Roberto Calasso - K.

The court doesn’t seem to fear the appalling accusations Josef K. has made public: such accusations are found in every history book. If the court were merely a corrupt, arbitrary center of power, prone to any sort of malfeasance, it would lose its peculiarity and its profile would blur together with so many others. And yet, in Josef K.’s impassioned speech, given not in his own name but in the name of the many who suffer similar abuses and who, he supposes, are present in the audience (“I’m fighting for them, not for myself,” he says, in the tone of a tribune), there lurks a passage whose implications might truly worry the court: “What is the point of this great organization, gentlemen? It consists in arresting innocent people and starting proceedings against them that are senseless and that, in most cases, including my own, go nowhere.” Corruption may even be necessary in order to sustain the “senselessness of the whole thing.” A new perspective has come to light here: the goal of the “great organization” isn’t to obtain power or money or to impose some idea — the three forms of which history offers examples in such abundance. The goal is to arrest the innocent and then to punish them. The goal is punishment for its own sake, a self-sufficient activity, like art. And recognizable by the splendor of its “senselessness.”

But Josef K. isn’t able to pursue this course any further — and perhaps he doesn’t even realize the power of what he’s just said. The room is already abuzz, the audience choosing now the role of voyeur, as the student subdues and gropes the washerwoman “in a corner by the door.” And when Josef K. turns around to look, all the observers — no longer just some among them — appear to him to be infiltrators from the court: “You’re all officials, I see, you’re the corrupt band I was speaking against.” In a matter of moments, the oppressed populace in whose defense he had risen has become a compact representation of the oppressors. All Josef K. can do now is grab his hat and leave the scene. As he runs down the stairs, he is followed by “the noise of the assembly, which had come to life again, probably to discuss what had happened as students might.”

One Sunday morning, Josef K. visits the court offices “out of curiosity.” He sees other defendants sitting on benches and waiting, as if out of habit. Their clothes look “neglected,” but various signs make it clear that most of them “belonged to the upper classes.” Social rank is quite relevant to the court. It isn’t attracted to the guilt of the common people. It is among the bourgeoisie — that metamorphic class that is willing and able to take the shape of everything else, to imitate the aristocracy and seep into the working class — that guilt flourishes. There is little to differentiate these defendants from those men at the bank who wait in the antechamber outside Josef K.’s office, except their careless dress. And a terrible hypersensitivity: “Defendants in general are so sensitive,” observes the court usher when a distinguished gentleman, Josef K.’s “colleague” insofar as he’s a defendant, suddenly yells as if Josef K. “had touched him not with two fingers but with red-hot tongs.”

The court that tries Josef K. “isn’t very well known among the common people”; it seems to have an esoteric purview. It wants to make a good first impression, however, and thus it has appointed an information officer, charged with giving out “any information the waiting parties may need.” This man has two characteristics: “he knows an answer for every question,” and he is elegant, sporting “a gray waistcoat that ended in two long sharp points.” His clothes were acquired thanks to a collection taken up from among the court employees and the defendants, since the administration proved “rather strange” about it. In the attics that host the court offices, as well as in the distressing corridor where the defendants sit waiting, hats beneath their benches, this man moves with the ease of a master of ceremonies in the halls of a Grand Hôtel. But sometimes he can’t help laughing in the defendants’ faces — as he does with Josef K. A female employee next to Josef K. explains: “Everything’s set to make a good impression, but then he ruins it all with his laugh, which scares people.” The information officer is an embodiment of the court: long steeped in the stagnant attic air, he can’t stand fresh air, as if he were afraid of dissolving outside those offices where he is both genius loci and tour guide. He is ceremonious and cruel. “He really knows how to talk to the parties,” the woman whispers to Josef K., who nods.

Josef K. tries to speak with a defendant, who wants only to be left alone to wait (“I thought I could wait here, it’s Sunday, I have some time and won’t bother anyone here,” he pleads). The stale air makes it hard to breathe. A sort of “seasickness” overtakes Josef K. From the end of the hall he hears “a roar of pelting waves, as if the hallway were pitching back and forth and the defendants on either side were rising and falling with it.” He finally knows where he is now. The information officer’s laugh and the sly sarcasm of his words reverberate: “Just as I said. It’s only here that the gentleman feels unwell, not in general.” Only here: But Josef K. has now ascertained the vastness of that here: it’s a sea that lifts and sweeps away everything in its path. These offices are linked by an obscure equation to the work of punishment, and Josef K. is on the verge of recognizing this link when he is overcome by vertigo. But there’s no need to worry: “Almost everyone has an attack like this the first time they come,” the woman tells him gently.

In the same attic rooms, depending on the day, either laundry is hung out to dry or the court hearings take place. But what’s the difference between laundry drying on a line and the work of the court? To a large extent they coincide, or at least each infuses the other. The court is a hallucination superimposed on everything else. It overruns everything from below, from the margins, from above. It thrives on the periphery, in poor neighborhoods, in attics. It generates suffocating heat and clouds of steam. However, if one prefers, there’s always a sensible explanation: “You can’t completely prohibit the tenants” from hanging their laundry in the attics, remarks the employee who helps Josef K. and whose face bears the “severe expression that certain women have even in the bloom of youth.” And she adds: “That’s why these rooms aren’t very well suited for offices, even if in other ways they offer great advantages.” She doesn’t specify what these “great advantages” might be.

Mrs. Grubach takes Josef K.’s “happiness” to heart, for he is “her best and dearest boarder,” but she doesn’t give much weight to his arrest. For her, it isn’t as “serious” as being arrested for stealing. No, his is an arrest that seems “like something scholarly.” Thus she can say: “I don’t understand it, but then one doesn’t need to understand it.” Josef K. replies as though he has immediately grasped her meaning, but suggests that the arrest, rather than “something scholarly,” ought to be considered a “nothing.” He adds: “I was caught by surprise, that’s all.” And he goes on to explain: “If immediately upon awakening, without letting myself be thrown off by the fact that Anna hadn’t appeared, I’d risen immediately and, ignoring anyone in my path, had come to you and eaten breakfast in the kitchen for a change, if I’d had you bring my clothes from my room, in short if I had behaved reasonably, nothing else would have happened. Everything that wanted to come into being would have been stifled.”

This conversation between Josef K. and his landlady, as she patiently darns a pile of stockings into which he “from time to time buried his hand,” is one of the most vertiginous exchanges in all of The Trial . But neither of the two interlocutors grasps its import, and neither of course does the reader, for the story has just begun. The words exist and act on their own, occasionally passing through people but never belonging to them — indeed they are immediately forgotten. Only a writer’s hand will one day be able to gather them and set them in their place, at the nerve center of events.