Get used to calls Kafkaesque to the tragic judicial impasse, the sources that inspired Kafka’s anti-bureaucracy often go unnoticed, that rejection of a sharpened labyrinth of procedures designed to conceal and obstruct, with noise and uproar, what can be resolved in good faith. Although the character of Josef K., the protagonist from Procedurestands out because the reason for which he was accused before the courts is unknown, I was intrigued by the idea of ​​a kind of counter-novel in which the main character is guilty, but uses all the intricacies and legalities, including demanding his right to defend himself, to overshadow the guilt that is clear, obvious and inexorable, and what’s more: the culprit knows it.

Outside the context of the bureaucracy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in which Kafka was born and experienced his disintegration, there are concrete and decisive novels that fascinated the Czech author and whose influence he knew how to process: one is Michael Kohlhass (1808), by the German writer Heinrich von Kleist, and the second is empty house, by Charles Dickens, published almost fifty years later. The first is a short novel of about a hundred pages that can be read in one sitting. The author didn’t even divide it into chapters, especially because the wild escalation that Kohlhaas provokes gives no respite. It is about a horse trader who, on his usual trade route, which he traveled seventeen times, came across a new toll imposed by the castle of Tronka. Although he said he would bring the permit when he returned, they did not let him leave with the horses. After obtaining permission, on his return to the castle he found his horses abused and useless. In a series of lawsuits, where the Dresden court and then other higher authorities did not agree with him, Kohlhaas is transformed: he becomes an outlaw, a guerrilla who calls hundreds of rebels and proclaims himself “the lieutenant of the archangel Michael, who came to punish with blood and fire (.. .) the wickedness into which the world has sunk.” Burning cities and murder. A peaceful horse trader is a risk to the kingdom. He is eventually arrested. He manages to get a confession for the wrong done to him initially, but is beheaded as punishment for the disproportionate destruction he has caused. Kleist’s disturbing story, though detailing Kohlhass’s trial transformation point by point, he ends up achieving the inconclusiveness that must have fascinated Kafka. In the opening lines of his story, Kleist indicates that his neighbors would remember him as a good man if he had not “overstepped one virtue”: the disproportionate pursuit of justice, regardless of the means to the end .

WITH empty house The problem and treatment is different: the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce has not been resolved in the London courts for years. Dickens’s novel, in my edition, has 1273 pages. This case, the novel says, “still buzzes like a bumblebee”. And what is important for her Kafkaesque connection is highlighted: “This ghostly lawsuit has become so complicated over time that no one knows what it actually consists of” and “it continues to drag its terrible excess before the Court into years of hopelessness.” “. The novel’s young protagonists will devote themselves to trying to solve the case, but not before going through countless digressions and unforeseen events. A novel admired by Kafka, but also by Nabokov, Haruki Murakami and Kazuo Ishiguro, cannot be summed up at the risk of losing one of its essential novel elements: the experience of the temporal duration of reading. In both novels, the initial motivation is clouded over time, and the sense of justice is clouded into an aberration.

Arguing with a lawyer about the difficulties of approaching a perverse and evil character in the novel, the writer has no choice but to expose and distance himself, rather than judge him, which is a procedure close to the rhetorical figure of litote, i.e. a resource to say something, but without resolving it imprint of prejudice. For example, instead of saying that someone is a dwarf, lítote resorts to the construction “He is not a tall person”. This indirect route avoids qualification a priori and allows the development of the plot, and above all the risk of the writer judging his characters. I asked the lawyer what he did when he knew his client was guilty. He thought for a few seconds: he told me that he was looking for defects in the case against the client, even if he was guilty, and was asking for leniency. That’s your practical way. The risk, as Kafka helped to show in his anti-bureaucratic concern, was to understand the two fictions of Kleist and Dickens in relation to the world in which he lived and which was heralded, a complete breakdown of values ​​where recourse to formal trappings could conceal guilt, responsibility, themselves facts and start a crazy game of distractions and sounds that end up being acts of evil. And even further, in the “banality of evil”, Hannah Arendt’s controversial expression about the stupidity of Eichmann, who, without being a perverse character, wanted to be an effective employee of Hitler. There will always be plenty of excuses.

What comes after Kafka? In Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, Inconsolable, the protagonists carry a sense of guilt that torments them. But there is no court to judge them. It is your conscience that is in charge of expressing regret. The paradox is that since consciousness is responsible, it fails in its own cognitive consistency with distortions and forgetting, as happens to the narrator, Charles Ryder, in perfect narrative alienation. For better or worse, we need courts. The problem will always be those who in bad faith tighten the processes to distract from their responsibility. (OR)