/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.2922324]

Just finished the Trial.
It was dry and boring. The Metamorphosis was the perfect length, and felt far more oppressive. The Trial was bad. Why is it regarded as a classic, /lit/?

[Anonymous No.2922330]

>The Trial was bad.
Your arguments being:
>dry
The translation?
>boring
As opposed to interesting? There are few qualities that a book can have that can be as subjective as those.

I mean, maybe you're right, but you're going to have to go into much more detail to support your viewpoint, rather than what you will do, which is shit on the poorly structured reasons that some tired person who's on /lit/ because he's bored and wants a break types out gives for it being good. Which proves nothing and is unproductive and boring.

[Anonymous No.2922332]

I loved it. I didn't find it either dry or boring.

[Anonymous No.2922334]

>>2922330
Yeah, what you're saying is true.
Okay. I concede that the Trial wasn't bad. I did not enjoy it.
This was probably due to the translation, but everything was written with complete objectivity. There was no flow to the writing, nothing unique about it and it felt more like stage directions than writing. The goings-on are too closely-plated with allegory to really have any significance or interest on their own, and the listless, bored prose doesn't pick up any slack.
I feel as if I gained about as much from the novel as I did from the Wikipedia plot summary of the novel.
See? I didn't shit on anyone's reasons. The initial post was just to gauge interest. This is the follow-up, only written since someone replied.
Is what I gave reason enough? Anyone have a counterpoint?

[Anonymous No.2922349]

>>2922334
I think one's enjoyment of The Trial on a less analytical level boils down to one thing. Is K interesting? The narrative is mainly the development of the characters (just the protagonist really). K is framed as this incredibly normal man undergoing a very strange process in the first chapter. But this is punctured pretty quickly with how he interacts with the people he's sharing a building with, particularly the younger woman whose name I've forgotten. However, the narrative voice remains distant and unjudgemental, and in moments of judgement even seems to treat him as normal. This dissonance is what I loved about the novel on its most basic level. And this becomes even sweeter when one considers the situation he's in. Pretty much everyone else treats it as normal. Even the narrator. Then there are the crazy-sounding inferences one can make from that, like, does the narrator treating both this and K as everyday mean that he knows something about K that K doesn't even know about himself? His and everyone else's treatment of K matches the treatment of the Trial. I have far too much written for the amount I tried to say, but fuck it, this is 4chan. No breaks either. Shameful.

[Anonymous No.2922352]

I agree that the length was not perfect, but keep in mind that it was edited by Brod, not by Kafka.
I like to think that Kafka would have edited it down to Metamorphosis length had he lived.

[Anonymous No.2922353]

>>2922352
Or he could have made it way longer. The courts have this "I can see forever" effect.

[Anonymous No.2922398]

The Trial was unfinished.

I loved it though and was sad because it has so much potential. I imagine if he went onto finish it, he would have cut so much and added/completed additional scenes.

[Anonymous No.2922417]

The detail to the most minute detail is what I love about Kafka's writing. Walter Bejamin has written about this.
If you enjoy long, flowing, elegant prose... then of course you aren't going to enjoy Kafka. That's understandable and I wont fault you for that. But you can't say that the prose is bad because of this.

Now to move on the status of it being a classic... you'll have to move past something as trite as "I didn't enjoy the prose."

When I think of literature, and I think most people could agree with this, one of the important things of a lasting piece is the impression that it leaves on the reader.


>The goings-on are too closely-plated with allegory to really have any significance or interest on their own

What does this even mean?

>I feel as if I gained about as much from the novel as I did from the Wikipedia plot summary of the novel.

Then you either didn't read carefully enough, and therefore didn't pay any attention to the motifs and references throughout the book, or you just aren't capable of reading beyond the text.

>>2922349
I agree with the essence of this post, but then we must ask ourselves for what reason was K put through this trial? Unless you start to answer that question you aren't ever going to understand why this novel is considered a classic by some.

[Anonymous No.2922426]

>>2922417
I've only read it once and should really read it again and maybe read some criticism, but to me it reeked of original sin, and K insisting his innocence was exactly the opposite of what the courts wanted him to do. I don't really know enough about theology or philosophy to take that further though. I guess I can see a parallel between government, social norms and the church in this regard, but then I feel like I'm getting too biographical.

[Anonymous No.2922432]

>>2922426
not who you're replying to, but you should check out kafka's aphorisms.

[Anonymous No.2922482]

>>2922426
>but to me it reeked of original sin

Original sin? Have you seen the way that Joseph K acts in the novel?

He basically sexually assaulted that woman in his household then smiled about it.
That fact was brought up before him in the first court meeting and he ignored it.

[Anonymous No.2922569]

aww, i loved metamorphosis, and was planning on reading this soon!

[Anonymous No.2922796]

You son of a bitch.
The Trial is my favourite novel. If you found either the K's Uncle, Leni, Painter[/spoiler/, or most especially the In The Cathedral chapter boring, you are officially a pleb (I don't give a shit if it's an overused /lit/ buzzword) and should leave this board forever.

[Anonymous No.2922798]

You son of a bitch.
The Trial is my favourite novel. If you found either the K's Uncle, Leni, Painter, or most especially the In The Cathedral chapter boring, you are officially a pleb (I don't give a shit if it's an overused /lit/ buzzword) and should leave this board forever.

[Anonymous No.2922813]

>>2922482
Are you implying he's on trial for rape and no one quite manages to tell him? Wouldn't that make the novel kind of trite?

I dunno, I prefer the interpretation where he hasn't necessarily done anything other than living in a totalitarian hellhole of a state.

[Anonymous No.2922816]

>>2922324
The Trial is my favorite novel by him, i consider 'The Castle' to be his worst personally.

You are wrong OP, atleast according to me.

[Anonymous No.2922828]

>>2922798
here.

Let me summarise briefly what I like most about The Trial, a feature it shares with many other Kafka stories (The Judgment, Before The Law, The Giant Mole, Amerika, Metamorphosis, The Urban World, In The Penal Colony, Give It Up, etc etc):

I think it and the other stories I mentioned, better than any other works of fiction or nonfiction I've read, illustrate the moral indeterminacy of much human life. What I mean by that is - most of the time in our lives we simply aren't in a position to know what we ought to be doing, whether the way we are living is damnable or virtuous. We don't have a good enough understanding of our own situation, the circumstances around which we grew up that moulded us into the people we are, the factors affecting the judgements others make of our own lives, the consequences of the actions we could undertake, etc, to ever really be in a position to understand what is right or what we should do. We rather go blindly through life, infected by the judgments of others whose opinions we can't help but be influenced by (our father-figures), and further whose opinions we can't ever really be sure have any validity; aren't the product of arrogance and prejudice, and having only our poor understanding of how the world works to see us through, acquired often through sources we often have at least some reason to believe would deliberately lie to us.

This moral indeterminacy, and really general epistemological indeterminacy, is I think an extremely significant aspect of human life, being as we are moral creatures who often act out of a desire to fulfil some purpose which we consider virtuous, and I think Kafka's fiction is of great cultural value for illustrating it so well.