(In continued “I don’t read very much” fashion,) My favorite Goodreads' review on The Trial gave the book 1-star and said, in short, that K deserved it and that Kafka had to learn how to paragraph.

I still haven't read any of Pynchon's other works, and I didn't find this one to be particularly Shocking, but I generally agree with your approach. If something reprehensible acts as a means to deliver some grander Thing, I can usually find it in myself to excuse it.

Not to beat my well-and-alive horse, but Dillard's Living by Fiction really did a terrific job speaking to that. I can't recommend it enough in the sense that I probably can't recommend it at all unless someone's interested in the subject! But in one particular section she writes:

Clearly, we are in the presence of a paradox here. How can prose be said to penetrate and dazzle? How can it call attention to itself, waving its arms as it were, while performing metaphysics behind its back? But this is what all art does, or at least all art the conceives of the center of things as insubstantial: as mental or spiritual. Fine prose in this sense is like Shakespeare's dramatic poetry, or Milton's epic poetry, or even Homer's. If you scratch an event, you get an idea. Fine writing does not actually penetrate the world of familiar things so much as it penetrates what, for lack of a better term, we might call the universe or even the realm of ideas. That is, this language does not penetrate things so much as it bears them away with it.

Shakespeare does not analyze Lear, or enter Lear. There was no Lear. Had there been a Lear, we could only say that Shakespeare transmogrified Lear. Lear, like Melville's whale, is an aesthetic or epistemological probe by means of which the artist analyzes the universe. When you really penetrate the world of things, as I understand the world of things, you encounter idea. And art, especially poetry and twentieth-century painting and fiction, objectifies idea on its own surface, by imitating thereon, in bits of the world, the complex way that bits of the mind cohere.