The Trial Rediscovered

ISBN-13: 9789584673664 / Angielski / Miękka / 2015 / 264 str.

Franz Kafka; Guillermo Sanchez Trujillo; Guillermo Sanchez Trujillo

Opis

For more than forty years, this novel remained a most absolute mystery until Letters to Felice was published in the early 1960s and it became known that the enigmatic F.B. in the Diaries, The Judgment and The Trial was Felice Bauer, an up-to-that-moment unknown Berliner who had been his girlfriend for five years and his fiancee twice. Felice Bauer's presence in The Trial made the enigma more complex because: What was Kafka's girl doing in the novel? About that time, Elias Canetti's book about the letters to Felice was published. Kafka's Other Trial: The Letters to Felice presented the hypothesis that The Trial was related with the court of law held against Kafka at the Askanischer Hof, which Kafka called "the hotel's court of law," and where the engagement between Kafka and Felice was broken. Canetti based himself on the letters and the Diaries to support his hypothesis, but very little on the text of the work itself that remains indifferent to any interpretation, as Canetti himself admitted and to whom his meditation around The Trial was an interference "intrusive as they may be, subtract subtract anything from the novel's ever increasing-mystery." As if there weren't enough problems posed by the content and interpretations of the novel, there was also a serious difficulty with the manuscript in that Kafka had kept the chapters in separate envelopes which were titled, but not with numbers, resulting in an ordering process which proved to be another enigma, this time hermetic. For this reason, the novel always appeared in ten chapters of the sixteen which make up the central bulk of the story. The remaining chapters appeared in an appendix, a decision which Max Brod, the editor, tried to justify by stating that the chapters were unfinished instead of speaking frankly and saying that he did not know what to do with them. As can be seen in the following editions, including the 1990 Critical German Edition, no one had the faintest idea where these chapters were to be placed. "With the manuscript in its current state," determined Reiner Stach, "the problem is unsolvable. We can only hope that one day a table of contents written by Kafka himself might be discovered in a forgotten attic in Prague. ...]." The situation was thus when the new kid on the block discovered that The Trial is a palimpsest of Crime and Punishment in that Kafka uses Dostoevsky's text to cryptically narrate his relations with Felice Bauer, particularly the relations of his marriage promise - the rupture of which being the principal theme of the novel. This signifies that The Trial has an onion-esque structure with three texts or superimposed layers: the first layer is the base text, Crime and Punishment, which serves as the backdrop; the second is the biographical element (real) of the story; the interweaving of these two (the actual work) is the third layer, the only layer visible for the eyes of the reader, and that which envelops the first two. ...] To write The Trial," Kafka disassembled all and each one of the parts of "Crime and punishment" and selected the blocks that he needed for his own construction, following this compositional principle: "The chapters of The Trial emerging from the same chapter or adjacent chapters] of Crime and Punishment go together." This principle easily enables the assembling of the puzzle of the novel, and the ordering of the chapters that has been sought for so many years. We now offer, in this edition, the true premiere of The Trial, appearing for the first time, complete and ordered."