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this is the archive of a discussion on the franz kafka discussion list. one person posted questions about the story (message 1), some else replied (message 2), and then went back and forth for a fewmore messages. this is the chronological account of their dialoge (just follow the "next" and "previous" buttons to navigate), and the messages have not been edited or altered in any way. on a similar note, though, because of this discussion, i wrote my own interpretation of "before the law". check it out if you like.
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I think that in some way you agree with me about the fatal error of taking the Law as something being merely "there", and so it is not so troublesome to understand it, when you write that "the thing that keeps him [the yearning man] out of the Law is not the doorkeeper at all, but his own conception of proper behaviour. The doorkeeper is that which holds power over one because one is afraid to 'become it'...". I subscribe one hundred per cent to that statement, as well as to that:"The Law as an empowering passage".
If the Law is merely "there", even if the man would decide himself to go into it and brave the series of doorkeepers, he would never reach his end: they are infinite in number, not to say that each one of them in the series is stronger and more terrifying than the one before him.
In that sense too, there is no map to guide the man into the Law, since there are no maps for infinite trips. But I agree with you "that the parable in itself is a sort of map". A sort of.
"My life has been a long hesitation before birth",... and so the man died before he was born. Naturally I am not using the word as "evacuation from the mother's body", but as "something else", as I am sure Kafka was doing when he literarily so described his own life.
Kierkegard, an author so dear to Kafka ("Ich habe heute Kierkegaard 'Buch des Richters' bekommen. Wie ich es ahnte, ist sein Fall trotz wesentlicher Unterschiede dem meinen sehr ähnlich, zumindest liegt er auf der gleichen Seite der Welt. Es bestätigt mich wie ein Freund", (T. 232 f.)), would speak of leap into faith rather than of birth.
In this context, which I think is not being arbitrarily evoked - but I would like to read your comments on that -, what keeps the man from entering the Law (a word so full of religious reminiscences in judaism, as it is 'God's logos' in the presence of Christ in christianism), is the impossibility to leap: there is no continuity between the finite and the infinite, which is proper of the Law and the way into it. If there is communication in between, this communication is a leap.
One of the essential diffrences I guess that Kafka is refering to, when he speaks about Kierkegaard, is that, for Kafka, that leap was not possible (it was not either, as it come to be proved, for the yearning man). God had "deserted" his world, and His ansence was an overwhelming one. What was left behind such a desertion was the desperating infinity of the world "there", an infinite amount of senseless stuff, a world suddenly divested of coherence, a ruin, as it is so beautifully depicted in Kafka's "Dichtung" (beauty, as Rilke would say, is just the first sign of horror - I am almost sure that my quotation is not a rigorous one).
What was left behind was a world so incomprehensible as the series of doorkeepers in "Vor dem Gesetz". The Law manifests itself in the yearnig man's percepion by its unbearable absence and unattainability, by the grotesque of the world "there" when mirrored in that absence.
I hope to have been able to give some insight to what I am trying to refer when I speak of the "thereness" of the Law as a trap. A fatal, but not less necessary one, in the context I evoked.
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