K.

XIII. Lawyer Visits

Josef K. goes to see his lawyer, Huld, to remove him from the case. He explains that in the early stages “unless he was somehow violently reminded of it,” he was able to forget completely about his trial. But now, he says, “the trial is steadily closing in on me.” The original—immer näher an den Leib rückt—means literally: the trial “is moving ever closer to my body.” And he adds: förmlich im Geheimen, “in complete secrecy.” The trial is a machine that comes ever closer to the body of the accused. When contact is finally made, the sentence is incised, as with the machine in the penal colony. But for now no one except the accused himself can see the machine. This terrifying vision, an early intimation of the story’s conclusion, is unleashed by the fact that a dead metaphor (the expression an den Leib rücken) has come back to life — and no longer as a metaphor but as a literal description of events.

With her large, sad, black eyes that bulge slightly, with her round doll’s face and her long white apron, Leni presides over everything that happens in Huld’s office — and in his bedroom too, which is, as always, the place of revelation. She is at once both nurse and jailer. She doles out both pleasure and punishment to the accused. The guardian of their metamorphoses, she plunges them ever deeper into guilt, thereby exalting their beauty. Like Gardena and Frieda with respect to the Castle, Leni has an insider’s knowledge of the court’s mysteries. Her every word is valuable and suggestive. But it would be illusory to think her on one’s side. If Leni loves all the accused and is lavishly promiscuous with them, that doesn’t mean she wants to help them. She’s the Eros of the law, amorously circling those to whom it is applied, before piercing them.

Leni gives herself to all the defendants, on principle, for she finds them all beautiful. “She clings to all of them, loves them all, and seems to be loved by them in return,” as is Ushas (Dawn) by those who, awakened, welcome her and offer her their first sacrifice. Then Leni returns to Huld and tells him about her affairs “to entertain him.” Of course, explains the lawyer, to recognize the defendants’ beauty one must have “an eye for it.” And Leni certainly does. From the moment Josef K. first sees her “large black eyes” through the peephole in the door, they give him the impression, perhaps deceptive, of being “sad.” But Leni, as we will learn, is behind every door, like a suction cup on the visible world. The touch of Leni’s body is the defendants’ guarantee that their beauty is flowering, that the proceeding is exerting its effect on them. In this, the court is impartial. Through Leni, it acknowledges its foundation: sexual attraction to guilt.

“There was total silence. The lawyer drank, Josef K. squeezed Leni’s hand, and Leni sometimes dared to caress Josef K.’s hair.” On another occasion too, Leni runs her fingers “very delicately and cautiously,” through Josef K.’s hair, much as the gentlemen in the barroom run their fingers through Pepi’s curls — though not delicately of course, but “avidly.” It’s the hallmark of intimacy and of the trial, of some obscure event unfolding.

Josef K. is he who waits, who observes — all the while looking for another way, as he squeezes Leni’s hand: the way of women. Leni doesn’t discourage him. Indeed, she risks an amorous gesture. In the silence, Huld drinks his tea “with a sort of rapacity.” Leaning over his cup, he seems unaware of what’s taking place around him. But we sense that nothing escapes him.

In the scenes where Josef K. is granted much more detailed “insight into the judicial system” than parties normally receive — as happens during his conversations with Titorelli and with Huld — feminine ears are always listening, hidden. The corrupt girls are huddled beyond the cracks in Titorelli’s walls. Leni, who appears in Huld’s bedroom “almost simultaneously with the sound of the bell,” has clearly had an ear to the door. The feminine presence behind these scenes signals their initiatory nature. Titorelli’s corrupt girls even have the impudence to intervene, like haughty priestesses, urging the painter not to paint the portrait of “such an ugly man” as Josef K. Could his ugliness be due to the fact that he is still “a newcomer, a youth” in terms of his trial, which itself is still so “young” that it hasn’t yet had time to take full hold of him and bring his beauty to light? Is he perhaps still too raw, as yet insufficiently ripened and refined by his “proceeding”?

All the legal proceedings, dauntingly complex, rigorous, and gradual, are merely preparatory to a judgment that is immediate and aesthetic — if that’s how we want to describe the physiognomic judgment that determines innocence or guilt “on the basis of the defendant’s face, and especially the line of his lips.” That’s the basis, according to superstition. And though Block calls it “ridiculous,” he’s quick to add that, according to several defendants, Josef K. faces “certain conviction, and soon,” a conviction they infer “from his lips.” But is superstition really such a silly thing? Or is it “the repository of all truths,” as Baudelaire wrote? If the latter, guilt would no longer reside in a person’s will, whether conscious or unconscious, but in his very shape. In that case, the task of the lawyers and the court alike would be to help make plain a conviction that has always existed.

The defendant in The Trial becomes the party in The Castle. A slight shift: it’s clear, after all, that every party is in the first place guilty. The dominant Eros is that which comes down from above toward the external, excluded world: from the court toward defendants, from the Castle officials toward parties. It’s the Eros of predators, detecting the scent of the unknown. It’s parallel to the Eros that belongs to the external world, to shapeless appearance — and so to parties and defendants — and that wants to enter the place of authority and law. The disparity between these two trajectories is beyond repair. One always, though perhaps by a slow, tortuous route, reaches its goal. The other, almost never.

Does guilt heighten beauty? Such an audacious question might never have been asked before. But as he listens to Huld speaking from bed, Josef K. is forced to put it to himself. “Defendants are the loveliest of all”: this is the undeniable reality Huld describes. But how can it be explained? Does the seriousness of the guilt determine the intensity of the beauty? That can’t be, Huld asserts, as if alarmed: “It can’t be guilt that renders them beautiful.” But he quickly adds: “At least as a lawyer I have to talk that way.” This aside strips the preceding assertion of all meaning. Indeed a lawyer, as part of his job, must above all maintain the innocence of his clients. Consequently, he must at all costs deny that their undeniable beauty is a product of their guilt, which he would otherwise be admitting. But where else might their beauty come from? At this point Huld advances a hypothesis that may be more alarming than the first: “It must result from the proceedings being brought against them, which somehow adhere to them.” It’s true, then, what Block the merchant—“that wretched worm” (Huld’s words) who nevertheless partakes of the beauty of defendants — observed moments earlier when he told Josef K.: “You must keep in mind that in this proceeding things the intellect can’t handle are continually being made explicit.” Leaving aside the question of guilt, and in the absence of any valid argument against its indissoluble connection with beauty, one arrives at the supposition that the “proceeding” itself, with its various elements that exceed the capacity of the intellect, has the power to adhere physically to the defendants, like the alchemic opus to the prima materia. The process of the trial is thus like any other process that entails the transformation of a substance. That substance is the defendant. And guilt seems to be the original state of every substance. The more the proceeding cuts into the defendant’s life, the more beautiful he becomes, and the worse his guilt can be assumed to be. And ripeness, the perfection of beauty, is that telos that also signifies the end, death: a capital sentence. Presumably, the defendant’s beauty in that moment is almost blinding.

Josef K. quickly realizes, with dismay, that everyone knows about his trial. But that fact, as Huld explains to his client, doesn’t mean that the proceeding is public. It certainly may become so, “if the court deems it necessary, but the law doesn’t require it.”

At this point, Josef K. may glimpse the brand-new archaism of his situation. There have been periods, of course, when no distinction was made between public and private, and others when such concepts didn’t even exist. But over time, ever more precise rules and definitions arose to circumscribe the scope and meaning of those two words. Now, however, it seems they must again be applied to an indistinct situation, while at the same time the various distinctions elaborated over the centuries continue to be relied on. Everyone knows that Josef K. has been accused, but “the record of the accusation is not available to the defendant or his lawyers,” meaning that the defense’s initial memorial to the court would be able to address “matters relevant to the case only by chance.” Observed from a certain distance, and once its unnerving elusiveness is grasped, the situation undeniably reveals a striking coherence: in every trial the first priority is to guard the sovereignty of the unknown. Ignotum per ignotius seems to be the court’s motto. Any move on the defendant’s part to gain some control, however limited, over the case (Sache), which in German is also the thing, is at every step discouraged, rebuffed, derided. Huld continues talking, eventually revealing to his client the all-governing principle: “In general the proceeding is kept secret not only from the public but from the defendant as well.” The first thing excluded is knowledge itself. The proceeding is, by nature, an underground river. If it occasionally becomes visible to the defendant, his lawyer, or the public, it does so only by accident. The whole thing could begin and end without ever becoming manifest. The defendant could live and die without ever knowing that he’s on trial or that he has been sentenced. And perhaps even without realizing that the sentence is being carried out. As for the general state of things, little would change.

Huld must be in the revealing vein this day, since he even grants his client a few glimpses into the lives of the officials. To begin with, it isn’t true that their power makes their lives easy. One should remember, as a fact noteworthy in itself, how “extraordinarily seriously the gentlemen take their occupations,” how they can even fall into “great despair” when faced with “obstacles that, by their very nature, can’t be overcome.” But what of the nature of the officials, the gentlemen? Hard to say, since one has such a limited view of it from outside the court. But one thing is clear: “the officials lack contact with the common people.” That’s precisely why these gentlemen, paradoxically, sometimes show up in the offices of the lawyers, a group generally mistreated and despised. Evidently the gentlemen want to learn something about the world. They fear they lack “a proper sense of human relations,” perhaps because they are “constantly constricted, day and night, within their law.” It’s as if the officials, longing to have some relationship with the outside world, have ventured, with understandable caution, into a clearly ambiguous and treacherous middle ground: lawyers’ offices. But if their approach to the outside world reflects uncertainty and bewilderment, their experience within the court proves equally vexing. And here once again, with magnanimous indulgence, Huld explains a general principle, which helps us get our bearings: “The court’s hierarchies and ever-increasing ranks are infinite and, even for initiates, ungraspable.” To belong to the court is simply to find oneself on one of its steps, without knowing how many come before and especially how many come after. The same state of obligatory ignorance that is peculiar to the defendant is replicated to some (also uncertain) degree within the court. Thus the proceeding that is usually hidden from the defendant, as Huld has already revealed, may also be hidden from “the lower officials.” For them too (again: as for the defendant) “the legal case appears within their field of vision often without their knowing where it came from, and it continues on without their knowing where it’s headed.”

The more Huld refers to the narrowness of the visual field of individuals — be they defendants, lawyers, or low-ranking officials — the greater our sense, by contrast, of the immensity of the whole. The court is truly a “great organism,” a vast cosmic animal whose imposing nature we may grasp, but not its overall shape. Whatever happens, “this great judicial organism remains somehow eternally suspended” (but where? one wonders; in which regions of the sky?), and if anything ever damages or wounds one part of it, “it easily compensates for the slight disturbance in some other part — after all, everything is interconnected — and it remains unchanged; indeed it becomes, if anything, and this is quite likely, even more closed, even more watchful, even more severe, even more cruel.” These lines might refer, point by point, to the self-regulating capacities of a brain, to the emanations of a divine pleroma, to the operating procedures of an information network, or to a secret cipher. But even before we pause to wonder about the identity of the object that Huld is describing, we are struck by the hints of its psychological characteristics. The “great organism” he speaks of is, above all, a closed system that rebuffs every “suggestion for improvement,” which indeed only the most ingenuous creatures — unfailingly defendants, especially the fresh ones still in the first phases of their trials — would dare offer. Huld here has the delicacy not to mention, as an example of one who has engaged in this ill-advised behavior, his own client, Josef K. But the description fits him to a T.

Further, the “great organism” is attentive. Constant wakefulness is its supreme quality, the one on which all others depend. The great organism is conscious, acutely conscious, perennially conscious. Each attack on it can only enhance its powers of mental acuity. Thus — and this is Huld’s most useful piece of advice — one must “above all not attract attention.” Those who know the great organism best are distinguished, as the Greeks were with regard to their deities, by their ability to go unnoticed by it. If the officials are already “irascible,” we might suppose that the great organism of which they are only tiny cells is even more so. In speaking of its attention, one speaks of the keystone of the organism’s existence: its uninterrupted mental life. But this implies certain behavioral traits. First of all, the “great organism” will be “severe.” And why? Because there’s a pact between wakefulness and the law. Indeed one might even suppose that the law is the partner of wakefulness, as if wakefulness were inconceivable except in connection with some law. Pure contemplation, content with itself, without any governing purpose, is obviously out of the question, which brings us to the final characteristic of the great organism: a certain wickedness. Wakefulness is linked, by some obscure mechanism that Huld doesn’t even begin to address, to a punitive aspect, a sharp-eyed will to strike. Can there be a wakefulness that doesn’t punish? That doesn’t need to be accompanied by the rigor of law? Huld doesn’t say — he adds only the advice that concerns him, the foundations of which he has now laid: “Let’s let your lawyer work, then, instead of disturbing him.”

Block, the grain dealer, is also represented by Josef K.’s lawyer, in his “business cases” as well as in a trial of the kind Josef K. is undergoing. This fact is of immediate interest to Josef.K., who asks: “So the lawyer takes on ordinary cases too?” At Block’s affirmative reply, Josef K. appears relieved: “That connection between the court and jurisprudence seemed extremely reassuring to K.” Until this moment, a corrosive suspicion has been building in him: that the court has nothing to do with the law and the legal codes. Perhaps the court is simply a powerful, impenetrable apparatus superimposed upon juridical praxis and terminology, but in the end completely separate, resting on other premises. Block’s answer is at first blush “reassuring,” because it makes the court’s very existence seem less foreign and opaque. Ultimately it might be one of many courts, one that simply by chance hasn’t come to Josef K.’s attention sooner. But in the very next moment, these thoughts open the door to an even more disturbing suspicion: the court might indeed be part of that “jurisprudence,” and the process of passing into its ambit from that of the ordinary cases might even be easy, one habit among many for certain men of the law, just as it is possible to sit calmly down in a café without realizing that one is surrounded only by costumed extras. And another suspicion arises: what if all the courts that deal with “ordinary cases” are only a cumbersome, misleading front for the one true court, that which judges Josef K. and prefers to camouflage itself among the normal courts?

Block is the assimilated Jew whose arrival is “always ill-timed,” even when he has been “summoned.” Whatever he does is the wrong thing, and yet it corresponds precisely to what is asked of him. Only he would think to boast of having “studied closely what decency, duty, and judicial custom demand.” Who else but Block would decide to “study” what “decency” demands? That itself is an indecent admission.

Though as defendants they share a common condition, Josef K. subjects the merchant to those violent oscillations between attraction and aversion that assimilated Jews endured in the period between the first emancipations and Hitler. Josef K. listens to Block’s stories with the greatest attention, leaning toward him. He has the impression that Block has “very important things” to say and knows how to say them. And yet, moments later, “K. suddenly couldn’t bear the sight of the merchant.” There’s something shameless in the way Block reveals his suffering. Josef K. watches him and thinks that the merchant is certainly experienced, “but those experiences had cost him dearly.” Block is a magnet for humiliation. It’s as if his body is the repository for that supplement of uncertainty, fatigue, and anxiety from which the Jew in the big city cannot escape.

In a letter to Milena, it happened that Kafka spoke of Jews directly and at length. He was writing in response to a question of Milena’s that had taken him aback and that must have seemed improbable (“You ask me if I’m Jewish, perhaps this is only a joke”). It was the perfect opportunity. He wrote:

The insecure position of Jews, insecure within themselves, insecure among people, should explain better than anything else why they might think they own only what they hold in their hands or between their teeth, that furthermore only tangible possessions give them a right to live and that once they have lost something they will never again regain it, rather it will drift blissfully away from them forever. Jews are threatened with dangers from the most unlikely quarters or, to be more precise, forget dangers and let’s say “they are threatened by threats.”

With Block one has the impression that he holds his trial documents “between his teeth.” In any case, they are never out of his sight. In the unlit room where Block sleeps, there is “a niche in the wall, by the head of his bed, in which he had carefully arranged a candle, an inkpot and pen, and also a bundle of papers, probably trial documents.”

Block’s voluntary humiliation at the bedside of his lawyer, Huld, and in the presence of Leni and Josef K., is an impious parody of monotheistic devotion, with respect to which every anti-Semitic caricature seems timid. That’s why the scene “nearly degraded the onlooker”—and the reader.

Even when first entering the bedroom, Block is unable to look at the lawyer, “as if the sight of his interlocutor were too dazzling to bear.” From this point on, each gesture takes on an additional resonance: biblical, devotional, ritual. Block begins to tremble, as the lawyer, his back turned, addresses him. His face would be an unbearable sight. Block stoops as if to kneel on the fur rug beside the bed. The lawyer and the merchant exchange these words: “‘Who is your lawyer?’ ‘You are,’ said Block. ‘And other than me?’ asked the lawyer. ‘None but you,’ said Block. ‘Then do not follow any other,’ said the lawyer.” It’s a profession of faith. Its model is Moses before Yahweh. A little later Block kneels on the bedside rug: “‘I’m on my knees, my lawyer,’ he said.” Then, encouraged by Leni, he kisses the lawyer’s hand, twice. Leni stretches her supple body and leans over to whisper something in Huld’s ear. Perhaps she is interceding on Block’s behalf, so that the lawyer will speak to him. Now the lawyer begins to speak and Block listens “with his head lowered, as if listening transgressed some rule (Gebot).” But Gebot is also “commandment.” At this point, Josef K. has a strong, decisive sensation: the scene isn’t taking shape before his eyes but is the repetition of something “that had repeated itself many times before and would repeat itself many times again, and only for Block could it retain its newness.” This is a definition of ritual. Indeed, it’s a definition of ritual that makes plain its affinity with obsessional neurosis, as defined by Freud.

The lawyer and Leni, those two harmonious accomplices, are ready to lead Block to his final abjection, which is the performance of ritual gestures for some alien purpose. This is the most subtle of profanations, and Block is compliant. They treat him like a caged and rather repulsive animal. The lawyer has already dubbed him “that wretched worm.” Now he asks Leni: “How has he behaved today?” In the manner of a John Willie governess with a leather bodice and a riding crop, Leni replies, “He’s been quiet and diligent.” Huld aims to transform his client into a “lawyer’s dog,” and Block is presented to Josef K. as model and prefiguration of what he himself could become. “If [the lawyer] had ordered him to crawl under the bed as into a kennel and to start barking, he would have done so gladly.” In order that his abjection be crystal clear, his devotional gestures must be fused with the repertoire of animal gestures.

Leni proceeds in her description of Block’s day, as she observed it through the peephole in his cell. “He was kneeling on his bed the whole time, he had the documents you loaned him open on the windowsill and was reading them there.” Thin, small, with a bushy beard, kneeling before a text, Block now appears to us as a Hasid immersed in the Torah. According to Leni, his devotion is a sign of obedience to the lawyer: “That made a good impression; the window in fact opens only onto an air shaft and gives barely any light. That Block was nevertheless reading showed me how obedient he is.” At this point Huld breaks in like the perfect straight man who knows how to take things further, even when they seem extreme already: “But does he at least understand what he reads?” And Leni, without missing a beat, retorts: “At any rate I could tell he was reading closely.” If there’s one image that has over the centuries characterized Jews, it’s reading closely. A Jew reading, as in Rembrandt, seems to reach the highest summits of intensity and concentration. That this is the image implied by Leni is confirmed at once: “He read the same page all day, and as he was reading he followed the lines with his finger.” Leni has in mind the little silver hand used to keep one’s place in the Torah. Block doesn’t possess one, he doesn’t possess anything anymore, but he revives the gesture. His life, Leni assures us, consists now only of study, “almost without interruption.” If he does pause, it’s only to ask for a glass of water — and he did that “just once.” So, she adds, “I gave him a glass through the peephole.” We know that Leni can also be “affectionate” with Block. She doesn’t deny him a glass of water. After all, the beauty of defendants shines even on him.

While Leni and the lawyer trade lines in their mise-en-scène, Block, still kneeling on the fur rug by the bed, “moved more freely and shifted from side to side on his knees.” These are signs of satisfaction, as a dog might show, because Block has the impression that they are saying “something flattering” about him. It’s a good moment to resume the torture — and the lawyer seizes it, saying to Leni, in a reproachful tone: “You praise him. But that’s just what makes it difficult to speak. The judge’s pronouncements were not indeed favorable, regarding neither Block nor his trial.” This is what Huld has been leading up to. But like an actor carried away with his part, he keeps going, recounting his conversation with the judge, using it as a pretext to humiliate Block further while pretending to defend him. He reports that, among other things, he told the judge: “Of course, [Block] as a person is unpleasant, has bad manners and is dirty, but from a procedural standpoint he’s irreproachable.” Even this cruelty, which might seem superfluous, has its function: it refines the torture. No doubt Block “has gained a great deal of experience” with trial procedures. His life by now consists of that experience and nothing else. At this point the lawyer launches his final attack: “What would he say if he were to learn that his trial hasn’t even begun?” It’s a hard blow, and in keeping with his doglike nature, Block becomes agitated, even wants to stand back up. Then he yields and sinks down to his knees again. The lawyer is quick to reassure him: “Don’t be afraid of every word…. One can’t begin a sentence without you staring as if your final judgment were coming”—a biblical expression again. And the lawyer continues: “What senseless fear! You must have read somewhere that in certain cases the final judgment comes unexpectedly, from a random mouth at a random moment.” Indeed, Block must have read something of that nature. One could even guess where. And the lawyer confirms that, “despite numerous reservations, that’s no doubt true.” Nothing is as exasperating, nothing as mocking, as the lawyer’s reservations — which now assume a sorrowful tone, for he can see in Block’s attitude “a lack of the necessary trust.” With this reproof, the lawyer seems to have concluded his peroration. But one lethal detail still remains. At bottom, Block’s only remaining pretense is that he’s able to understand — able to understand perhaps only a minute part but at least something of the trial that is by now his entire life and that perhaps, as he has just been told, hasn’t even begun. And it’s precisely that frantic eagerness to understand that “disgusts” Huld. For the death blow, the lawyer decides then to reveal the undisclosed, indeed strictly esoteric, premise of his activity. At this point, extraordinarily, he turns directly to Block: “You know that various opinions accumulate around the proceeding until they render it impenetrable.” Wanting to understand is above all useless. And this is the true ending. “Embarrassed,” Block plunges his fingers into the fur of the bedside mat. He turns the judge’s words over and over. Leni senses that the moment has come to end the scene. She lifts Block by the collar. And she commands: “Now leave that fur alone and listen to the lawyer.”

The humiliations and torments suffered by Block are used by Huld to show Josef K., as in an anatomy lesson, what awaits him. Not only does Block’s case resemble Josef K.’s and prefigure what it might look like at a riper stage but — and this is the most wounding point — Block himself resembles Josef K. as well. Block is the only other defendant Josef K. has spoken with at length up to now, and he can’t help recognizing himself in Block as in a repellent mirror. And when Josef K. nonetheless behaves toward Block like a lordly gentleman who must maintain the greatest possible distance, Block strikes back at once, with the quickness of a wounded animal and with concentrated venom: “You’re no better a person than I am, for you too are a defendant and you too are on trial. If, despite this, you’re still a gentleman, then I’m just as much a gentleman, if not a greater one.” Without ever saying the word Jew, which is unutterable in The Trial, Block wants to remind Josef K.: You are an assimilated Jew just as I am. It’s futile for you to make a show of despising me. Your existence too is “always ill-timed.”

Each time that Josef K. is doubled, it’s by a figure who embarrasses — and ultimately horrifies — him: in his normal life, which is his office life, it’s the vice director; in his life as a defendant, it’s Block. When Josef K. is summoned by telephone to his first interrogation, the person waiting to use the phone next is the vice director, who immediately asks, “Bad news?” for no reason other than “to get K. away from the phone.” Then he immediately invites him on a sailing trip, for the very Sunday when his interrogation is scheduled. As for Block, who is defended by the same lawyer, as soon as Josef K. decides to dismiss the lawyer, he discovers that Block has sought out five others, or rather six. And if Josef K. anticipates having to devote the better part of his energies to his trial, Block reveals that he has for some time devoted all his energies to his trial; he has gradually withdrawn from his business, having “spent everything [he] had on the trial.” He has even withdrawn from his offices and is reduced now to occupying only a “little back room, where [he] work[s] with an apprentice.” Of course Josef K. at first finds Block “ridiculous” but then is “extremely interested” in what he says. Might Block, Josef K. now wonders, be his most reliable source of information about the trial? When Block’s trial is “about the same age” as Josef K.’s, he isn’t “particularly happy” with Huld either. One might almost say that Josef K. is following, step by step, Block’s path. For this reason Josef K. “still had many questions and didn’t want Leni to discover him in that private conversation with the merchant.” He even goes so far as to think, while Block is speaking: “I’m learning everything here,” a feeling he never had with Titorelli or with Huld. This is the point where the figure of Block and that of Josef K. nearly merge. But one difference still remains: Block has entrusted the lawyer with the task of writing his memorials to the court. Josef K., on the other hand, wants to claim the task for himself. He wants to write by himself that which concerns him. Block professes to have determined that memorials are “completely worthless,” but Josef K. remains convinced that a single memorial, written by himself, can be decisive: it will be his “great memorial.” But despite this difference, Josef K. is ready now to recognize Block as a “man of some value, who at least had experience in these matters and knew how to convey it.” And Block, indefatigable, continues speaking. “He’s as dear as he is gossipy,” observes Leni when she returns to the scene. It doesn’t escape Josef K. that Leni “spoke to the merchant affectionately, but also with condescension.”

If Josef K. had not been awakened one morning by a guard dressed in a “traveler’s outfit,” what would have become of him? Perhaps he would have continued his bank career until the day he died, without ever becoming any the wiser. Or perhaps one day he would have been visited by a dream that finally would have both illuminated and resolved his situation, a dream that Kafka dreamed seven years after the draft of The Trial:

My brother has committed a crime, a murder I think, and I and others are accessories to his crime; punishment, resolution, liberation come from afar, they approach fearsomely, many signs point to their unstoppable advance, my sister, I think, announces each of these signs, and I greet them all with rapturous exclamations, my rapture increasing the closer they come. My exclamations were brief phrases, I thought that because of their obviousness I would never be able to forget them, and now I can’t remember any exactly. I could manage only exclamations because it took a huge effort for me to speak, I had to puff out my cheeks and twist my mouth at the same time, as with a toothache, before I could get a word out. Happiness consisted in this: that punishment was coming and I welcomed it so freely and with such conviction and joy, a sight that must have moved the gods, and I could feel the gods’ emotions almost to the point of tears.

In order for both the gods and the man contemplating them to be moved, punishment, announced by imperious signs, must arrive. Only then can one be sure that the gods and the man feel the same thing. And, since punishment is the consequence of a murder committed by a man, punishment — insofar as it is welcomed by both men and gods, indeed can move them both in exactly the same way — might be that which in other epochs was called sacrifice.