The Telling of Lies and the Casting of Lots: Franz Kafka’s The Trial and the Eternal Undecidability of the Scapegoat

This chapter continues the discussion of the accused as scapegoat through an examination of one of the greatest texts in law-and-literature, Fran Kafka’s The Trial. The drama of Josef K. can be understood as the demystification of legal process as a mechanism of scapegoating in which the violence of the community is directed at a ritualistically selected sacrificial victim. What Kafka, or ‘Franz K.,’ did so supremely well is to undertake this deconstruction of the law exclusively from the perspective of the scapegoat: the novel is a running commentary on the inherent arbitrariness, or ‘undecidability’, of the pre-representational logic of sacrificial substitution told from the point of view of the sacrificial goat from the Book of Leviticus. But I also argue, following Elias Canetti, that The Trial doubles as a real-time commentary on the ‘trial’ underwent by Franz K. following the collapse of his engagement to Felicia Bauer. Josef K. and Franz K. are ‘double doubles,’ both with each other and with the two sacrificial offerings to the Lord in the Book of Leviticus, the goat for Azazel and the goat of the sin offering. What undermines the facile contemporary interpretation of Franz K. as persecuted but innocent neurotic are the clear parallels between his own predicament and that of his textual double Josef K. Both really are guilty, but not of the unspecified accusation of some kind of visible legalistic transgression; rather, it is the mis-recognized mimetic ‘sin’ of metaphysical desire and ressentiment.