When he was writing, Kafka never knew what would come out of that gap in the walclass="underline" “a swarm of violent men,” or a “skinny young man” who might resemble himself so closely as to be indistinguishable.
XIII. Lawyer Visits
Josef K. goes to see his lawyer, Huld, to remove him from the case. He explains that in the early stages “unless he was somehow violently reminded of it,” he was able to forget completely about his trial. But now, he says, “the trial is steadily closing in on me.” The original—immer näher an den Leib rückt—means literally: the trial “is moving ever closer to my body.” And he adds: förmlich im Geheimen, “in complete secrecy.” The trial is a machine that comes ever closer to the body of the accused. When contact is finally made, the sentence is incised, as with the machine in the penal colony. But for now no one except the accused himself can see the machine. This terrifying vision, an early intimation of the story’s conclusion, is unleashed by the fact that a dead metaphor (the expression an den Leib rücken) has come back to life — and no longer as a metaphor but as a literal description of events.
With her large, sad, black eyes that bulge slightly, with her round doll’s face and her long white apron, Leni presides over everything that happens in Huld’s office — and in his bedroom too, which is, as always, the place of revelation. She is at once both nurse and jailer. She doles out both pleasure and punishment to the accused. The guardian of their metamorphoses, she plunges them ever deeper into guilt, thereby exalting their beauty. Like Gardena and Frieda with respect to the Castle, Leni has an insider’s knowledge of the court’s mysteries. Her every word is valuable and suggestive. But it would be illusory to think her on one’s side. If Leni loves all the accused and is lavishly promiscuous with them, that doesn’t mean she wants to help them. She’s the Eros of the law, amorously circling those to whom it is applied, before piercing them.
Leni gives herself to all the defendants, on principle, for she finds them all beautiful. “She clings to all of them, loves them all, and seems to be loved by them in return,” as is Ushas (Dawn) by those who, awakened, welcome her and offer her their first sacrifice. Then Leni returns to Huld and tells him about her affairs “to entertain him.” Of course, explains the lawyer, to recognize the defendants’ beauty one must have “an eye for it.” And Leni certainly does. From the moment Josef K. first sees her “large black eyes” through the peephole in the door, they give him the impression, perhaps deceptive, of being “sad.” But Leni, as we will learn, is behind every door, like a suction cup on the visible world. The touch of Leni’s body is the defendants’ guarantee that their beauty is flowering, that the proceeding is exerting its effect on them. In this, the court is impartial. Through Leni, it acknowledges its foundation: sexual attraction to guilt.
“There was total silence. The lawyer drank, Josef K. squeezed Leni’s hand, and Leni sometimes dared to caress Josef K.’s hair.” On another occasion too, Leni runs her fingers “very delicately and cautiously,” through Josef K.’s hair, much as the gentlemen in the barroom run their fingers through Pepi’s curls — though not delicately of course, but “avidly.” It’s the hallmark of intimacy and of the trial, of some obscure event unfolding.
Josef K. is he who waits, who observes — all the while looking for another way, as he squeezes Leni’s hand: the way of women. Leni doesn’t discourage him. Indeed, she risks an amorous gesture. In the silence, Huld drinks his tea “with a sort of rapacity.” Leaning over his cup, he seems unaware of what’s taking place around him. But we sense that nothing escapes him.
In the scenes where Josef K. is granted much more detailed “insight into the judicial system” than parties normally receive — as happens during his conversations with Titorelli and with Huld — feminine ears are always listening, hidden. The corrupt girls are huddled beyond the cracks in Titorelli’s walls. Leni, who appears in Huld’s bedroom “almost simultaneously with the sound of the bell,” has clearly had an ear to the door. The feminine presence behind these scenes signals their initiatory nature. Titorelli’s corrupt girls even have the impudence to intervene, like haughty priestesses, urging the painter not to paint the portrait of “such an ugly man” as Josef K. Could his ugliness be due to the fact that he is still “a newcomer, a youth” in terms of his trial, which itself is still so “young” that it hasn’t yet had time to take full hold of him and bring his beauty to light? Is he perhaps still too raw, as yet insufficiently ripened and refined by his “proceeding”?
All the legal proceedings, dauntingly complex, rigorous, and gradual, are merely preparatory to a judgment that is immediate and aesthetic — if that’s how we want to describe the physiognomic judgment that determines innocence or guilt “on the basis of the defendant’s face, and especially the line of his lips.” That’s the basis, according to superstition. And though Block calls it “ridiculous,” he’s quick to add that, according to several defendants, Josef K. faces “certain conviction, and soon,” a conviction they infer “from his lips.” But is superstition really such a silly thing? Or is it “the repository of all truths,” as Baudelaire wrote? If the latter, guilt would no longer reside in a person’s will, whether conscious or unconscious, but in his very shape. In that case, the task of the lawyers and the court alike would be to help make plain a conviction that has always existed.
The defendant in The Trial becomes the party in The Castle. A slight shift: it’s clear, after all, that every party is in the first place guilty. The dominant Eros is that which comes down from above toward the external, excluded world: from the court toward defendants, from the Castle officials toward parties. It’s the Eros of predators, detecting the scent of the unknown. It’s parallel to the Eros that belongs to the external world, to shapeless appearance — and so to parties and defendants — and that wants to enter the place of authority and law. The disparity between these two trajectories is beyond repair. One always, though perhaps by a slow, tortuous route, reaches its goal. The other, almost never.
Does guilt heighten beauty? Such an audacious question might never have been asked before. But as he listens to Huld speaking from bed, Josef K. is forced to put it to himself. “Defendants are the loveliest of all”: this is the undeniable reality Huld describes. But how can it be explained? Does the seriousness of the guilt determine the intensity of the beauty? That can’t be, Huld asserts, as if alarmed: “It can’t be guilt that renders them beautiful.” But he quickly adds: “At least as a lawyer I have to talk that way.” This aside strips the preceding assertion of all meaning. Indeed a lawyer, as part of his job, must above all maintain the innocence of his clients. Consequently, he must at all costs deny that their undeniable beauty is a product of their guilt, which he would otherwise be admitting. But where else might their beauty come from? At this point Huld advances a hypothesis that may be more alarming than the first: “It must result from the proceedings being brought against them, which somehow adhere to them.” It’s true, then, what Block the merchant—“that wretched worm” (Huld’s words) who nevertheless partakes of the beauty of defendants — observed moments earlier when he told Josef K.: “You must keep in mind that in this proceeding things the intellect can’t handle are continually being made explicit.” Leaving aside the question of guilt, and in the absence of any valid argument against its indissoluble connection with beauty, one arrives at the supposition that the “proceeding” itself, with its various elements that exceed the capacity of the intellect, has the power to adhere physically to the defendants, like the alchemic opus to the prima materia. The process of the trial is thus like any other process that entails the transformation of a substance. That substance is the defendant. And guilt seems to be the original state of every substance. The more the proceeding cuts into the defendant’s life, the more beautiful he becomes, and the worse his guilt can be assumed to be. And ripeness, the perfection of beauty, is that telos that also signifies the end, death: a capital sentence. Presumably, the defendant’s beauty in that moment is almost blinding.