Roberto Calasso - K.

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.”