谁能读懂这本书？我读过一些解释，最好的是sussman写的kafka` unholy trinity.还有就是下面这本书的一章。我节录后一本书的部分。
Stephen D. Dowden著《Sympathy for the Abyss——A Study in the Novel of German Modernism:
Kafka, Broch, Musil, and Thomas Mann》，Max Niemeyer Verlag Tübingen 1986
Reading Der Prozeß is like viewing the Spanish plains from the inside of Don Quixote's mind. The Archimedean point of Sancho Panza and his commentary has disappeared. With no firm and incontrovertible sense of what is real, the reader loses his footing in the traditional grounding of interpretation and is as baffled in his confrontation with the novel as Josef K. is in his confrontation with the court. 第96页
A lie is the specifically linguistic form of untruth and as such is the writer's most formidable obstacle in the pursuit of knowledge in and through literature. No longer does Kafka seek to embody truth symbolically in narrative. His new strategy is to undo the lies and deceptions of language and narrative by turning words ironically against themselves. In this way narrative points not toward some absolute meaning but toward itself as the purveyor of Spaß and Verzweiflung, Narrative is not an open door to the truth, and words are not transparent. They have instead turned out to be opaque objects in the world among its other opaque objects. 第101页
The economy of his unpretentious style testifies to Kafka's distaste for confectionery affectation in narrative. This lucidity of form stands in contradiction to the level of >meaning< in his stories. The contradiction is Kafka's self-conscious tactic. The opaque surfaces of Kafkan narrative serve to make visible the disparity between verbal signs and the things they seem to represent.They do so by calling attention to signs themselves as material things 第102页 Kafka's style exploits the conventional illusionism that is so firmly entrenched in the reading habits of the realist novel's popular audience.
He turns this convention against itself by using the language of the real to invent an impossibly irreal world. In this way Kafka parodies the
representational conventions of realism. 第103页 Kafka's aim is no longer to pour forth his inner self into symbolic signs and figures. He begins instead to probe the disturbed relationship between reality and literary expression, to show how the seemingly transparent language of realism congeals into an impenetrably dense verbal surface that calls attention to itself and shows itself in the true form of its separated state,······· 第104页 As he was beginning the project he expressed in a diary entry the fear that his ability to represent his »dreamlike inner life« may have left him forever (T, 262). This concern makes explicit his continued ambition to pour forth into symbolic narrative an unmediated vision of his inner self and thereby achieve a full unity of art and truth. 第104页 No longer does Kafka see the strength of his narrative in terms of filling every word with himself (T, 24f) or of
giving to his »dreamlike inner life« its commensurate literary form. His writing has now become an exercise in controlled duplicity. This crucial shift has occurred precisely during the period in which he was
composing Der Prozeß. 第105页 He embeds into the novel a series of »mirrors,« as it were, that reflect the fictional status of the narrative. These self-reflexive, metafictional devices are the playful vehicle of Geständnis because they confess to the reader that the novel's signs, figures, and images are mere fictions - Lüge. These mirrors of narrativity are representations -paintings, descriptions, scenarios and, especially, the prison chaplain's parable of the law - that Kafka nests into the text of the novel, which is itself a representation. K.'s confrontation with the court is identical with his attempt to decipher these representations. He takes them to be manifestations of the court's inner law and assumes that these surface features are continuous with the truth that lies beneath and beyond them. He always fails because the law always eludes the categories he tries to impose on it. 第106页 K.'s problem as a seeker of the law is analogous to Kafka's problemas a writer and the reader's problem as an interpreter.From all three points of view, representation has become something that is autonomous. It has lost its traditional tie to the truth that it is supposed to embody or re-present. Kafka's comments on the despair of writing, Josef K.'s experience with his court, and the reader's vain attempts to wrest some kind of objective meaning from the novel all point toward 第106页，接着下面 the aporia of literature as represented reality. The rift between narrative representation and the putative object of representation means a crisis of narrative art. Yet the failure of representation - or more precisely, the awareness of its inherent limitations - need not mean the failure of art itself. Kafka's disclosure of the rupture between truth and representation is simultaneously the opening up of a space from which something else can emerge. Narrative signals this event by means of a poetic articulation. This articulation is neither a representation nor objectification of that which it addresses. Instead it is something more along the order of a gesture or a hint that intimates the presence of this emergent truth. 第107页 Kafka is suggesting that this >other< cannot be named or represented at all. The alternative that he offers is Andeutung, a vague term that resists precise translation. The sense of his proposition is that language can imply or indicate the presence of a thing or event for which there exists no proper name and no basis for linguistic comparison. In remaining true to this insight Kafka honors the limits of representation. 第107-108页 The relation of song to silence, of narrative to >other< is similar in Kafka's Prozeß. Its irony makes sport of the signs and similitudes that seem to promise K. a way of grasping the law or defeating the court. Yet the grotesquely comical despair of K.'s situation is fraught with the gesture that articulates the novel's true purport: conscience. Conscience is not a thing that can be represented, yet it emerges from the seeming void that appears when representation and >objective truth< cleave and drift apart. 第108页 Kafka articulates the presence and power of conscience as it pervades and suffuses the narrative from which it arises. He provides it with a space in which it can show itself. The visible circumstances of Josef K.'s story is first of all the unexpected confrontation of two worlds. K. finds himself caught betweentwo apparently irreconcilable realities. The first is his workaday world, with its regular banking hours, evenings at the usual Bierstube with the usual fellows. 第109页 But on the morning of K.'s thirtieth birthday he awakens to the presence of something unprecedented and unexpected: 第110页 Another reality, that of the inexplicable court, has breached the orderly continuity of K.'s everyday life. K.'s awakening, which coincides with the appearanc e of the court, mark s the beginnning of a conflict that reveals the unspokenpresence of conscience. Josef K. inhabits just such a double world, and Goethe's observation provides a way of opening it up. Goethe offers two distinct mechanisms of reflection: 1) from above toward below, and 2) from the outside toward the inside. In Kafka's Prozeß both directions of reflection are present. The court »above« reflects K. »below···· 第110-111页 Within the framework of the fictional world K. and the court reflect one another mutually. The court and the figures associated with it constitute the ramified images of K. and his normal life. A simple example for this phenomenon is the perniciously accomodating women of the court, especially Leni. They reflect his thwarted desire for Fräulein Bürstner. Taken together, the scenes and figures of the court comprise an elaborate double for K.'s hopes, fears, desires, and bad conscience. There are many signs that point toward the fundamental unity of K. and court. After his »awakening« and arrest K. bites into a breakfast apple that is so obvious an allusion as to border on parody. He has eaten of the tree of knowledge and knows the difference between good and evil. In spite of his protestations to the contrary, K. knows that he is guilty, and he knows that the trial is his trial in a radical sense. Yet he refuses to admit to himself that his own conce is the final authority in his confrontation with the court. 第111页
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