Roberto Calasso - K.

What Josef K. wants to find out can never be breathed. Titorelli knows that — and nods “as though he understood K.’s malaise very well.” The close, oppressive air of Titorelli’s garret is now ready to flow out over the vast wasteland of apparent acquittal and protraction.

Does the fact that legends can’t be used as evidence reflect one of their intrinsic weaknesses — or one of their privileges? Since the legends deal with “ancient legal cases” for which “the court’s final verdicts are not published,” one might assume that their inadmissibility as evidence stems from the impossibility of verifying their contents. Titorelli’s account, however, doesn’t say that in the past the court’s final verdicts were not published. The painter asserts, rather, that such verdicts are never published. If that’s the case, not only the legends but also all other evidence, of any kind, would be inadequate. It would always be unverifiable. As for the legends, they would then be the only texts that at least “contain real acquittals,” the only ones, therefore, that incorporate some of the final verdicts. Of course, the legends may all be frauds. But they may also be the last surviving vestige of the court’s final verdicts. The last vestige of something “real” in a world as cut off from reality as Josef K. is from air.

For a long time, during the greater part of human history, myth was the prime source of wisdom. Then it became a sequence of insidious, pointless stories, meaningful only to the degree that they helped us understand how people lived in the past. The sources of wisdom shifted. Matters myth had once told stories about were now proved and applied. But there were those who noticed that some of myth’s wisdom had been sealed off within the new wisdom. No big deal, most felt. We’ll know a little less about our past, but what does the past matter when before us lies the immensity of the present? Others, however, persisted. They noticed that the inaccessible part of myth dealt with the “court’s final verdicts.” And no other text did, since those verdicts “are not published.” Thus the hope was born, in a few, that one might, through the myths, come to know things that one could never otherwise discover. Most considered such hope a serious delusion, but they couldn’t prove it, since the court’s recent verdicts, which might have countered the ancient ones, were also inaccessible. For even now the verdicts were not published. Meanwhile the world continued to be embroiled in trials and verdicts, which, however, were never final. The trials were all visible, the verdicts all provisional. Reality had been taken away, everything became a snarl of appearance and protraction.

Why aren’t the real acquittals published? In order to guard some secret? So that “the highest court” can protect its exclusive right to grant “final acquittals,” thereby ensuring the inaccessibility of the secret? Nothing indeed is as inaccessible as what isn’t there. And many claim it isn’t, convinced that the barricade erected around the secret serves above all to allow the greatest freedom of action at the highest levels. But this explanation, however plausible and seductive, addresses only the secret’s easiest, most external aspect. Its foundation appears when Titorelli describes what happens in the event of a real acquittal: “The court acts must all be set aside, they disappear totally from the proceedings; not only is the charge destroyed, but also the trial and even the acquittal, everything is destroyed.” If everything is destroyed, one can see why real acquittal is never made public: because it is destroyed in the very moment it comes into being. The extinction of the acts —and here again, as we move beyond the surface sense of “judicial acts,” the literal meaning shows through: that of acts as karma —is the only way out of the trial, following the exertion, on the part of the highest judges, of their “great power to free a person from the charge.” All the rest is made of ropes that slacken or tighten according to the will of ordinary judges, who enjoy only “the power to unbind a person from the charge.”

As for apparent acquittals: it’s clear that these cover a vast share of the possibilities — and Titorelli lets it be understood that the most congenial solution for Josef K. lies in this area. Apparent acquittal is characterized by its tendency to grant the relief of temporary victory, but only in the context of ongoing anxiety. One who obtains an apparent acquittal and returns contentedly home can never be sure he won’t find someone waiting for him there, ready to arrest him again on the same charge. The charge, by its nature, tends to remain “alive” and “continues to hover over” the defendant like a dark bird. It’s no surprise that, “as soon as the high order comes,” the charge can “immediately take effect” again. And here Titorelli touches on a crucial point: a trial may lead to a verdict, but “the proceeding remains active.” The trial is only a temporary dramatization of something that never ceases but rather “continues pendulum-like, with larger or smaller oscillations, with longer or shorter interruptions”—and that’s the “proceeding.” Titorelli’s meticulous description only confirms Josef K.’s recent insight: “A single executioner could take the place of the entire court.” Behind all its imposing apparatus, the court “serves no purpose.” It certainly doesn’t serve to determine guilt, given that in every case “the court is firmly convinced of the defendant’s guilt” from the start. Why, then, does the court continue to exist? Couldn’t a single executioner eliminate the interminable series of acts, all of which have a predetermined outcome? And isn’t this like saying that every life could be immediately ended by death, without having to develop through all manner of branching and leafing? Maybe Titorelli would have hinted at an answer had Josef K. not been in such a hurry to get out of that stifling garret. But where would he go to breathe easier? Into the hallways of the court, with which that room communicates via the door behind the painter’s bed.

In his work at the bank, Josef K. deals with laws and courts of every kind. And that multiplicity comforts him, because it seems to limit each individual power. Speaking with Titorelli, however, he realizes that his convictions are mistaken. Everything converges toward a single court — and that court extends everywhere. More disconcerting even than its omnipresence is its talent for mimicry. The court is pervasive, yet it can pass unnoticed or be confused with other courts. The court’s activities are widely known, but at the same time one isn’t bound to be aware of them. Many people are familiar with Josef K.’s trial, but only because they have something to do with the court. Otherwise his trial would be a secret. This is the real terror: that some normal life may exist, that it may be proceeding smoothly along, but that it may contain within it another life, one with radically different aims, working quietly, as if protected by the sheath of the normal life. If that’s true, it will no longer be possible to appeal to normality, and even less to nature, for both will be suspected of serving as mere covers for another process, which proceeds along a completely different course. And whose proceedings have a completely different meaning.

“No acts get lost, the court doesn’t forget anything”: this is still Titorelli speaking. Everything piles up and coalesces. But, in the course of this vast procession of proceedings, does anything final, transparent, or unquestionable manage to survive? It would seem not. The real acquittals are destroyed the moment they are pronounced. And the convictions? There are none. Beyond the void left by the destruction of the real acquittals, there remain only cases of apparent acquittal — which are by their nature never final, since “the proceeding remains active,” like an ember beneath ash — and cases of protraction, where the trial is cunningly kept “at the lowest stage,” so that it never gets as far as a verdict and a possible conviction. The procession of proceedings seems in the end unable to produce not only acquittals but convictions as well. Yet Josef K. will be convicted and killed in the most atrocious manner: “like a dog.” One day the secretary Bürgel, who is the prison chaplain’s secular counterpart, will explain to Josef K. that “there are things that founder for no other reason than themselves.”