An ongoing legal battle over the rights to unpublished papers by Franz Kafka
Scott Horton of
Harper's Magazine reports on the complex legal procedures surrounding recently unearthed manuscripts by Franz Kafka:
Franz Kafka’s The Trial revolves around a surrealistic legal procedure governed by a nontransparent logic. At times it seems a criticism of what scholars call “legal indeterminacy,” that is, the inability of the legal system to provide clear rules for decision. “The right understanding of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other,” Kafka writes at one point. Now a set of manuscripts that at least at one point included the text of The Trial has become the subject of legal proceedings in Israel that seem as contradictory and interminable as the novel itself. [Read More]
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I’ve been interested in Kafka for some time, and I was surprised to find out that the premise of ‘The Trail’ isn’t necessarily that ‘surrealistic’, but possibly realistic. The seemingly arbitrary trail methods employed in the novel, whereby K is tried without knowledge of the charge and without recourse, wasn’t that uncommon in continental Europe in earlier times. Judicial regimes that functioned by such means were discussed by Foucault in his ‘discipline and punish’. Granted I buy into some of the existential, sociological and psychoanalytical readings of Kafka, but it might also be that he was just describing a situation that was current.
Yes, kinda unrelated. My two cents.
kafka cant be understood merely on the basis of reading his novels
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