The Trial
First English edition in jacket, 1937
The Trial (Der Proceß, written 1914, published posthumously 1925) is one of the defining works of twentieth-century fiction and a foundational text of the dystopian tradition. The novel opens with Josef K., a senior bank clerk, being arrested one morning in his lodgings for a crime that is never named. He is not imprisoned. He is simply told the proceedings have begun, and left to conduct his ordinary life while the invisible machinery of the Court works around him. As he attempts to navigate the case, finding lawyers, petitioning officials, seeking an audience with the Court, he discovers a system that is simultaneously omnipresent and inaccessible, governed by laws no defendant is permitted to read, staffed by officials who have no authority and clerks who have too much. Translated from the German by Will and Edwin Muir. First edition in English.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo original blue cloth with title stamped in blue on spine. London: Gollancz, 1937. Jones & Newman, Horror: The 100 Best Novels (34). #11370.
Very good copy in a lovely near fine dust jacket with darkened spine and a few minor nicks along the edges.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo original blue cloth with title stamped in blue on spine. London: Gollancz, 1937. Jones & Newman, Horror: The 100 Best Novels (34). #11370.
Very good copy in a lovely near fine dust jacket with darkened spine and a few minor nicks along the edges.
Additional Details
The Trial is Franz Kafka's novel about an ordinary man entered into a legal proceeding that has no discernible rules, no accessible charges, and no apparent exit. Josef K. is a careful, competent, moderately ambitious bank official who does nothing wrong in the novel and is destroyed anyway. The charge against him is never stated. The law under which he is prosecuted is never quoted. The court that tries him has no fixed address. Its offices are found in attic rooms above apartment buildings, staffed by officials whose authority cannot be verified and whose jurisdiction shifts without explanation.
K. responds initially with the instincts of a reasonable man. He demands to see the charges. He retains a lawyer. He seeks an audience with the examining magistrate. He tries to understand the procedures. Kafka makes clear that these responses, which would be entirely appropriate in an actual legal proceeding, are precisely what mark K. as naive. The Court is not interested in facts. It processes guilt as a given, and the only question before it is the form that guilt will take and when they will conclude.
The novel's cast of subsidiary figures each represents a different attitude toward the system. Huld, K.'s lawyer, has spent decades in proximity to the Court without advancing any case to resolution. His professional identity depends on the system's impenetrability. The painter Titorelli explains that acquittal is theoretically possible but practically unknown. What actually occurs are "ostensible acquittals" and "indefinite postponements," both of which leave the accused perpetually subject to re-arrest. The prison chaplain, K.'s most honest interlocutor, tells him the parable of the man who waits his entire life at the door of the Law, which stands open but which the doorkeeper will not allow him to enter. Before the man dies, he asks why no one else has ever come to this door. "No one else could have gained entry here," the doorkeeper explains, "because this entrance was intended only for you. Now I am going to close it."
What makes The Trial dystopian in a specific sense, distinct from its more general existential reading, is its treatment of guilt as a bureaucratic category rather than a moral one. Josef K. has done nothing. The system does not care. Guilt is not determined by what a person does but by the act of being caught within the Court's attention, and once that happens, the outcome is never really in question. K.'s eventual execution, carried out by two men in frock coats who knife him "like a dog" in a quarry, is presented not as a punishment but as a procedure being completed.
Kafka wrote the novel in 1914 and left it unfinished. Max Brod, his friend and literary executor, published it in 1925 against Kafka's express wish that it be destroyed. The first English edition, translated by Will and Edwin Muir and published by Gollancz in 1937, brought the novel to British readers twelve years after the German publication and two years before the outbreak of the war that would make its subject matter feel less like allegory.
K. responds initially with the instincts of a reasonable man. He demands to see the charges. He retains a lawyer. He seeks an audience with the examining magistrate. He tries to understand the procedures. Kafka makes clear that these responses, which would be entirely appropriate in an actual legal proceeding, are precisely what mark K. as naive. The Court is not interested in facts. It processes guilt as a given, and the only question before it is the form that guilt will take and when they will conclude.
The novel's cast of subsidiary figures each represents a different attitude toward the system. Huld, K.'s lawyer, has spent decades in proximity to the Court without advancing any case to resolution. His professional identity depends on the system's impenetrability. The painter Titorelli explains that acquittal is theoretically possible but practically unknown. What actually occurs are "ostensible acquittals" and "indefinite postponements," both of which leave the accused perpetually subject to re-arrest. The prison chaplain, K.'s most honest interlocutor, tells him the parable of the man who waits his entire life at the door of the Law, which stands open but which the doorkeeper will not allow him to enter. Before the man dies, he asks why no one else has ever come to this door. "No one else could have gained entry here," the doorkeeper explains, "because this entrance was intended only for you. Now I am going to close it."
What makes The Trial dystopian in a specific sense, distinct from its more general existential reading, is its treatment of guilt as a bureaucratic category rather than a moral one. Josef K. has done nothing. The system does not care. Guilt is not determined by what a person does but by the act of being caught within the Court's attention, and once that happens, the outcome is never really in question. K.'s eventual execution, carried out by two men in frock coats who knife him "like a dog" in a quarry, is presented not as a punishment but as a procedure being completed.
Kafka wrote the novel in 1914 and left it unfinished. Max Brod, his friend and literary executor, published it in 1925 against Kafka's express wish that it be destroyed. The first English edition, translated by Will and Edwin Muir and published by Gollancz in 1937, brought the novel to British readers twelve years after the German publication and two years before the outbreak of the war that would make its subject matter feel less like allegory.
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