The Greatest Opening Line in Literature No. 3

With a few exceptions, every cell in your body contains the instructions—that is, the DNA—to create your body. This strikes me as an apt metaphor for great writing: a novel is nothing more than its sentences, sure, but you can find the entire thing in every one. This is what Kenneth Burke meant when he wrote, “the well-formed work of art is internally synecdochic, as the beginning of a drama contains its close or the close sums up the beginning, the parts all thus being consubstantially related.”

All of which brings us to the opening line of The Trial:

Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.

There it is, the entire book: the paranoia of “someone,” the unofficiality of “slandered,” the nonchalance of “one morning,” the seriousness of “arrested.”

But what I love most is that dependent clause tucked away like an afterthought: “without having done anything truly wrong.” That “truly” is doing so much work! It reminds me of the claim that the average American breaks three laws a day. This article does a good job summing up the nuances of said half-truth:

Sharing your Netflix password is a good example. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) prohibits certain unauthorized access to protected computers. Theoretically, an aggressive reading of the CFAA could treat certain types of password sharing as “unauthorized access,” but courts have increasingly narrowed how far that language can stretch, and no one has ever been charged—let alone convicted—for sharing a personal streaming password.

You get the feeling the only thing keeping you safe, whether from the government or Google or an online mob, is security through obscurity: there are eight billion people on earth and the Leviathan hasn’t turned its sights on you. This mostly works, despite the fact you reuse passwords, drive ten miles over the limit, or occasionally rebroadcast Major League Baseball with implied oral consent, not express written consent, but if you ever do win the lottery-of-the-damned… Well, just ask Martha Stewart.

And so Kafka’s writing is fractal, the whole reflected by the parts, the parts reflected by the whole, from level of the novel to the level of the sentence to the level of a single word.

We never learn what Joseph K. did wrong: probably something ubiquitous, perhaps even necessary. What a nightmare: a world in which, because of the vagaries of luck, you’re punished by an anonymous, vague, uncaring bureaucracy, unable to even protest your innocence because, well, technically you aren’t.

Someone should invent a word for that.