Roberto Calasso - K.

The lawyer and Leni, those two harmonious accomplices, are ready to lead Block to his final abjection, which is the performance of ritual gestures for some alien purpose. This is the most subtle of profanations, and Block is compliant. They treat him like a caged and rather repulsive animal. The lawyer has already dubbed him “that wretched worm.” Now he asks Leni: “How has he behaved today?” In the manner of a John Willie governess with a leather bodice and a riding crop, Leni replies, “He’s been quiet and diligent.” Huld aims to transform his client into a “lawyer’s dog,” and Block is presented to Josef K. as model and prefiguration of what he himself could become. “If [the lawyer] had ordered him to crawl under the bed as into a kennel and to start barking, he would have done so gladly.” In order that his abjection be crystal clear, his devotional gestures must be fused with the repertoire of animal gestures.

Leni proceeds in her description of Block’s day, as she observed it through the peephole in his cell. “He was kneeling on his bed the whole time, he had the documents you loaned him open on the windowsill and was reading them there.” Thin, small, with a bushy beard, kneeling before a text, Block now appears to us as a Hasid immersed in the Torah. According to Leni, his devotion is a sign of obedience to the lawyer: “That made a good impression; the window in fact opens only onto an air shaft and gives barely any light. That Block was nevertheless reading showed me how obedient he is.” At this point Huld breaks in like the perfect straight man who knows how to take things further, even when they seem extreme already: “But does he at least understand what he reads?” And Leni, without missing a beat, retorts: “At any rate I could tell he was reading closely.” If there’s one image that has over the centuries characterized Jews, it’s reading closely . A Jew reading, as in Rembrandt, seems to reach the highest summits of intensity and concentration. That this is the image implied by Leni is confirmed at once: “He read the same page all day, and as he was reading he followed the lines with his finger.” Leni has in mind the little silver hand used to keep one’s place in the Torah. Block doesn’t possess one, he doesn’t possess anything anymore, but he revives the gesture. His life, Leni assures us, consists now only of study, “almost without interruption.” If he does pause, it’s only to ask for a glass of water — and he did that “just once.” So, she adds, “I gave him a glass through the peephole.” We know that Leni can also be “affectionate” with Block. She doesn’t deny him a glass of water. After all, the beauty of defendants shines even on him.

While Leni and the lawyer trade lines in their mise-en-scène, Block, still kneeling on the fur rug by the bed, “moved more freely and shifted from side to side on his knees.” These are signs of satisfaction, as a dog might show, because Block has the impression that they are saying “something flattering” about him. It’s a good moment to resume the torture — and the lawyer seizes it, saying to Leni, in a reproachful tone: “You praise him. But that’s just what makes it difficult to speak. The judge’s pronouncements were not indeed favorable, regarding neither Block nor his trial.” This is what Huld has been leading up to. But like an actor carried away with his part, he keeps going, recounting his conversation with the judge, using it as a pretext to humiliate Block further while pretending to defend him. He reports that, among other things, he told the judge: “Of course, [Block] as a person is unpleasant, has bad manners and is dirty, but from a procedural standpoint he’s irreproachable.” Even this cruelty, which might seem superfluous, has its function: it refines the torture. No doubt Block “has gained a great deal of experience” with trial procedures. His life by now consists of that experience and nothing else. At this point the lawyer launches his final attack: “What would he say if he were to learn that his trial hasn’t even begun?” It’s a hard blow, and in keeping with his doglike nature, Block becomes agitated, even wants to stand back up. Then he yields and sinks down to his knees again. The lawyer is quick to reassure him: “Don’t be afraid of every word…. One can’t begin a sentence without you staring as if your final judgment were coming”—a biblical expression again. And the lawyer continues: “What senseless fear! You must have read somewhere that in certain cases the final judgment comes unexpectedly, from a random mouth at a random moment.” Indeed, Block must have read something of that nature. One could even guess where. And the lawyer confirms that, “despite numerous reservations, that’s no doubt true.” Nothing is as exasperating, nothing as mocking, as the lawyer’s reservations — which now assume a sorrowful tone, for he can see in Block’s attitude “a lack of the necessary trust.” With this reproof, the lawyer seems to have concluded his peroration. But one lethal detail still remains. At bottom, Block’s only remaining pretense is that he’s able to understand — able to understand perhaps only a minute part but at least something of the trial that is by now his entire life and that perhaps, as he has just been told, hasn’t even begun. And it’s precisely that frantic eagerness to understand that “disgusts” Huld. For the death blow, the lawyer decides then to reveal the undisclosed, indeed strictly esoteric, premise of his activity. At this point, extraordinarily, he turns directly to Block: “You know that various opinions accumulate around the proceeding until they render it impenetrable.” Wanting to understand is above all useless. And this is the true ending. “Embarrassed,” Block plunges his fingers into the fur of the bedside mat. He turns the judge’s words over and over. Leni senses that the moment has come to end the scene. She lifts Block by the collar. And she commands: “Now leave that fur alone and listen to the lawyer.”

The humiliations and torments suffered by Block are used by Huld to show Josef K., as in an anatomy lesson, what awaits him. Not only does Block’s case resemble Josef K.’s and prefigure what it might look like at a riper stage but — and this is the most wounding point — Block himself resembles Josef K. as well. Block is the only other defendant Josef K. has spoken with at length up to now, and he can’t help recognizing himself in Block as in a repellent mirror. And when Josef K. nonetheless behaves toward Block like a lordly gentleman who must maintain the greatest possible distance, Block strikes back at once, with the quickness of a wounded animal and with concentrated venom: “You’re no better a person than I am, for you too are a defendant and you too are on trial. If, despite this, you’re still a gentleman, then I’m just as much a gentleman, if not a greater one.” Without ever saying the word Jew , which is unutterable in The Trial , Block wants to remind Josef K.: You are an assimilated Jew just as I am. It’s futile for you to make a show of despising me. Your existence too is “always ill-timed.”

Each time that Josef K. is doubled, it’s by a figure who embarrasses — and ultimately horrifies — him: in his normal life, which is his office life, it’s the vice director; in his life as a defendant, it’s Block. When Josef K. is summoned by telephone to his first interrogation, the person waiting to use the phone next is the vice director, who immediately asks, “Bad news?” for no reason other than “to get K. away from the phone.” Then he immediately invites him on a sailing trip, for the very Sunday when his interrogation is scheduled. As for Block, who is defended by the same lawyer, as soon as Josef K. decides to dismiss the lawyer, he discovers that Block has sought out five others, or rather six. And if Josef K. anticipates having to devote the better part of his energies to his trial, Block reveals that he has for some time devoted all his energies to his trial; he has gradually withdrawn from his business, having “spent everything [he] had on the trial.” He has even withdrawn from his offices and is reduced now to occupying only a “little back room, where [he] work[s] with an apprentice.” Of course Josef K. at first finds Block “ridiculous” but then is “extremely interested” in what he says. Might Block, Josef K. now wonders, be his most reliable source of information about the trial? When Block’s trial is “about the same age” as Josef K.’s, he isn’t “particularly happy” with Huld either. One might almost say that Josef K. is following, step by step, Block’s path. For this reason Josef K. “still had many questions and didn’t want Leni to discover him in that private conversation with the merchant.” He even goes so far as to think, while Block is speaking: “I’m learning everything here,” a feeling he never had with Titorelli or with Huld. This is the point where the figure of Block and that of Josef K. nearly merge. But one difference still remains: Block has entrusted the lawyer with the task of writing his memorials to the court. Josef K., on the other hand, wants to claim the task for himself. He wants to write by himself that which concerns him. Block professes to have determined that memorials are “completely worthless,” but Josef K. remains convinced that a single memorial, written by himself, can be decisive: it will be his “great memorial.” But despite this difference, Josef K. is ready now to recognize Block as a “man of some value, who at least had experience in these matters and knew how to convey it.” And Block, indefatigable, continues speaking. “He’s as dear as he is gossipy,” observes Leni when she returns to the scene. It doesn’t escape Josef K. that Leni “spoke to the merchant affectionately, but also with condescension.”