This paper focuses on Kafka’s The Trial and The Castle paying close attention to the metaphors and other tropes employed in the text. I will show that the first is metaphoric throughout, unlike the second, which relies more on metonymy. Also the third master trope, irony is identifiable in the texts. All that is based on the dominant desires of the two main characters in the novels, a bank clerk, Joseph K, and a land surveyor, K: to know the name of his alleged crime and to find a way to the Castle who has promised to employ K. Concerning the interpretation of Kafka’s meaning in the novels, I argue that both texts are meaningless in a special way. The texts do not allow for a literal meaning, because their tropological structure is devised in such a way that ultimately nothing is meaningful. The main examples are the priest in the Cathedral and the story of the man and his own Gate of Law in The Trial.
Introduction: Two Persons, Two Tasks, Two Desires
Both novels, The Trial and The Castle begin by introducing a meaningful looking event: Joseph K, a bank clerk, is arrested at home for an unspecified crime, and K, a land surveyor, arrives in a snow covered village next to the Castle of Count Westwest.1 These two events immediately introduce the reasons for their dominant desires, desires that will rule the narrative throughout, relentlessly but at the same time hopelessly. Through these two obviously innocent events, both men are trapped in the web of desires that will from now on dominate their life and action and in the end prove hopelessly demanding and even fatal. The two narratives appear to me mimetically related. They reflect and repeat each other as if they were two variants of one extended idea or allegory.2 Both men are doomed to suffer and fail although they will never admit their defeat. Their respective situations may not look exceptionally difficult or extraordinary in any sense. Joseph K wants to know what the charge against him is, as he has done nothing, as the narrative says as if it were objectively true and not merely a subjective opinion of Joseph K. It is remarkable that such an oratio recta
The situation of K, the land surveyor is much simpler: he needs to go to the Count’s Castle where he has been invited to work as a land surveyor. He knows all the relevant facts, he has work to do up in the Castle but for some unspecified reason he cannot enter or even approach it; in fact, he is not even allowed to try. He is stuck in limbo down in the valley, in the village, and its various Weinstuben. He wants to go up to the Castle, yet he cannot, and he has no idea why. Again, there is something he does not understand – he never will. When the novel ends, it was never completed by its author, he is still where he was when the story began. He is reduced to the role the Willie of the Valley, ultimately a rather suspicious and dirty character, who has sex with bar girls while the cave he has entered slowly collapses on him. This plot is much simpler than the first one: to try to understand the metaphysics of crime and guilt is a task of altogether different scope from an attempt to enter a building. In the same way, the sufficient conditions of success are different: at what point do you think, with justification, that you know what the law is, compared to knowing when you have entered a building? Of course, in the case of Joseph K, we may hope to simplify his task by simply requiring that he should know the name of his alleged crime. But then, in a legal context, the name of the crime may well be and remain a mystery to all who are involved, an essentially contested ascription suggested by the prosecution. In many legal cases, the true title of the crime emerges only in the decision of the court and may well change when the verdict is appealed. This is of course a problem because the accused cannot know the name of her crime, or what she did; how could she have known that she committed a crime when she acted? Is it enough to argue that she must have known she did something wrong but not exactly what it is? And how can we say she did something wrong if we do not know what she did? In this sense, Joseph K’s situation is not that outlandish. The accused may ask, plausibly, what did I do, tell me?
I suggest that Joseph K faces a metaphysical abyss where he enters at his own peril. K on the contrary faces a practical task, a job he cannot do, and this draws him into an endless circle of failed attempts, a stuck wheel he is unable to turn. He has the relevant evidence to the effect that he cannot and he must not enter the Castle but he refuses to recognize this evidence and modify his beliefs accordingly. This allows him to desire a goal that, simply, is unavailable to him. His problem seems to be his inability to find the reasons for his own failure; and because he finds no reasons he is unable to change his beliefs, which keep alive his vain desire to enter the Castle. If somebody told him why he probably would turn around and go back home. But no such reasons will appear and thus he cannot alter his relevant beliefs and desires. He learns all kind facts about the Castle and its officials, but nothing that would be relevant to his key desire: to enter and then start working there. In this way The Castle is an endless narrative that cannot have an ending. The only ending would be the death of K. Joseph K of course dies in the end since he is guilty and this dictates the logic of his fate, but K is only working hard to be able to go a place where he should be able to go. What kind of a logical ending could there be? Perhaps it is impossible to say. You try until you die, which entails a narrative that is hardly worth telling.
Tropological Considerations: The Castle
The hypothesis is that the narrative of The Castle mainly utilizes metonymy without allowing much metaphoric content to enter its plot whereas The Trial is through and through metaphoric. However, the master trope in both contexts is mocking irony whose rule is both undeniable and all-conquering.3 To give a simple example: first, introduce desires that are crucial to the narrative plot, around which everything turns, and then at the same time make it immediately clear that such desires are unsatisfiable – this is an application of irony. The reader quickly realizes what the plot is, namely, that the main character’s desire is impossible, or even quixotic – this is the second source irony, or a kind of narrative meta-irony that is lifted out of the text to come and trouble the reader. The reader comes to know so much more than the characters in
Kafka’s literary strategy is to embed this into a narrative frame that resembles what we say and read about any normal, everyday life. Both Joseph K and K both try to live as usual although they are constantly troubled by their unfulfilled desire to know the name of the crime and discover a path to the Castle. When the narrative progresses, normal life dominates it as if the author wanted to tell about it and not of something else that is so much more important. This is another source of irony: from the point of view of the narrative what is important is treated as of secondary importance. Especially in The Castle this ordinary life aspect dominates the narrative, less so in The Trial. In the latter novel we find some embedded narratives that are highly symbolic and loaded with metaphors, for instance, the discussion with the priest in the dark and old Cathedral. A parallel embedded narrative in The Castle tells the story of a young girl, Amalia, who is accused by the Castle of a rather strange crime, namely, disturbing the peace of mind, because of her beauty, of an official of the Castle named Sortini. However, this narrative is totally different from the episodes told in The Trial; the mysteries of the former have not much metaphoric import. The crime mentioned is like that of Oedipus: Amalia intended no harm, she could not avoid the damaging incident, yet she is guilty in the eyes of all. She must suffer because of her crime; actually, all her people must suffer as if her guilt were contagious. As I said, here Kafka plays with some ancient punitive principles in a context where they become merely atavistic and vengeful. Metaphors are largely missing here as the narrative is played at the level of metonymic language accompanied by some bitter ironies just like Amalie’s beauty that enrages Sortini. How did he see Amalia? Whatever the answer is, it must take into account a disturbance in the information flow between the two persons. This is case of oratio obliqua irony. The audience knows that Sortini’s perception of Amalia is all too weird. On the other hand, males may react in this way. Female beauty sometimes is disturbing and hence it brings about an aggressive reaction.
Another ironic point is that Sortini, as a high-ranking official from the Castle, behaves like a drunken sailor (the language he uses) or an adolescent boy (hating what he could not immediately get). The effect of the narrative style and technique in The Castle is certainly sinister and depressing, starting from the surrounding nature, the snow covered isolated valley continuing to its nasty and in a way primitive inhabitants ending up with the description of the Castle itself. The Castle is not a castle in the same sense as the Castle of Prague
K wants, more than anything else, to enter the Castle
He believes that the Castle is an important place and its officers are noble men in the centre of his own mental universe.
The Castle, which he has seen, is just a group of ordinary houses and its officials, whom he knows about, daunting thugs.
The second and third sentences are certainly mutually inconsistent, yet K refuses to see this crucial fact. The reader can see it, it is obvious, and hence one cannot escape the ironic effect in this case. Another point concerns the metonymic aspects of this same example. The ironic effect is now created by means of a simple metonymic pair: an aristocratic Castle is a group of peasant houses. The two terms are freely exchangeable with each other or they refer to the same physical, real entity, which is at the same time a Castle and a group of houses on a hill. The hill binds them together, isolates them from the rest of the village and, in the text, emphasizes the crucial importance of this very metonymy. “A fine Castle it is” counts as an ironic statement when it refers to that bunch of houses, that fata morgana, on a hill, given that the audience knows how the things are – K certainly does not. This mocking statement then adds to the overall nasty atmosphere in the narrative of The Castle.
In relation to such visual considerations, we can find the testimonial of the teacher K meets: there is not much difference between the Castle and
The Castle and its people become stranger and stranger when the narrative develops even if it never quite reaches any metaphoric depth. Of course one
If he forced himself to walk at least as far as the entrance to the castle, that was more than enough in his present state. So he walked on, but it was a long way. For he was in the main street of the village, and it did not lead to Castle Mount but merely passed close to it before turning aside, as if on purpose, and although it moved no further away from the castle, it came no closer either. K. kept thinking that the road must finally bring him to the castle, and, if only because of that expectation, he went on. Because of his weariness he naturally shrank from leaving the road, and he was surprised by the extent of the village, which seemed as if it would never end, with more and more little houses, their window-panes covered by frost-flowers, and with the snow and the absence of any human beings – so at last he tore himself away from the road on which he had persisted and struck out down a narrow alley where the snow lay even deeper. Pulling his feet out of it as they kept sinking in again was hard work. He broke out in a sweat, and suddenly he stopped and could go no further.6
This is a great surrealist paragraph. It is the correct road as K is later told, yet when he walks it the village never ends, the road turns so that it keeps the same distance from the Castle regardless of how long he walks. It is like trying to reach the end of the Universe that is infinite but limited. The road is mocking him, teasing him until he gets too tired to continue. K also notices a time
Tropological Considerations: The Trial
The Trial is a metaphoric narrative through and through, unlike The Castle. The text is a process in its treatment of metaphoric emphasis: from the description of the everyday life of Joseph K, a bank clerk, and its metonymies the narrative progresses ever so gradually towards its metaphysical and metaphoric depths, culminating in the epic discussion with the priest in the old and gloomy, desolated Cathedral, to say nothing of its crowning allegory of the old man at the Gates of Law. The main narrative has its sub-narrative that again has its sub-narrative. How could a mystery that is embedded in a mystery in a mysterious main narrative be understood? Obviously one tries to read the narrative about the priest and the narrative by the priest as two mutually independent stories, but this cannot be right. This leads us towards a deep and unresolvable mystery, into the dark night of interpretation where all cows are black – as Hegel once said about Schelling’s philosophy. As I said above, I have nothing to say about such mysteries; the deepest of allegories I accept as what they are, allegories that either have an obvious meaning or no fixed meaning at all. Allegories are easy to read because they have their known and undisputable meaning or no meaning at all. In other words, allegories tend to be conventional, for instance religious mysteries. What the devout see as deep truths are
Now, what makes The Trial progressively more symbolic is the nature of Joseph K’s desires. They grow so complex that the simple desires of the land surveyor K look insignificant; K wants to enter the Castle, meet the people who hired him, and start working. To find something metaphoric here is a big task that can be done but not within the limits of the actual narrative. The case of the bank clerk Joseph K is different: when the narrative progresses the initial metonyms change into metaphors and then into ever more challenging metaphors until the whole narrative structure vanishes into a chaos of allegories. This is what happens to Joseph K, psychologically, when he learns more and more about his own case and the social context where he is and where it all happens. He is a professional person, an educated man, who should be familiar and knowledgeable of the legal institutions of the country; it is totally surprising that he has no clue about what will happen once he is charged of a crime. A new gate opens up in front of him, arrive two bailiffs who have a message to him, then he is arrested because of an unspecified crime although he has in fact done nothing. This is an ironic hyperbola because certainly he has done something and also something wrong in the course of his life. Yet he case is clear, two persons have emerged from somewhere through an invisible door that opens up to and from somewhere where he has never been, which is called the Law. He now faces an existence he has no idea of. This the Law. Now he wants to know the name of his crime and also the Law and its relevant agents and agencies, the judges and law courts. Logically enough, he wants to proceed as far high up the ladder as necessary in order to find the persons, the high judges, who accuse him of the crime, whatever it is, that he never committed, and who also can absolve him. He wants to clear his tarnished reputation and, what this entails, avoid the punishment. However, K does not seem to think of the punishment too much, except in the end.
Let us look at the desires of K. If we simplify a little we can find the following intertwined desires that he feels must be satisfiable; these are cognitive, knowledge related desires that look satisfiable in any developed society: I want to know the name of my crime, who accuses me, where can I find them, how can I clear my name. All these are normal and as such innocent desires. Never
The situation indicates a deep irony and even ridicule. Joseph K is unable to recognize his new situation as new and hence he continues as usual. The ironic construal of the oratio obliqua case progresses as usual: Joseph K does not know what he obviously should know, the reader knows that the world and its description have changed, and this gap is the source of the inherent irony to be found in the case. Joseph K finds out that all the attics of Prague are actually offices of the Law but, nevertheless, he keeps on searching as if it were somehow normal that attics have been turned into offices without him knowing it. Basically the foundational irony of The Trial is even simpler than that: the first sentence of the narrative, namely “Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K, for without having done anything wrong he was arrested on fine morning” is the foundation of all the subsequent ironies: fine morning it is when you get arrested!9 Joseph K was arrested although he had done nothing wrong. You must pay attention when you think of it because of the fantastic, metaphysical implications of all this, but only when you have read the whole narrative from its innocent beginning to its horrifying end-scene the vertigo hits you. The first sentence opens up all the gates of hell, the infinite and everlasting tortures of the cursed valley of Gehenna, from where no convicted person ever came back. In the end Joseph K is taken to an old quarry, his own Gehenna. The supreme irony now is that the reader may anticipate it all, unlike Joseph K, whose innocence in the long run approaches stupidity as he is unable to change his very frame of thought.
To approach the metaphoric structure of The Trial, let us pay attention to the transcendent approach there compared to the dominant immanence of The Castle. K knows where the Castle is, he has received an invitation, and he even found the road leading to the Castle; yet, he cannot get there. All this is within the category of immanence as it takes place in the same world where he already is. The Castle may be far, both literally and figuratively, but yet it is where he himself is. He knows people who are from the Castle and who go to the Castle.
Joseph K’s situation is different, it is transcendent, although initially it may not look so: the two bailiffs enter his room through a door, he visits a court to attend the preliminary hearings of his case – all this is normal. But then the context starts changing as he learns how strange the facts actually are: the court is everywhere, in every house, in every attic; everybody belongs to the law, even the little giggling girls he meets in the staircase; the indictment cannot be denied or overturned although the proceedings can be postponed indefinitely; he sees paintings of high judges although they are not really high; the highest judges are so high they cannot be said to exist or they exist in some inaccessible realms, they cannot be depicted, which is to say their existence is, somehow, another thing.
Here we see the narrative process extending from some simple facts to the metaphysical realms of the law that are so deep and profound that they are far beyond Joseph K’s normal abilities of comprehension. The narrative is now transcendent. Joseph K has left through the same door where the bailiffs once entered and now he is in another realm of existence where his guilt is obvious and his ability to influence his own destiny is totally lacking. The door is the key metaphor. Think of what he sees when he opens the door of a closet: a cruel and awful whipping scene.10 This underlines the significance of the door as a gateway to another world and its transcendence – I do not think this strange and isolated scene has any other function or interpretation than that. What I mean by transcendence is this: Joseph K is reaching towards facts and truths that are no longer knowable because they reside not here but there. Joseph K hardly understands the situation. He is totally unable to figure out the fact that what he wants is beyond his capabilities as an indigenous dweller of a wrong world; the problem is that he cannot come to know the law that is independent of everything he knows and believes on an experiential basis, or on the basis of what he has learned during his life.
This is what metaphors do: a metaphor moves the original meaning to a new field of discourse that is prima facie disconnected from it, to a new context that opens up rich sources of novel meanings, associations, ideas, contrast etc. transforming what is said into another thing. I say after narrowly escaping a serious accident, this time I got lucky, the guardian angel was with me. The point then is, I was not lucky in terms of what happened to me. I do not say, I was lucky that speeding car did not hit me. I say, the guardian angel has not always been with me but in this case she was. The guardian angel indeed protected
The example above belongs to the category of intrinsic metaphors, or metaphors that are created to be metaphors, so that their only role in discourse is as metaphors. In other words, they do not have a literal meaning in any discursive model. They certainly have their metonymic uses, but metonym is a special type of metaphor. Think of this: a guardian angel and God’s protecting hand form a metonymic pair in which both terms refer to the same thing, whatever that might be, perhaps good luck or a happy coincidence in a threatening situation. Such intrinsic metaphors show clearly what it means to say that metaphors are essentially transcendent in the sense that they break the immanent limits of a discourse and travel to some distant lands where they gain their fresh halo of ever richer meanings. Notice that intrinsic metaphors need not be mythical; think of “albatross,” or “a burden that is psychological and sometimes might feel as if you are cursed because of that burden,” and compare it with “a heart of stone.”11 The former is an extrinsic metaphor because albatross, the bird, actually exists. The word “albatross” can be used metaphorically or literally. The latter is an intrinsic metaphor because no heart is made of stone and, hence, the phrase is nothing but a metaphor.
Certainly the intrinsic master metaphor in The Trial is the Law whose meaning is explained by the priest in the Cathedral. It is indeed an intrinsic metaphor. At this point we see that what the Law is and what it entails is no longer something one can understand literally in reference to positive law. The Law is not the law. Certainly it is not the same as the law we mean when we talk about the law, law court, and the rule of law, namely, a certain set of published norms that are created by the lawgiver in a certain authoritative order. No, the Law is a metaphor of something that the reader does not quite understand. In fact it is an intrinsic metaphor because it deals with the Law that has nothing to do with the law. From an ironic point of view, it is clear that Joseph K cannot see this crucial point, namely, that the Law is an extended metaphor of something that is non-existent. However, it is a deadly metaphor as we learn in the end when Joseph K is taken to an old quarry to be killed with a butcher’s
I cannot offer any ideas of what the Law is in Joseph K’s newly found universe. I suggest that it is a mistake to attempt to do so. What we have here is a trap: the author teases us with a number of misleading clues as if trying to convince us that the new Law has something to do with the old law. It has not; what we have here is a misleading and empty metaphor, or a metaphor of something we cannot say what it is. The effect of such narrative is surrealistic. The first sentence already says it all, Joseph K has done nothing, yet he is arrested – although he is not really arrested. Next, he is interrogated but that is not really so. His case is processed somewhere, which does not seem to be true, and finally he is punished in a way which has nothing to do with a legal execution; actually, he is butchered (the knife) or put away like a dog (as he says). All the evidence is there, The Trial is not about a trial – there is no legal process or trial in the book. The title of the book is a misnomer. What Joseph K is so ardently chasing is a metaphorically construed end that is in the end no end; it is not what it looks like to be; it is not even what it is said to be.
Therefore, what I want to say is this: The Trial is first about the Law and then Joseph K in the hands of the Law, but this Law is not the law. It is a dark and hidden metaphor we cannot decipher, some kind of a metaphor of itself. The same alien and nameless Other comes into the room through Joseph K’s door that opens up to a foreign, transcendent reality where an odd, reified metaphor called the Law reigns supreme. He has no idea what is it, except that it misjudges and threatens him. Perhaps the Law is the metaphoric, or allegoric, expression of some kind of an existential threat. That may work, although in the end it is a trivial idea. Another possibility is that the Law is the metaphor of universal guilt that harasses us endlessly and relentlessly, if we give it a chance. Both suggestions can be adopted, if you like, but I cannot see any direct evidence for them. You may say that Joseph K enters his own subconsciousness without being able to do any analytical work there. He meets his guilt but he cannot make sense of what his superego tells him. He lives in denial, thinking that he is innocent, although the Law knows better.
I reject all such suggestions simply because the narrative fails to support them. I see the narrative as the story of an impossible desire, just like in the case of K in the Castle, which is not a castle. The whole point of Joseph K’s effort is his attempt to understand the metaphor that is now called the Law.
I want to know what the Law is; that is, I am asking for the definition of it (de dicto).
I want to know what the Law says; that is, I am asking for a verdict in my case (de re).
It is clear that Joseph K cannot draw a distinction between these two formulations. If he does not figure out the first problem, the second one remains meaningless. If he starts from the second sentence, he assigns a meaning to the first one without thinking of its justification. He indeed seems to assume that what is now called the Law is what is conventionally called the law. He fails to see the intrinsically metaphoric nature of it. Joseph K should not be asking any of those questions he is asking as if the Law were law. The more he keeps asking the more confusing the case becomes. No castle on the hill exists as a place where K could try to get. This is the difference between a metonym based desire (Castle) compared to a metaphor based one (the Law). In fact, no metaphoric formulation of the goal of desire allows for the satisfaction of the desire. How could it? The task of metaphor is to enrich and divert the relevant meanings until they are intractable. This is to say, in the end you do not know what you want. This entails no satisfaction. If he wants to be a stud, what does he want? You need to provide an exact answer if you want to see what de re object corresponds with this de dicto formulation of the desire. We talk about a stud simply because we do not know, we cannot know, and we do not want to know. We leave the strange business of desire satisfaction to rest in the dense cloud of fog raised by an apt metaphor.
As I argued, metaphors travel towards some transcendent realms where their meaning feeds itself from novel, unexpected, and rarefied sources, which is to say that metaphors sometimes reach the state where they seem to work well but they in fact are meaningless, at least if we talk about cognitive meaning. Normally we compensate this by fixing the meaning of the metaphor by a convention, rather than dropping it altogether. Somehow the metaphor feels so fine and valuable that we do want to keep it. But then we require a meaning,
I already offered an example of intrinsic metaphors: all these are undecipherable without authoritative conventions. God the Creator is a possible example. Think of it. If an artist creates a statue, is this what creation is and God’s work its metaphor? I do not think so. God’s creation is the original case and artistic creation is its metaphor. But if it goes this way, we have no idea what creation means, except that it is something that an artist sometimes achieves. Holy Ghost is a metaphor of what? This metaphor is meaningless without an authoritative advice and decision. What about secular cases? You can turn many would-be metaphors into meaningless suggestions by spelling out their meaning in a narrative form, just like Kafka does in The Trial and refuses to do in The Castle where mere metonyms rule over an ironic universe. Think of the door as a metaphor in The Trial: a bailiff enters through the door, “At one there was a knock at the door and a man entered whom he had never seen before in the house.”13 When you say that much, the metaphoric use of “door” disappears. Suppose you for some reason do not know the metaphoric meaning of “He is a stud.” You tell a full story of the life in a horse breeding farm, how semen is collected, the insemination done, and the mares treated. Do you think anyone can connect these facts to the life of a successful and good looking young male? Metaphors always seem to contain conventional elements unlike similes and some poor metaphors that are only simple, condensed similes. Kafka plays with this very idea by creating an unconventional yet familiar looking metaphors without ever providing a key to their interpretation. The end of the book, in the old quarry, makes this clear. The end is ironic to the core: that way of killing a person has nothing to do with the law, neither has it nothing to do with how to resolve your guilty feelings or experienced threats. Persons, however timid or guilty, do not perish like stray dogs.
Joseph K pretends that he might come to know what the Law is and even meet with its representatives, or the high judges. He deceives himself and he is wrong, but this is not the main point. The point is that he at the same time
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F. Kafka, Complete Novels. Trs. W. and E. Muir. London: Vintage, 2008.
See A. Melberg, Theories of Mimesis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
See K. Burke, A Grammar of Motives, D: Four Master Tropes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962. Irony oratio recta indicates a denied disturbance in information flow when the speaker knows that the audience understands what is happening. You pour a drink to my lap and I do not react except by saying “nice work.” Another type of irony is irony oratio obliqua: only the audience knows that the information flow is disturbed and disturbing although the observed speakers should and could see it that way, too.
The Castle. Kafka, 2008, p. 12.
This is called polymorphy. “Jesus was capable of appearing in various different forms simultaneously.” The same applies to the Devil, or “the polymorphous Satan” in early Christian writing. If the change is permanent, it is metamorphosis. Klamm may indeed be polymorphic. (I. Czachesz, The Grotesque Body in Early Christian Discourse. London: Routledge, 2014, pp. 115, 117). Of course, demons may have no fixed shape and thus Klamm can also be seen as a demonic character.
The Castle. Tr. A. Bell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Wiktionary defines “paradiastole”: A form of euphemism in which a positive synonym is substituted for a negative word. Actually, the relevant expression need not be a euphemism as it may be used ironically, like here. The Bible says, for instance, the last come first and first come last, which is a paradiastolic depiction of the human condition.
Hermetica, “Corpus Hermeticum ii.” Tr. B.P. Copenhaver. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 11.
The Trial. Kafka, 2008, p. 3.
The Trial. Kafka, 2008, Ch. 5 “The Whipper.” This chapter is easy to read as an expression of Joseph K’s raw guilt feelings: he is as if responsible for the suffering of the bailiffs because he has filed a complaint about them, which he knows he has not done. Again he is accused of something he has not done.
In his excellent biography Kafka, The Early Years (Tr. S. Frisch. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017) Reiner Stach offers some typical, biographical interpretative keys, as if he could not resist the temptation, see pp. 66f. Then p. 71 seems to condemn the earlier interpretative method as definitely “naïve.”
The Trial. Kafka, 2008, p. 3.
Cf. E.R. MacCormac, A Cognitive Theory of Metaphor. Cambridge: The mit Press, 1988.