Josef K. tries to speak with a defendant, who wants only to be left alone to wait (“I thought I could wait here, it’s Sunday, I have some time and won’t bother anyone here,” he pleads). The stale air makes it hard to breathe. A sort of “seasickness” overtakes Josef K. From the end of the hall he hears “a roar of pelting waves, as if the hallway were pitching back and forth and the defendants on either side were rising and falling with it.” He finally knows where he is now. The information officer’s laugh and the sly sarcasm of his words reverberate: “Just as I said. It’s only here that the gentleman feels unwell, not in general.” Only here: But Josef K. has now ascertained the vastness of that here: it’s a sea that lifts and sweeps away everything in its path. These offices are linked by an obscure equation to the work of punishment, and Josef K. is on the verge of recognizing this link when he is overcome by vertigo. But there’s no need to worry: “Almost everyone has an attack like this the first time they come,” the woman tells him gently.
In the same attic rooms, depending on the day, either laundry is hung out to dry or the court hearings take place. But what’s the difference between laundry drying on a line and the work of the court? To a large extent they coincide, or at least each infuses the other. The court is a hallucination superimposed on everything else. It overruns everything from below, from the margins, from above. It thrives on the periphery, in poor neighborhoods, in attics. It generates suffocating heat and clouds of steam. However, if one prefers, there’s always a sensible explanation: “You can’t completely prohibit the tenants” from hanging their laundry in the attics, remarks the employee who helps Josef K. and whose face bears the “severe expression that certain women have even in the bloom of youth.” And she adds: “That’s why these rooms aren’t very well suited for offices, even if in other ways they offer great advantages.” She doesn’t specify what these “great advantages” might be.
Mrs. Grubach takes Josef K.’s “happiness” to heart, for he is “her best and dearest boarder,” but she doesn’t give much weight to his arrest. For her, it isn’t as “serious” as being arrested for stealing. No, his is an arrest that seems “like something scholarly.” Thus she can say: “I don’t understand it, but then one doesn’t need to understand it.” Josef K. replies as though he has immediately grasped her meaning, but suggests that the arrest, rather than “something scholarly,” ought to be considered a “nothing.” He adds: “I was caught by surprise, that’s all.” And he goes on to explain: “If immediately upon awakening, without letting myself be thrown off by the fact that Anna hadn’t appeared, I’d risen immediately and, ignoring anyone in my path, had come to you and eaten breakfast in the kitchen for a change, if I’d had you bring my clothes from my room, in short if I had behaved reasonably, nothing else would have happened. Everything that wanted to come into being would have been stifled.”
This conversation between Josef K. and his landlady, as she patiently darns a pile of stockings into which he “from time to time buried his hand,” is one of the most vertiginous exchanges in all of The Trial. But neither of the two interlocutors grasps its import, and neither of course does the reader, for the story has just begun. The words exist and act on their own, occasionally passing through people but never belonging to them — indeed they are immediately forgotten. Only a writer’s hand will one day be able to gather them and set them in their place, at the nerve center of events.
To counter Mrs. Grubach’s theory, according to which some doctrine, perhaps a complex, ancient one, lies behind his arrest, Josef K. wants to reduce it to a pure physiological fact. The arrest is something “that wanted to come into being” but that could have been “stifled” had he shown sufficient quickness in the moment of awakening (“immediately,” gleich, appears twice in three lines). What follows is comic in its labored detail — he should have moved immediately into the kitchen, had breakfast in the kitchen, had clothes brought from his room — but immensely serious in its aim: “to stifle” something that is about to come into being. The implicit thesis is this: if one acted “reasonably,” one could ensure that “everything that wanted to come into being” would be “stifled.” Bold metaphysical thesis. The ancient terror of becoming is caught in the instant of awakening, therefore at the source of that which is becoming. And that includes all things, since the world itself is something “that wanted to come into being.” But awakening requires this virtue: a quick reaction time, which only the prepared can count on. And here Josef K. is forced to admit, as if ruminating: “We are so poorly prepared.” That fact alone explains how one can get mixed up in a trial. But what is required in order to be prepared (and therefore to act “reasonably”)? At the very least, an office. Josef K. adds: “At the bank, for example, I’m prepared, nothing like this could ever happen to me there.” Certain consequences can be inferred from his ominous aside, including, above all, this one: that in order to act “reasonably” one needs to contain within oneself the equivalent of an office, since one can’t expect the awakening to take place in an actual office. Further, the “reasonable” action has, among its functions, that of stifling certain things that want to happen. If events take another course, if two strangers devour our breakfast, if the same strangers confiscate our clothes, then there has been a disturbance in our awakening, which is “the riskiest moment.” Josef K.’s entire story shows us what the risk is: that revelation may transform into persecution.
Awakening, the bodhi that is continually spoken of in Indian thought from the Vedas to the Buddha, is something that happens during wakefulness, an invisible shift, a sudden change in distances and in the mental pace, thanks to which consciousness is able to observe itself — and is therefore able to observe itself in its typical role as observer. The most effective metaphor for this event is the awakening from sleep, the passage from dream to wakefulness. That auroral moment of fullness and astonishment — but also sometimes of bewilderment and anxiety — suggests another fullness that can characterize every instant of waking life. Few people experience awakening as a perpetually renewed act, within wakefulness — such an act is definitive only in the Buddha. And yet such people are the only ones, according to some, who can be said to think. Everyone, however, experiences the act of waking, of rousing oneself from sleep. But this phenomenon that everyone experiences daily is merely an example, a hint, a rough figuration of that other phenomenon, of which most remain unaware.