In the child’s view, the sense of the “wrong that had been done him” was linked only to himself, as if that injustice had been specially devised for that occasion. As a result, notes the child at a distance of years, “there developed the beginnings of the hatred that determined my family life and from then on, in certain ways, my entire life.”
Two words are particularly striking: work and hatred—words that emerge from the process of the erasure of peculiarity. We are thrown, from the scene of the child immersed in reading and forced to go to bed, into a menacing, oppressive landscape. Thus we arrive at the decisive passage: “My peculiarity went unrecognized; but, since I felt it, I had to recognize in this behavior toward me a disapproval, all the more since I was very sensitive in that regard and always on the alert.” That disapproval is the prelude to a sentence. Peculiarity and guilt converge. Or rather, the first thing we’re guilty of is peculiarity. The sentence comes down from the outside world, but soon it is carried out internally by the child himself, who “kept [certain peculiarities] hidden because he himself recognized in them a small wrong.” Now we are on a slippery slope, at the bottom of which can only be self-condemnation: “If however I kept a peculiarity hidden, the consequence was that I hated myself or my destiny — considered myself bad or cursed.” The climate has imperceptibly changed: the circle of light around the reading child is now the spotlight isolating the defendant. By now it is no longer a question of peculiarities that must be defended but rather of confessions that must be rendered. Suddenly we find ourselves back with Josef K. as he tries to decide how to compose his “great memorial” to the court. And whether it’s even possible. The answer (a negative one) is given here: “The peculiarities I revealed multiplied the closer I got to the life that was accessible to me. But this didn’t bring with it liberation, the mass of what was kept secret didn’t diminish as a result, but rather a sharpening power of observation made it clear that it had never been possible to confess everything, that even the apparently complete confessions of earlier times had, as it turned out, left their hidden root within me.” Here the texture of The Trial emerges: he speaks of “apparently complete confessions,” of “the mass of what was kept secret,” of the ineradicable “root” of something that must be considered a source of guilt. Such words can be grasped only within the territory of The Trial. Indeed they are located at its outermost edges. The problem here is the impossibility of confessing the secret — and therefore of exhausting it. And since the secret has to do with peculiarity, and peculiarities are guilt itself, we’re left with the inextinguishability of the guilt we carry with us. And having reached the peak of lucidity, the analysis now falls back into the vortex: “This wasn’t a delusion, only a particular form of the knowledge that, at least among the living, no one can rid himself of himself.” At this point, suspended in the void, we barely notice that parentheticaclass="underline" “at least among the living.”
It isn’t sufficient to write, by oneself, a memorial in one’s own defense, thinks Josef K.: one must then submit it “immediately and pressure them, every day if possible, to examine it.” And here an extraneous splinter wedges its way in: “To that end, it wouldn’t of course be enough for K. to sit in the hall with the others, placing his hat beneath the bench. He himself or the women or other messengers would have to besiege the officials day after day, forcing them to sit down at their desks and examine K.’s statement instead of staring into the hall through the grille.” The women, says Josef K. But which women? Who are these women he mentions, who will have to “besiege” the officials to make them read some pages he has written? Miss Bürstner, Mrs. Grubach, the washerwoman, the nurse Leni, the dancer Elsa: those are the only ones we know about. They don’t have much in common, but then we remember another insight that came to Josef K. as Leni was sitting on his lap: “I’m seeking help from women, he thought, almost amazed — first Miss Bürstner, then the court usher’s wife, and now this little nurse, who seems to feel some inexplicable need for me.” This insight raises an issue that isn’t easily explained and that is enough to derail his train of thought: this “inexplicable need” for him that a woman he has just met seems to feel, very like what other women — Frieda, Pepi, Olga — will seem to feel toward K. in the village beneath the Castle. But how can that inexplicable feminine need be put to use as part of the rigorous plan of self-defense that Josef K. is preparing? And what about those “messengers” who might, if necessary, replace the women? They are even more perplexing. This momentary and almost imperceptible vacillation of his argument risks vitiating it entirely, the way a paranoiac’s hasty parenthetical remark can open and then immediately close again the peephole into his vast delirium, canceling out an otherwise impeccable line of reasoning. Josef K.’s idea that “the women,” in general, might help him compel the court officials to read his memorial seems already somehow incongruous, comical, or overly specific, even if it’s a specificity that eludes the reader. It won’t elude the prison chaplain, who will one day tell him: “You seek too much help from others and especially from women.”
And the “messengers”? Josef K. hasn’t mentioned them before — and it’s hard to imagine what their function might be. Which messengers? Used to communicate what? And invested with what powers? No answers can be abstracted from any of Josef K.’s prior thoughts. We’re completely in the dark. But if we gaze ahead into the distance, we glimpse the silhouette of Barnabas in his silver livery, in the as yet unconceived Castle. It’s as if the crosshatched contours of another world are emerging, where the world of The Trial is destined to be continued.
The court offices are located in the places of things one wants to forget: in the attics of the big city. But the court itself is incapable of forgetting. It’s the universal preserve, the horreum of memory spoken of by Giordano Bruno, the “granary” of what happens. Its limits can’t be known, because any attic might continue on into the next, into even more extensive offices. What the court demands, if an individual dares — as Josef K. does — to write up his own memorial, is complete knowledge of his own life, reconstructed down to the last detail. Clearly no one is capable of responding satisfactorily. And this inability establishes once and for all the disparity between the court and the individual. Consequently the court may oppress the individual without the slightest effort, simply because its task is to keep alive the traces of everything that has ever happened. Sometimes dangerously alive.
The life of the court is found, like Odradek, in junk rooms — places where even the poor store what they no longer use, where the power feared by everyone, beginning with those who serve it, is exercised. And so, in a room at Josef K.’s workplace, among “old unusable printed matter and ceramic ink pots, empty and overturned,” we find a representative of the court at work: the flogger with his naked arms, his “savage, ruddy face,” and his sailor’s tan, wrapped in a dark leather girdle as if he had just left an S/M club. He has been entrusted with a special kind of punishment: sordid, secret, suited to lowly characters such as the guards who arrested Josef K. and took possession of his undergarments. He must flog them, perhaps to death, because Josef K. denounced them in his deposition. And we know that the court wants “to make a good impression.”