Josef K.’s double in his life outside his trial is the vice director. On one hand, Josef K. would like nothing better than to usurp him. On the other, “the vice director was good at appropriating everything K. was now forced to abandon.” Each of them wants to appropriate the role of the other. Their essence is substitutability. The vice director comes into Josef K.’s office and pokes around “in the bookcase as if it were his own.” Josef K. feels the same anxiety, perceives the same intrusiveness as when the vice director, in order to illustrate a funny story about the stock market, begins to draw on the notepad intended for Josef K.’s memorial to the court. In the same way, the vice director soon thereafter appropriates clients who had waited at length and in vain to speak with Josef K. And it will be the vice director — not Josef K., as originally planned — who closes the deal with the manufacturer. “A charming man, your vice director, but certainly not harmless,” the manufacturer will later tell Josef K., as if in warning. As soon as Josef K. turns his back to step out into the unmentionable world of the trial, he knows that someone else will take his place and complete the tasks that ought to fall to him. Even before he’s out the door, the vice director is foraging among the papers in his office. He’s looking for a contract, it seems, and he quickly leaves saying he has found it. But under his arm he has “a thick stack of papers” that certainly contains much more than the contract. Every responsibility that Josef K. sheds in the course of the trial gets instantly assimilated by the vice director, strengthening him: on his face, even the “deep clean lines seemed less a sign of age than of vigor.”
Behind all this lies Josef K.’s memory of the guards who devoured his breakfast. This expropriating power is always at work, manifesting itself obliquely, as if by chance, but with absolute assurance.
Josef K. has spent two hours, in his office, lost in thoughts of the memorial he wants to write. He has kept various clients waiting. When at last he receives the first, a manufacturer, the vice director enters the room; he is “not quite clear, as if behind a gauzy veil.” This image alerts us to what by now we already know: the vice director isn’t a typical character, with distinguishing traits that are clearly defined and often in evidence. The vice director is a larval form of Josef K. Wherever he appears, something delicate is happening to Josef K., within Josef K. This time the vice director begins talking cordially with the client — and soon the two figures overshadow Josef K. If a lens were now to focus on this scene, isolating it from everything else, this is what we would see: Josef K. is sitting at his desk, and, lifting his gaze, he has the impression that “above his head two men, whose size he mentally exaggerated, were in negotiations over him. Slowly, turning his eyes cautiously upward, he tried to ascertain what was happening above him, and without looking he took a sheet of paper from his desk, placed it on the palm of his hand, and lifted it little by little toward the two gentlemen, as he himself stood up.” Two giants discuss, in coded language, the life of an inferior creature who is nearly flattened by their bodies and who, to get their attention, slowly lifts toward them a page on the palm of his hand. But who, in a normal office, ever offers a page to someone by lifting it slowly on the palm of one hand? Josef K. knows this perfectly welclass="underline" “He wasn’t thinking of anything in particular, he acted only out of a feeling that he would have to behave in this way once he had composed the great memorial that would completely unburden him.” For Josef K., events are arranged on two very distinct planes: on one hand, in the normal workaday world, there unfolds a commonplace office scene among three people — two bank officers and one client — who are discussing business; on the other, in the secret world of the trial, there looms something that may happen in the future, after Josef K. has successfully completed the act that will decide his fate, the only act that could “completely unburden him”: writing his “great memorial.” To reach that moment, one must offer a written document from low to high, taking the risk that the offer will not be noticed, or else — and this, the worst-case scenario, is promptly played out — that it will be deemed devoid of interest. “Thanks, I already know all that,” says the vice director, after barely glancing at the page. But why is the vice director so dismissive? “Because whatever was important to the chief officer wasn’t important to him.” On one hand, then, the “great memorial” that Josef K. has resolved to write must contain every least detail of his life, reaching levels of extreme, unutterable intimacy; on the other, it runs the risk of not even being taken into consideration because it’s too personal. Why, indeed, should what matters to Josef K. matter to the vice director? A nasty, paralyzing question. Josef K. doesn’t know how to escape it. Meanwhile, the vice director is one of two giants who are discussing his fate, who in fact may have already decided it.
In an obscure, mocking way, the vice director seems to know what’s going on in Josef K.’s mind. He knows because he is in his mind. If Josef K. imagines the moment when the memorial will “completely unburden [entlasten] him,” a few moments later the vice director says that Josef K. looks “overburdened [überlastet]”—and thus incapable of discussing anything. And he adds: “The people in the antechamber have been waiting for him for hours now.” The vice director’s observation gives rise to a most unpleasant suspicion: that Josef K., who already feels persecuted by an elusive authority, behaves the same way it does, capriciously making the bank’s clients wait just as the judges make him wait. The superimposition seems perfect. When it’s made clear that Josef K. isn’t even thinking of admitting another client, the text says: “admitting any other party [irgendeine andere Partei],” using the same word, Partei, that designates the other parties we encounter — not just those summoned for trials, but also those who will appear one day, radiant with mystery, in the speculations that Bürgel addresses to K., toward the end of The Castle.
A “great memorial,” such as Josef K. conceives, must first of all be unmistakable. It must be the very voice of some peculiarity. But how does the world treat peculiarity? “Every individual is peculiar and called on to act out of the strength of his peculiarity, but he must take pleasure in his peculiarity,” Kafka once wrote. Then this drastic sentence: “As for my own experience, both in school and at home, the desired goal was to erase this peculiarity.” If the individual in general, then, is characterized by being peculiar, it’s also true that the earliest collective powers with whom he comes in contact (family, school) immediately take it upon themselves to erase that which defines him. Everyone conspires to ensure that no individual will “take pleasure in his peculiarity.”
The third sentence is even more ruthless: “Doing so made the work of education easier, but it also made life easier for the child, who however first had to savor the pain caused by restriction.” The erosion of the individual’s primary attribute (his peculiarity) is therefore both a part of the “work” of education and an aid to help the new being through life. For life to be livable, one’s peculiarity must be extinguished. But this idea seems somehow monstrous and unthinkable, as would, from a child’s point of view, the request to stop reading an “exciting story” and go to bed. The monstrosity is implicit in the disproportion of the elements: for the reading child, “everything was infinite or else faded into the distance,” so that he found it inconsistent when “arguments limited only to him” were used to persuade him to interrupt his reading, so inconsistent in fact that they “failed to reach even the threshold of what merited serious consideration.” The child’s peculiarity lay precisely in that determination “to keep reading.” For the adult, it will become the determination to keep writing. In both cases, at night. Then, “even the night was infinite.”