Barton Hall panelists' discussion on Kafka's Trial ranges from the personal to the political

By Franklin Crawford

As more than 3,000 new Cornell students settled noisily onto bleachers and metal folding chairs in the acoustically-challenged Barton Hall, Aug. 22, Provost Biddy Martin called for "order in the court" -- a jest fitting to the occasion.

Mark Combs '08, left, and Lili Xu '09 (architecture) listen to Professor David Bathrick's comments during the discussion in Barton Hall, Aug. 22. Both Combs and Xu later posed questions to the panelists. Photos by Kevin Stearns/University Photography
Panelist David Bathrick addresses the student audience during The Trial book discussion, Aug. 22.	Candice Williams '08 addresses remarks to panelist Associate Professor Cindy Hazan.

The gathering marked the first event for the university's fourth annual New Student Reading Project, a faculty panel discussion of Franz Kafka's The Trial, which was the required reading for all new students. The hour-and-a-half-long program was simulcast throughout Tompkins County on Time Warner Cable Channel 16.

Following introductory remarks from Martin, David Bathrick, the J.G. Schurman Professor of Theater, Film and Dance and professor of German studies, took to the podium. He was followed by Cindy Hazan, associate professor of human development and newly appointed dean of the Carl Becker House on West Campus; and Faust Rossi, the S.S. Leibowitz Professor of Trial Techniques at the Law School.

Making the most of their 10-minute presentations, Bathrick, Hazan and Rossi offered insights and raised questions that would serve as fodder for dialogue in the 230 small group discussions that took place across campus the following day.

After each panelist's presentation, Martin invited two or three questions from the floor. What time remained after the final presentation was given entirely to the audience -- with one exception. A videotaped query was submitted by alumnus Daniel Noll '93, speaking from Kafka's gravesite in Prague, in the Czech Republic.

Addressing the literary and cultural aspects of The Trial, Bathrick urged students to consider the voice, character and style of Kafka's work. Who is telling the story, Bathrick asked. It is a third person narration, "but it is really from the perspective of Joseph K. Every single sentence in this book could have been written as a first-person or 'I' sentence," he said.

"By shackling the narrator to Joseph K., we can only know as readers what Joseph K. knows," Bathrick argued. "It's difficult, but it also frees readers to make their own interpretation, to take risks, to go outside the box ... there are hundreds of books just on this novel and none of them really agree. That's intimidating, but it's also liberating because there are a lot of insights and questions which are not answered within the text itself."

Using Kafka's diaries and letters, Hazan sketched a psychological portrait of the author that focused on his relations with Felice Bauer. It was a romance Hazan described as "Kafka's other trial." Initially Bauer served as a muse for Kafka, inspiring him, Hazan suggested, to write some of his very best work. But as the relationship evolved from letter-writing to talk of marriage, Kafka's neuroses emerged, with tragicomic details that Hazan recited directly from the author's correspondences.

Following a torturous break-off with Bauer, the savagely self-recriminating and guilt-ridden Kafka began writing The Trial, she told the student audience.

Hazan said she was not suggesting that The Trial was simply an "autobiographical punishment fantasy. ... But thanks to Kafka himself, we know that at a time in his life when his personal guilt was high, he felt compelled to write this particular story, about a man who is the same age and similar temperament who has done nothing truly criminal, but nevertheless something that in the eyes of others deserves the ultimate punishment."

Rossi, in his discussion, speculated on the question of "Who is trying Joseph K.?" And then he offered three interpretations. The first and most obvious, he said, "is that the state is trying Joseph K. -- the state or some shadowy powerful organization that it tolerates.

"Here we take the story pretty much at face value," Rossi said. "It is a bleak tale about the destruction of an individual by an unjust system that operates without a semblance of fair process."

Other interpretations, he said, include that God is trying Joseph K., and finally, that Joseph K. is trying himself. While Rossi focused on the legal interpretation, he also quoted Richard Posner who stated that "'The Trial is about law and legal process like Orwell's Animal Farm is about animal management.'" Rossi then discussed interpretations that link symbolic passages in the book to the Jewish Kabbalah, and he also made a pitch for interpreting the novel as a self-indictment, somewhat along the lines discussed by Hazan.

Martin then opened the event to the floor, including the pre-recorded question from alumnus Noll, who originally submitted his query via web-streaming on the Internet. Cornell's Education Television Center transcribed the file to video and broadcast it on two enormous television screens hanging from the Barton rafters. The screens also showed Channel 16's TV coverage of the entire event.

Noll asked: "If Kafka were alive today, which news stories or currents events would he think most resemble events in The Trial, and why?"

Noll's question was directed to the panel, and Martin opened it up to the student audience as well. Karthik Kota, a freshman in Arts and Sciences, strode to the microphone to offer his idea of the most Kafkaesque current events.

"The imprisonment of current terrorism suspects in places like Guantanamo Bay," he posited, "... or the people who have been imprisoned in Iraq who apparently did nothing more ... than be in the wrong place at the wrong time and had to suffer in places like Abu Gharaib for months on end."

Students then lined up at the four microphones in the hall for a spirited half-hour of discussion, with assertions about the book's resonance today and questions that ranged from an exhortation to "remember the (Twin) Towers," to an observation that Joseph K. was ultimately a better person for having gone through The Trial.

Martin praised the students for their incisive questions.

The New Student Reading Project is overseen by Provost Martin and Vice Provost Isaac Kramnick, with support from the office of Susan Murphy, vice president for student and academics services.