Josef K. already has an “opinion” about the court, even if he prolongs his captious interrogation in an effort to “uncover contradictions” in the painter’s words, and he too now has something to say about it, which, in its terseness, seems like a final judgment: “A single executioner could take the place of the entire court.” That executioner is death itself, which acts without consulting instructions or verdicts, just as the Goddess of the Hunt, whom Josef K. thought he recognized in the painting propped on Titorelli’s easel, strikes in the mazy forest without the authorization of any preliminary judgment. Josef K. has lucidly perceived that the court is the place where the Goddess of Justice and the Goddess of the Hunt blur into a single figure. Titorelli suggests that the Goddess of Victory can be seen in the same figure. But that’s a superfluous addendum. Victory, for the court, is a given for every moment of the world’s existence.
In the eyes of the manufacturer who first speaks to Josef K. about him, Titorelli is a postulant, “almost a beggar,” as every artist is, in principle. In Josef K.’s eyes he is first of all a “poor man,” precisely what he himself will seem in Titorelli’s eyes. And yet that “poor man,” thanks to his profession, is the only one who has direct access to the remote past, to the “legends.”
The subject of legends comes up when Titorelli is explaining to Josef K. that there are three types of absolution: “real acquittal, apparent acquittal, and protraction.” Titorelli knows of no case of real acquittal. But he knows that some real acquittals “are said to have occurred,” at least among the legal cases handed down in legend.
When they speak of legends in The Trial, they may as well be speaking of myth, a word Kafka doesn’t use here, perhaps because it brings in something superfluous or academic. The legends tell of judgments that are otherwise inaccessible: the court’s ancient verdicts, which “are not published.” This alone should render them valuable. An abyss, however, divides us from those legends. Certainly they are “very beautiful,” and one can even attribute to them “a kind of truth”—and here, rustling behind Titorelli’s words, we hear the age-old dispute over myth: Plato is watching us—“but they are not provable.” And what is a court if not the place where proof must be offered? Is it possible, then, Josef K. asks, “to appeal to such legends in court?” Of course not, the painter replies. He even laughs. A terrible laugh. The court is steeped in legends, right down to the portraits of its judges — and these legends are the only means of accessing a part of its history. If nothing else, they offer beauty and “a kind of truth.” But they can’t be utilized, and so, Josef K. concludes, “it’s useless to talk about them.”
This ferocious amputation has many consequences: above all, it becomes pointless to consider “real acquittal,” because real acquittal is treated only in the legends — and it’s useless to talk about legends. It’s as if the world agreed, with a simple gesture, to abolish a part of itself. And the only part, furthermore, where the adjective “real” is applicable. All the rest of the world, which soon will be considered the whole world, is divided up between “apparent acquittal” and “protraction.” Within that world things can be proved, but they may not be real. As for any acquittal that one might obtain there, it will certainly not be “real.” This brief exchange in Titorelli’s cramped, stifling studio, between two people who have just met, has a grave consequence: in the name of reality, reality is left aside. With the haste of a man who is after tangible results, Josef K. says at once: “Then let’s leave real acquittal aside.” What remains? Apparent acquittal and protraction. Only they have applications; only of them is it useful to speak. In the meantime, Titorelli asks Josef K.: “But don’t you want to take your jacket off before we discuss them? You must be very hot.” Josef K. agrees — and says: “It’s nearly unbearable.” He finds it nearly unbearable mainly because he has come too close to grasping the nature of his situation. Thus, just as he is getting ready to talk about what can be most useful to him, he has “the feeling of being totally cut off from air.” Here begins a brief, dense back-and-forth between him and Titorelli on air, fog, windows, heat, doors. In The Trial, any mention of windows or air or breathing is a signal — like a conversation about clothes in The Castle—that we have entered an intense, highly sensitive zone.
What Josef K. wants to find out can never be breathed. Titorelli knows that — and nods “as though he understood K.’s malaise very well.” The close, oppressive air of Titorelli’s garret is now ready to flow out over the vast wasteland of apparent acquittal and protraction.
Does the fact that legends can’t be used as evidence reflect one of their intrinsic weaknesses — or one of their privileges? Since the legends deal with “ancient legal cases” for which “the court’s final verdicts are not published,” one might assume that their inadmissibility as evidence stems from the impossibility of verifying their contents. Titorelli’s account, however, doesn’t say that in the past the court’s final verdicts were not published. The painter asserts, rather, that such verdicts are never published. If that’s the case, not only the legends but also all other evidence, of any kind, would be inadequate. It would always be unverifiable. As for the legends, they would then be the only texts that at least “contain real acquittals,” the only ones, therefore, that incorporate some of the final verdicts. Of course, the legends may all be frauds. But they may also be the last surviving vestige of the court’s final verdicts. The last vestige of something “real” in a world as cut off from reality as Josef K. is from air.
For a long time, during the greater part of human history, myth was the prime source of wisdom. Then it became a sequence of insidious, pointless stories, meaningful only to the degree that they helped us understand how people lived in the past. The sources of wisdom shifted. Matters myth had once told stories about were now proved and applied. But there were those who noticed that some of myth’s wisdom had been sealed off within the new wisdom. No big deal, most felt. We’ll know a little less about our past, but what does the past matter when before us lies the immensity of the present? Others, however, persisted. They noticed that the inaccessible part of myth dealt with the “court’s final verdicts.” And no other text did, since those verdicts “are not published.” Thus the hope was born, in a few, that one might, through the myths, come to know things that one could never otherwise discover. Most considered such hope a serious delusion, but they couldn’t prove it, since the court’s recent verdicts, which might have countered the ancient ones, were also inaccessible. For even now the verdicts were not published. Meanwhile the world continued to be embroiled in trials and verdicts, which, however, were never final. The trials were all visible, the verdicts all provisional. Reality had been taken away, everything became a snarl of appearance and protraction.
Why aren’t the real acquittals published? In order to guard some secret? So that “the highest court” can protect its exclusive right to grant “final acquittals,” thereby ensuring the inaccessibility of the secret? Nothing indeed is as inaccessible as what isn’t there. And many claim it isn’t, convinced that the barricade erected around the secret serves above all to allow the greatest freedom of action at the highest levels. But this explanation, however plausible and seductive, addresses only the secret’s easiest, most external aspect. Its foundation appears when Titorelli describes what happens in the event of a real acquittaclass="underline" “The court acts must all be set aside, they disappear totally from the proceedings; not only is the charge destroyed, but also the trial and even the acquittal, everything is destroyed.” If everything is destroyed, one can see why real acquittal is never made public: because it is destroyed in the very moment it comes into being. The extinction of the acts—and here again, as we move beyond the surface sense of “judicial acts,” the literal meaning shows through: that of acts as karma—is the only way out of the trial, following the exertion, on the part of the highest judges, of their “great power to free a person from the charge.” All the rest is made of ropes that slacken or tighten according to the will of ordinary judges, who enjoy only “the power to unbind a person from the charge.”