Kafka Notes

I've been re-reading The Trial, and making notes as I go, marginalia. Paradoxically, I find that if I'm totally immersed in a book/text, I can make little of it, the experience is too complete. A little critical distance needs to be maintained in order to have something to say about what you have just read. It's a lower order of reading. Proper engagement is a lived experience. Some texts I refuse to comment on, because I read them over and over in order to live in them, and they in me. Moby Dick I read annually, and I look forward to it the way one looks forward to going abroad on holiday. I go live there for a while, and come back changed. I think The Trial is one of those books that displaces you outside of itself, in jolts of estrangement. It generates commentary as an attempt to assimilate it's strangeness. I think it is a primary text in the way The Book of Job is a primary text. There's no way I would want to live inside the Book of Job, or allow it to interiorise itself in me without critical examination. Likewise The Trial. Always read such books with a pencil handy, a sharp one.

1. People watching in silence - witnesses. e.g. The old woman neighbour in the opening pages.
2. Eavesdroppers not within direct line of vision.
3. Does K acquiesce voluntarily in his own arrest and trial?
4. The Law. This appears to be something different from the civic laws and customs of his country as K is familiar with them.
5. On two occasions at the time of his arrest K considers action that would be decisive in denying it's actuality, but on both occasions is stopped by considerations relating to his 'advantage' and 'superiority' over the warders. Is K being decoyed into some kind of game theory or scenario? Is it a maze of his own construction deriving out of self-considerations and ploys designed by him to preserve and bolster his self?
6. An abstract arrest?
7. 1st interrogation - the audience Rabbinical, exegetical?
8. Why is the interrogation chamber located in a suburban street, accessed, once there, through a room in a tenement block?
9. Leni - K's kiss to her fingers: Leni's response! Things we only half-mean or intend given back with the full force of their meaning as if we had fully intended them?
10. Is the sense of dislocated meaning, of the imbalance between intention and response, indicative of K's guilt, symptomatic of it, or the thing which he is guilty of?
11. Where to locate meaning in Kafka?
12. "remote, inaccessible courts", inward structures of exegesis. Fractal.
13. Imbalance between intention and response, between cause and effect, the most lucid, economical and rational description, and that which it describes. Strategies of rationality applied to the enigmatic, bestial and grotesque. The whole machinery of exegesis, of commentary and explication, running at full tilt to correct the imbalance.
14. Distant valedictory gestures: signals inviting but resisting decipherment.
15. The Law. Admittance to The Law. A man seeks admittance, why? Is The Law structure and meaning? Is The Law in it's purity, The Law itself, as opposed to it's interpretations and exegesis, the answer to the imbalance noted above?
16. At the end, K and his executioners form a Triptych, on their way to K's execution. Then as if a painting of St Stephen with a tiny urban landscape in the distance grossly intruded upon at the moment of his death by the brutal faces of two clowns, his executioners.