A Reader on Trial

Toward the end of The Trial, Josef K. makes the decision to dismiss his lawyer Huld as his representative in the case against him. It is, perhaps, his fatal error—the most decisive error in a long series of mistakes, miscalculations, and misunderstandings. I wrote in a previous piece about Josef K.’s sensory failures—his inability to properly “see” and “hear,” not just in the limited sense of an individual’s perception of the world but in the sense of penetrating the surface order or structure of things to find deeper meaning.

Josef K.’s decision to fire his lawyer highlights another faulty process: the inability to judge. The ostensible rationale for the dismissal of the lawyer is a perceived lack of progress, most notably the lawyer’s failure to submit even a single petition on K.’s behalf during the first six months of his trial. Such seeming neglect is incomprehensible to K., especially as he measures all things in relation to tangible processes and orderly procedures.

There are, in addition to these ostensible reasons, at least two other reasons for the lawyer’s dismissal. The first, as K. admits, is that since his uncle convinced him to engage Huld on the case, the psychological burden of the trial on Josef K. has grown greater, not lessened, as he expected it would. The hiring of the lawyer has increased K.’s preoccupation with his status as an arrested subject, and he blames Huld for not relieving him of this burden, for not, as he puts it, shouldering the load which now presses down on him with added weight. The second reason Josef K. desires to fire Huld, and I use the word “desire” quite intentionally, is to assert power and agency—to assert his independence from Huld, and, by association, from the entire world, and grip, of the trial. If Josef K. can’t assert himself against the trial directly—it remains too opaque and amorphous for such an assertion—the closest surrogate for this is Huld. This is why Josef K. wants to conduct the dismissal in person. How else might he experience the pleasure of his assertion? How else would he feel the full impact of his agency? And how, other than in person, could he assess the impact of his action, its seriousness?

It’s after ten at night when Josef K. rings at Huld’s door. He’s arriving after a long and inefficient day of work at the bank. His life in the bank has deteriorated in the face of the parallel life of the trial, the latter sucking the energy vampirically from the former. The person who answers the door is not Huld, of course, and in this case isn’t Huld’s maid Leni. The small and rather pathetic-looking man is Rudi Block, a grain merchant.

Block has come to the door in his nightshirt, and K. can hardly fathom how a client—a man ostensibly like himself—could appear at the lawyer’s house dressed in such a manner. The meeting at the door—Josef K. almost violently pushing his way inside—sets up a competition or comparison between the men. There is the sexual competition over Leni, the maid, a subject K. opens immediately when he demands to know from Block if Leni is his lover, if she belongs to Block or to himself. It is Josef K.’s first question. Related to this question of entitlement to Leni or ownership of her is the question of status. Who, Block or Josef K., occupies the higher position on the social ladder and thus can dictate the terms of the encounter? For K., attire is decisive. Block’s “inappropriate” dress, most notably his lack of a jacket, immediately establishes the basis for the imagined hierarchy Josef K. constructs. The mere possession of a heavy overcoat, as the novel’s narrator says, “made him feel quiet superior to the short, skinny man.” The narrator elaborates on what this superiority means to Josef K., though the elaboration, as with many of Kafka’s elaborations, adds more confusion than clarity to the scene. Still, it is worth lingering over this very Kafkian narrative statement:

He [Josef K.] felt totally at ease, the way one normally feels speaking to inferiors in a foreign country, avoiding everything personal, just talking indifferently about their interests, thereby elevating them in importance, but also in a position to drop them at will.

Josef K.’s interpretation of the power relationship between himself and Block is illuminating. Though there seems to be some justification for K.’s feeling of occupying a superior position to Block, at least he is afforded more respect from the lawyer, it is based, at this early point in the scene, almost entirely on the fact that Block wears no coat while he, K., possesses one. It is a kind of Gogolesque comedy. Despite this absurdity, there is something quite a bit darker in K.’s cerebrations. His feeling of total ease when “speaking to inferiors in a foreign country” indicates at best bourgeois snobbery and entitlement, at worst a kind of colonialist worldview based on civilizational hierarchies—and such hierarchical civilizational frames operated (and continue to operate) also within European space. “Inferiors” in foreign lands, K. implies, are doubly inferior to those in K.’s home country, for those at home remain close enough to necessitate strict attention to social rules, norms, and boundaries. Abroad, in certain contexts, as this logic goes, one can relax in full confidence in an unbridgeable gap, an insurmountable existential difference. From such a higher perch, a person can play with thoughts, can entertain ideas, knowing they are ultimately meaningless and can be tossed aside, abandoned, whenever one’s whim desires. This is a worldview ethically and morally empty. It is precisely such narcissistic frivolity, based on a sense of inherent or natural superiority, that defines the bourgeois order to which K. belongs, an order which Josef K. embodies.

In this moment, Josef K. has fully externalized himself, becoming nothing but his overcoat, which itself is a surface signifier of the capitalist order, the world of the bank. The overcoat, to borrow (and recontextualize) a concept from Klaus Theweleit, has become Josef K.’s “body armor.” Block, on the other hand, has shed his armor. He is open, porous, able to allow his emotions to flow in and out of himself, able to trust Josef K., for example, who, in turn, deals with Block in utterly bad faith, using Block instrumentally to promote his own interests, or so he thinks.

But isn’t Block also a capitalist, a grain merchant? Of course, but the core difference is a temporal one: Block is five years into his trial. The disintegration of Josef K.’s ability to sustain a professional life in the face of the trial is magnified for Block. His business has collapsed. His money is gone. He has been driven out of the bourgeois world into—quite literally—a windowless maid’s quarters. If one can say that the lower classes were the testing ground for the bourgeoisie’s colonial ambitions, it makes sense that Josef K. would feel Block’s “foreignness” in their encounter. Block has fallen out of Josef K.’s world. He moves through an inferior zone, a niedrige Welt.

But the joke is on Josef K. It is precisely in this other, foreign, inferior world that the trial takes place, and Block, by relinquishing his bourgeois status, by becoming foreign, has gained a sort of access to the place of the trial, however partial or limited, that Josef K. has not and cannot. Block’s abandonment of his previous life, his immersion in the realm of the trial, has not led to a breakthrough in his case, or even to a modest “success,” but it has, it seems, produced stasis, which, as we know from the previous chapter with the painter Titorelli, is probably the best possible outcome for the accused—a permanent forestalling of judgment (protraction), a grim metaphor of life itself. But isn’t protraction preferable to Josef’s K.’s ultimate fate?

Block’s immersion into the world of the trial has allowed him to collect certain fragments of wisdom in the form of various “sayings” he’s heard in his proximity to the court. In his self-defense against Josef K.’s condescending treatment, Block shouts at him:

But if you think you’re privileged because you’re allowed to sit here quietly and listen while I, as you put it, crawl around on all fours, then let me remind you of the old legal maxim: a suspect is better off moving than at rest, for one at rest may be on the scales without knowing it, being weighed with all his sins.

Block’s self-defense against Josek K. in front of Huld, combined with Huld’s reproaches of Block, turn Leni’s loyalty from K. to Block. During Block’s conversation with the lawyer, Josef K. has been holding Leni tightly, but as she watches Block’s tribulations she attempts to free herself from his grip. Josef K. reacts to Leni’s resistance by tightening his grasp around her wrist, refusing to let go of what he considers to be his possession. Leni fights free, telling K., “You’re hurting me, leave me alone. I’m going to Block.” Block, first introduced as the most ridiculous specimen, has now inverted the power dynamic between him and Josef K. It is Block, not K., who is proving more successful at gaming the trial. He, Block, has retained the lawyer while also being able to operate around or independent of the lawyer. And, most crucially in terms of his competition with Josef K., he has won Leni, not through force but through affection. All this foreshadows the ultimate inversion: if the merchant Block is reduced to the level of a dog begging at the lawyer’s feet (Leni even lifts “him up a bit by the collar”) at least he remains a living dog, whereas at the end of the novel Josef K. “dies like a dog,” impaled with the executioner’s knife.

It seems clear that Block’s methods of dealing with the trial are vastly better than those of Josef K. Consider this exchange:

“I saw the gentlemen there in the waiting room,” said K., “their waiting seemed to me so pointless.” “Waiting isn’t pointless,” said the merchant, “the only thing that’s pointless is independent action.”

Block grasps what Josef K. cannot understand: the trial is, at its heart, a communal mesh, part of an organic social order. It doesn’t operate by the cool application of legal concepts. It operates through human relationships, which involve micro-power dynamics, traditions, and interpretations of traditions—tradition as a contested field. It has an intellectual element, but this doesn’t negate its emotional or creative dimensions, or its erotic dimension. It could be, as Block perhaps senses and Josef K. cannot fathom, that Leni’s love, the love of a mere lawyer’s maid, protects the accused from final judgment. When Josef K. loses Leni, he loses the lawyer; when he loses the lawyer, the trial is also lost. In his utter isolation, severed from all roots, Josef K. is already a dead man. This might be why the lawyer makes the following enigmatic claim to Josef K.:

I suspect that what’s led to both to your false judgment of my legal assistance and to your general behavior is that, in spite of being an accused man, you’ve been treated too well, or to put it more accurately, you’ve been treated with negligence, with apparent negligence. There’s a reason for this as well; it’s often better to be in chains than to be free.

There is no statement in the whole of The Trial, I think, that assaults the modern liberal imagination more than this one—cutting against modernity itself, turning Rousseau’s adage (“man was born free but everywhere is in chains”) on its head. What is the use of freedom, after all, if its endpoint is utter egoism? Notions like community and responsibility, tradition, family, friendship, love—these are the chains that bind us. We see around us today, in our world of billionaire excess, a type of unchained individualism, unchained “freedom,” freedom that has broken all binds, that cares not for anything but individual, atomistic aggrandizement, opulence, and power. Through this prism, we can grasp the wisdom in Huld’s words.

I’ve come to a faltering end of my year-long exploration of Kafka’s The Trial. I’ve hardly reached any definitive conclusions. At the beginning of this process, I’d hoped that by looking closely at some “political” elements of the novel, I would gain insight into some of the deeper or fundamental issues we are facing today. I’m not sure I’ve achieved this goal, and in any case, it was probably a misguided project to begin with. I’ve come to the conclusion that Josef K. is a myopic bourgeois capitalist, representative of the moral and spiritual emptiness at the heart of modernity, the model or forerunner of today’s cult of transactional and instrumental being. My Josef K., this particular Josef K., aligns quite exactly with my general perspective on today’s culture and society. Has my “close” reading been nothing more than the projection of my worldview onto the text? Have I done what in my first post on The Trial I accused Arendt of doing in her 1944 essay on Kafka? Have I “read” Kafka only, unwittingly, to read myself?

I’ll conclude with this. It is Leni’s defense of Block before the lawyer. Here’s what I take to be the key moment:

“What did he [Block] do all day?” asked the lawyer. “I locked him in the maid’s room, where he generally stays anyway,” said Leni, “so that he wouldn’t bother me while I was working. I checked on what he was doing from time to time though the peephole. He was always kneeling on the bed with the documents you loaned him open on the windowsill, reading them. That made a positive impression on me; the window opens only onto an airshaft that offers hardly any light. That Block was reading in spite of this made me realize how obedient he is.” “I’m glad to hear it,” said the lawyer. “But did he understand what he was reading?”

Who am I but a descendant of the merchant Block, kneeling on my bed, squinting at a text I, too, can read but cannot understand? Is this “obedience,” as Leni claims? If so, whom am I obeying? Is this “reading” pointless, as the lawyer implies? Or is it something else, something more, something like the nearly impossible quest to discover an answer, a solution, a secret hidden behind or beneath or above the alphabetical cipher we call language? To turn the question in another direction, perhaps this “reading” joins me with a tradition of searchers, fellow readers—and I suspect you are among them—who refuse to accept the futility of discovering what’s impossible to know. Readers put on trial.

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Quotations of The Trial from Breon Mitchell’s translation (Schocken Books 1998).