Roberto Calasso - K.

At first light, the streets empty, Karl pushes a cart that wobbles beneath a shapeless burden, covered by a gray cloth. Sacks of potatoes, one man thinks. Sacks of apples, Karl tells another. But it is Brunelda. Robinson and Delamarche will not be heard from again. Karl, having taken yet another step on the road to the irreparable, is now alone with his burden, which will be hard to shed. Finally they come to the “dark narrow alleyway where Enterprise No. 25 was located.” There, Karl and the singer meet a man who is waiting impatiently. But what is Enterprise No. 25? An office? A factory? A brothel? A freak show? A circus? We’ll never know, though the brief description we’re left with, before the manuscript breaks off for good, suggests a brothel. The paint on the walls is reasonably fresh, and the artificial palm trees are “only slightly dusty,” but Karl is struck most by a particular quality of the place: a dirtiness that “wasn’t tangible.” This is a metaphysical obstacle; it goes beyond the physical facts. Here “everything was greasy and repulsive, as though everything had been put to some ill use and by now no amount of cleaning could have remedied it.” Here even Karl, the most upbeat, open-minded, and willing of all the heroes, finds himself for the first time at a loss as he confronts the irredeemable: “Karl, when he first came to a place, loved to think about what might be improved there and what a pleasure it would be to get to work at once, heedless of the potentially endless work involved. But this time he didn’t know what could be done.” On the road to abjection — a thoroughly unintentional abjection, shaped by circumstance — Karl has reached the dead end. For the first time, Kafka writes, he didn’t know what could be done.

The Theater of Oklahama is certainly the “biggest theater in the world”—some say it’s “nearly limitless.” But the few who pause outside the racetrack are a bit suspicious, as if its banners conceal some catch. Karl may have guessed why: “It’s possible that the enticements used in the recruitment campaign are failing precisely because of their grandiosity.” There is an inescapable disproportion between this spectacle that is almost coextensive with the world and the inhabitants of the world itself. The spectacle is too vast, too boundless. It exists apart, in a sort of cosmic autism. At best, one might be able to get a walk-on role, as Fanny does with her trumpet — as Karl himself does when, on that same trumpet, he plays a few bars of a song he heard once in some pub.

Exegetes of various stripes agree that the Theater of Oklahama inspires both dismay and euphoria. For some it’s the only apparition of happiness in Kafka’s work. For Adorno, it is also the only plausible image of that utopia that pervaded his thought. It’s as if the call of the poster inviting people to the Clayton racetrack were addressed to each person individually. But the world is full of posters — and “no one believed in posters anymore.” This one, however, sounds like an eschatological announcement (the model, after all, for posters): “The great Theater of Oklahama is calling you! It’s calling only today, only once!” The appeal is directed at the individual reading it. And the individual learns that he is everyone: “All are welcome!” But this total openness is paired with the cruel temporal arbitrariness: “Everything closes at midnight, never to reopen!” To which is appended the merciless codicil of every eschatology: “Cursed be those who don’t believe us!”

If there was one place in the twentieth century that came to represent mathematical, irresponsible happiness, it was the set of the Hollywood musical. But when Kafka was writing The Missing Person , the musical didn’t exist yet. Neither did the sound track, which burst into meta-history, accompanying and anticipating history, with the messy chorus of trumpets that greets Karl in front of the Clayton racetrack. The vision that unfurls there before his eyes is the original scene of the musical: a variation that finally upsets the symmetry of the angel formations in Dante’s paradise. The direction is at once simple and grandiose. Every detail stands out, but especially this one: hundreds of women standing together.

In front of the entrance to the racetrack a long, low platform had been built, on which hundreds of women dressed as angels, with white robes and great wings on their backs, played long gleaming golden trumpets. They weren’t standing directly on the platform, rather each stood on a pedestal, which however was hidden from sight by the long flowing robes of the angel costume. But since the pedestals were quite tall, some indeed as tall as two meters, the figures of the women appeared gigantic; it was only their little heads that to some degree disturbed the impression of great size, and their loose hair too seemed strangely short and faintly ridiculous in the way it fell between and around their great wings. In order to avoid any uniformity, they had used pedestals of varying heights, and there were very low women who appeared only slightly taller than their actual size beside others who soared to such heights that the slightest breeze seemed to threaten them. And now these women were playing in unison.

These words suffice to convey an almost unbearable sense of happiness — and this time an unmotivated happiness, free from any worry of election or exclusion. It’s a pure visual and auditory fact. Nothing more is required. The perfect life would need no other introduction.

In 1914, between August and October, Kafka found himself writing a new novel, The Trial , and at the same time trying to finish an interrupted novel, The Missing Person . A year later he made this observation: “Rossmann and K., the innocent and the guilty, in the end both alike killed in punishment, the innocent with a lighter hand, more pushed aside than taken down.” Such words could resolve many of the exegetes’ doubts. Finally we learn, from an authoritative source, that Josef K. is guilty, without further ado, and that Karl Rossmann is innocent, without further ado. But none of that matters to a higher power that wants only to kill them. By execution, in K.’s case. As for Karl Rossmann, he simply needs to be pushed off the edge of the road, like an animal hit by a car.

“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.