One rainy morning, Josef K. is preparing to leave his office in order to take an Italian client of his bank on a tour of the monuments of his city. He gets a phone call. It’s Leni, who asks him how he is. He replies that he has an appointment at the cathedral, explains why. Leni “suddenly” tells him: “They’re hunting you down.” Josef K. replaces the receiver, disturbed by the warning. And he tells himself: “Yes, they’re hunting me down.”
This is perhaps the moment of purest terror in Josef K.’s story. Behind the voice of the invisible Leni, we sense an unknown, sinister immensity yawning open. And again, only a woman is capable of auguring its existence. Until that moment, Josef K. thought that having to show the client around the city was merely an inconvenient duty, since “every hour away from the office troubled him.” A minor annoyance, part of the course of daily life. But as soon as he replies to Leni, he senses something fatal — and preordained — about this appointment at the cathedral, something to which he is alerted by an inner voice that harmonizes perfectly with hers. Their two voices blur: “Yes, they’re hunting me down.” Normal office life has now become a fragile, transparent shell, beneath which can be recognized, by its slow, lethal breath, an abysmal creature: the indomitable life of the trial.
Diary entry from November 2, 1911: “This morning for the first time in a long time the joy again at the thought of a knife being turned in my heart.” Antepenultimate sentence of The Triaclass="underline" “… while the other stuck the knife into his heart and turned it there twice.” One notices first the repetition: already in 1911, the knife in the heart is like an old acquaintance who has reappeared. Then the attention to the gesture, as if the decisive element of the whole scene were the verb drehen, “to turn.” And finally the “joy” the thought inspires. That’s a rare word in Kafka. Up until the very end, Josef K. rebels against — and collaborates with — the power that wants to kill him. When the two executioners come to take him away, he is ready. His outfit even matches theirs. They wear frock coats “with seemingly immovable top hats.” Josef K. is “dressed in black” with “new gloves that were snug on his fingers.” He’s sitting near the door “with the look of one who expects guests.” As the trio walks down the street, the two executioners hold him tightly between them, forming “a unit of the sort usually formed only by lifeless matter.” His last rebellious line of reasoning, then, is utterly disinterested, having no chance by this point to help his case, and it’s subtle enough to offer itself as a brainteaser: “Were there objections that had been forgotten? Of course there were. Logic is, no doubt, unshakable, but it’s no match for a man who wants to live.” As for him, he had stopped being “a man who wants to live” a year ago.
The two executioners want Josef K.’s head to rest nicely on a “loose block of stone” in a “suitable spot” in the quarry that has been preselected for the killing. They struggle to get him into the right position, a task made easier by “K.’s cooperation with them.” And yet his “position remained quite forced and implausible.” This is the true end point of The Trial. Even when the executioners and the condemned man join forces, the victim’s position remains “implausible.” The execution is real; the actions have something incongruous and distorted about them. That imbalance is the hallmark of the whole affair. Maybe that’s what Josef K. is thinking, moments later, as he watches the two executioners pass the butcher knife back and forth but declines to take it in hand and drive it home himself. In the end, he can’t “relieve the authorities of all the work.” Thus he commits one “final error,” of course: but who bears “the responsibility” for the error, if not “the one who had denied him the remnant of strength required”? And who might that be? Whose task is it to strip Josef K. of that last bit of strength he needs not only to help the executioners position his head properly on the stone block but also to open up his body with the butcher knife? This is the extreme question that The Trial leaves hanging. And the most frightening. But it’s easily overlooked: the unfolding series of actions is too vivid for one to pay much attention to Josef K.’s final cogitation.
A moment later, a light goes on in a window on “the top floor of a building next to the quarry,” and a figure appears there in silhouette. This figure — it could be a man or a woman — is the last of many who have appeared in windows. It recalls the figures who, from the facing windows, observed Josef K.’s arrest.
If the fact that Josef K. can’t find the strength to stick the butcher knife in his own chest is a “final error,” then the trial, in its pure, ideal form, must have been plotting his suicide from the very start. But in all the key moments, Josef K. turns out to lack sufficient strength, either to remain awake long enough to listen to the revelatory words, or to perform, with his own hand, the resolving gesture. Thus his two executioners have the air of tenors or vaudeville extras. They are “fleeting improvised men,” Judge Schreber would have said, and serve only for that momentary task of plunging the knife into Josef K.’s body. If the order of the world were more perfect, they would be unnecessary. Josef K. would act alone. But would there be, in that case, a trial? Or wouldn’t the trial coincide with the act of creation, with that long suicide?
XII. The Stuff of Legends
For generation upon generation, the painters charged with painting the portraits of the court judges have passed down “rules that are numerous, varied, and above all secret.” The latest artist called on to apply them is Titorelli, a painter of mythological scenes with a penchant for heathscapes. As Reynolds painted the great ladies of his day in the attitudes of Diana or Minerva, so Titorelli paints a judge in the semblance of a goddess: the Goddess of Justice, of course. Though she could also be the Goddess of Victory, the artist notes. Or maybe even, after some final retouches, which Titorelli performs in Josef K.’s presence, the Goddess of the Hunt. She is depicted mid-chase, with wings on her ankles. Surely every jolt must unbalance those scales of justice. A blindfolded woman running: that’s what Titorelli is painting. More than a goddess, she’s a riddle, one whose solution isn’t clear. Is she solemn? Derisive? This is all we know for sure: the Goddess of Justice is visible at once, and the Goddess of the Hunt is the last to reveal herself. Does this, perhaps, foretell the court’s ultimate, esoteric meaning?
Josef K. and K. experience their decisive revelations while sitting on the edge of a bed: K. on Bürgel’s bed, Josef K. on Titorelli’s. Less important, but still significant, is proximity to a bed: Gardena beside K.’s bed in the maids’ room, K. beside the superintendent’s bed. Even the position one assumes on the bed is meaningful, as we can see from Titorelli’s behavior. It isn’t enough for him that Josef K. sit on the edge of the bed. Instead the painter “pushed him back into the eiderdown and the cushions.” Only when Josef K. is sinking toward the middle of the bed does Titorelli ask his “first actual question”: “Are you innocent?” And Josef K. answers: “Yes.”
The edge of the bed is the threshold of another world, and one must sink into that other world before the most essential, most direct question can be asked. Only in Titorelli’s studio, in that oppressive burrow, two strides wide in each direction, only in that stale air, can such words be uttered. And what Titorelli says now hasn’t been heard before. First: “The court can never be swayed.” If it has seen guilt, no one can persuade it that the guilt isn’t there. This is a valuable, if indirect, rejoinder to the declaration of innocence that Josef K. has just made. Second: the corrupt girls who play on the stairs and who guided Josef K. to Titorelli “belong to the court.” Indeed, the painter adds, “everything belongs to the court.” With his ceremonious, indifferent manner, and above all with these last words, added “half in jest, half in explanation,” Titorelli has offered Josef K. revelations that could carry great weight, if only he didn’t find them, thanks to his unshakable mistrust, “unbelievable.”