Roberto Calasso - K.

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.”