K.

XI. The Riskiest Moment

“The strange thing is that when one wakes up in the morning, one generally finds things in the same places they were the previous evening. And yet in sleep and in dreams one finds oneself, at least apparently, in a state fundamentally different from wakefulness, and upon opening one’s eyes an infinite presence of mind is required, or rather quickness of wit, in order to catch everything, so to speak, in the same place one left it the evening before.” These lines, which are the fundamental chord of The Trial, were crossed out by Kafka (and again one suspects that he crossed out whatever gave too much evidence of the thought behind the text). We encounter them in the opening scene, when Josef K. begins talking with the guards. He recalls then what an unspecified “someone” once told him about the fact that waking is “the riskiest moment.” And that unknown person had added: “If you can manage to get through it without being dragged out of place, you can relax for the rest of the day.” The Trial is the story of a forced awakening. Josef K. is the one for whom nothing will ever return to its proper place.

In the beginning, Josef K. is certainly not the foreigner to whom absolutely anything might happen. He’s an executive in a large bank. His immediate goal is to undermine the current vice director and install himself in his place (a word that is already tormenting him). At his office, he’s known to have a particular talent for organization. He has a good memory. He can speak decent Italian. He knows a little about art history. He is a member, representing the bank, of the society for the preservation of the city’s monuments. He rents a room in the apartment of a respectable woman who takes in boarders. His lover is a dancer who performs at night in a tavern and receives him during the day once a week.

Josef K.’s existence is rooted deeply in order. At the bank, he can keep his clients waiting, even if they are important entrepreneurs. Time vibrates, “the hours hurtle by”—and Josef K. wants to enjoy them “like a young man.” A thought troubles him: will his superiors at the bank view him with sufficient benevolence to offer him the post of vice director?

Josef K. doesn’t know that all these facts predispose him to being put on trial. Like a fragrant, friable substance, he will during handling reveal new qualities, among them the pathetic beauty of the defendant — if it’s true that “defendants are the loveliest of all.”

Josef K.’s situation, as his trial begins, greatly resembles Franz Kafka’s in the spring of 1908. Both are brilliant employees. Kafka, younger by five years, is about to be hired, following flattering recommendations, by the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute, after having resigned from another insurance company (Assicurazioni Generali). Both permit themselves to “enjoy the brief evenings and nights.” Kafka frequents the Trocadero and the Eldorado, eloquent emblems of the Prague demimonde. He once concocted a plan to show up in those places after five in the morning, like a tired, dissipated millionaire. Josef K. keeps in his wallet a photo of his lover, Elsa, who “by day received visitors only in bed.” Kafka recounts one of his late-afternoon visits to the enchanting Hansi Szokoll. He sat on the sofa by Hansi’s bed; her “boy’s body” was covered by a red blanket.

Hansi introduced herself on her calling cards as “Artistin” or “Modistin,” two terms sufficiently vague as to rule nothing out. According to Brod, Kafka once said of her that “entire cavalry regiments had ridden over her body.” Again according to Brod, Hansi made Kafka suffer during their “liaison.” We know this much for sure: they posed together for Kafka’s loveliest surviving photograph. Elegant in his buttoned-up frock coat and derby, Kafka is resting his right hand on a German shepherd that looks like an ectoplasmic emanation. But someone else is petting the dog: Hansi, whose figure has countless times been cropped out of the photo as if it were a Soviet document. She is smiling beneath a panoply of presumably auburn curls, topped by a little round hat. Kafka and Hansi are seated, posing, symmetrical. The out-of-focus, demonic dog sits between them — and their hands are almost touching.

According to Brod, Kafka in that photo has the look of one “who would like to run away the next moment.” But that’s a spiteful interpretation. His expression seems closer to absorbed melancholy. On the other hand we must be suspicious when Kafka smiles in a photograph, as in that silly pose at the Prater with three friends, facing a painted airplane. There Kafka is, in fact, the only one smiling, yet we know that in those very hours he was suffering from acute despair.

K. and Karl Rossmann are two figurations of the foreigner, he who sets foot in a world about which he knows nothing and through which he must make his way, step by step. But their gaze always retains, deep in their eyes, the reflection of another life. Josef K. is quite different: not only does he not start out as the foreigner, but he gets asked by his superiors to serve as guide for a foreigner who is passing through their city. The foreigner is he who is forced to understand, who must take it as his calling to understand, if he wants to survive. Josef K., on the other hand, is the native, and he’s completely at home in the bank where he works, to such a degree that he can be chosen to represent the company. It’s not required of him that he understand so much as that he submit to the order of which he is a part.

K. and Karl Rossmann live in a state of protracted wakefulness and chronic alarm. Josef K. is subjected to a forced awakening, thanks to two guards, who may even be impostors. The moment they choose is early morning, the moment that corresponds to physiological awakening. When the two kinds of awakening merge, one can be sure that a strange, ungovernable event is about to take place: everything is becoming literal. And so more dangerous. From the moment of his forced awakening, Josef K. is compelled not to understand but to recognize the existence of an ulterior world that has always been concealed within his city, mostly in anonymous, dreary places: the offices of the court that has issued the order for his arrest. With respect to that world, Josef K. will finally find himself in the position of the foreigner, a position he doesn’t like and hasn’t sought.

Josef K. thus has an acquired foreignness. He is the one forced to become foreign, whereas Karl Rossmann and K. are foreign from the start — Karl by order of his parents, K. by his own choice. Karl is the only one with a long line of precursors behind him: all those who, under adverse circumstances, have had to leave home and seek their fortune in the world. The antecedents of Josef K. and K., on the other hand, are not as clear, their relatives not as numerous. The simple K that marks them announces the disappearance of that jewel box of details that defines the Balzacian variety of novelistic character. That letter becomes an algebraic symbol, which designates a range of possibility. But this shift doesn’t imply a greater abstraction. Indeed, by now characters with thick identification files have become an atavism. Much more common is the cohabitation under the same name — or under the same insignia — of many people, even incompatible ones, who often cross one another’s paths without recognition, perhaps a few seconds apart, like daily riders of the subway.

Josef K. first grasps the gravity of his situation when he sees the two guards who have come to arrest him “sitting by the open window.” What are they doing? “They’re devouring his breakfast.” The verb Kafka uses, verzehren, is stronger than the usual essen, “to eat.” The voracity of the two guards presumes their total autonomy and the insignificance of whomever the breakfast was meant for. In an instant, life strips Josef K. of all authority. As with his breakfast, so with his undergarments, which the guards have already confiscated, going so far as to say: “You’re better off giving these things to us rather than the depository.”

No less intimate than undergarments, breakfast marks the end of the delicate phase of awakening and the entrance into the normal course of the day. But it is precisely this from which the guards want to exclude Josef K. From now on, he will have to remain perpetually exposed, vulnerable, defenseless, like a man just shaken from sleep who hasn’t yet got his bearings. Now he will have to get used to his new state, until it comes to seem normal. There will be no more breakfasts. At most, he’ll be allowed to bite the apple he left on his bedside table. The guards imply all this when they dip the bread and butter into the honey. For Josef K., this scene is like the gaze of the guard Franz: “likely full of meaning, but incomprehensible.”

When Josef K. realizes that two unknown persons have come to arrest him, he thinks at first that it’s all a joke, indeed a “crude joke,” being played on him by “his colleagues at the bank, for unknown reasons, perhaps because it was his thirtieth birthday.” He is comforted in any case by the thought that he lives “in a state governed by law,” where “peace reigned everywhere and all the laws were in force.”

And yet, when he withdraws briefly into his room, he finds it surprising — or “he found it surprising at least according to the guards’ way of thinking”—that “they had driven him into his room and left him alone there, where it would be ten times easier to kill himself.” Resuming then for a moment “his way of thinking,” Josef K. wonders “what motive he could possibly have for doing so.” He answers himself at once: “Perhaps because those two were sitting in the next room and had taken his breakfast?” This is the most delicate of passages. From the very beginning, Josef K. has tried to “insinuate himself somehow into the guards’ thoughts,” in order to sway them in his favor (a vice or virtue he will frequently indulge during the various phases of his trial). In so doing, he has discovered that his arrest is tantamount to a death sentence, and hence the risk of suicide, which would seek to preempt the sentence. But immediately following this insight, when he wonders about the possible motive for suicide, he reenters his own “way of thinking”—and it is there that he formulates the laughable hypothesis according to which his suicide might be provoked by the fact that the guards have taken his breakfast. Josef K. judges this thought “absurd,” and yet it’s the most lucid thought he has had so far: the sight of the guards devouring his breakfast implies that he has been notified of his death sentence. It implies too that notification and execution tend to coincide. The breakfast that the guards are devouring is already the breakfast of a dead man. By now the psychic commingling has begun; it will become increasingly difficult for Josef K. to distinguish between his own “way of thinking” and that of his persecutors. Blunders will become increasingly likely.

In a very brief time, the same event — the arrest — has seemed both a foolish waste of energy and a death sentence, with the attendant danger that the condemned man might try to escape the sentence through suicide. As for the suicide, it could also be prompted by the fact that the guards were eating Josef K.’s breakfast. Josef K. rejects these absurdities, as anyone would. He doesn’t notice, however, that they were all formulated in his own head in the course of a few instants: the joke (a poor one), the death sentence, the suicide as preemption of the sentence, and the suicide as protest against the commandeering of his breakfast. Josef K. is all this. If in the end, in place of the guards, there appear two executioners who stick a knife in his chest and twist it, this too happens as a result of a thought he had in those early moments. He told himself then that the suicide idea had a flaw: “It would be so absurd to kill himself that, even had he wanted to, the absurdity would have prevented him.” Accordingly, when one day he is taken away by the executioners, among his last thoughts is that it is “his duty to seize the knife, which sailed over him from one hand to the other, and stab himself.” Of course, by now the gesture seems much less absurd. But Josef K. will still be unable to perform it.

Josef K. looks at the guards who have come to arrest him with distaste. They seem too lowly. He thinks: “Their confidence is made possible only by their stupidity.” And yet one of the guards has just told him something that could cast light on what will happen to him: “Our authorities, as far as I understand them, and I understand them only on the most basic level, don’t seek out guilt among the populace, but are, as the law says, attracted to guilt and have to send us guards out. That’s the law.” The law recognizes explicitly the attraction exerted by guilt, the one magnet of all action. The law is like an animal sniffing its prey: it follows only the call that emanates from guilt. From life in general.

Josef K. makes one mistake after another. At the beginning, he actually shows “contempt” for his trial, as if it were a painful and indecorous inconvenience. He doesn’t understand that its wretched aspects allude, by antiphrasis, to the majesty of the trial itself. Then, after having observed his lawyer, Huld, pretending “for months already” to be hard at work on his case, he decides to intervene directly. The trial seems to him then like one of the many negotiations that he has had to expedite at the bank. If the court is, as it seems, a “great organization,” then any dealing with it must constitute a “major transaction,” which, like any transaction, could result in a profit or a loss. Such a transaction, then, certainly wouldn’t involve “thoughts of any kind of guilt.” Indeed, and here Josef K. allows himself to be extreme in his reflections: “There wasn’t any guilt.” Guilt and transaction are words that belong to completely different spheres. With the enterprise of a star employee, Josef K. decides to treat his life like a bank transaction. His is a delirium with all the appearance of rationality — he now identifies with a bank. But in the subsequent passage he falls back into the most embarrassing intimacy: as soon as he decides to write his memorial to the court on his own, he realizes that such a document would necessarily resemble a general confession, which he can’t think about without “a feeling of shame”—the same “shame” that would “survive” him after his death sentence is carried out. All these stories of the trial and of writing in connection with the trial are steeped in shame as their essential element. It’s the air surrounding them. There are only two kinds of air we can breathe: the air of paradise and the air of shame. Those are the only two kinds that Adam breathed.

Josef K.’s defense strategy. In order to demonstrate his innocence, he will examine his own life, aspiring to that high level of organization and that capacity for scrutiny that are normally attributed to the court itself: “It all had to be organized and scrutinized, at last the court would come across a defendant who knew how to stand up for his rights.” The accused individual lays claim to the same instruments used by the vague, powerful court. He wants to beat it at its own game. But at the same time he feels overwhelmed by the “difficulty” of the enterprise he’s preparing to undertake, a difficulty tied not only to the contents of the memorial to the court but also to the very fact of writing. The only way — he thinks at once — would be to write it “at home, at night.”

From this point on, what’s said about the memorial applies also to writing in general as Kafka conceived it:

Anything but stopping half way, that was the most foolish thing of all, not only in business, but anywhere, any time. Of course, the memorial would entail almost infinite labor. One needn’t be especially faint of heart to jump to the conclusion that it would be impossible ever to finish the memorial. Not because of laziness or deceit, which would alone be enough to prevent the lawyer from finishing it, but rather because, since he was in the dark about the existing charges and all their possible ramifications, his whole life down to the smallest action and event would need to be called back up, exposed, and examined from all angles. And what a sad job that would be besides.

Understood radically, the “memorial” presumes a gap-free knowledge of one’s own life. This is literature’s delusion of omnip otence, a delusion inextricably bound to its origin, which presupposes guilt — or at least accusation. And this delusion itself is the origin of every doubt, of every suspicion of impotence and inadequacy. The endless oscillation between the suspicion of total futility and the desire for total dominion is such that the feelings associated with this practice take on a tonality of sadness. Sad is what it is, this writing, this elaboration of a complete consciousness that Josef K. feels obliged to make. It’s a task at once boundless and infantile, like literature. And also, to be brutal about it, senile: a job “well suited perhaps for keeping the mind occupied once it has become childish, after retirement, and for helping it get through those long days.”

Josef K.’s double in his life outside his trial is the vice director. On one hand, Josef K. would like nothing better than to usurp him. On the other, “the vice director was good at appropriating everything K. was now forced to abandon.” Each of them wants to appropriate the role of the other. Their essence is substitutability. The vice director comes into Josef K.’s office and pokes around “in the bookcase as if it were his own.” Josef K. feels the same anxiety, perceives the same intrusiveness as when the vice director, in order to illustrate a funny story about the stock market, begins to draw on the notepad intended for Josef K.’s memorial to the court. In the same way, the vice director soon thereafter appropriates clients who had waited at length and in vain to speak with Josef K. And it will be the vice director — not Josef K., as originally planned — who closes the deal with the manufacturer. “A charming man, your vice director, but certainly not harmless,” the manufacturer will later tell Josef K., as if in warning. As soon as Josef K. turns his back to step out into the unmentionable world of the trial, he knows that someone else will take his place and complete the tasks that ought to fall to him. Even before he’s out the door, the vice director is foraging among the papers in his office. He’s looking for a contract, it seems, and he quickly leaves saying he has found it. But under his arm he has “a thick stack of papers” that certainly contains much more than the contract. Every responsibility that Josef K. sheds in the course of the trial gets instantly assimilated by the vice director, strengthening him: on his face, even the “deep clean lines seemed less a sign of age than of vigor.”

Behind all this lies Josef K.’s memory of the guards who devoured his breakfast. This expropriating power is always at work, manifesting itself obliquely, as if by chance, but with absolute assurance.

Josef K. has spent two hours, in his office, lost in thoughts of the memorial he wants to write. He has kept various clients waiting. When at last he receives the first, a manufacturer, the vice director enters the room; he is “not quite clear, as if behind a gauzy veil.” This image alerts us to what by now we already know: the vice director isn’t a typical character, with distinguishing traits that are clearly defined and often in evidence. The vice director is a larval form of Josef K. Wherever he appears, something delicate is happening to Josef K., within Josef K. This time the vice director begins talking cordially with the client — and soon the two figures overshadow Josef K. If a lens were now to focus on this scene, isolating it from everything else, this is what we would see: Josef K. is sitting at his desk, and, lifting his gaze, he has the impression that “above his head two men, whose size he mentally exaggerated, were in negotiations over him. Slowly, turning his eyes cautiously upward, he tried to ascertain what was happening above him, and without looking he took a sheet of paper from his desk, placed it on the palm of his hand, and lifted it little by little toward the two gentlemen, as he himself stood up.” Two giants discuss, in coded language, the life of an inferior creature who is nearly flattened by their bodies and who, to get their attention, slowly lifts toward them a page on the palm of his hand. But who, in a normal office, ever offers a page to someone by lifting it slowly on the palm of one hand? Josef K. knows this perfectly well: “He wasn’t thinking of anything in particular, he acted only out of a feeling that he would have to behave in this way once he had composed the great memorial that would completely unburden him.” For Josef K., events are arranged on two very distinct planes: on one hand, in the normal workaday world, there unfolds a commonplace office scene among three people — two bank officers and one client — who are discussing business; on the other, in the secret world of the trial, there looms something that may happen in the future, after Josef K. has successfully completed the act that will decide his fate, the only act that could “completely unburden him”: writing his “great memorial.” To reach that moment, one must offer a written document from low to high, taking the risk that the offer will not be noticed, or else — and this, the worst-case scenario, is promptly played out — that it will be deemed devoid of interest. “Thanks, I already know all that,” says the vice director, after barely glancing at the page. But why is the vice director so dismissive? “Because whatever was important to the chief officer wasn’t important to him.” On one hand, then, the “great memorial” that Josef K. has resolved to write must contain every least detail of his life, reaching levels of extreme, unutterable intimacy; on the other, it runs the risk of not even being taken into consideration because it’s too personal. Why, indeed, should what matters to Josef K. matter to the vice director? A nasty, paralyzing question. Josef K. doesn’t know how to escape it. Meanwhile, the vice director is one of two giants who are discussing his fate, who in fact may have already decided it.

In an obscure, mocking way, the vice director seems to know what’s going on in Josef K.’s mind. He knows because he is in his mind. If Josef K. imagines the moment when the memorial will “completely unburden [entlasten] him,” a few moments later the vice director says that Josef K. looks “overburdened [überlastet]”—and thus incapable of discussing anything. And he adds: “The people in the antechamber have been waiting for him for hours now.” The vice director’s observation gives rise to a most unpleasant suspicion: that Josef K., who already feels persecuted by an elusive authority, behaves the same way it does, capriciously making the bank’s clients wait just as the judges make him wait. The superimposition seems perfect. When it’s made clear that Josef K. isn’t even thinking of admitting another client, the text says: “admitting any other party [irgendeine andere Partei],” using the same word, Partei, that designates the other parties we encounter — not just those summoned for trials, but also those who will appear one day, radiant with mystery, in the speculations that Bürgel addresses to K., toward the end of The Castle.

A “great memorial,” such as Josef K. conceives, must first of all be unmistakable. It must be the very voice of some peculiarity. But how does the world treat peculiarity? “Every individual is peculiar and called on to act out of the strength of his peculiarity, but he must take pleasure in his peculiarity,” Kafka once wrote. Then this drastic sentence: “As for my own experience, both in school and at home, the desired goal was to erase this peculiarity.” If the individual in general, then, is characterized by being peculiar, it’s also true that the earliest collective powers with whom he comes in contact (family, school) immediately take it upon themselves to erase that which defines him. Everyone conspires to ensure that no individual will “take pleasure in his peculiarity.”

The third sentence is even more ruthless: “Doing so made the work of education easier, but it also made life easier for the child, who however first had to savor the pain caused by restriction.” The erosion of the individual’s primary attribute (his peculiarity) is therefore both a part of the “work” of education and an aid to help the new being through life. For life to be livable, one’s peculiarity must be extinguished. But this idea seems somehow monstrous and unthinkable, as would, from a child’s point of view, the request to stop reading an “exciting story” and go to bed. The monstrosity is implicit in the disproportion of the elements: for the reading child, “everything was infinite or else faded into the distance,” so that he found it inconsistent when “arguments limited only to him” were used to persuade him to interrupt his reading, so inconsistent in fact that they “failed to reach even the threshold of what merited serious consideration.” The child’s peculiarity lay precisely in that determination “to keep reading.” For the adult, it will become the determination to keep writing. In both cases, at night. Then, “even the night was infinite.”

In the child’s view, the sense of the “wrong that had been done him” was linked only to himself, as if that injustice had been specially devised for that occasion. As a result, notes the child at a distance of years, “there developed the beginnings of the hatred that determined my family life and from then on, in certain ways, my entire life.”

Two words are particularly striking: work and hatred—words that emerge from the process of the erasure of peculiarity. We are thrown, from the scene of the child immersed in reading and forced to go to bed, into a menacing, oppressive landscape. Thus we arrive at the decisive passage: “My peculiarity went unrecognized; but, since I felt it, I had to recognize in this behavior toward me a disapproval, all the more since I was very sensitive in that regard and always on the alert.” That disapproval is the prelude to a sentence. Peculiarity and guilt converge. Or rather, the first thing we’re guilty of is peculiarity. The sentence comes down from the outside world, but soon it is carried out internally by the child himself, who “kept [certain peculiarities] hidden because he himself recognized in them a small wrong.” Now we are on a slippery slope, at the bottom of which can only be self-condemnation: “If however I kept a peculiarity hidden, the consequence was that I hated myself or my destiny — considered myself bad or cursed.” The climate has imperceptibly changed: the circle of light around the reading child is now the spotlight isolating the defendant. By now it is no longer a question of peculiarities that must be defended but rather of confessions that must be rendered. Suddenly we find ourselves back with Josef K. as he tries to decide how to compose his “great memorial” to the court. And whether it’s even possible. The answer (a negative one) is given here: “The peculiarities I revealed multiplied the closer I got to the life that was accessible to me. But this didn’t bring with it liberation, the mass of what was kept secret didn’t diminish as a result, but rather a sharpening power of observation made it clear that it had never been possible to confess everything, that even the apparently complete confessions of earlier times had, as it turned out, left their hidden root within me.” Here the texture of The Trial emerges: he speaks of “apparently complete confessions,” of “the mass of what was kept secret,” of the ineradicable “root” of something that must be considered a source of guilt. Such words can be grasped only within the territory of The Trial. Indeed they are located at its outermost edges. The problem here is the impossibility of confessing the secret — and therefore of exhausting it. And since the secret has to do with peculiarity, and peculiarities are guilt itself, we’re left with the inextinguishability of the guilt we carry with us. And having reached the peak of lucidity, the analysis now falls back into the vortex: “This wasn’t a delusion, only a particular form of the knowledge that, at least among the living, no one can rid himself of himself.” At this point, suspended in the void, we barely notice that parenthetical: “at least among the living.”

It isn’t sufficient to write, by oneself, a memorial in one’s own defense, thinks Josef K.: one must then submit it “immediately and pressure them, every day if possible, to examine it.” And here an extraneous splinter wedges its way in: “To that end, it wouldn’t of course be enough for K. to sit in the hall with the others, placing his hat beneath the bench. He himself or the women or other messengers would have to besiege the officials day after day, forcing them to sit down at their desks and examine K.’s statement instead of staring into the hall through the grille.” The women, says Josef K. But which women? Who are these women he mentions, who will have to “besiege” the officials to make them read some pages he has written? Miss Bürstner, Mrs. Grubach, the washerwoman, the nurse Leni, the dancer Elsa: those are the only ones we know about. They don’t have much in common, but then we remember another insight that came to Josef K. as Leni was sitting on his lap: “I’m seeking help from women, he thought, almost amazed — first Miss Bürstner, then the court usher’s wife, and now this little nurse, who seems to feel some inexplicable need for me.” This insight raises an issue that isn’t easily explained and that is enough to derail his train of thought: this “inexplicable need” for him that a woman he has just met seems to feel, very like what other women — Frieda, Pepi, Olga — will seem to feel toward K. in the village beneath the Castle. But how can that inexplicable feminine need be put to use as part of the rigorous plan of self-defense that Josef K. is preparing? And what about those “messengers” who might, if necessary, replace the women? They are even more perplexing. This momentary and almost imperceptible vacillation of his argument risks vitiating it entirely, the way a paranoiac’s hasty parenthetical remark can open and then immediately close again the peephole into his vast delirium, canceling out an otherwise impeccable line of reasoning. Josef K.’s idea that “the women,” in general, might help him compel the court officials to read his memorial seems already somehow incongruous, comical, or overly specific, even if it’s a specificity that eludes the reader. It won’t elude the prison chaplain, who will one day tell him: “You seek too much help from others and especially from women.”

And the “messengers”? Josef K. hasn’t mentioned them before — and it’s hard to imagine what their function might be. Which messengers? Used to communicate what? And invested with what powers? No answers can be abstracted from any of Josef K.’s prior thoughts. We’re completely in the dark. But if we gaze ahead into the distance, we glimpse the silhouette of Barnabas in his silver livery, in the as yet unconceived Castle. It’s as if the crosshatched contours of another world are emerging, where the world of The Trial is destined to be continued.

The court offices are located in the places of things one wants to forget: in the attics of the big city. But the court itself is incapable of forgetting. It’s the universal preserve, the horreum of memory spoken of by Giordano Bruno, the “granary” of what happens. Its limits can’t be known, because any attic might continue on into the next, into even more extensive offices. What the court demands, if an individual dares — as Josef K. does — to write up his own memorial, is complete knowledge of his own life, reconstructed down to the last detail. Clearly no one is capable of responding satisfactorily. And this inability establishes once and for all the disparity between the court and the individual. Consequently the court may oppress the individual without the slightest effort, simply because its task is to keep alive the traces of everything that has ever happened. Sometimes dangerously alive.

The life of the court is found, like Odradek, in junk rooms — places where even the poor store what they no longer use, where the power feared by everyone, beginning with those who serve it, is exercised. And so, in a room at Josef K.’s workplace, among “old unusable printed matter and ceramic ink pots, empty and overturned,” we find a representative of the court at work: the flogger with his naked arms, his “savage, ruddy face,” and his sailor’s tan, wrapped in a dark leather girdle as if he had just left an S/M club. He has been entrusted with a special kind of punishment: sordid, secret, suited to lowly characters such as the guards who arrested Josef K. and took possession of his undergarments. He must flog them, perhaps to death, because Josef K. denounced them in his deposition. And we know that the court wants “to make a good impression.”

Josef K. tries to intervene, then runs away terrified by the thought of being discovered there by some bank clerk. With formidable agility, he quickly develops a series of justifications for his behavior, throwing in for good measure a vague threat against “the truly guilty, the high-level officials, none of whom had yet dared show themselves to him,” as if they were the ones who were obliged to respond to him — and not he to them. This baldly inconsistent reversal signals that Josef K. is by now in a state of extreme weakness. The terror is in him. But not only because of the unmitigated ferocity of the scene he has just witnessed. At work, the next day, he “still couldn’t get the guards off his mind.” He wonders: where are they now? He opens the junk-room door and finds again the exact scene from the previous evening, down to the last detail. There’s nothing left to do but shut the door again and pound his fists against it, “as if that might close it better.”

The flogger episode reveals to Josef K. something for which no remedy exists: the court hasn’t merely insinuated itself, via attics and junk rooms, into the recesses of space; it has also sequestered time. The flow of time is pierced in every instant by a succession of tableaux vivants. The flogger perpetually raises his naked arm against the two groaning guards. The closed door always opens on the same scene. And no new instant is capable of clearing the room.

Returning from a visit to his brother-in-law’s abhorred (and no doubt deadly) asbestos factory, of which he had been forced to become a silent partner, Kafka observed that one feels less foreign in a foreign city than one does on the outskirts of one’s own city. In a foreign city, one can easily bypass such feelings, even “forgo comparisons,” as if it were a hallucination or a landscape unreeling beyond the window of a train. A few tram stops, however, or a half-hour walk, can carry one across the imperceptible border that delimits the “wretched, dark fringe, scored with furrows like a great gorge,” that is the periphery of one’s own city. “Therefore,” he continued, “I always enter the periphery with mixed feelings of anxiety, distress, pity, curiosity, haughtiness, wanderlust, and virility, and I return with a sense of well-being, of gravity, of calm.” The court before which Josef K. had to appear was based, shrewdly, in the periphery. By the time the defendant arrives there, he is already weakened, vulnerable, exposed to the unknown, and yet what he sees there is utterly commonplace, scenes that repeat themselves everywhere: children playing, strangers looking out a window or crossing a courtyard. The most serious changes are of such a nature: modest in terms of the distance covered, barely noticeable while in progress, overwhelming by the time one is welcomed into the “dark fringe” of meaning.

The charges Josef K. levels against the court, in his bold, vehement deposition — his first and only — are those that, by age-old tradition, are customarily leveled against every center of power: that it’s based on arbitrariness and injustice (as an example, Josef K. cites the story of his arrest), on brutality and dishonesty (even among the audience in the hearing room are “persons who are being directed from up here”); that, on the other hand, despite its rough-hewn outward appearance, one can glimpse a “great organization” behind it. Corruption is obviously essential to the functioning of the machine, corruption that no doubt extends from the simple guards all the way to the “highest judge.” And in addition to “the inmunerable, indispensable retinue” of those who collaborate with the machine, along with the “ushers, copyists, gendarmes and other assistants,” Josef K. doesn’t shrink from including “perhaps even executioners.” Only a small part of all this would be more than enough to charge him with contempt of court. But the examining magistrate is unruffled. He wants only to make it clear that, with his deposition, Josef K. has deprived himself “of the advantages that an interrogation invariably offers the arrested man.”

The court doesn’t seem to fear the appalling accusations Josef K. has made public: such accusations are found in every history book. If the court were merely a corrupt, arbitrary center of power, prone to any sort of malfeasance, it would lose its peculiarity and its profile would blur together with so many others. And yet, in Josef K.’s impassioned speech, given not in his own name but in the name of the many who suffer similar abuses and who, he supposes, are present in the audience (“I’m fighting for them, not for myself,” he says, in the tone of a tribune), there lurks a passage whose implications might truly worry the court: “What is the point of this great organization, gentlemen? It consists in arresting innocent people and starting proceedings against them that are senseless and that, in most cases, including my own, go nowhere.” Corruption may even be necessary in order to sustain the “senselessness of the whole thing.” A new perspective has come to light here: the goal of the “great organization” isn’t to obtain power or money or to impose some idea — the three forms of which history offers examples in such abundance. The goal is to arrest the innocent and then to punish them. The goal is punishment for its own sake, a self-sufficient activity, like art. And recognizable by the splendor of its “senselessness.”

But Josef K. isn’t able to pursue this course any further — and perhaps he doesn’t even realize the power of what he’s just said. The room is already abuzz, the audience choosing now the role of voyeur, as the student subdues and gropes the washerwoman “in a corner by the door.” And when Josef K. turns around to look, all the observers — no longer just some among them — appear to him to be infiltrators from the court: “You’re all officials, I see, you’re the corrupt band I was speaking against.” In a matter of moments, the oppressed populace in whose defense he had risen has become a compact representation of the oppressors. All Josef K. can do now is grab his hat and leave the scene. As he runs down the stairs, he is followed by “the noise of the assembly, which had come to life again, probably to discuss what had happened as students might.”

One Sunday morning, Josef K. visits the court offices “out of curiosity.” He sees other defendants sitting on benches and waiting, as if out of habit. Their clothes look “neglected,” but various signs make it clear that most of them “belonged to the upper classes.” Social rank is quite relevant to the court. It isn’t attracted to the guilt of the common people. It is among the bourgeoisie — that metamorphic class that is willing and able to take the shape of everything else, to imitate the aristocracy and seep into the working class — that guilt flourishes. There is little to differentiate these defendants from those men at the bank who wait in the antechamber outside Josef K.’s office, except their careless dress. And a terrible hypersensitivity: “Defendants in general are so sensitive,” observes the court usher when a distinguished gentleman, Josef K.’s “colleague” insofar as he’s a defendant, suddenly yells as if Josef K. “had touched him not with two fingers but with red-hot tongs.”

The court that tries Josef K. “isn’t very well known among the common people”; it seems to have an esoteric purview. It wants to make a good first impression, however, and thus it has appointed an information officer, charged with giving out “any information the waiting parties may need.” This man has two characteristics: “he knows an answer for every question,” and he is elegant, sporting “a gray waistcoat that ended in two long sharp points.” His clothes were acquired thanks to a collection taken up from among the court employees and the defendants, since the administration proved “rather strange” about it. In the attics that host the court offices, as well as in the distressing corridor where the defendants sit waiting, hats beneath their benches, this man moves with the ease of a master of ceremonies in the halls of a Grand Hôtel. But sometimes he can’t help laughing in the defendants’ faces — as he does with Josef K. A female employee next to Josef K. explains: “Everything’s set to make a good impression, but then he ruins it all with his laugh, which scares people.” The information officer is an embodiment of the court: long steeped in the stagnant attic air, he can’t stand fresh air, as if he were afraid of dissolving outside those offices where he is both genius loci and tour guide. He is ceremonious and cruel. “He really knows how to talk to the parties,” the woman whispers to Josef K., who nods.

Josef K. tries to speak with a defendant, who wants only to be left alone to wait (“I thought I could wait here, it’s Sunday, I have some time and won’t bother anyone here,” he pleads). The stale air makes it hard to breathe. A sort of “seasickness” overtakes Josef K. From the end of the hall he hears “a roar of pelting waves, as if the hallway were pitching back and forth and the defendants on either side were rising and falling with it.” He finally knows where he is now. The information officer’s laugh and the sly sarcasm of his words reverberate: “Just as I said. It’s only here that the gentleman feels unwell, not in general.” Only here: But Josef K. has now ascertained the vastness of that here: it’s a sea that lifts and sweeps away everything in its path. These offices are linked by an obscure equation to the work of punishment, and Josef K. is on the verge of recognizing this link when he is overcome by vertigo. But there’s no need to worry: “Almost everyone has an attack like this the first time they come,” the woman tells him gently.

In the same attic rooms, depending on the day, either laundry is hung out to dry or the court hearings take place. But what’s the difference between laundry drying on a line and the work of the court? To a large extent they coincide, or at least each infuses the other. The court is a hallucination superimposed on everything else. It overruns everything from below, from the margins, from above. It thrives on the periphery, in poor neighborhoods, in attics. It generates suffocating heat and clouds of steam. However, if one prefers, there’s always a sensible explanation: “You can’t completely prohibit the tenants” from hanging their laundry in the attics, remarks the employee who helps Josef K. and whose face bears the “severe expression that certain women have even in the bloom of youth.” And she adds: “That’s why these rooms aren’t very well suited for offices, even if in other ways they offer great advantages.” She doesn’t specify what these “great advantages” might be.

Mrs. Grubach takes Josef K.’s “happiness” to heart, for he is “her best and dearest boarder,” but she doesn’t give much weight to his arrest. For her, it isn’t as “serious” as being arrested for stealing. No, his is an arrest that seems “like something scholarly.” Thus she can say: “I don’t understand it, but then one doesn’t need to understand it.” Josef K. replies as though he has immediately grasped her meaning, but suggests that the arrest, rather than “something scholarly,” ought to be considered a “nothing.” He adds: “I was caught by surprise, that’s all.” And he goes on to explain: “If immediately upon awakening, without letting myself be thrown off by the fact that Anna hadn’t appeared, I’d risen immediately and, ignoring anyone in my path, had come to you and eaten breakfast in the kitchen for a change, if I’d had you bring my clothes from my room, in short if I had behaved reasonably, nothing else would have happened. Everything that wanted to come into being would have been stifled.”

This conversation between Josef K. and his landlady, as she patiently darns a pile of stockings into which he “from time to time buried his hand,” is one of the most vertiginous exchanges in all of The Trial. But neither of the two interlocutors grasps its import, and neither of course does the reader, for the story has just begun. The words exist and act on their own, occasionally passing through people but never belonging to them — indeed they are immediately forgotten. Only a writer’s hand will one day be able to gather them and set them in their place, at the nerve center of events.

To counter Mrs. Grubach’s theory, according to which some doctrine, perhaps a complex, ancient one, lies behind his arrest, Josef K. wants to reduce it to a pure physiological fact. The arrest is something “that wanted to come into being” but that could have been “stifled” had he shown sufficient quickness in the moment of awakening (“immediately,” gleich, appears twice in three lines). What follows is comic in its labored detail — he should have moved immediately into the kitchen, had breakfast in the kitchen, had clothes brought from his room — but immensely serious in its aim: “to stifle” something that is about to come into being. The implicit thesis is this: if one acted “reasonably,” one could ensure that “everything that wanted to come into being” would be “stifled.” Bold metaphysical thesis. The ancient terror of becoming is caught in the instant of awakening, therefore at the source of that which is becoming. And that includes all things, since the world itself is something “that wanted to come into being.” But awakening requires this virtue: a quick reaction time, which only the prepared can count on. And here Josef K. is forced to admit, as if ruminating: “We are so poorly prepared.” That fact alone explains how one can get mixed up in a trial. But what is required in order to be prepared (and therefore to act “reasonably”)? At the very least, an office. Josef K. adds: “At the bank, for example, I’m prepared, nothing like this could ever happen to me there.” Certain consequences can be inferred from his ominous aside, including, above all, this one: that in order to act “reasonably” one needs to contain within oneself the equivalent of an office, since one can’t expect the awakening to take place in an actual office. Further, the “reasonable” action has, among its functions, that of stifling certain things that want to happen. If events take another course, if two strangers devour our breakfast, if the same strangers confiscate our clothes, then there has been a disturbance in our awakening, which is “the riskiest moment.” Josef K.’s entire story shows us what the risk is: that revelation may transform into persecution.

Awakening, the bodhi that is continually spoken of in Indian thought from the Vedas to the Buddha, is something that happens during wakefulness, an invisible shift, a sudden change in distances and in the mental pace, thanks to which consciousness is able to observe itself — and is therefore able to observe itself in its typical role as observer. The most effective metaphor for this event is the awakening from sleep, the passage from dream to wakefulness. That auroral moment of fullness and astonishment — but also sometimes of bewilderment and anxiety — suggests another fullness that can characterize every instant of waking life. Few people experience awakening as a perpetually renewed act, within wakefulness — such an act is definitive only in the Buddha. And yet such people are the only ones, according to some, who can be said to think. Everyone, however, experiences the act of waking, of rousing oneself from sleep. But this phenomenon that everyone experiences daily is merely an example, a hint, a rough figuration of that other phenomenon, of which most remain unaware.

One rainy morning, Josef K. is preparing to leave his office in order to take an Italian client of his bank on a tour of the monuments of his city. He gets a phone call. It’s Leni, who asks him how he is. He replies that he has an appointment at the cathedral, explains why. Leni “suddenly” tells him: “They’re hunting you down.” Josef K. replaces the receiver, disturbed by the warning. And he tells himself: “Yes, they’re hunting me down.”

This is perhaps the moment of purest terror in Josef K.’s story. Behind the voice of the invisible Leni, we sense an unknown, sinister immensity yawning open. And again, only a woman is capable of auguring its existence. Until that moment, Josef K. thought that having to show the client around the city was merely an inconvenient duty, since “every hour away from the office troubled him.” A minor annoyance, part of the course of daily life. But as soon as he replies to Leni, he senses something fatal — and preordained — about this appointment at the cathedral, something to which he is alerted by an inner voice that harmonizes perfectly with hers. Their two voices blur: “Yes, they’re hunting me down.” Normal office life has now become a fragile, transparent shell, beneath which can be recognized, by its slow, lethal breath, an abysmal creature: the indomitable life of the trial.

Diary entry from November 2, 1911: “This morning for the first time in a long time the joy again at the thought of a knife being turned in my heart.” Antepenultimate sentence of The Trial: “… while the other stuck the knife into his heart and turned it there twice.” One notices first the repetition: already in 1911, the knife in the heart is like an old acquaintance who has reappeared. Then the attention to the gesture, as if the decisive element of the whole scene were the verb drehen, “to turn.” And finally the “joy” the thought inspires. That’s a rare word in Kafka. Up until the very end, Josef K. rebels against — and collaborates with — the power that wants to kill him. When the two executioners come to take him away, he is ready. His outfit even matches theirs. They wear frock coats “with seemingly immovable top hats.” Josef K. is “dressed in black” with “new gloves that were snug on his fingers.” He’s sitting near the door “with the look of one who expects guests.” As the trio walks down the street, the two executioners hold him tightly between them, forming “a unit of the sort usually formed only by lifeless matter.” His last rebellious line of reasoning, then, is utterly disinterested, having no chance by this point to help his case, and it’s subtle enough to offer itself as a brainteaser: “Were there objections that had been forgotten? Of course there were. Logic is, no doubt, unshakable, but it’s no match for a man who wants to live.” As for him, he had stopped being “a man who wants to live” a year ago.

The two executioners want Josef K.’s head to rest nicely on a “loose block of stone” in a “suitable spot” in the quarry that has been preselected for the killing. They struggle to get him into the right position, a task made easier by “K.’s cooperation with them.” And yet his “position remained quite forced and implausible.” This is the true end point of The Trial. Even when the executioners and the condemned man join forces, the victim’s position remains “implausible.” The execution is real; the actions have something incongruous and distorted about them. That imbalance is the hallmark of the whole affair. Maybe that’s what Josef K. is thinking, moments later, as he watches the two executioners pass the butcher knife back and forth but declines to take it in hand and drive it home himself. In the end, he can’t “relieve the authorities of all the work.” Thus he commits one “final error,” of course: but who bears “the responsibility” for the error, if not “the one who had denied him the remnant of strength required”? And who might that be? Whose task is it to strip Josef K. of that last bit of strength he needs not only to help the executioners position his head properly on the stone block but also to open up his body with the butcher knife? This is the extreme question that The Trial leaves hanging. And the most frightening. But it’s easily overlooked: the unfolding series of actions is too vivid for one to pay much attention to Josef K.’s final cogitation.

A moment later, a light goes on in a window on “the top floor of a building next to the quarry,” and a figure appears there in silhouette. This figure — it could be a man or a woman — is the last of many who have appeared in windows. It recalls the figures who, from the facing windows, observed Josef K.’s arrest.

If the fact that Josef K. can’t find the strength to stick the butcher knife in his own chest is a “final error,” then the trial, in its pure, ideal form, must have been plotting his suicide from the very start. But in all the key moments, Josef K. turns out to lack sufficient strength, either to remain awake long enough to listen to the revelatory words, or to perform, with his own hand, the resolving gesture. Thus his two executioners have the air of tenors or vaudeville extras. They are “fleeting improvised men,” Judge Schreber would have said, and serve only for that momentary task of plunging the knife into Josef K.’s body. If the order of the world were more perfect, they would be unnecessary. Josef K. would act alone. But would there be, in that case, a trial? Or wouldn’t the trial coincide with the act of creation, with that long suicide?