The legal labyrinth.(Transcript)

My THEME is judgment and forgiveness, one of the many pathways that can be used to explore the legal labyrinth. Halls, corridors. courts, the nature of a legal system--the area to be investigated is vast. To reduce it to a manageable size, I will take as my point of departure an old cardboard box found in the lavatory of a dilapidated house in Prague not so long ago.

The house in question was once the home of the Czech writer Gustav Janouch. The cardboard box contained an unpublished manuscript concerning Janouch's friend and contemporary, Franz Kafka. In this fragmentary memoir, Janouch mentions a conversation between the two friends shortly after the Great War which illuminates Kafka's famous novel The Trial. The exchange bears upon my theme.

Janouch describes a visit to Kafka's office in the Workers' Insurance Institute of Prague where the aspiring writer was hunched over a desk attending to the demands of his day job, a solitary figure in the bureaucratic cave to which his training as a lawyer had assigned him. The conversation turned to an occasion in Kafka's boyhood when the cook in his family home, exasperated by some youthful prank, muttered to Kafka: "You're just a ravachol."

According to Kafka, by this remark the cook seemed to include him in a class of humanity which was quite unknown to him. Her declaration made him a figure in a dark mystery. It made him tremble. He was a ravachol! The word affected him "like a verbal spell which evoked an unbearable tension".

That evening, when the bewildered boy approached his parents at their nightly card game, and asked what the word ravachol meant, his father, without looking up from his hand of cards, told him curtly: "It means a criminal." When his mother asked him where he had heard the word, Kafka stammered out some reply, but one that made little sense, for "the knowledge that the cook had recognised a criminal in me had paralysed my tongue".

It then emerged that Ravachol was a French anarchist whose exploits had been mentioned with such frequency in the Prague press that the name was being used as a shorthand tag for any kind of unruly miscreant. Kafka's mother managed to assure her frail son that the cook did not mean what she had said. Kafka was not a criminal. Nonetheless, as Kafka told his friend Janouch many years later, the name of Ravachol remained within him like the broken-off point of a needle which circulates throughout the body. "Nothing sticks so fast in the mind as a groundless sense of guilt," Kafka added. "Since it has no real foundation, it cannot be eliminated by any form of repentance or redemption."

TO MY MIND, the essence of Kafka's critique of the law is embedded in this incident, a critique that was brought to a terrifying conclusion in his masterpiece The Trial. His view of the law is presented in an allegorical form, and is therefore open to various interpretations. However, the feeling of estrangement he evokes seems true of legal systems throughout the modern world, as though, somehow, the tongue-tied boy from Prague, in later life, was able to refine his experience and give it the force of a revelation.