court cases, arrests, interrogations, trials, with all their complex protocols of swearing witnesses, taking evidence, making depositions, rendering verdicts, and so on is a prime source, for example, of the examples J. L. Austin adduces and analyzes in that originary text of speech act theory, How to Do Things with Words. A rhythmic counterpoint of multitudinous references to law, lawyers, judges, and courtroom scenes punctuates How to Do Things with Words.5 These serve as an explicit reminder of what is at stake in making performatives work. One of Austin's important essays,"A Plea for Excuses," uses a legal term in its title ("plea") and gives a detailed account of an actual criminal case from the nineteenth century. It can be argued, without much exaggeration, that the underlying purpose and raison d'être of How to Do Things with Words is to make it possible for a judge speaking in the proper circumstances to say, "I find you guilty" (HT, 58) and to have it work to get the miscreant punished.
Surely, I thought, The Trial must be an exemplification of this dependence of a legal system on the just workings of legal performatives, even if Josef K. is condemned unjustly. Dickens's Bleak House has more than once been compared to Kafka's The Trial.6 Both deal with a legal system that has gone seriously awry. However monstrously unjust are the delays of Chancery in Bleak House that have destroyed the lives of so many of the characters–How to Do Things with Words of a performative utterance is: "I bequeath my watch to my brother." Each of those acts John jarndyce mentions (swearing, interrogating, filing, and so on) is a specific legal speech act with its own strict rules, obedience to which is necessary for its "felicity." The lawyers are paid to make sure that the swearing and interrogating and filing are done correctly. Surely, I thought, The Trial must be similar.
Finally, said I to myself, it is well known that Kafka had received advanced training in Civil and Canon Law in Prague. He received the Doctor of Law degree in June, 1906, after having served as a clerk in his uncle's law office while studying law. In 1906-7 he practiced law in the Landesgericht (provincial high court) and in the Strafgericht (criminal court), and he then rose to a relatively high position in the semi-state-owned Workers Accident Insurance Company for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague. There he held, among other positions, that of "Concipist" or junior legal advisor and he must have had plenty of opportunity there to see the workings of legal speech acts at close hand. The fragmentary chapter of The Trial entitled "Public Prosecutor" seems as if it may perhaps be based on Kafka's own evening discussions at taverns with legal colleagues. If Kafka had wanted to base The Trial on the actual workings of the law in Prague at that time he could certainly have done so. A whole book, Lida Kirchberger's Franz Kafka's Use of Law in Fiction,7 has been devoted to exploring the ways Kafka's legal training is reflected in his work. For all these reasons, I thought, The Trial might be expected to contain many examples of felicitous legal speech acts.
As anyone knows, however, anyone who has ever tried methodically to read The Trial in the light of speech act theory (if there has ever been such a person before me), the texture of speech acts in Kafka's novel is extremely peculiar, to say the least. Not only are there relatively few speech acts of any kind in The Trial, whereas Bleak House is full of them, even in the everyday conversation of the characters, but such performatives as there are in The Trial are highly irregular, incomplete or incorrectly performed, so that they are all in one way or another what Austin calls "infelicitities" or "misfires." The Trial is a largescale example of how not to do things with words or of how not to do anything with words or of how to do nothing with words, how to use words to stop forward movement in a perpetual wavering.
Take, for example, Josef K.'s arrest. In the celebrated first sentence the narrator tells the reader that someone must have been slandering K. because without having done anything wrong (etwas Böses), he was arrested (verhaftet) one morning. Kafka first wrote "gefangen (held)," then struck it through and wrote "verhaftet." The chapter is called "Verhaftung (Arrest)." An arrest is a paradigmatic example of a speech act: "I arrest you, in the name of the Law." That sentence, however, is never pronounced by anyone in The Trial. The proceedings of the so-called arrest, moreover, are extremely irregular, illegitimate, one might say even "illegal," as K. himself observes. Two men, burst into his bedroom while he is still in bed. Four other men (three witnesses and one man described as an "inspector") are added to the first two when he is ordered into the adjoining room. He is told that he is "being held" ("Sie sind ja gefangen." K. answers: "Es Sieht so aus" [G69]), but his doubled guards, Wilhelm and Franz, refuse to tell him why. "We weren't sent to tell you that," they say (E5). ("Wir sind nicht dazu bestellt, Ihnen das zu sagen" [G9]. Only later in the scene is he told that he is "under arrest " (E8): "Sie sind doch verhaftet" (G13). Completely unsatisfactory answers are given to all K.'s questions, even though, as K. reflects to himself, he "lived in a state governed by law (in einem Rechtsstaat), there was universal peace (über all herrschte Friede), all statutes were in force (alle Gesetze sostanden aufrecht); who dared assault him (ihn überfallen) in his own lodgings?" (E6; G11). No charge is stated. No arrest warrant is produced. The guards have no interest in seeing K.'s identity papers, his "Legitimationspapiere" (G14), though at first he can find only his bicycle license, then his birth certificate. He is told only that his arrest must be in order because the court they represent, or rather the "department" of it they represent, "as the Law states, is attracted by guilt and has to send us guards out. That's the Law." When K. says he doesn't know that law, Franz uses this as an argument against K.'s protestations of innocence: "You see, Wilhelm, he admits that he doesn't know the Law and yet he claims he's innocent (er gibt zu, er kenne das Gesetz bicht und behauptet gleichzeitig schuldlos zu sein)" (E9; G15). How can K. know he is innocent if he does not know the law that might condemn him?
The whole first chapter of The Trial is a darkly hilarious nightmare travesty of a regular arrest, though it is of course, as many commentators have observed, just the sort of thing that happens in a totalitarian country, where people are arrested, taken from their homes, detained, tortured to death, and their bodies dumped in a ditch or simply "disappeared." The explanation, however, that The Trial corresponds to a police state does not really fit since The Trial takes place, as K. says, in a country under the rule of law. I suppose, however, that all totalitarian regimes say that. In any case it is not the secret police but the courts that have jurisdiction over K. Though K. may have been arrested, he is allowed to go on living his normal life, more or less, working at the bank, living in his boarding house, visiting his girlfriend Elsa, and so on. Perhaps The Trial corresponds best, prophetically, with the situation under, say, Communist East Germany, when a person could go on living an apparently normal life while a secret dossier made up of the reports of ubiquitous often slanderous spies was being compiled that would ultimately lead to that person's imprisonment or execution. Even Kafka does not seem quite to have been able to anticipate the torture chambers of the Gestapo, the KGB, in the Argentinian regime under Peron, on in the political prison in Montevideo, Uruguay, now a shopping center, or indeed the recent situation in Bosnia, or under the jurisdiction of the Los Angeles police recently, or in many countries in Africa, certainly so under Apartheid in South Africa. Nor does K. ever apparently doubt the existence somewhere of a sovereign Law that governs all lesser laws and all the infinite gradations of the court. The problem, of course, is that this Law is totally unavailable to K. or to his lawyer or to anyone else in the lower circles of the court. The Law, as goal, is infinitely distant, though all powerful, in spite of the fact that there is, it appears, no way to reach it.
The remaining chapters after K.'s arrest develop this situation through various confrontations, all of which involve "infelicitous" speech acts, misfires. In the chapter called "Initial Inquiry" K. is summoned by telephone (a highly irregular method) to appear in court on a Sunday (the wrong day, surely, for legal proceedings), for the first of what are promised to be a long series of interrogations (which, by the way, never take place). When he shows up an hour and five minutes late (because he has not been told just where the court is located, only the number of the building on a distant street where it is said to be found), instead of allowing himself to be interrogated in a regular way by the "examining magistrate (Untersuchungsrichter [G62])" K. makes a long speech to the large crowd present. He denounces the court and all its proceedures and then leaves the court, only to be told at the door by the examining magistrate: "you have today deprived yourself–The Torments Grete Suffered at the Hands of Her Husband Hans. Once more, as in many other places in The Trial, sex and the court are curiously intertwined.
When K.'s uncle forces him to engage the lawyer Huld to defend him in his case, he leaves the room to be seduced by Leni just when Huld, his uncle, and the Chief Clerk of the Court begin a conversation that might greatly help his case. What his lawyer tells him in the next chapter about the court is not at all reassuring. The proceedings of the Court are all officially secret, so that it is impossible for the accused or his lawyers to get their hands on the indictment. This means, among other things, that no officially sanctioned lawyers exist for this court: "there are no court-recognized lawyers; all those who appear before the court as lawyers are basically shysters (Winkeladvokaten)" (E114; G152). The result is that petitions (Eingaben: speech acts of course) addressed to the court are generally useless: ". . . the court records, and above all the writ of indictment (die Anklageschrift dem Angeklagten), are not available to the accused and his defense lawyers, so that in general it's not known, or not known precisely, what the first petition should be directed against, and for that reason it can only be by chance that it contains something of importance to the case. Truly pertinent and reasoned petitions can only be devised later, when, in the course of the defendant's interrogations, the individual points of the indictment and its basis emerge more clearly, or may be surmised (erraten)" (E113; G152). Such surmises may or may not be on the mark. No way exists to know for sure. In any case, though K.'s lawyer claims to be working on a petition for K. he never finishes it or submits it: "He was always at work on the first petition, but it was never finished" (E122). Moreover, as Huld says, even if the petition were finished and filed, it would most likely never be read or would be returned at some point as useless, as a performative that has not performed, as empty language without any sort of power to do anything with words: "Then you come home one day," says Huld, "to find on your desk all the many petitions you submitted so diligently and with such great hopes in the case; they've been returned; since they can't be transferred to the new stage of the trial, they're worthless scraps of paper (wertlose Fetzen)" (E121; G163).
Lawyer Huld, like almost everyone else from whom K. learns about the court, seems to think that indirect means are best: the appeal to friends in the court hierarchy, bribery of one form or another, such as offering one's wife or servant girl to some member of the court staff, "pulling strings," as one says in English, trying every unofficial means to court favor. Nevertheless, as Huld tells K., absolutely no certainty can be had that this will work: "no matter how decisively they [court officials who have been unofficially appealed to] state their new intent, they may well go straight to their office and issue a decision the next day that conveys the exact opposite, and is perhaps even more severe with respect to the defendant than that which they had at first intended, and which they claimed to have entirely abandoned" (E116-7). Even if these indirect means function by way of speech acts–
K. ultimately dismisses his lawyer. This is one speech act that works or that seems to work (since Huld never accepts the dismissal), but of course it is a speech act that leaves K. exactly where he was at the beginning, stuck in a state of arrest. Nor does K. ever carry out his determination (or at any rate his consideration of the possibility that he might determine) "to prepare a written defense and submit it to the court (eine Verteidigungsschrift auszuarbeiten und bei Gericht einzureichen)" (E111; G149). How could he defend himself against a charge he cannot know? He would need to tells the whole story of his life in minutest detail, justifying every act in it, in the hope that he might by accident hit on the excuse (another speech act) that would exonerate him. That would be an infinitely long document, therefore unwritable, and K. never gets around anyway even to beginning it. This is a case of kettle logic, to allude to Freud's story in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious of the man who returned a borrowed kettle with a hole in it and then excused himself by saying he had not borrowed it, it had a hole in it when he borrowed it, and anyway it did not have a hole in it when he returned it.8 Many cases of kettle logic punctuate The Trial and may be taken to define the triple bind he is in.
In the next chapter, K. enlists the help of the court painter Titorelli, who appears to be attached to the court, but surely in a way that gives him no official jurisdiction, any more than it makes sense that Titorelli tells K. the motley group of girls who peer through the door and listen to K.'s conversation with the painter are also attached to the court. Titorelli paints even low-level judges perched on a throne as if they were the highest of judges, and behind the throne a figure who combines "Justice and the goddess of Victory in one" (E145), though to K. it looks "just like the goddess of the Hunt" (E, 146). This figure is a fine emblem of the sort of justice that can be expected from a court that assumes the guilt of the accused, is "impervious to proof" (E153), does not tell the defendant what what the charge is, and gives the defendant no means of defending himself or herself.
Every careful reader of The Trial will remember the three outcomes Titorelli says are possible ways to avoid condemnation, all strange forms of acquittal. An acquittal is of course another speech act. The jury in a trial by jury votes for acquittal, and the judge pronounces the verdict: "You are acquitted," or "This court acquits you." In the case of the strange court that has arrested Josef K., however, three possible forms of this exist, none satisfactory. Together they form a splendid case of kettle logic, since they put K., even though he declares his innocence to Titorelli, in an impossible situation, a situation in which no forward movement is possible. A declaration of innocence is another speech act, but, as we have seen, K. has no way of knowing whether he is innocent or not, since he does not know of what he is accused. His declaration of innocence is therefore infelicitous.
The first possibility, "actual acquittal (die wirkliche Freisprechung)," is not really a possibility, since Titorelli, with all his long court experience, has never seen a single instance of actual acquittal: "Ich weiß von keiner wirklichen Freisprechung" (G207). Note that the German word for acquittal stresses the performative aspect of this legal event. It is a setting free by means of a speech act, a "Sprechung." Actual acquittals may have occurred, but no way exists to know about them, since "the final verdicts of the court are not published" (E154). The second possibility, "apparent acquittal (die scheinbare Freisprechung)," is no better. In an actual acquittal the records are all destroyed, whereas in an "apparent acquittal" they are saved and "no file is ever lost (Es Geht kein Akt verloren, es gibt bei Gericht kein Vergessen)" (E158; G214). The result is that "someday–Verschleppung: a wonderful word!)," the third choice, is just as bad. It consists in prolonging the case by various means, so that "the trial is constantly kept at the lowest stage (daß der Proceß dauernd im niedrigsten Proceß stadium erhalten wird)" (E160; G216).
Both apparent acquittal and protraction "have this in common: they prevent the accused from being convicted" (E161), but "they also prevent an actual acquittal" (ibid.), thereby leaving the defendant in a permanent double bind or rather triple bind, caught once more in the tangles of kettle logic, which always seems to come in threes. Actual acquittal is unheard of, possible, perhaps, but apparently extremely unlikely, since arrest assumes the guilt of the accused. All that is possibly possible is either apparent acquittal, which is not acquittal at all but leads sooner or later to another arrest, or protraction, which, as its name suggests, just puts off the evil day. Sooner or later the protraction will come to an end. The culprit who chooses protraction must live in the perpetual malconfort of not knowing when that moment will come. He must spend every waking hour protracting the protraction, without a moment's rest.
All three possibilities converge on the ultimate necessity of conviction and execution, just as every human life ends ultimately in death, perhaps today, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps at a virtually infinite distance. The presupposition of all three possibilities is that guilt is assumed and innocence impossible to prove. You cannot, logically, pursue all three strategies at once, but all three choices come in the end to the same, though each seems distinct. Each is inhabited by the others as shadows of itself. K. leaves Titorelli without having chosen which of the three to go for, and of course he cannot choose, since any choice would be equally disastrous. And so he remains poised, inactive, paralyzed, which is certainly the effect of kettle logic generally. Such illogical logic might be defined as a horrible parody of dialectical reasoning.
The final speech act in The Trial is of course the verdict that seals Josef K.'s guilt and condemns him to death. This performative too is hideously infelicitous. In any sensible court of law the judge would render a verdict, for example a death sentence, and then the sentence would be carried out. In Josef K. case the verdict, absurdly, follows the execution. The two executioners come for K. on his birthday, just a year after his initial arrest. He is waiting dressed in black, as if he somehow expects them to come. The executioners, who strike K. as being like cheap actors or operatic tenors, hired inexpensively to perform the execution, then lead K. to an abandoned quarry, pass the long thin sharp butcher knife back and forth across his body. Then one of them plunges it into his heart, turning it twice in the last case of the many doublings in The Trial. As K. passes judgment on his own death ("Like a dog! [wie ein Hund!]," he says [E231; G312]), "the men drew near his face, leaning cheek-to-cheek to witness the verdict (Entscheidung, decision)" (E231; G312). The verdict does not precede the punishment, but may be, absurdly, witnessed after the fact in the dying gaze of the one who is executed. This verdict is the climactic infelicitous speech act.
What can one say about this cascade of defective performatives that starts with K's arrest, occurs repeatedly in different forms in almost every chapter and culminates in his death-verdict? Here is a succinct formulation of the law that determines the infelicity of every speech act in The Trial: Speech act theory, including that theory as it has been applied, whether by Austin or by others, to legal acts, depends on there being a situation in which law and order are installed, in which the law is codified in comprehensible form available to all (for example the law of wills that determines whether a given case of saying or writing "I bequeath my watch to my brother" will work), and in which regular rules and protocols for evaluating the felicity or lack of it of a given legal speech act exist, are ascertainable, and are agreed upon by the community. The social system presupposed by speech act theory, in short, is rational and finite.
None of these conditions obtains in The Trial. The social system in The Trial is irrational and infinite. Speech act theory depends not only, as has often been said, on the stability and continuity through time of the ego that makes promises, files petitions, issues verdicts, passes legal sentences, and so on, but also on the stability, finitude, and comprehensibility of the social system within which, as context, one "I" or another ennunciates a speech act. The context must be "saturable," in Jacques Derrida's word for it in "Signature Event Context." In The Trial, however, the context is radically insaturable, infinite, immeasurable, impossible to master. As a result speech acts are powerless. They are doomed to be infelicitous in one way or another. Like The Trial itself, the context within which speech acts are enunciated in The Trial is anacoluthonic. Not only is it oriented toward an infinitely distant goal, the Law, but it is discontinuous, interrupted, incoherent, full of gaps within itself. It is anacoluthonic in the etymological sense of a "failure in following." It is non-sequential, inconsequential, like a sentence with abrupt breaches in syntax (the standard linguistic definition of "anacoluthon").
As the parable "Before the Law"affirms, the sovereign Law exists, but it is unknown and unknowable. It is impossible to get access to it. No merely human speech act has any purchase on it. As Kafka asserts in "The Problem of our Laws," the problem of our laws is that "our laws are not generally known"; "the very existence of these laws, however, is at most a matter of presumption" (Great Wall, 254-5). As that brief text says, "it is an extremely painful thing to be ruled by laws that one does not know" (ibid., 254). You can say that again! There is a goal but no way; what we call the way is only wavering. No better demonstration of that wavering exists in The Trial than the consistent failure of speech acts ever to be regular or to work. How can K. be arrested, secretly tried, convicted, and executed in the name of a Law that is apparently unknown and unknowable? I began by saying that The Trial is a genuinely strange work. One of its strangest aspects is the weirdly askew performative utterances that punctuate it and that determine its most important moments. These moments, however, do not get anywhere. They do not move the action forward. They rather testify by their impotence to the impossibility of moving forward. They do not constitute more than a running in place on an infinitely long road.
An odd self-effacement characterizes the narrator of The Trial. He, she, or perhaps best "it," never says "I," never speaks for itself, but just imperturbably follows K.'s actions, speech, thoughts, and experience of the behavior and speech of others, repeating them or expressing them in past tense third person language. The narrator of The Trial is, to borrow a term from a recent brilliant essay by Jacques Derrida on Henri Thomas's Le Parjure, an acolyte. The word "acolyte" is closely related to the word "anacoluthon." It means someone who closely follows a superior authority. As acolyte the narrator of The Trial follows K. closely without ever overtly affirming an authority of its own, implicitly claiming a merely constative or truth-telling function. Or rather the narrator of The Trial is both an acolyte and an anacolyte. It is someone or something, a narrative voice, who or which follows closely K.'s every step and thought, but who does not really follow, partly because he, she, or it keeps a quietly smiling, imperturbable, slightly ironic distance, partly because he, she, or it has not been arrested, is not guilty, apparently, like K., of some crime committed inadvertently.
Moreover, the narrator survives K.'s execution to tell K's story in the past tense, from some unidentified time in the future. The narrator is nevertheless, like all narrators, to some degree a complicitous witness, if only in revealing something that would not otherwise have been revealed and that perhaps ought not to have been revealed. The last words of The Trial are "'Wie ein Hund!' sagte er, es war, als sollte die Scham ihn überleben ('Like a dog!' he said; it seemed as though the shame was to outlive him)" (G312; E231). This phrasing, by the way, is echoed in Kafka's Letter to His Father and applied by Kafka to himself.9 The outliving of K.'s shame happens in no other way than through the narration, through the responsible speech acts of the narrator. The narration as a whole is one supremely felicitous performative. It is an act of giving testimony performed by the narrator as discreet, effaced, unassertive witness, someone or something that never says "I," but who (or which) is the issuing place for the language that brings it about that K.'s shame outlives him.
The narration as a whole fulfills Austin's definition of a speech act as a way to do things with words. Behind the narrator of course is Kafka himself, who wrote it all down, failed to finish it, then in another speech act ordered his friend Max Brod to destroy it along with his other manuscripts after his death (rather than destroying it himself), and then had to suffer the posthumous shame of Brod's refusal to carry out the command in an implicit negative performative: "I refuse to do what I have been enjoined to do."
Does not the narrator, Kafka, Brod, and the reader, any reader, in spite of their collective refusal to take overt responsibility, perhaps repeat the crime of which K. may be guilty, the crime of not ever having confronted and so coming to know the Law? Like Josef. K. just before he is executed, I end by asking questions, appropriating K.'s questions, as the narrator does in the indirect discourse with which he (or it) speaks: "Where was the judge he'd never seen? (Wo war der Richter den er nie gesehen hatte?) Where was the high court he'd never reached? (Wo war das hohe Gericht bis zu dem er nie gekommen war?)" (E231; G312). My initial confession, the confession with which this paper began, my admission that I do not think I understand The Trial, may have confessed to more than I knew when I made it. By confessing to you as witnesses my complicity in K.'s ignorance of the Law I hope to pass the responsibility on to you, my dear listeners or readers. On your head be it if you do not understand, or if you add or subtract from the text when you claim to understand it.
1 Franz Kafka, Der Proceß, ed. Malcolm Pasley, Kritische Ausgabe (Frankfurt a. M.: S. Fischer, 1990), 143, henceforth G, followed by the page number.
2 Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Breon Mitchell (New York: Schocken, 1998), 106, henceforth E, followed by the page number.
3 Franz Kafka, "Reflections on Sin, Pain, Hope, and the True Way," The Great Wall of China: Stories and Reflections, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken, 1946), 283, henceforth GW, followed by the page number.
4 In an adjacent reflection Kafka asserts that "All human error is impatience, a premature renunciation of method, a delusive pinning down of a delusion" (GW, 278). "Method": it means etymologically, "according to the way." What method can be appropriate or other than an impatient renunciation of method in a situation in which the road is endless or in which there is a goal but no way? It could only be an infinitely patient method, one that would attempt to with unremitting care to account for every detail and element of The Trial, every letter of its law, though at the end the interpreter would not be one fraction of an inch closer to the goal. His attention to each detail would be no more than the application of the reader's own childish measuring yard.
5 Here is a more or less complete list, from J. L. Austin, How to Do Thngs with Words, 2nd ed., ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980): 4, 7, 13, 19, 22, 24, 31, 33, 35, 36, 40, 41, 42, 57, 59, 65, 85, 88-9, 98-9, 98-9, 122, 128, 130, 141, 153, 154, 155, 157.
6 See Mark Spilka, Dickens and Kafka (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963), and Murray Krieger, "Bleak House and The Trial," in The Tragic Vision (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960).
7 New York: Peter Lang, 1986.
8 See Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey, Standard Ed. (New York: Norton, n.d.), 72. The story of the ketttle is referred to again on p. 254-5, where it is explicitly related to the "unconscious mode of thought," in which "either-or" is replaced by "and": "In dreams, in which the modes of thought of the unconscious are actually manifest, there is accordingly no such thing as an 'either-or,' only a simultaneous juxtaposition." The story of the kettle is also referred to in The Interpretation of Dreams (trans. James Strachey [New York, Avon: 1970], 152-3) in connection with Freud's interpretation of his dream about Irma. It would be easy enough to argue that Der Proceß obeys the logic of dreams as worked out by Freud, but I think it would be a mistake to push this too far as a full accounting for what is strange about this novel, since "real life," it may be, also obeys the kettle logic of dreams, at least as it is persuasively represented by Kafka.
9 See Franz Kafka, Letter to His Father/Brief an den Vater, bilingual ed., trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (New York: Schocken, 1966), 72, 73: "Er fürchtet, die Scham werde ihn noch überleben. (He is afraid the shame will outlive him, even.)"