SOURCE: Low, Andrew. “Bernard Williams, Moral Law, and Kafka's Der Prozess.” Symposium: A Quarterly Journal of Modern Foreign Literatures 52, no. 3 (fall 1998): 142-54.

[In the following essay, Low focuses on Kafka's depiction of justice and morality in The Trial, suggesting that his notion of it is a complex, nuanced one not easily summarized by modern critics.]

It would be inaccurate to label as “postmodern” Bernard Williams's criticisms, written in the last several decades, of the major Western traditions of philosophical ethics—inaccurate, but not altogether misleading. Without rejecting as necessarily ideological any competence claims of reason, and without forswearing all attempts to ground a view of ethics in a rational (for him, this will ultimately mean scientific) study of human beings and their social worlds, he nevertheless provides a highly solvent critique of the most familiar attempts of Western reason to establish a unified discipline of ethics. In its place, he introduces a loose aggregation of considerations, centrifugal to the point of disintegration. This taste for the decentered and plural is immediately recognizable as a dominant feature of contemporary intellectual, artistic, and political style. Williams claims that his ethical revisionism supplies a singularly appropriate fit for this predisposition.

Though Williams and his work are deeply serious, the contemporary celebration of the centrifugal, in general, sometimes seems less so. This essay confronts Williams with a representative work of Franz Kafka, whose own position, in its rich ambivalence toward the fragmentary and decentered, provides, I think, a corrective to an all-too-easy acceptance. Much of Kafka's oeuvre consists of fragments; it has the appearance of reflecting a rationally and religiously centerless experience. Nevertheless, it cannot be called either a straightforward celebration or even simply the sober reflection of modern fragmentation.

The modernism under which Kafka's work is usually categorized is itself a nice example of unclarity about the identification and ambivalence surrounding the status of the fragmentary. When the style first appeared, some interpreted it as the victory of an epistemologically irresponsible incoherence and culturally decadent centrifugality; some thought its fragmentation honest and beneficent. Others tended to see in the style precisely the opposite: a new and promising flowering of the centuries-old but by definition “modern” urge towards rational centeredness; still others saw a noxious totalitarianism in this drive for completeness.¹ I argue here in accordance with Kafka, as it were, and against Williams (who does not directly address Kafka's work) that insofar as ethics is concerned, the uncertainty about uncertainty that is characteristic of Kafka, and to some extent of modernism generally, and the unwillingness simply to celebrate, or entirely to acquiesce in what is fragmentary or ungrounded, constitute in fact a defensible response to the insistent claims on their behalf. Kafka appears to occupy a kind of middle ground between Williams on one side, who denies the existence of a moral law, and Kant on the other, who insists not just upon its existence, but its accessibility as well.

It is a familiar paradox that what is newest is often a resurrection and reinterpretation of what is oldest. The twentieth century is perhaps less dependent on classical antiquity for its innovations than earlier centuries have been, but calls for a return to some aspect of Greekness, or laments about the unlikelihood of such a return, are not unfamiliar even at a historical moment deeply suspicious of Helenophilia. One familiar form of this taking of bearings by reference to ancient Greece has been to measure the advance of an unsettling process of fragmentation understood to be a consequence of modernity, or simply part of its definition, against an apparent wholeness and centeredness of the Greeks at some point in their history (which point varies in different accounts). This type of philosophical-sociological elegy goes back at least as far as Schiller and continues in the twentieth century in the work of Lukács, Heidegger, and Leo Strauss and among contemporaries, in that of Alisdair MacIntyre and to some extent that of Martha Nussbaum.

It is one of the more interesting features of Bernard Williams's ethics that so neatly inverts this scheme. In his recent Shame and Necessity (1993), he returns, as did Nietzsche and Lukács, to Homer and the Greek tragedians to recover and reassemble paradigmatic forms of life and awareness, which he then employs to assess and diagnose contemporary, reduced, or sometimes simply false forms. In an affront to long tradition, however, he sees this falseness as lying precisely in a modern proclivity to an unreal wholeness and centeredness, and values Homeric and tragic-age alternatives just because of a forthright openness to and acceptance of fragmentation.

Among Williams's concerns during the last two decades has been the attempt to reassess critically, and largely to reject, the Western tradition of philosophical ethics since Plato. Although he finds problems with other forms of ethical theory, such as contractualism, linguistic analysis, and utilitarianism, it is Kantianism that he seems particularly anxious to refute, for he understands it not simply as one philosophical school among others, but as the explicit working out of many of the dominant ethical assumptions that have established themselves over the last two millennia and that are responsible for shaping, or as he argues, distorting, our thinking on the subject generally. Such assumptions, partly Platonic and partly Christian in origin, have had a long run, but they have now, Williams believes, receded to the point that we are finally in a position to redescribe our ethical experience freshly and without the confusions and mistakes that these Platonic-Christian-Kantian presuppositions have fostered.

As we set about doing so, Williams suggests, we find that the ethical conceptions of the Greeks before Plato are “more secure than our own” ([Shame and Necessity, hereafter] SN 8). Implicit in this discovery is a moment of recognition: unlike Nietzsche's recourse to the tragic age, that of Williams involves no real revival of lost values; he speaks instead of preparing the way for a long-delayed acknowledgment of already existing but suppressed ethical continuities. At present, Kant, who supplies a rigorous and vital reformulation of the intervening ethical and religious tradition, and the inchoate assumptions it shares with more popular manifestations of this tradition, are seen as the central obstacles to this necessary acknowledgment.

Williams concludes his Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985) with a sustained attack on these Kantian-traditional obstacles, which he calls simply “the morality system”:

The philosopher who has given the purest, deepest, and most thorough representation of morality is Kant. But morality is not an invention of philosophers. It is the outlook, or, incoherently, part of the outlook, of almost all of us.

(174)

The elements of the morality system to which he objects are as follows. Ethical life, he urges, is not to be seen exclusively, or even primarily, as a matter of recognizing and responding to obligations, the central, even exclusive category of “morality.” Ethics is not properly to be understood as being, in Kant's term, “categorical”; that is, ethical considerations should not be conceived as always and everywhere trumping other kinds of considerations. Ethical life is not, as morality has it, necessarily indifferent to pleasure or to emotions generally, nor is it situated in an a priori realm that hovers above the specificity of individual character. Ethical life cannot be characterized in Kantian fashion as occurring in a realm of pure freedom: the morality system puts “too much pressure on the subject of the voluntary” by requiring a voluntariness “that will be total and will cut through character and psychological or social determination” ([Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, hereafter] ELP 194). Ethical considerations do not reveal themselves in the shape of a moral law or maxim; they are not just a matter of reason and philosophy, do not form an autonomous or even a clearly definable sphere, and so are not sharply divided from other sorts of concerns.

In Shame and Necessity, Williams's preoccupations and central categories remain essentially the same, but he now attempts to flesh out the alternative to the “morality system” through a reading of Homer and the tragedians. “We are,” Williams concludes,

in an ethical condition that lies not only beyond Christianity, but beyond its Kantian and its Hegelian legacies. … We know that the world was not made for us, or we for the world, that our history tells no purposive story, and that there is no position outside the world or outside history from which we might hope to authenticate our activities. We have to acknowledge the hideous costs of many human achievements that we value, including this reflective sense itself. … We are, in our ethical situation, more like human beings in antiquity than any Western people have been in the meantime.

(166)

It is the honest acknowledgment of such division and homelessness that Williams appreciates in the early Greeks, who do not seem to have been under the illusion that the world of human experience could derive its ultimate meaning from and find its center in a single integral moral system. (Compare, in passing, this savvy, postmodern Homer with the archetypally premodern one invoked by Lukács in the somewhat embarrassingly lyrical opening lines of The Theory of the Novel:

Happy are those ages when the starry sky is the map of all possible paths. … Everything in such ages is new and yet familiar, full of adventure and yet their own. The world is wide and yet it is like a home, for the fire that burns in the soul is of the same essential nature as the stars; the world and the self, the light and the fire, are sharply distinct, yet they never become permanent strangers to one another. … Thus each action of the soul becomes meaningful and rounded in this duality, complete in meaning—in sense.

(29)

The argument of Shame and Necessity is that because of the similarity of our cultural situations, we post-Christian post-Kantians have a direct and heretofore largely unrecognized connection to the ethical outlook of much of pre-Platonic Greek literature (Plato having been among the first of the false harmonizers). This connection is to be sketched in the form of what Williams calls “structural substitutions” (164). Though Williams's ancients and moderns are similar in their refusal to represent their self-understandings as in any kind of harmony with their world, so that the structures of the mind and experience are conceived as at odds with that of nature, their respective vocabularies for describing and interpreting these disharmonies differ, and some effort is required to bring them into alignment. Once this alignment has been worked out, we should be able, Williams claims, without serious distortion to effect substitutions between essentially equivalent terms.

Thus, Homer's gods often intervene to motivate a mortal to select one course of action over another. We might reflect at such moments that we ourselves are often at a loss to explain motivations adequately, our own as well as those of others, and that this lack of clarity is essentially what the gods of Homer express:

People can act for reasons, and those reasons often explain what they do; but why one reason should prevail rather than another, or take over someone's attention, can remain hidden. Homer's gods, in cases such as these, operate in the place of those hidden causes.

(32)

It should be noted that Williams does not resort to literature simply for examples or demonstrations of ethical principles properly at home in philosophy; it is an important part of his project to deny philosophy any privileged access to genuine ethical experience. This experience he conceives to be as much a matter of imagination as of anything else, and to be, in its complexity and unavoidable tensions and contradictions—this, again, in contrast to the oversimplifications of “morality”—particularly suited to literary articulation.

The ancient ethical categories for which Williams is especially concerned to show plausible modern substitutes are the “shame” and “necessity” of his title. Under “necessity” we are to understand several related phenomena: fate, the pollution or miasma that befalls those like Oedipus who commit even unwitting crimes, and the form of social necessity that subjects some, without justification, to slavery. The arguments Williams brings to support his assertion of the currency and relevance of these categories, or their equivalents, are closely related to those he made in a suggestive earlier essay called “Moral Luck.”

In the Kantian-traditional conception, luck and morality are mutually exclusive terms: by definition “morality” governs the realm, posited by practical reason, of human freedom. Luck is altogether outside of this realm, so morally relevant experience is luck-free. According to the morality system, morality is the central category for the interpretation and assessment of human activity generally; thus, at the core of its significance, human action is immune to luck. This conclusion Williams sees as an example of modern delusions on the subject of the possibility of wholeness and harmony. To demonstrate the sort of conflict and disorientation that arises when ethical experience is more directly and honestly addressed, he considers whether the painter Paul Gauguin might have been justified in ignoring so completely his immediate human obligations in order to pursue his art.

He concludes that because of his artistic success, Gauguin could perhaps have been able eventually to justify himself, to some people at least, though perhaps never sufficiently to those whom he had directly wronged. This self-justification, however, would lie entirely outside of the morality system: it could not be reduced to a matter of rule following, and would in any case be possible only ex post facto. If he had turned out to be a less-interesting artist, he would have had little that was pertinent to say on his own behalf. His exclusive devotion to painting was thus not just prudentially, but even ethically, a throw of the dice, though in this instance aesthetic concerns might properly be said to outweigh ethical ones. This is Williams's “moral luck”: The morality system built on the concept of obligation has been decentered and therefore supplanted; ethics has been removed from the calm of a realm of pure freedom controlled completely by the will and transplanted into the stormy realm of historical contingency, where luck has a part in the framing of one's self-justifications, and so of one's self-understandings as well. One finds oneself constantly in a state of being ethically exposed, as it were.

It is Williams's contention that Greeks before Plato recognized and accepted this ethical exposure. Whereas Bruno Snell had found in Homer no conception of integral selfhood, in part because he lacked the word and apparently the concept of a sovereign “will,” Williams argues that there is in Homer precisely as much integral selfhood as one needs to make sense of experience. The notion of a sovereign will, he maintains, represents a false psychologizing of ethics; without the conception of a fixed moral law to give it shape, the will dissolves into something more liquid, namely, a process by which deliberation yields decisions based simply upon whatever considerations suggest themselves as most important from one moment to the next.

Because “shame” is not as closely tied to a conception of the will as is its morality-system counterpart “guilt” (for one can be ashamed merely at being struck by some misfortune), and is exposed to circumstance in a way that guilt is not, Williams presses the claim of shame to be ethically more useful than the idea of guilt, which is usually assumed to represent a higher stage of ethical development. For much the same reason, he holds the tragic conception of pollution or “miasma” to be of continuing relevance: someone who accidentally ran over a child would be an ethical monster if he or she were able to reason himself or herself out of feeling something like miasma even now. And the acceptance of the (bad) luck that made some people slaves simply because no one could conceive of a social order working properly without slaves is not, Williams suggests, altogether without economic parallels now. In this fashion he defends—by finding contemporary equivalents for them—the pre-morality, and in his view usefully unsystematic ethical concepts of Greek epic and tragedy.

Franz Kafka's Der Prozess seems an appropriate site for testing Williams's affirmation of the immediate relevance of early Greek ethics for modern sensibilities: On the subjects of modern sensibility about shame and guilt, miasmic pollution, the status of moral law, and the ethical role of luck, this text seems an especially germane witness. The problem, of course, is that the work is variously interpreted, and with respect to precisely those points. Although it would be an oversimplification to reduce this variety to a dispute between only two sides, something like a pattern of figure/ground reversals emerges out of much of the criticism of this novel. One side maintains that Joseph K. is innocent, more or less, and the machinery of the law is culpable (J. P. Stern is a good example of this group; he holds that Kafka, in a prophetic mode, is anticipating the Third Reich). The other side holds the opposite to be true (Ingeborg Henel argues that K. succumbs to the illusion that “the authorities are the obstacle to the law, instead of seeking it within”).

Milan Kundera provides a recent restatement of the first position in his discussion of Kafka in Testaments Betrayed. His is a nuanced reading; indeed it is about nuance in reading, directing itself, much like the work of Williams that we have been considering, against a brittle and reductive moralism, this time one that boils down the life and work of politically controversial but culturally important figures like Heidegger, Mayakovsky, and Ezra Pound to a single question of political morality, to decide which later generations feel competent to establish themselves as a tribunal to sit in judgment. Unlike Orwell's 1984, which, Kundera maintains, as a bad novel, reduces all of life to a single dimension, Kafka's Prozess, more sensitive to the demands of the novel form, both avoids and criticizes such narrowness. Kundera treats the trial of Joseph K. as demonstrating (few surprises here) the flattening instrumentalization of the person by such dehumanizing forces as bureaucracy, technology, history, and particularly the clichés of mass moralism. His trial comes to absorb K. completely, depersonalizes him, induces in him an artificial sense of guilt, and makes him ridiculous as it does so. Here and there, however, windows into a wider and richer world are seen to appear—for example, into an enlivening quiddity that evades reductive moral categories, an immediacy that Kundera finds invoked in the description of the street scene that K. encounters as he is attempting to track down (time and place had been left unspecified) his first interrogation:

Most of the windows were occupied, men in shirtsleeves were leaning there smoking or holding little children carefully and tenderly on the windowsills. Other windows were piled high with bedding, above which the disheveled head of a woman would appear for a moment. … Near him a barefooted man was sitting on a crate reading a newspaper. Two boys were seesawing on a handcart. A frail young girl was standing at a pump in her nightdress and gazing at K. while she filled her jug with water.

These sentences remind Kundera of

Flaubert's descriptions: concise; visually rich; a sense of detail, none of which is clichéd. That power of description makes clear how thirsty K. is for reality, how avidly he drinks up the world that, just a moment earlier, was eclipsed by worries about the trial.

(223)

Despite Kundera, however, it is difficult to find in the novel's descriptions anything suggestive of a rich multifacetedness in things. Rather, these descriptions seem hollow, coolly alien, and random. In this they are similar not only to the sometimes randomly episodic structure of the novel (which was not, as Malcolm Pasley has shown, conceived or executed as an organic whole), but also to its many somewhat rational-sounding discursive or deliberative passages, such as the long exercise in interpretation appended to the “Vor dem Gesetz” parable: The novel and its parts share a drily mechanistic and merely additive principle of composition, apparently without the redemptive interruption of any of Kundera's “windows.” The passage quoted above actually begins—unpromisingly for someone looking to it for an example of uncorrupted vitality—thus:

Er hatte gedacht, das Haus schon von der Ferne an irgendeinem Zeichen, das er sich selbst nicht genau vorgestellt hatte, oder an einer besonderen Bewegung vor dem Eingang schon von weitem zu erkennen. Aber die Juliusstraße, in der es sein sollte und an deren Beginn K. einen Augenblick lang stehenblieb, enthielt auf beiden Seiten fast ganz einförmige Häuser, hohe, graue, von armen Leuten bewohnte Miethäuser.

(34)²

It is a perverse reading that sees any vibrant immediacy in the monotonous indeterminacy sketched here; Kundera's reference to Flaubert is doubtless apt, but precisely because Flaubert's descriptions are constantly being colonized, in a weary sort of way, by flagrant pointlessness and self-conscious clichés.

Indeed, Kafka seems to belie Williams's suggestion (Martha Nussbaum and Charles Taylor have made arguments similar to that of Williams recently) that literature, because of its sensitivity to the rich and variegated surface of human experience and its resistance to reductive systematization, is closer to the heart of ethical life than is philosophy. Kafka tends rather to undermine through mechanization all the major discursive forms that participate in the novel, its narrative, description, and discursiveness.

If there are in the novel no windows into richness and immediacy, the thematic structure that Kundera attributes to it, borne by the opposition between vital specificity and individuality on one hand (glimpsed here and there by K. in moments of private perception) and a reductive, totalitarian bureaucracy on the other (embodied in K.'s vaguely public trial), falls apart.

Other formulations of the “K. is innocent” reading would seem to require something similar to Kundera's windows, something sane and whole that is ruined by the invasive tribunal. But nothing of the sort makes an appearance. The remote bureaucratism manifest in the arrest and trial turns out, in fact, not to be so very invasive at all: The bureaucracy and hierarchies of Joseph K.'s office life, with its power plays and arbitrary exhibitions of authority, are altogether of a piece with the bureaucracy and hierarchies of the legal system that claims him. The only significant difference between the two is K.'s relative status in them: he seems quite at home amid the mystifications of the workplace, where he has risen to respectability, whereas his position before the law is, for the most part, lowly.

What changes with his arrest is thus not really the form of K.'s life, which remains bureaucratically determined, but its substance or focus: He is forced to concern himself directly with himself, his past and its justification. Even when at work, he finds his attention drawn in the (for him) unusual direction described here:

Der Gedanke an den Prozeß verließ ihn nicht mehr. Öfters schon hatte er überlegt, ob es nicht gut wäre, eine Verteidigungsschrift auszuarbeiten und bei Gericht einzureichen. Er wollte darin eine kurze Lebensbeschreibung vorlegen und bei jedem irgendwie wichtigeren Ereignis erklären, aus welchen Gründen er so gehandelt hatte, ob diese Handlungsweise nach seinem gegenwärtigen Urteil zu verwerfen oder zu billigen war und welche Gründe er für dieses oder jenes anführen konnte.

(98)³

This retro- and introspection represents a genuinely new note in the novel, whose form-giving structure thus seems to be supplied not by an opposition between a sane private life and an irrational and oppressive public one, but by one between a state of thoughtless absorption in the hierarchies and concerns of commercial life, and a more ethically self-aware involvement in those of the legal order. Though there is considerable overlap, these two hierarchies seem susceptible to demarcation: The office hierarchy peaks in a director whose chief and perhaps only distinction lies apparently in his fluency in Italian; the legal hierarchy, though its visible lower strata are humanly sloppy and corrupt, peaks somewhere entirely out of view in a conception of law striking in its transcendent purity. This ideal is, of course, never directly experienced as something realized, but the sense of its existence provides the legal sphere with a seriousness that the commercial one cannot achieve; if we are provided with any window into meaningfulness, it is here. That Joseph K. becomes so consumed by his trial seems indicative not so much of his succumbing to totalitarian injustice, as of his first awakening to the complexities of ethical life.

This might suggest (a) a Heideggerian reading, according to which K. passes into authenticity from conformist anonymity (this is the direction of Wilhelm Emrich's reading not just of Der Prozess but mutatis mutandis of Kafka's oeuvre generally), or (b) something more Kantian, namely, that the novel traces K.'s path into autonomy from the heteronymous realm of nature, if one emphasizes the role of the wholly transcendent law, which K. encounters or intuits for the first time as he is put on trial.

A Kantian reading does not finally work well, however, because whatever ethical quickening K. undergoes leaves him not with an autonomous guilt vis-à-vis a rationally apprehended law, but with shame before inevitable witnesses, and under rules about which most of the novel shows him struggling unsuccessfully to attain some clarity. One version of the “K. is guilty” reading, suggested by Ingeborg Henel in 1963 and defended more recently by Ritchie Robertson, locates the guilt in just that unclarity. The source of K.'s guilt has been discovered elsewhere in a sterile lovelessness, or in a certain automatization of his life, or in Kafka's own breaking of his engagement with Felice Bauer. Robertson accepts those as useful suggestions but maintains that ultimately the guilt in question is precisely that of being ignorant of the law: “Nobody is ever tried simply for not knowing the law. But there is another kind of law which can be transgressed by sheer ignorance of it, and that is the moral law” (101).

Though Derrida makes the Kantian foundations of this interpretation explicit in his treatment of the “Vor dem Gesetz” parable, Robertson does not; nevertheless, it is clearly a Kantian reading. It tends, however, to ignore the traces of ethical awareness that K. actually displays because they wear the smudge of the sloppy heteronomy of shame; the novel itself, on the other hand, insists upon the centrality of shame: Its last words, as K. dies, are: “‘Wie ein Hund,’ sagte er, es war, als sollte ihm die Scham überleben” (193).⁴ His death is observed, on the last page, by someone from a window, just as his arrest is observed from a window on the first page, by a neighbor: This constant state of being observed, and K.'s consciousness of it, ought not to be dismissed as ethically irrelevant. (Curiously, just as it is K.'s and the novel's, seeming obsessions with hierarchies that point, at their remotest extrapolation, toward a law of transcendent purity, so does the same hierarchy-awareness open out, at its other, mundane end, into a highly developed sensitivity for shame.)

Robertson assumes that in the universe invoked by the novel there really is a moral law, that it is not just an imaginative extrapolation, and that ignorance of that law constitutes K.'s crime. This works in Kant because the moral law is something that does not need to be learned, but apprehended; why it should work in Kafka is never made very clear. Though it is clear that the idea of a pristine moral law has a role to play in the novel, there is no indication that such a law is supposed actually to exist there. Indeed, the entire novel can be read, like the “Vor dem Gesetz” parable it includes, as the depiction of a fruitless search for it: however high in the legal hierarchy K. applies himself to press, the only ethically relevant motivation he discovers is the stuff of shame (judges whose portraits flatter, lawyers who require their clients to grovel). “Dein Prozeß wird vielleicht über ein niedriges Gericht gar nicht hinauskommen. Man hält wenigstens vorläufig deine Schuld für erwiesen,” K. is told toward the end, in the cathedral. “‘Ich bin aber nicht schuldig,’ sagte K., ‘Wie kann denn ein Mensch überhaupt schuldig sein. Wir sind hier doch alle Menschen, einer wie der andere’”(180).⁵ Shame before people he understands, but guilt before a moral law, apparently, is entirely beyond reach. The mechanical quality of the narrative that gives one the sense that it could go on forever seems to reflect the endlessness of K.'s hopeless approach to the law.

We assume that the man from the country who desires access to the law in “Vor dem Gesetz” comes for the purpose of some kind of redress, though he in fact makes no mention of any wrong suffered; it may be that he is simply hoping from the law what the morality system provides, a rounded wholeness and centeredness, and like Joseph K., he is looking for a refuge from luck and ethical exposure. If Williams is right that this is an illusion now beyond our capacity any longer to support—and certainly Kafka seems to suggest as much by the unapproachable remoteness of his law—he is nevertheless wrong to suppose that the return to an untroubled Homeric fragmentation is an alternative. Der Prozess is about the experience of the absence of the moral law, something Homer would have known nothing about. If it is true that modernity has lost contact with an actual moral law, our memory of or our ability to imagine such a law puts us in quite a different position from that of the early Greeks. Modern liberalism of the type outlined by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice, for example, seems to be the attempt to weave a vision of Kantian moral law into the fabric of the experience of political life in spite of its alleged absence elsewhere. In this respect, Kafka seems indeed a reliable witness to the ethical experience of modernity, but it is not quite the experience Williams describes.

The parable accurately models one aspect of Joseph K.'s story, the fruitless search for knowledge of, and unmediated access to, the law. In another respect, though, K.'s experience is quite different from that of the man from the country: Minions of the law do not just block his way to it as they point toward it (which all seems somewhat Platonic); instead they come after him and finally run him down. K. is chased by the law without knowing how he violated it; this, of course, is the substance of the by now clichéd adjective “kafkaesque.” It is also a challenge to Kantianism and a manifestation of Williams's category of “moral luck”: K.'s ethical experience is not circumscribed by the boundaries separating a sovereign will from a realm of necessity; this encounter with necessity is irredeemably heteronymous. It is portrayed as identity shaping (his trial completely consumes K.), and it simply imposes a new, unfamiliar hierarchy on top of the old and familiar ones that had already structured K.'s life. In some sense, all of these hierarchies are held in place by the shame that autonomy-conferring “morality” abhors but that Williams acknowledges. The novel's many discursive passages, particularly the inconclusive interpretative expatiations that follow the parable in the cathedral, seem to parody Kantian notions of a moral law accessible to reason alone, and the entire trial is a decadent formalism with no trace of content—this is a criticism of Kantian morality familiar since Hegel.

Still, the novel cannot really be said to parody the morality system, nor even to elegize it as something now lost beyond recovery, though Bernard Zelechow observes in Der Prozess a repetition of Adam's expulsion from Eden. “An implicit assumption in [Kafka's] worldview,” he claims, “is that God, in the most remote past, revealed the law of the universe directly. But for modern consciousness the law is known only insofar as it remains unknown” (377, 380). In another context this would make no sense at all; here it lingers on the verge of intelligibility. In any case, a direct apprehension of the law (a kind of beatific vision), and the individual autonomy together with the guilt that accompanies it, all seem more a project than a memory. Nevertheless, Joseph K. shows a certain susceptibility to their mystique: “Die Reinheit!” he blurts to his unprepared and thoroughly bourgeoise landlady, “wenn Sie die Pension rein erhalten wollen, müssen Sie zuerst mir kündigen” (24).⁶

His impurity, however, is as yet obscure and miasmic; like Orestes (though K. simply neglects his mother), he seeks absolution in a clarity about and a transparency in the law, but he never finds it, and his Furies are never transformed into avatars of morality. Though the hopeful vision of the law does not materialize, it maintains its appeal throughout. Intimations of its beauty are retained and cultivated in legends of ancient trials which, the painter tells K., are not only very beautiful but contain a certain truth as well (133). Leni, the lawyer's nurse, seems to find Joseph K. particularly attractive; it turns out that she finds all who have been indicted under the law irresistible. “Die Angeklagten sind eben die Schönsten,” observes the lawyer: “es kann … nur an dem gegen sie erhobenen Verfahren liegen, das ihnen irgendwie anhaftet” (158).⁷ The man from the country in the parable is held by the priest to have been in a sense superior to the gatekeeper who blocks him: “denn [der Mann vom Lande] sieht den Glanz, der aus dem Eingang des Gesetzes bricht, während der Türhüter als solcher wohl mit dem Rücken zum Eingang steht. …” (187).⁸ On the other hand, the doorkeeper, a servant of the law, is ennobled by his service: “Durch seinen Dienst auch nur an den Eingang des Gesetzes gebunden zu sein, ist unvergleichlich mehr, als frei in der Welt zu leben” (188).⁹

This attitude is not simply mystification, or if it is, it does not seem to have been exposed as such by modernity, pace Williams. “Justice” (if not “law”), understood very much as a part of the morality system, is frequently spoken of in similar tones even now. However ambiguous the concept of justice, it manages still to suggest a richness, plenitude, and centrality; if it is nowhere completely realized, or even entirely understood, that lack has not really dulled its luster. Kafka suggests that the contention that we have moved altogether beyond the possibility of conceiving such an ethical centeredness or groundedness is untrue, however difficult this has become. He seems, then, to offer a correction or modification of Kant on one hand and Williams on the other, in both cases in the direction of a hopeful uncertainty.

Notes

1. This contradiction in common definitions of modernism is discussed in Astrader Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990.

2. “He had thought that the house would be recognizable even at a distance by some sign which his imagination left unspecified, or by some unusual commotion before the door. But Julius-strasse, where the house was said to be and at whose end he stopped for a moment, displayed on both sides houses almost exactly alike, high gray tenements inhabited by poor people” (34).

3. “The thought of his case never left him now. He had often considered whether it would not be better to draw up a written defense and hand it in to the Court. In this defense he would give a short account of his life, and when he came to an event of any importance explain for what reasons he had acted as he did, intimate whether he approved or condemned his way of action in retrospect, and adduce grounds for the condemnation or approval” (113).

4. “‘Like a dog!’ he said; it was as if the shame of it must outlive him.”

5. “‘Your case will perhaps never get beyond a lower Court. Your guilt is supposed, for the present, at least, to have been proved.’ ‘But I am not guilty,’ said K.; ‘it's a mistake. And, if it comes to that, how can any man be called guilty? We are all simply men here, one as much as the other’” (210).

6. “‘Respectable!’ cried K. … ‘If you want to keep your house respectable you'll have to begin by giving me notice.’” (So, at any rate, runs the Muir translation; this, however, ruins my point. Reinheit is more accurately translated “cleanness” or “purity.”)

7. “[T]hose who are experienced in such matters can pick out one after another all the accused men in the largest of crowds. How do they know them? you will ask. … They know them because accused men are always the most attractive. [I]t must be the mere charge preferred against them that in some way enhances their attraction” (184).

8. “Many indeed profess to find that [the doorkeeper] is subordinate to the man even in knowledge, toward the end, at least, for the man sees the radiance that issues from the door of the Law while the doorkeeper in his official position must stand with his back to the door” (219).

9. “Whatever he may seem to us, he is yet a servant of the Law; that is, he belongs to the Law and as such is beyond human judgment. In that case one must not believe that the doorkeeper is subordinate to the man. Bound as he is by his service, even only at the door of the Law, he is incomparably greater than anyone at large in the world” (220).

Works Cited

Derrida, Jacques. “Devant la Loi.” Trans. Avital Ronell. Kafka and the Contemporary Critical Performance. Ed. Alan Udoff. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987.

Emrich, Wilhelm. Franz Kafka: A Critical Study of His Writings. Trans. Sheema Zeben Buehne. New York: Ungar, 1968.

Henel, Ingeborg. “The Legend of the Doorkeeper and Its Significance.” Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Trial: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. James Rolleston. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1976.

Kafka, Franz. Der Prozess. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1989.

———. The Trial. Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. New York: Schocken, 1968.

Kundera, Milan. Testaments Betrayed. Trans. Linda Asher. New York: HarperCollins, 1995.

Pasley, Malcolm. “Wie der Roman entstand.” Nach Erneuter Lektüre: Franz Kafkas Der Process. Ed. Hans Dieter Zimmermann. Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1992.

Robertson, Ritchie. Kafka: Judaism, Politics, and Literature. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1985.

Stern, J. P. “The Law of The Trial.” On Kafka: Semi-Centenary Perspectives. Ed. Franz Kuna. New York: Harper and Row, 1976.

Williams, Bernard. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1985.

———. Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973-1980. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981.

———. Shame and Necessity. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.

Zelechow, Bernard. “The Rejection of Tragedy in Kafka's Theological Modernism.” Journal of Literature and Theology 5 (1991): 375-3.