Patrick Gallagher | The Redaction of Space: Segregation and the Urban Imagination in Franz Kafka’s The Trial
One of the most fascinating characteristics of Franz Kafka’s fiction is the wealth of missing information. The Trial provides a uniquely fascinating trove of lacunae in its portrayal of the city where Josef K. lives, works, and strives to assert his “innocence” of a never-specified crime. Not only does the city (famously) lack a name, but neither is there any sense of how the areas of the city are related to one another geographically. Rather than as a single map, constructed of contiguous neighborhoods, the different areas visited by K. in The Trial each appear as though suspended on a distinct plane of their own. This paper will situate The Trial in dialogue with Henri Lefebvre’s The Right to the City in order to show how the novel’s geographical lacunae comment on the imaginative culture of the industrial city.
As an element of the plot, the city does not figure strongly in The Trial. Josef K.’s Trial gives the character a tour of his city, an excuse to visit quarters that he never would otherwise, and an opportunity to understand the place that his life and routine occupy within a large, complex urban framework. Yet it is also true that this is an opportunity that Josef K. does not accept: K. never shows an increased level of familiarity or comfort with his city, much less of the kind that would help him understand his own predicament. The frequent and conspicuous references to urban scenery that the novel makes all the same—particularly in the crowded, dilapidated, yet bawdy and vital “Vorstadt” in which much of the “Court” appears to be headquartered—warrant attention for the precise reason that they seem to have no significance.
This paper will take as its point of departure the novel’s very failure to integrate its physical descriptions of K.’s city into the narrative in any immediately apparent fashion. With reference to the novel’s well known use of free indirect discourse, the paper will then show how the novel’s failure to narratively integrate K.’s city contributes to the same narrative technique as does free indirect discourse, namely that of representing K.’s conscious thoughts without comment. Finally, the paper will engage the novel’s portrayal of K.’s splintered geographical imagination with Lefebvre’s discussions of the imaginative impoverishment of the urban by segregation in The Right to the City. In my reading, the extent to which K.’s mind erases the connections between spaces will be shown to operate ideologically, obfuscating production as such from the urban fabric, but, paradoxically, only insofar as it affirms the city as a site of freedom of imaginative production.