See also: Lawsuit (homonymy)

the Lawsuit (in German Der Prozeß ) is a novel of the Czech writer of German language Franz Kafka. He reports the mishaps of Joseph K. , which awakes one morning and, for a reason which one never discovers, is stopped and subjected to the rigors of justice.

Just like the other novels of Kafka, the Lawsuit was not completely completed with its death, and did not have vocation to be published. The manuscript was collected by his/her friend and executor, max Brod, and was published for the first time in 1925 under the title DER Process , with the editions “Die Scheide”, Berlin. If the division and the titles of the chapters are all of Kafka, the distribution and the distribution are of Brod, which moreover drew aside from the principal screen some incomplete chapters.

A “novel black” and marked by the Absurdity

the Lawsuit is a work with the sinister tone, developing a choking world where any thing is seen deprived of direction. At first sight the subject is political, with in backdrop the denunciation of the governments affirming their authority by arbitrary and totalitarian means.

However, the greatest capacity of the novel is due to the description of the consequences that this climate involves in the life and the spirit of Joseph K, which in spite of its innocence, feels with the wire of the history a growing culpability, pretense related to the only fact of living being and to exist.

Joseph K. opposes to his situation absurdity and despairing a voluntarism which will be only being reduced to the wire of its disillusions, vis-a-vis the blind and pitiless apparatus of a justice so perfectly unjust.

Account by chapters

Chapter I - Arrest of Joseph K.; Conversation with Mrs. Grubach then with Miss Bürstner

In the morning of its thirtieth birthday, Joseph K., young person tally working in a bank and alive in a pension, is stopped in an unexpected way by two mysterious agents for a crime not specified. The agents refuse to name the authority which sends them. Joseph K. finally is not imprisoned but is not left free at his place, with the obligation to await the instructions of the board of inquiry. Strongly disturbed, K will forget some its go evening with Elsa, a prostitute whom he attends.

Mrs. Grubach, her landlady, tries to comfort Joseph in connection with the lawsuit, but it will wound it without wanting it by insinuating that this procedure is perhaps related to an immoral relation that it suspects it of holding with Miss Bürstner, its neighbor of stage. Joseph then will return visit to this young lady, by need to expose his concern, but ends up kissing the indifferent young girl, which confirms a posteriori the suspicions of Mrs. Grubach. It is about a first index letting suppose that Joseph K. does not control any more his destiny.

Chapter II - The friend of Miss Bürstner

A few days later, after being itself reconciled with its landlady, Joseph K. discovers while returning of its work that Miss Montag, the tenant of another room, settles at Miss Bürstner. Thinking that this operation has of another goal only to move away it from Miss Bürstner, Joseph K. sees his suspicions being confirmed when Miss Montag discusses with him and asks him, in the name of his friend, more to importune them. Humiliated, Joseph tries despite everything to meet Miss Bürstner while penetrating with the improvist in his room, without success.

Chapter III - First interrogation

Joseph K. is soon summoned to go to the court a certain day, without one specifying the hour nor the place to him exact. That leads it to lose much time to visit the various buildings of these poor suburbs, before finally finding by chance the good door.

An assembly of over-excited old men, chaired by a judge rather little reassuring, reproaches him her delay severely. In spite of a beautiful bearing plea on the nonsense of this lawsuit and the vacuity of his charge, Joseph K. causes the hostility of a room seeming very acquired with the judge and has the greatest evil to extirpate place of interrogation.

Chapter IV - In the empty room; The student; Clerc's Offices

Joseph K. tries to obtain an interview with the examining magistrate in load of the file, but can find only the wife of an assistant of justice. He will learn that the authorities rent with this couple part of the court to make their hearth of it, but force them to move their business each day of meeting.

Benefitting from its passage to throw an eye with books belonging to the magistrate, it realizes that the latter contain only pornographic illustrations. The woman coarsely tries to allure it, and whereas Joseph is solved to succumb to his advances to defy the legal apparatus, a student in right makes irruption on the scene, disputes with Joseph and carries in his arms that which he says to being his mistress. The latter, although it treats the student of small dirtiness, is let readily make with a hypocritical fatalism, asserting that this student is promised with brilliant future and that it must satisfy it to ensure the career of her husband.

Wandering in the offices of the court, Joseph meets the husband in question, which only complains very slightly about the attitude of his wife, seeming to accept it like irreducible reality, but which however places in K. the hope of a possible change. Well of others marked are there to hopelessly await news of their business. At this point in time Joseph realizes that it was lost, perhaps as well intellectually as geographically. The heaviness of the atmosphere of the offices involves at K. a faintness of which it does not manage to control the effects. There must thus in spite of him remain sitted before a civil servant accompanied by the employee to the information the assistance to leave this place in which K becomes aware of the weaknesses of its body up to now infallible.

Chapter V - The fouettor

Later, whereas it is with work, it discovers in a boxroom of its own bank the two agents who had stopped it, beaten by a superior. The two agents which are made whip beseech Joseph K. to help them… this last tries to pay the torturer, to bribe it but this one refuses. Finally K leaves while leaving these three individuals in the wall cupboard… He imagines at the time that this scene absurdity and fantasmatic was designed with an only aim of frightening it. But the next day, it turns over to the boxroom and the same delirious table is offered exactly to him.

Chapter VI - The uncle; Léni

Joseph K. receives the visit of his uncle, an active countryman downtown from time to time. Anxious of the noises which run on its nephew, it is made tell in detail the little that Joseph knows itself in connection with the lawsuit. It presents to Me Huld to him, a lawyer of its friends, patient and weakened, and with the lawyer reputation rather little reassuring “of the poor”.

Constantly confined to bed, the lawyer is helped with the daily newspaper by Leni, an young woman expressing an immediate and pathological attraction for Joseph. With the right in the middle of the maintenance of this last with the uncle and lawyer, Leni is arranged in order to move away it one moment and further involves it in the apartment for some rejoicings.

It is with the bottom of the building that Joseph finds then his uncle, which lets burst its anger and shame that it felt after the departure of his nephew, lawyer and having perfectly known to him with what to leave it.

Chapter VII - The lawyer, the industrialist and the painter

At the time of the later visits that it returns to its lawyer, Joseph realizes at which point Me Huld is a capricious character not being able to be to him of a very great help. At the bank, it is its rival it director-assistant who enjoys to undermine his authority.

One of the customers of the bank recommends to him to go to seek the councils of Titorelli, official painter of the court. This last does not have a real influence but its great experiment of justice painfully clarifies K, to which it shows the possibility for only assumptions complex and unpleasant since no final payment, says he, is never possible.

Chapter VIII - Mr. Block the trader; K is demolished of its lawyer

K congédie its lawyer at his place, it meets Mr. Block, a former trader in grains who has been in lawsuit for more than five years. It sacrificed very to be devoted to it and became a kind of slave for Me Huld.

Chapter IX - With the cathedral

K is charged to accompany an important Italian customer to the cathedral by the city. While it awaits the arrival of this last inside, a priest challenges it by his name, although K never went there before. The ecclesiastic tells a supposed fable to him to explain his situation to him, but the dubious significance of the account and the complexity of the comments of the priest (the parabola of the law, present at the beginning of film of Welles) rather leave the impression which the case of Joseph is desperate.

Chapter X - End

The last day of its thirtieth year, two men are able to carry out Joseph. They lead it in a small career out of the city, and assassinate it without another species of formality, using a butcher's knife. The last words of K summarize the conditions of its clean dead: “Like a dog, he says, as if shame had to survive to him”.

Interpretations

Bureaucracy

the Lawsuit is a tale black and seizing, marked by the strangeness and a disconcerting atmosphere. Superficially, the subject is the bureaucracy, an illustration of a legal and religious system twisted but depicts in a realistic way. However, one of the interests of this work is the painting of the effects of this system on the life and the spirit of Joseph K.

Humanity

To analyze this novel, it is important to notice that the first scene to be written is the end, the scene of died of the hero. One never announces with K. that it is guilty. When he declares his innocence, one asks him “innocent what immediately? ”. By confessing his culpability of human being, perhaps Joseph K it could have released himself from the lawsuit. This topic of inhumanity, or the inexistence of the mankind, is recurring in the work of Kafka. He questions on arbitrary standard and beliefs of the life which can appear, under a certain lighting, as strange as the events of the life of K.

Marriage and social relations

An interpretation of the Procès is provided by the Journal , around the dates of drafting of the novel. In 1914, Kafka becomes engaged to Felice Bauer. In a letter with Felice, it compares their couple with two in love which, under the Terreur, had been led together on the scaffold. It returns visit to Felice to Berlin several times this same year. Kafka notes in connection with a meeting which was to make it possible to officialize engagement, that it are connected with a lawsuit followed by a judgment, in which it was put aside, whereas other people decided her life in its place. Another visit with Felice led to an argument in which it was put again on side. Kafka would then have decided to break engagement. Kafka describes its letter of good-bye like a “speech made on the bracket”. Itself found that the prospect for the marriage threatened the source of revenue which the writing got to him, activity which it carried out of night, at one moment when it from now on would be supposed to sleep in company of his wife.

Such a reading makes it possible to give an account of the will of Joseph K to take part in its execution, insofar as Kafka sees the end of its engagement there. The end of Kafka as human and member of a family are indeed seen there. That also makes it possible to give an account of the sexual tension subjacent with the work which, in the form of interludes, give an account of the visits that Kafka returns in Felice on several occasions.

The correspondence goes however further that these appearances. The history told by the abbot, of the man waiting until an usher lets it enter the Law, is particularly relevant. The execution of K thus seems its triumph, insofar as it carries out the constant adjournment, implicit with its desire of “entry in the Law”. In the place, it decides to accept its destiny without decaying, contrary to the old man who waits vainly the door of the Court in the history of the abbot. Kafka as, at this time of its life, decides as it would not let its life be the play of the others, agrees to be withdrawn as “human” and from living a fully selected life, though in a world with share.

Jewish identity

Another way of interpreting the Lawsuit is to consider what Jean-Paul Sartre in said in its Réflexions on the Jewish question . The book then reports the way in which the Jews perceive the world, particularly with the catches with the anti-semitism. Sartre claims that the Jewish life in such a world is comparable with the experiment of Joseph K and perhaps even to that of Kafka.

Lastly, the interpretation of George Steiner makes Procès a rabbinical interpretation. In this interpretation, the unfinished tales which constitute most of the work of Kafka, are built like “comments in acts” and the techniques implemented are about the “rabbinical hermeneutics”. In the Lawsuit , Kafka makes carry its reflection on the law, which is the language of the man after his fall of the Eden.

Catalog of films

• the Lawsuit was adapted out of film by Orson Welles in 1963.

Internal bond

• anti-totalitarian Literary works

External bonds

• '' the Lawsuit '' on Biblioweb
• German Text
• Course and documents on '' the Lawsuit ''
• '' the Lawsuit of Kafka '', analyzes work on Libresavoir.org
• Critique of the film

References

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