Roberto Calasso - K.

Even if “everything belongs to the court,” only in two cases are particular people said to belong to the court: Titorelli says this about the corrupt girls who surround him, and the priest says it about himself in the cathedral. The girls mock Josef K., and the priest is more “friendly” toward him than anyone else has been. In both cases, we’re dealing with manifestations of the court, which must be compatible with each other, or else the entire construction would collapse. At most, they may play different roles within the same “great organism,” where we know that “everything is interconnected” and effortlessly “remains unchanged” even in the presence of disturbances. Perhaps now we can begin to grasp the words the chaplain will eventually say to Josef K.: “You don’t have to regard everything as true, you only have to regard it as necessary.” Nothing is stranger, or more misleading, or more deceptive, than necessity. In this sense, Josef K. has grounds for declaring: “The lie becomes the order of the world.” But as soon as it becomes such, it spreads out over every manifestation, and hence even over the judgment that condemns it. Without knowing it, Josef K. himself belongs in that moment to the court and to its lie.

There are always at least two worlds, and between them no direct contact is permitted. It’s rumored, however, that such contact does occasionally take place, in violation of every rule. And it is always looming, like a threat or an omen, discernible even in a door set into a wall. Josef K. noticed that door in Titorelli’s garret and immediately wondered what it was for. Later someone told him that the court offices were in communication with the painter’s room. That door was the thinnest interspace between the two worlds. Speaking with Titorelli, Josef K. had come as close as possible to the court. But he didn’t trust what he heard, just as K., late one night, hesitated to believe what Bürgel was saying. A door like the one in Titorelli’s studio might look something like this:

In my apartment there’s a door I’ve never paid attention to. It’s in my bedroom, in the wall shared with the house next door. I’ve never thought anything of it, indeed I never even realized it was there. And yet it’s quite visible; the lower part is blocked by the beds, but it rises high above them, it’s not like a regular door, it’s more like a main entryway. Yesterday it was opened. I was in the dining room, which is separated by another room from the bedroom. I had come home very late for lunch, no one else was home, only the maid working in the kitchen. Then the racket began in the bedroom. I rush over there at once and see that the door, the door I’ve been unaware of until this moment, is being slowly opened and at the same time, with gigantic strength, the beds are being pushed out of the way. I yell: “Who is it? What do you want? Easy! Careful!” and I expect to see a swarm of violent men come bursting in, but instead it’s just a skinny young man who, as soon as the gap is wide enough for him to pass, slips through and greets me cheerfully.

When he was writing, Kafka never knew what would come out of that gap in the wall: “a swarm of violent men,” or a “skinny young man” who might resemble himself so closely as to be indistinguishable.

Josef K. goes to see his lawyer, Huld, to remove him from the case. He explains that in the early stages “unless he was somehow violently reminded of it,” he was able to forget completely about his trial. But now, he says, “the trial is steadily closing in on me.” The original— immer näher an den Leib rückt —means literally: the trial “is moving ever closer to my body.” And he adds: förmlich im Geheimen , “in complete secrecy.” The trial is a machine that comes ever closer to the body of the accused. When contact is finally made, the sentence is incised, as with the machine in the penal colony. But for now no one except the accused himself can see the machine. This terrifying vision, an early intimation of the story’s conclusion, is unleashed by the fact that a dead metaphor (the expression an den Leib rücken ) has come back to life — and no longer as a metaphor but as a literal description of events.

With her large, sad, black eyes that bulge slightly, with her round doll’s face and her long white apron, Leni presides over everything that happens in Huld’s office — and in his bedroom too, which is, as always, the place of revelation. She is at once both nurse and jailer. She doles out both pleasure and punishment to the accused. The guardian of their metamorphoses, she plunges them ever deeper into guilt, thereby exalting their beauty. Like Gardena and Frieda with respect to the Castle, Leni has an insider’s knowledge of the court’s mysteries. Her every word is valuable and suggestive. But it would be illusory to think her on one’s side. If Leni loves all the accused and is lavishly promiscuous with them, that doesn’t mean she wants to help them. She’s the Eros of the law, amorously circling those to whom it is applied, before piercing them.

Leni gives herself to all the defendants, on principle, for she finds them all beautiful. “She clings to all of them, loves them all, and seems to be loved by them in return,” as is Ushas (Dawn) by those who, awakened, welcome her and offer her their first sacrifice. Then Leni returns to Huld and tells him about her affairs “to entertain him.” Of course, explains the lawyer, to recognize the defendants’ beauty one must have “an eye for it.” And Leni certainly does. From the moment Josef K. first sees her “large black eyes” through the peephole in the door, they give him the impression, perhaps deceptive, of being “sad.” But Leni, as we will learn, is behind every door, like a suction cup on the visible world. The touch of Leni’s body is the defendants’ guarantee that their beauty is flowering, that the proceeding is exerting its effect on them. In this, the court is impartial. Through Leni, it acknowledges its foundation: sexual attraction to guilt.

“There was total silence. The lawyer drank, Josef K. squeezed Leni’s hand, and Leni sometimes dared to caress Josef K.’s hair.” On another occasion too, Leni runs her fingers “very delicately and cautiously,” through Josef K.’s hair, much as the gentlemen in the barroom run their fingers through Pepi’s curls — though not delicately of course, but “avidly.” It’s the hallmark of intimacy and of the trial, of some obscure event unfolding.

Josef K. is he who waits, who observes — all the while looking for another way, as he squeezes Leni’s hand: the way of women. Leni doesn’t discourage him. Indeed, she risks an amorous gesture. In the silence, Huld drinks his tea “with a sort of rapacity.” Leaning over his cup, he seems unaware of what’s taking place around him. But we sense that nothing escapes him.

In the scenes where Josef K. is granted much more detailed “insight into the judicial system” than parties normally receive — as happens during his conversations with Titorelli and with Huld — feminine ears are always listening, hidden. The corrupt girls are huddled beyond the cracks in Titorelli’s walls. Leni, who appears in Huld’s bedroom “almost simultaneously with the sound of the bell,” has clearly had an ear to the door. The feminine presence behind these scenes signals their initiatory nature. Titorelli’s corrupt girls even have the impudence to intervene, like haughty priestesses, urging the painter not to paint the portrait of “such an ugly man” as Josef K. Could his ugliness be due to the fact that he is still “a newcomer, a youth” in terms of his trial, which itself is still so “young” that it hasn’t yet had time to take full hold of him and bring his beauty to light? Is he perhaps still too raw, as yet insufficiently ripened and refined by his “proceeding”?