Josef K. tries to intervene, then runs away terrified by the thought of being discovered there by some bank clerk. With formidable agility, he quickly develops a series of justifications for his behavior, throwing in for good measure a vague threat against “the truly guilty, the high-level officials, none of whom had yet dared show themselves to him,” as if they were the ones who were obliged to respond to him — and not he to them. This baldly inconsistent reversal signals that Josef K. is by now in a state of extreme weakness. The terror is in him. But not only because of the unmitigated ferocity of the scene he has just witnessed. At work, the next day, he “still couldn’t get the guards off his mind.” He wonders: where are they now? He opens the junk-room door and finds again the exact scene from the previous evening, down to the last detail. There’s nothing left to do but shut the door again and pound his fists against it, “as if that might close it better.”
The flogger episode reveals to Josef K. something for which no remedy exists: the court hasn’t merely insinuated itself, via attics and junk rooms, into the recesses of space; it has also sequestered time. The flow of time is pierced in every instant by a succession of tableaux vivants. The flogger perpetually raises his naked arm against the two groaning guards. The closed door always opens on the same scene. And no new instant is capable of clearing the room.
Returning from a visit to his brother-in-law’s abhorred (and no doubt deadly) asbestos factory, of which he had been forced to become a silent partner, Kafka observed that one feels less foreign in a foreign city than one does on the outskirts of one’s own city. In a foreign city, one can easily bypass such feelings, even “forgo comparisons,” as if it were a hallucination or a landscape unreeling beyond the window of a train. A few tram stops, however, or a half-hour walk, can carry one across the imperceptible border that delimits the “wretched, dark fringe, scored with furrows like a great gorge,” that is the periphery of one’s own city. “Therefore,” he continued, “I always enter the periphery with mixed feelings of anxiety, distress, pity, curiosity, haughtiness, wanderlust, and virility, and I return with a sense of well-being, of gravity, of calm.” The court before which Josef K. had to appear was based, shrewdly, in the periphery. By the time the defendant arrives there, he is already weakened, vulnerable, exposed to the unknown, and yet what he sees there is utterly commonplace, scenes that repeat themselves everywhere: children playing, strangers looking out a window or crossing a courtyard. The most serious changes are of such a nature: modest in terms of the distance covered, barely noticeable while in progress, overwhelming by the time one is welcomed into the “dark fringe” of meaning.
The charges Josef K. levels against the court, in his bold, vehement deposition — his first and only — are those that, by age-old tradition, are customarily leveled against every center of power: that it’s based on arbitrariness and injustice (as an example, Josef K. cites the story of his arrest), on brutality and dishonesty (even among the audience in the hearing room are “persons who are being directed from up here”); that, on the other hand, despite its rough-hewn outward appearance, one can glimpse a “great organization” behind it. Corruption is obviously essential to the functioning of the machine, corruption that no doubt extends from the simple guards all the way to the “highest judge.” And in addition to “the inmunerable, indispensable retinue” of those who collaborate with the machine, along with the “ushers, copyists, gendarmes and other assistants,” Josef K. doesn’t shrink from including “perhaps even executioners.” Only a small part of all this would be more than enough to charge him with contempt of court. But the examining magistrate is unruffled. He wants only to make it clear that, with his deposition, Josef K. has deprived himself “of the advantages that an interrogation invariably offers the arrested man.”
The court doesn’t seem to fear the appalling accusations Josef K. has made public: such accusations are found in every history book. If the court were merely a corrupt, arbitrary center of power, prone to any sort of malfeasance, it would lose its peculiarity and its profile would blur together with so many others. And yet, in Josef K.’s impassioned speech, given not in his own name but in the name of the many who suffer similar abuses and who, he supposes, are present in the audience (“I’m fighting for them, not for myself,” he says, in the tone of a tribune), there lurks a passage whose implications might truly worry the court: “What is the point of this great organization, gentlemen? It consists in arresting innocent people and starting proceedings against them that are senseless and that, in most cases, including my own, go nowhere.” Corruption may even be necessary in order to sustain the “senselessness of the whole thing.” A new perspective has come to light here: the goal of the “great organization” isn’t to obtain power or money or to impose some idea — the three forms of which history offers examples in such abundance. The goal is to arrest the innocent and then to punish them. The goal is punishment for its own sake, a self-sufficient activity, like art. And recognizable by the splendor of its “senselessness.”
But Josef K. isn’t able to pursue this course any further — and perhaps he doesn’t even realize the power of what he’s just said. The room is already abuzz, the audience choosing now the role of voyeur, as the student subdues and gropes the washerwoman “in a corner by the door.” And when Josef K. turns around to look, all the observers — no longer just some among them — appear to him to be infiltrators from the court: “You’re all officials, I see, you’re the corrupt band I was speaking against.” In a matter of moments, the oppressed populace in whose defense he had risen has become a compact representation of the oppressors. All Josef K. can do now is grab his hat and leave the scene. As he runs down the stairs, he is followed by “the noise of the assembly, which had come to life again, probably to discuss what had happened as students might.”
One Sunday morning, Josef K. visits the court offices “out of curiosity.” He sees other defendants sitting on benches and waiting, as if out of habit. Their clothes look “neglected,” but various signs make it clear that most of them “belonged to the upper classes.” Social rank is quite relevant to the court. It isn’t attracted to the guilt of the common people. It is among the bourgeoisie — that metamorphic class that is willing and able to take the shape of everything else, to imitate the aristocracy and seep into the working class — that guilt flourishes. There is little to differentiate these defendants from those men at the bank who wait in the antechamber outside Josef K.’s office, except their careless dress. And a terrible hypersensitivity: “Defendants in general are so sensitive,” observes the court usher when a distinguished gentleman, Josef K.’s “colleague” insofar as he’s a defendant, suddenly yells as if Josef K. “had touched him not with two fingers but with red-hot tongs.”
The court that tries Josef K. “isn’t very well known among the common people”; it seems to have an esoteric purview. It wants to make a good first impression, however, and thus it has appointed an information officer, charged with giving out “any information the waiting parties may need.” This man has two characteristics: “he knows an answer for every question,” and he is elegant, sporting “a gray waistcoat that ended in two long sharp points.” His clothes were acquired thanks to a collection taken up from among the court employees and the defendants, since the administration proved “rather strange” about it. In the attics that host the court offices, as well as in the distressing corridor where the defendants sit waiting, hats beneath their benches, this man moves with the ease of a master of ceremonies in the halls of a Grand Hôtel. But sometimes he can’t help laughing in the defendants’ faces — as he does with Josef K. A female employee next to Josef K. explains: “Everything’s set to make a good impression, but then he ruins it all with his laugh, which scares people.” The information officer is an embodiment of the court: long steeped in the stagnant attic air, he can’t stand fresh air, as if he were afraid of dissolving outside those offices where he is both genius loci and tour guide. He is ceremonious and cruel. “He really knows how to talk to the parties,” the woman whispers to Josef K., who nods.