Roberto Calasso - K.

All the legal proceedings, dauntingly complex, rigorous, and gradual, are merely preparatory to a judgment that is immediate and aesthetic — if that’s how we want to describe the physiognomic judgment that determines innocence or guilt “on the basis of the defendant’s face, and especially the line of his lips.” That’s the basis, according to superstition. And though Block calls it “ridiculous,” he’s quick to add that, according to several defendants, Josef K. faces “certain conviction, and soon,” a conviction they infer “from his lips.” But is superstition really such a silly thing? Or is it “the repository of all truths,” as Baudelaire wrote? If the latter, guilt would no longer reside in a person’s will, whether conscious or unconscious, but in his very shape. In that case, the task of the lawyers and the court alike would be to help make plain a conviction that has always existed.

The defendant in The Trial becomes the party in The Castle . A slight shift: it’s clear, after all, that every party is in the first place guilty . The dominant Eros is that which comes down from above toward the external, excluded world: from the court toward defendants, from the Castle officials toward parties. It’s the Eros of predators, detecting the scent of the unknown. It’s parallel to the Eros that belongs to the external world, to shapeless appearance — and so to parties and defendants — and that wants to enter the place of authority and law. The disparity between these two trajectories is beyond repair. One always, though perhaps by a slow, tortuous route, reaches its goal. The other, almost never.

Does guilt heighten beauty? Such an audacious question might never have been asked before. But as he listens to Huld speaking from bed, Josef K. is forced to put it to himself. “Defendants are the loveliest of all”: this is the undeniable reality Huld describes. But how can it be explained? Does the seriousness of the guilt determine the intensity of the beauty? That can’t be, Huld asserts, as if alarmed: “It can’t be guilt that renders them beautiful.” But he quickly adds: “At least as a lawyer I have to talk that way.” This aside strips the preceding assertion of all meaning. Indeed a lawyer, as part of his job, must above all maintain the innocence of his clients. Consequently, he must at all costs deny that their undeniable beauty is a product of their guilt, which he would otherwise be admitting. But where else might their beauty come from? At this point Huld advances a hypothesis that may be more alarming than the first: “It must result from the proceedings being brought against them, which somehow adhere to them.” It’s true, then, what Block the merchant—“that wretched worm” (Huld’s words) who nevertheless partakes of the beauty of defendants — observed moments earlier when he told Josef K.: “You must keep in mind that in this proceeding things the intellect can’t handle are continually being made explicit.” Leaving aside the question of guilt, and in the absence of any valid argument against its indissoluble connection with beauty, one arrives at the supposition that the “proceeding” itself, with its various elements that exceed the capacity of the intellect, has the power to adhere physically to the defendants, like the alchemic opus to the prima materia . The process of the trial is thus like any other process that entails the transformation of a substance. That substance is the defendant. And guilt seems to be the original state of every substance. The more the proceeding cuts into the defendant’s life, the more beautiful he becomes, and the worse his guilt can be assumed to be. And ripeness, the perfection of beauty, is that telos that also signifies the end, death: a capital sentence. Presumably, the defendant’s beauty in that moment is almost blinding.

Josef K. quickly realizes, with dismay, that everyone knows about his trial. But that fact, as Huld explains to his client, doesn’t mean that the proceeding is public. It certainly may become so, “if the court deems it necessary, but the law doesn’t require it.”

At this point, Josef K. may glimpse the brand-new archaism of his situation. There have been periods, of course, when no distinction was made between public and private, and others when such concepts didn’t even exist. But over time, ever more precise rules and definitions arose to circumscribe the scope and meaning of those two words. Now, however, it seems they must again be applied to an indistinct situation, while at the same time the various distinctions elaborated over the centuries continue to be relied on. Everyone knows that Josef K. has been accused, but “the record of the accusation is not available to the defendant or his lawyers,” meaning that the defense’s initial memorial to the court would be able to address “matters relevant to the case only by chance.” Observed from a certain distance, and once its unnerving elusiveness is grasped, the situation undeniably reveals a striking coherence: in every trial the first priority is to guard the sovereignty of the unknown. Ignotum per ignotius seems to be the court’s motto. Any move on the defendant’s part to gain some control, however limited, over the case ( Sache ), which in German is also the thing , is at every step discouraged, rebuffed, derided. Huld continues talking, eventually revealing to his client the all-governing principle: “In general the proceeding is kept secret not only from the public but from the defendant as well.” The first thing excluded is knowledge itself. The proceeding is, by nature, an underground river. If it occasionally becomes visible to the defendant, his lawyer, or the public, it does so only by accident. The whole thing could begin and end without ever becoming manifest. The defendant could live and die without ever knowing that he’s on trial or that he has been sentenced. And perhaps even without realizing that the sentence is being carried out. As for the general state of things, little would change.

Huld must be in the revealing vein this day, since he even grants his client a few glimpses into the lives of the officials. To begin with, it isn’t true that their power makes their lives easy. One should remember, as a fact noteworthy in itself, how “extraordinarily seriously the gentlemen take their occupations,” how they can even fall into “great despair” when faced with “obstacles that, by their very nature, can’t be overcome.” But what of the nature of the officials, the gentlemen? Hard to say, since one has such a limited view of it from outside the court. But one thing is clear: “the officials lack contact with the common people.” That’s precisely why these gentlemen, paradoxically, sometimes show up in the offices of the lawyers, a group generally mistreated and despised. Evidently the gentlemen want to learn something about the world. They fear they lack “a proper sense of human relations,” perhaps because they are “constantly constricted, day and night, within their law.” It’s as if the officials, longing to have some relationship with the outside world, have ventured, with understandable caution, into a clearly ambiguous and treacherous middle ground: lawyers’ offices. But if their approach to the outside world reflects uncertainty and bewilderment, their experience within the court proves equally vexing. And here once again, with magnanimous indulgence, Huld explains a general principle, which helps us get our bearings: “The court’s hierarchies and ever-increasing ranks are infinite and, even for initiates, ungraspable.” To belong to the court is simply to find oneself on one of its steps, without knowing how many come before and especially how many come after. The same state of obligatory ignorance that is peculiar to the defendant is replicated to some (also uncertain) degree within the court. Thus the proceeding that is usually hidden from the defendant, as Huld has already revealed, may also be hidden from “the lower officials.” For them too (again: as for the defendant) “the legal case appears within their field of vision often without their knowing where it came from, and it continues on without their knowing where it’s headed.”