1. The Manuscript
After Franz Kafka’s death (1883-1924), two documents
known as the will were found amongst
his papers, in which he had asked Max
Brod to collect all of his writing: “his diaries, manuscripts, letters (his own
and from others), drawings, etc” and to burn them “without leaving anything
behind and without reading anything.” Brod recovered almost everything that had
been left by his friend but not with the intention of carrying out the request,
but rather to do exactly the opposite, that is to say, to publish the diaries,
manuscripts, letters (his own and from others), drawings, etc; Brod was
convinced that his friend was a saint who had brought with him a message of
salvation for humanity.
The first work
published by the hand of Brod was The
Trial, the second of three novels which Kafka had written, and the one
Kafka wrote between August 1914 and January 1915. In 1920 he gave the
manuscript of the novel to his friend and literary executor, Max Brod, who edited the text for publication by Verlag Die Schmiede, in April, 1925, ten months after the author’s death
that had occurred on June 3, 1924.The manuscript became a puzzle to editors of “The Trial” to the present
time.
It turns out
that the chapters of the novel were kept in separate envelops, not numbered and
with no hint as to what their place was in the novel; some of the chapters,
according to Brod, had not even been completed. Then Brod eliminated those
chapters he considered to be unfinished and he organized the others according
to his own criteria: “My work on the great bundle of papers which at the time
represented this novel ─he wrote─ was confined to separating the finished from
the unfinished chapters”.
This is why The Trial´s first edition appeared with
only eleven chapters out of the seventeen present in the original manuscript,
in the following order:
2.
First
Interrogation
3.
In the Empty
Courtroom. The Student. The Offices
4.
Fräulein
Bürstner‘s Friend.
5.
The Whipper
6.
K.’s Uncle. Leni
7.
Lawyer.
Manufacturer. Painter.
8.
Block, the
Tradesman. Dismissal of the Lawyer
9.
In the Cathedral
10. The End
The second edition published by Schocken in 1935
included the remaining chapters (five out of six) not listed in the first
edition, in an appendix, where they have remained up to now. Brod did not
include the chapter “A Dream” because Kafka had already published it in a
collection of short stories known as “A Country Doctor” (1918)
Appendix to the second edition
·
On the Way to
Elsa
·
Journey to his
Mother
·
Prosecuting
Counsel
·
The House
·
Conflict with
the Assistant Manager
Ever since the appendix was first presented, scholars
familiar with The Trial have tried to
find where in the novel those chapters can fit, because, regardless of the fact
that they are still unfinished, it is preferable to have them occupy the right
place in the book rather than piled up in an appendix.
The first intent at organizing The Trial came from Herman Uyttersprot, who proposed a revision of
the novel structure. According to Uyttersprot, it was possible through content
analysis to temporarily place the chapters and incidents of the novel to
determine its order of succession. But, nobody accepted the “concrete and
sufficient chronology” developed by him, starting with Brod, who found
extremely troublesome the excessive number of connections.
Later, other academics such as Hans Elema (1977) and
Christian Eschweiler (1988) proposed different structures that were not
accepted either, among other reasons because it was said that as long as the
manuscripts were not available any attempt to organize the chapters of the book
would be judged as mere speculation. The
manuscripts were not accessible because Brod kept them locked and did not allow
anyone to review them.
After Brod’s death in 1968, his secretary Esther Hoffe
inherited the manuscripts. In 1987, Ms. Hoffe consigned them with Sotheby’s to
be auctioned, and there the manuscript of The
Trial was acquired by the German Literature Archive in Marchbach, where
they are currently kept.
But, having the manuscript of The
Trial in their hands, was of little help to the scholars that, who since
1978 and with the support of the German government, were preparing a critical
edition of the Complete Works by Franz Kafka, not only because the chapters
were kept in non-numbered envelopes but also because three of the envelopes
contained files with various chapters written sequentially in what seemed to be
an arbitrary order, turning the structure of the novel into a real enigma
Fig.1.
In 1990, The Trial was
published as the third and last volume of the novels of German Critical Edition
of Kafka’s complete works, ending as an impoverished version of the 1935
edition. However, it is called the “definite edition”.
German
Critical Edition’s Structure of The Trial (1990)
·
The Arrest.
·
Conversation with Frau
Grubach. Then Fräulein Bürstner
·
First Interrrogation
·
In the Empty Courtroom.
The Student. The Offices
·
The Whipper
·
K.’s Uncle. Leni
·
Lawyer. Manufacturer.
Painter.
·
Block, the Tradesman.
Dismissal of the Lawyer
·
In the Cathedral
·
The End
Appendix
·
Fräulein Bürstner’s
Friend
·
Prosecuting Counsel
·
On the Way to Elsa
·
Conflict with the
Assistant Manager
·
The House
·
Journey to his Mother
In early 1995, Stroemfeld Verlag decided to cut to the chase with a
facsimile edition of the manuscripts, in separate envelopes just like the
originals, so that it would be up to the readers to order the chapters as they
pleased. The same year, Schocken Books published Brod’s edition again, referring
to it as the “definitive edition,” and sending a clear message to Fischer
Publishing House to “leave the novel as it was before, it cannot be improved.”
In 2002, the
problem of the order of the chapters of The
Trial was “officially” declared unsolvable in the second volume of Kafka’s
biography, “The Decisive Years”, by Reiner Stach:
“With the manuscript in its current state, the problem is unsolvable. We
can only hope that one day a table of contents written by Kafka himself might
be discovered in a forgotten attic in Prague.”
For the first time all Kafka
experts seemed to agree but only because they didn’t have to deal anymore with
that nightmare.
2. The Internal Structure of The
Trial
The situation was thus when the new kid on the block discovered that The
Trial is a palimpsest of Crime and
Punishment in that Kafka uses Dostoevsky’s text to cryptically narrate his
relations with Felice Bauer, particularly the relations of his marriage promise
- the rupture of which being the principal theme of the novel. This signifies
that The Trial has an onion-esque structure
with three texts or superimposed layers: the first layer is the base text, Crime and Punishment, which serves as
the backdrop; the second is the biographical element (real) of the story; the
interweaving of these two (the actual work) is the third layer, the only layer
visible for the eyes of the reader, and that which envelops the first two.
The history of science is full of many so called
unsolvable problems that were easily solved by a simple change of point of
view, or by the development of a new method. The discovery that The Trial is a palimpsest was definitive
for its arrangement because the key was not in The Trial, the most superficial layer of the palimpsest, but rather
in Crime and Punishment, the deep
layer that supported and gave meaning to the story.
To write The Trial”, Kafka disassembled all and
each one of the parts of Crime and
punishment and selected the blocks that he needed for his own construction.
So, The Trial is structured as a
puzzle made up of the chapters of Crime
and Punishment from where the chapters of The Trial come from. To be solved, the
problem demanded a new method, a type of X-rays, that would allow the view of
the internal structure of the novel chapters in order to assemble and complete the puzzle.
The chapters of “The Trial” consist of one, two,
three, and even four pieces, such as the case of “Journey to His mother” and
“End”, whose respective X-rays are [(3, I) (4, I) (7, VI) (Epilogue)] and [(4,
I) (5, I) (2, II) (8, VI)]. These X-rays are very interesting because “Journey
to His Mother” and “End” are the last two chapters of The Trial and they are constructed with the last two chapters of Crime and Punishment [(7, VI) (8, VI)]
and the epilogue.
This provides the key to organize Kafka’s novel: the plot and structure of The Trial follow the plot and structure of Crime and Punishment. In addition, the last chapters of The Trial are the only ones that have
pieces from the first part of Dostoyevsky’s novel: [(3, I), (4, I), (5, I)] and, therefore,
“A Dream”, that comes from [(5, I)], is part of these chapters.
3. The Structure of The Trial
It is known that The
Trial lasts exactly one year: it starts with K´s detention on a Tuesday
morning, the day of his thirtieth birthday, and ends with his execution on the eve of
his thirty-first birthday; therefore, the first chapter is “The Arrest”
and the last chapter is the “End”: this allows
to establish the following successions (Table I):
All of
the proposed orders (Uyttersprot, Elema, Eschweiler) coincide with this
relative order, except the German critical edition that did not improve Brod’s
edition as others did, placing “Fräulein Bürstner’s Friend” and “Journey to His
Mother” in the corresponding places. The rest of the chapters (Table 2) cannot be placed in the
central core of the novel without making arbitrary assumptions. Let´s
look at the case in the “Prosecuting Counsel”:
Uyttersprot places it as the first chapter, Eschweiler as the second,
Elema as the seventh and Pasley (German critical edition) changes the place
Brod had assigned it in the appendix.
So, the only thing that
can be said with certainty about the structure of The Trial is that 10 of its seventeen chapters have a sequential
known order and the remaining seven are misplaced waiting to find a definite
place in the novel. Now, let us give these chapters the order that results in
placing their respective radiographs in line with the structure of Crime and punishment (Table 2). With X-rays
we get the structure of The Trial
because the X-rays of the chapters fit like pieces of a puzzle.
The Trial mirrors the linear structure of Crime and Punishment using the
transitions in the chapters in Tables 1 and 2, which is proof of the
craftsmanship with which Kafka wrote the novel. Until now, specialized critics
have considered Kafka to be an improviser, a literary Mozart, and no one
seemed to suspect the opposite: that he was a patient and accomplished
craftsman with such a sophisticated technique and construction method that he
could create a complex literary architecture in which he synchronized scenes,
characters, and dialogues that follow a structure and plot parallel to those of
Crime and Punishment until the end.
With X-rays we get the structure
of “The Trial” because the X-rays of the chapters fit like pieces of a puzzle: The first group in Table 1 finishes in
the chapter “In the Empty Assembly Hall / The Student / The Court Offices”,
whose radiography (1, II) continues in “The Flogger” (2, II). Then, (6, II) and
(7, II) are related to “To Elsa’s” and “Prosecutor”, respectively. The second
group in Table 1 ends with “Block, the Businessman / Dismissal of the Lawyer”,
whose radiograph (5, IV) continues in “The House” (6, IV). The next chapters
are “In the Cathedral” (2, VI) and “Battle with the Deputy Manager” (3, VI). In
Table 1, only the last two chapters in The Trial have pieces from Part
I, but they are also inspired by the last two chapters of Crime and
Punishment, i.e., (7, VI) and (8, VI). Therefore, “A dream” precedes
them.
The X-rays come from the Crime and Punishment quotes hidden in
the texts of The Trial, they can be
verified, are objective and, therefore, are legitimate. The probability that
the structure of (Table 3.) be
fortuitous is zero. The solution is incontrovertible: mathematical.
