Roberto Calasso - K.

To counter Mrs. Grubach’s theory, according to which some doctrine, perhaps a complex, ancient one, lies behind his arrest, Josef K. wants to reduce it to a pure physiological fact. The arrest is something “that wanted to come into being” but that could have been “stifled” had he shown sufficient quickness in the moment of awakening (“immediately,” gleich , appears twice in three lines). What follows is comic in its labored detail — he should have moved immediately into the kitchen, had breakfast in the kitchen, had clothes brought from his room — but immensely serious in its aim: “to stifle” something that is about to come into being. The implicit thesis is this: if one acted “reasonably,” one could ensure that “everything that wanted to come into being” would be “stifled.” Bold metaphysical thesis. The ancient terror of becoming is caught in the instant of awakening, therefore at the source of that which is becoming. And that includes all things, since the world itself is something “that wanted to come into being.” But awakening requires this virtue: a quick reaction time, which only the prepared can count on. And here Josef K. is forced to admit, as if ruminating: “We are so poorly prepared.” That fact alone explains how one can get mixed up in a trial. But what is required in order to be prepared (and therefore to act “reasonably”)? At the very least, an office. Josef K. adds: “At the bank, for example, I’m prepared, nothing like this could ever happen to me there.” Certain consequences can be inferred from his ominous aside, including, above all, this one: that in order to act “reasonably” one needs to contain within oneself the equivalent of an office, since one can’t expect the awakening to take place in an actual office. Further, the “reasonable” action has, among its functions, that of stifling certain things that want to happen. If events take another course, if two strangers devour our breakfast, if the same strangers confiscate our clothes, then there has been a disturbance in our awakening, which is “the riskiest moment.” Josef K.’s entire story shows us what the risk is: that revelation may transform into persecution.

Awakening, the bodhi that is continually spoken of in Indian thought from the Vedas to the Buddha, is something that happens during wakefulness, an invisible shift, a sudden change in distances and in the mental pace, thanks to which consciousness is able to observe itself — and is therefore able to observe itself in its typical role as observer. The most effective metaphor for this event is the awakening from sleep, the passage from dream to wakefulness. That auroral moment of fullness and astonishment — but also sometimes of bewilderment and anxiety — suggests another fullness that can characterize every instant of waking life. Few people experience awakening as a perpetually renewed act, within wakefulness — such an act is definitive only in the Buddha. And yet such people are the only ones, according to some, who can be said to think. Everyone, however, experiences the act of waking, of rousing oneself from sleep. But this phenomenon that everyone experiences daily is merely an example, a hint, a rough figuration of that other phenomenon, of which most remain unaware.

One rainy morning, Josef K. is preparing to leave his office in order to take an Italian client of his bank on a tour of the monuments of his city. He gets a phone call. It’s Leni, who asks him how he is. He replies that he has an appointment at the cathedral, explains why. Leni “suddenly” tells him: “They’re hunting you down.” Josef K. replaces the receiver, disturbed by the warning. And he tells himself: “Yes, they’re hunting me down.”

This is perhaps the moment of purest terror in Josef K.’s story. Behind the voice of the invisible Leni, we sense an unknown, sinister immensity yawning open. And again, only a woman is capable of auguring its existence. Until that moment, Josef K. thought that having to show the client around the city was merely an inconvenient duty, since “every hour away from the office troubled him.” A minor annoyance, part of the course of daily life. But as soon as he replies to Leni, he senses something fatal — and preordained — about this appointment at the cathedral, something to which he is alerted by an inner voice that harmonizes perfectly with hers. Their two voices blur: “Yes, they’re hunting me down.” Normal office life has now become a fragile, transparent shell, beneath which can be recognized, by its slow, lethal breath, an abysmal creature: the indomitable life of the trial.

Diary entry from November 2, 1911: “This morning for the first time in a long time the joy again at the thought of a knife being turned in my heart.” Antepenultimate sentence of The Trial: “… while the other stuck the knife into his heart and turned it there twice.” One notices first the repetition: already in 1911, the knife in the heart is like an old acquaintance who has reappeared. Then the attention to the gesture, as if the decisive element of the whole scene were the verb drehen , “to turn.” And finally the “joy” the thought inspires. That’s a rare word in Kafka. Up until the very end, Josef K. rebels against — and collaborates with — the power that wants to kill him. When the two executioners come to take him away, he is ready. His outfit even matches theirs. They wear frock coats “with seemingly immovable top hats.” Josef K. is “dressed in black” with “new gloves that were snug on his fingers.” He’s sitting near the door “with the look of one who expects guests.” As the trio walks down the street, the two executioners hold him tightly between them, forming “a unit of the sort usually formed only by lifeless matter.” His last rebellious line of reasoning, then, is utterly disinterested, having no chance by this point to help his case, and it’s subtle enough to offer itself as a brainteaser: “Were there objections that had been forgotten? Of course there were. Logic is, no doubt, unshakable, but it’s no match for a man who wants to live.” As for him, he had stopped being “a man who wants to live” a year ago.

The two executioners want Josef K.’s head to rest nicely on a “loose block of stone” in a “suitable spot” in the quarry that has been preselected for the killing. They struggle to get him into the right position, a task made easier by “K.’s cooperation with them.” And yet his “position remained quite forced and implausible.” This is the true end point of The Trial . Even when the executioners and the condemned man join forces, the victim’s position remains “implausible.” The execution is real; the actions have something incongruous and distorted about them. That imbalance is the hallmark of the whole affair. Maybe that’s what Josef K. is thinking, moments later, as he watches the two executioners pass the butcher knife back and forth but declines to take it in hand and drive it home himself. In the end, he can’t “relieve the authorities of all the work.” Thus he commits one “final error,” of course: but who bears “the responsibility” for the error, if not “the one who had denied him the remnant of strength required”? And who might that be? Whose task is it to strip Josef K. of that last bit of strength he needs not only to help the executioners position his head properly on the stone block but also to open up his body with the butcher knife? This is the extreme question that The Trial leaves hanging. And the most frightening. But it’s easily overlooked: the unfolding series of actions is too vivid for one to pay much attention to Josef K.’s final cogitation.

A moment later, a light goes on in a window on “the top floor of a building next to the quarry,” and a figure appears there in silhouette. This figure — it could be a man or a woman — is the last of many who have appeared in windows. It recalls the figures who, from the facing windows, observed Josef K.’s arrest.