Roberto Calasso - K.

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.”