Doorkeeper Legal Meaning
As Khuswant Singh once wrote, it is safe to start from the beginnings. The main protagonist Josef K. (also accused in a case whose accusations are not even known to Joseph himself) meets the priest of the cathedral while he is waiting for someone else. The priest, who introduces himself as a prison chaplain, begins to discuss with Joseph his case and how he is going in the wrong direction. A little after the conversation began, the priest began to tell Joseph a story: «Before the law, there is a guardian.» The New Testament does not mention the Order of the Guardians of the Temple. But a guardian (thuroros) is mentioned in connection with a private house (Mark 13:34), with the house of the high priest (John 18:16, 17), and with sheepfolds (John 10:3), a servant who in some cases serves as a doorman (Acts 12:13). When American composer Arnold Rosner used the four-point motif for his Opus 97, «The Parable of the Law,» it wasn`t the first time this cornerstone of Western music was used to convey an idea of challenge or resistance. Although these notes also helped convey an English-translated version of a parable that would be called in his absurd, unrealistic or as such ideas in the 20th century Kafkaesque tells the dizzying fate of an ignorant but stubborn man who encounters the law and its «guardians». «Before the Law,» written by Franz Kafka, the Bohemian author, is more than a simplistic moral analogy. His subjective placement in the main novel «The Trial» conveys the futuristic objective criticism of the law, the blockages in its accessibility, the ignorance of people seeking justice, the ignorance of the people who execute it, and especially the secrecy of the law. Their importance today can be less emphasized if nothing, let alone law and its institutions, remains separate from politics, ideologies and their radicalization. Biography: Shubham Chauhan is a law student interested in critical legal studies.
Saurabh is a lawyer based in New Delhi. In a sense, «Before the Law» – written at the time Kafka wrote The Trial – could be analyzed as a microcosm of this longer work, a distillation of the central meaning of this 200-page novel into just two pages. Just like Josef K. in The Trial attempts to penetrate the ambiguities and complexities of the law in order to purify his name of the crime of which he has been accused (as we know, he never learns what this crime is supposed to be), so that «the man of the land» in «Before the law» comes to «the law», presented as a physical space that lies behind the door, who is kept in the hope of being welcomed there and, as we assume, of understanding it. But like Josef K., he didn`t discover anything until his death. Before the law is a guardian (or a guardian in some translations). A local man comes forward and asks to be admitted to the law. But the doorman tells him that he can`t give him access to the law now.
The man asks if he can be admitted later, and the doorman replies that it is possible. But not now. The German-speaking (now Czech) Bohemian writer Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was called everything from modernist to existentialist, from fantastic writer to realist. His work presents itself almost single-handedly as a subgenre in its own right, and the adjective «Kafkaesque» – whose meaning, like the meaning of Kafka`s work, is difficult to determine – has become known even to people who have never read a word of Kafka`s writings. Perhaps inevitably, he is often misunderstood as a dark, humorless writer on nightmarish scenarios, when at best it conveys some of who he is. The gates of an eastern city and the courtyards of the temple were so similar to the door of a house that the same Hebrew word was used for guardian and guardian. It is often translated by the less explicit word «doorman». In the scriptures before the exile (2 Samuel 18:26; 2. Kings 7:10, 11) refers to the porters at the gates of the cities of Mahanaim and Samaria.
These early writings also mention a small number of «gatekeepers» of the temple, whose duties included collecting money from the people for the purposes of the temple and maintaining the sacred vessels (2 Kings 12:9; 22:4; 23:4). They held an honorable position (2 Kings 25:18) and occupied rooms in the temple (Jeremiah 35:4). The same term is used to describe the officers of the house of the king of Persia (Esther 2:21; 6:2). In Psalm 84:10, «I preferred to be a doorman in the house of my God,» the word is not used in its technical sense. the revised version, Rand gives «standing (the King James version edge «sitting») at the threshold, for an oriental mind a situation of deep humility (compare the titles of Ps and 1 Chronicles 9:19). That is one side of the coin. Haven`t we, the people, also lost our way? The crimes of Brutus had their legitimacy only by the Romans. Kafka emphasizes that the free man is superior to the man who must serve the other. The man in this story was free to go wherever he wanted.
The only thing he is forbidden to do is to enter into the law, and besides, there is only one man who forbids him to do so, the guardian. If he takes the stool and sits next to the door and stays there all his life, he does so of his own free will.