Avery then called our attention to the book’s title in German, Der Prozeß, which means both “the case” and “the process.” Citing a text from our secondary-reading list, he began to mumble about three different “universes of interpretation” in which the text of The Trial could be read: one universe in which K. is an innocent man falsely accused, another universe in which the degree of K.’s guilt is undecidable…I was only half listening. The windows were darkening, and it was a point of pride with me never to read secondary literature. But when Avery arrived at the third universe of interpretation, in which Josef K. is guilty, he stopped and looked at us expectantly, as if waiting for us to get some joke; and I felt my blood pressure spike. I was offended by the mere mention of the possibility that K. was guilty. It made me feel frustrated, cheated, injured. I was outraged that a critic was allowed even to suggest a thing like that.
“Go back and look at what’s on the page,” Avery said. “Forget the other reading for next week. You have to read what’s on the page.”
JOSEF K., WHO has been arrested at home on the morning of his thirtieth birthday, returns to his rooming house after a long day at work and apologizes to his landlady, Frau Grubach, for the morning’s disturbances. The arresting officials briefly commandeered the room of another boarder, a young woman named Bürstner, but Frau Grubach assures K. that her room has been put back in order. She tells K. not to worry about his arrest — it’s not a criminal matter, thank God, but something very “learned” and mysterious. K. says he “agrees” with her: the matter is “completely null and void.” He asks Frau Grubach to shake his hand to seal their “agreement” about how meaningless it is. Frau Grubach instead replies, with tears in her eyes, that he shouldn’t take the matter so much to heart. K. then casually asks about Fräulein Bürstner — is she home yet? He has never exchanged more than hellos with Fräulein Bürstner, he doesn’t even know her first name, but when Frau Grubach confides that she worries about the men Fräulein Bürstner is hanging out with and how late she’s been coming home, K. becomes “enraged.” He declares that he knows Fräulein Bürstner very well and that Frau Grubach is completely mistaken about her. He angrily goes into his room, and Frau Grubach hastens to assure him that her only concern is with the moral purity of her rooming house. To which K., through a chink in the door, bizarrely cries, “If you want to keep your rooming house clean, you’d better start by asking me to leave!” He shuts the door in Frau Grubach’s face, ignores her “faint knocking,” and proceeds to lie in ambush for Fräulein Bürstner.
He has no particular desire for the girl — can’t even remember what she looks like. But the longer he waits for her, the angrier he gets. Suddenly it’s her fault that he skipped his dinner and his weekly visit to a B-girl. When she finally comes in, toward midnight, he tells her that he’s been waiting more than two and a half hours (this is a flat-out lie), and he insists on having a word with her immediately. Fräulein Bürstner is so tired she can hardly stand up. She wonders aloud how K. can accuse her of being “late” when she had no idea he was even waiting for her. But she agrees to talk for a few minutes in her room. Here K. is excited to learn that Fräulein Bürstner has some training as a legal secretary; he says, “That’s excellent, you’ll be able to help me with my case.” He gives her a detailed account of what happened in the morning, and when he senses that she’s insufficiently impressed with his story, he starts moving her furniture around and reenacting the scene. He mentions, for no good reason, that a blouse of hers was hanging on the window in the morning. Impersonating the arresting officer, who was actually quite polite and soft-spoken, he screams his own name so loudly that another boarder knocks on Fräulein Bürstner’s door. She tries again to get rid of K. — he’s now been in her room for half an hour, and she has to get up very early in the morning. But he won’t leave her alone. He assures her that, if the other boarder makes trouble for her, he’ll personally vouch for her respectability. In fact, if need be, he’ll tell Frau Grubach that everything was his fault — that he “assaulted” her in her bedroom. And then, as Fräulein Bürstner tries yet again to get rid of him, he really does assault her:
…lief vor, faßte sie, küßte sie auf den Mund und dann über das ganze Gesicht, wie ein durstiges Tier mit der Zunge über das endlich gefundene Quellwasser hinjagt. Schließlich küßte er sie auf den Hals, wo die Gurgel ist, und dort ließ er die Lippen lange liegen.[15]
“Now I’ll go,” he says, wishing he knew her first name. Fräulein Bürstner nods tiredly and walks away with her head down and her shoulders slumping. Before he falls asleep, K. thinks about his behavior with her and concludes that he’s pleased with it — indeed, is surprised only that he’s not even more pleased.
I thought I’d read every word of the first chapter of The Trial twice, in German and in English, but when I went back now I realized that I’d never read the chapter even once. What was actually on the page, as opposed to what I’d expected to find there, was so unsettling that I’d shut my mind down and simply made believe that I was reading. I’d been so convinced of the hero’s innocence that I’d missed what the author was saying, clearly and unmistakably, in every sentence. I’d been blind the way K. himself is blind. And so, disregarding Avery’s talk of three universes of interpretive possibility, I became dogmatically attached to the opposite of my original supposition. I decided that K. is a creepy, arrogant, selfish, abusive shmuck who, because he refuses to examine his life, is having it forcibly examined for him.
THAT FALL, I was happier than I’d been since high school. My friend Ekström and I were living in a two-room double in a centrally located dorm, and I’d lucked into the job of editing the college literary magazine. In the same zany early-seventies spirit that had saddled the college’s art-film series with the name TAFFOARD,[16] the magazine was called The Nulset Review. Its previous editor was a petite red-haired poet from New York who’d had a mostly female staff and had mostly printed poetry by female poets. I was the outsider who was supposed to freshen up the magazine and find new contributors, and the first thing I did was organize a contest to rename it. The red-haired former editor relinquished her post graciously, but without conceding that anything had been wrong with The Nulset Review. She was a languid, large-eyed woman with a soft, tremulous voice and a thirty-year-old Cuban boyfriend in New York. My staff and I spent the first half hour of our first editorial meeting waiting for her to show up and tell us how to run a magazine. Finally, someone called her at home and woke her up — it was one o’clock on a Sunday afternoon — and she drifted in half an hour later, carrying an enormous mug of coffee and basically still sleeping. She lay on a sofa, her head pillowed in the nest of her curly red hair, and rarely spoke unless we were struggling to understand a submitted manuscript. Then, accepting the manuscript with a languid hand, she cast her eye over it briefly and delivered an incisive summary and analysis. I could see she was my competition. She was living upstairs from a grocery-and-meat market, in an off-campus apartment where the dark-haired French major I was chasing also lived. They were best friends. At a party in November, while everybody else was dancing, I found myself standing alone with the competition for the first time. I said, “I guess this means we finally have to have a conversation.” She gave me a cold look, said, “No, it doesn’t,” and walked away.
15
…rushed over, grabbed her, kissed her on the mouth and then all over her face, the way a thirsty animal works its tongue over the long-sought spring water. Finally he kissed her neck, where the throat is, and let his lips lie there a long time.