mean two paths that are in opposition to one another, and which
seem to force one to choose between them, for lack of a third way.
This third way is the being of the Goddess as a Trinity that overcomes the apparent duality. The ordeal of Joseph K. in The Trial hinges on 95 Kafka,
The Trial, 152.
96 D’Este,
Hekate, 15, 59-60.
97 Ibid., 15.
98 Ibid., 26.
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strife between two aspects of his character, his Apollonian conscious
mind and the wild, bestial, shadowy aspect of his Dionysian
unconscious. An inherent multiplicity of subjectivity precludes the
possibility of the moral judgment of Justice in the sense of Dike or proper earthly law and order.99 If there is no singular subject present then a person cannot be held responsible in the name of Justice, nor
can he hold others accountable. The following three passages from
Kafka’s Blue Octavo Notebooks are key to understanding the kind of unaccountable ‘Justice’ at work in The Trial:
Through the door on the right one’s fellow men push into a room
in which a family council is being held, hear the last word uttered
by the last speaker, take it up, with it pour out into the world
through the door on the left, and shout out their judgment. The
judgment of the word is true, the judgment in itself is void. If
they had wanted to judge with final truth, they would have had
to stay in the room forever, would have become part of the family
council and thus, of course, again incapable of judging. Only he
who is a party can real y judge, but as a party he cannot judge.
Hence it follows that there is no possibility of judgment in the
world, only a glimmer of it.100
In one and the same human being there are cognitions that,
however utterly dissimilar they are, yet have one and the same
object, so that one can only conclude that there are different
subjects in one and the same human being.101
Nobody can desire what is ultimately damaging to him. If in
individual cases it does appear to be so after all – and perhaps it
always does so appear – this is explained by the fact that someone
in the person demands something that is, admittedly, of use to
someone, but which to a second someone, who is brought in half
in order to judge the case, is gravely damaging. If the person had
99 Hamilton,
Mythology, 40.
100 Brod,
Blue Octavo Notebooks, 25.
101 Ibid., 93.
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from the very beginning, and not only when it came to judging
the case, taken his stand at the side of the second someone, the
first someone would have faded out, and with him the desire.102
The dual nature of Joseph K. is apparent from the very beginning of
the novel. Upon being arrested, K. at first entertains the possibility that the “ridiculous” spectacle of the two warders may be a
“rude joke”, one that might be brought to an end by his knowing
acknowledgment of it as such: “perhaps he had only to laugh
knowingly in these men’s faces and they would laugh with him.”103
However, almost immediately, he decides to take the matter seriously
so as not to “give away any advantage that he might possess” over the
warders. The attempt of Joseph K. to possess people, and to seize or
maintain “advantage” over them, persistently resurfaces throughout
the course of The Trial.
It should come as no surprise that Joseph’s attempt to possess
advantage is inextricably intertwined with his desire to recover
and assert a fixed and unitary identity. Straightaway upon deciding
that he will take the warders seriously, K. searches for his ‘identity papers’, and on account of his agitation has trouble finding them
in his otherwise orderly desk drawer. Kafka seems to be ridiculing
the naiveté of this search for identity when he has K. contemplate
offering his “bicycle license” in lieu of his “birth certificate” – as if to suggest that the two could be interchangeable as evidence (of equal
worth) for one’s existence as a unique being. It may also be of some
significance that a bicycle is a means of conveyance built around
two separate wheels, which require perpetual motion if the whole apparatus is not to crash to the ground. In other words, we have here
a tension between fixity of identity and a duality ever in motion.
(He might actual y have done better to go ahead and hand the
warders the bicycle license.) Joseph presents his identity papers to
the warders and, in exchange, he demands that they clearly identify
themselves and present their warrant for his arrest.
102 Ibid., 94.
103 Kafka,
The Trial, 4.
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At this point, Kafka makes a very interesting suggestion, namely,
that the two warders “stand closer” to Joseph K. “than any other
people in the world.”104 Kafka might be hinting, even at this very
early stage of the novel, that the Court officials are manifestations
of an unconscious aspect of Joseph K. that is divided against his
conscious and deliberative self. The suggestion is emphasized by the
fact that one of the warders says: “That’s so, you can believe that.”
The significance of the warder’s words is underlined by the fact that
he stops himself from raising his coffee to his lips in order to give K.
“a long, apparently significant, yet incomprehensible look.” K. finds
himself “decoyed into an exchange of speaking looks with Franz”, but
then continues to insist on identification. The warder who exchanges
the speaking looks with K. is named Franz. The combination of the
two names would give “Franz K.” or Franz Kafka. Also, note that
the letter “K” consists of two strokes branching off from a third.
Furthermore, Franz’s affirmation of the other warder’s comment
must be taken in the context of the nearly relentless deception that
we go on to see from the Court officials in the rest of the novel.
Franz is saying that this comment, as opposed to all those that are to come, can indeed be believed. It is the truth, as opposed to the other lies. That this speaking glance takes place in the context of Joseph’s demand for identification, and that it is incomprehensible to K., may
suggest a failure of dialogue between the two aspects of his divided
‘selfhood’.
This would explain why proximity to the two warders makes
thought impossible. Thought depends on concepts ( begriff) of
objects generated and applied by a unitary subject, and it is in this
sense that we should read Joseph’s insistence on grasping ( greifen) the situation as a form of possessiveness, though of a more subtle
(and deep rooted) nature than that which is concerned with material
possessions: “Any right to dispose of his own things which he might
possess he did not prize very highly; far more important to him
was the necessity to understand his situation clearly; but with these
104 Ibid., 6.
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people beside him he could not even think.”105 The Apollonian aspect
&
nbsp; of K. so desperately seeks to reestablish order that he welcomes the
command that the warders give him when he is called to see the
Inspector. Kafka tel s us that: “The command itself was actual y
welcome to him.”106 This means that the content of the command
is irrelevant to K., it is the hierarchy ( heiros arche) implicit in the command as such that he craves.
Joseph’s failure to recognize an aspect of himself in the warders,
and his struggle to define his selfhood in opposition to them (‘I am so and so…who are you…’) and possess an advantage over their Court,
intensifies into open and deadly conflict as The Trial progresses. This intensification is seen when Joseph K. contemplates severing his
connection with the Lawyer and taking action on his own behalf.
He decides that in presenting his own plea to the court, he should
follow the model of the successful business deals that he has closed
for the bank, seeing as: “This legal action was nothing more than a
business deal such as he had often concluded to the advantage of the
Bank.”107 In such a case the “right tactics were to avoid letting one’s thoughts stray to one’s own possible shortcomings, and to cling as
firmly as one could to the thought of one’s advantage.”108
After suffering months of the Court’s assault on sound reason
and common sense, a mere “birth certificate” apparently no longer
suffices to ground his sense of identity. Joseph K. contemplates
writing his own defense plea, wherein he would “give a short
account of his life, and when he came to an event of any importance
explain for what reasons he had acted as he did.”109 He himself would
draw up the questions for cross-examination, which his lawyer
had henceforth failed to do: “To ask questions was surely the main
thing…he could draw up all the necessary questions himself.” K.
believes that in answering such questions he could thereby “intimate
105 Ibid., 4.
106 Ibid., 9.
107 Ibid., 127.
108 Ibid.
109 Ibid., 113.
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whether he approved or condemned his way of action in retrospect,
and adduce grounds for the condemnation or approval.” Such self-
examination clearly evokes the old Delphic injunction of the twin
brother of Artemis, the god Apollo: “Know Thyself.” In his Blue
Octavo Notebooks, Kafka writes the following commentary on that maxim:
“Know Thyself” [ Erkenne dich selbst] does not mean “Observe
thyself.” “Observe thyself” is what the Serpent says. It means:
“Make yourself master of your actions.” But you are so already,
you are the master of your actions. So that saying means:
“Misjudge yourself! [ Verkenne dich] Destroy yourself!” which is something evil – and only if one bends down very far indeed
does one also hear the good in it, which is: “In order to make of
yourself what you are.”110
In his quest for a crystalline knowledge of his own character, Joseph
K. ultimately realizes that “to meet an unknown accusation, not to
mention other possible charges arising out of it, the whole of one’s
life would have to be recalled to mind, down to the smallest actions
and accidents, clearly formulated and examined from every angle.”111
Though he ultimately decides that the completion of such a plea is
a “sheer impossibility”, K. decides to dismiss his ineffective Lawyer
nonetheless. He opts not to announce the dismissal by telephone
or letter because “he did not want to lose the advantage” that a
personal interview with the Lawyer might possess.112 Kafka himself
unambiguously expresses the impossibility of the descriptive self-
knowledge that Joseph K. contemplates, which mistakenly takes the
self to be a thing-object that can be circumnavigated. In his Blue Octavo Notebooks, we read:
110 Brod,
The Blue Octavo Notebooks, 21.
111 Kafka,
The Trial, 128.
112 Ibid., 166.
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How pathetical y scanty my self-knowledge is compared with,
say, my knowledge of my room. (Evening.) Why? There is no
such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the
outer world. At least descriptive psychology is probably, taken
as a whole, a form of anthropomorphism, a nibbling at our own
limits. The inner world can only be experienced, not described.113
4. Possessiveness and Promiscuous Women
So we have seen that there is one aspect of Joseph K. that is
perpetual y seeking advantage and attempting to assert a clear self-
identity. The two are of course inseparable; without a clear sense of
self, one cannot know what would be to one’s advantage. However,
from the very beginning of The Trial, Kafka also clues us into the fact that this deadly serious desire for order and judgment is not
characteristic behavior for Joseph K, who “had always been inclined
to take things easily, to believe in the worst only when the worst
happened, to take no care for the morrow even when the outlook
was threatening.”114 We are told that his decision not to interpret his arrest as a joke is motivated by an uncharacteristic learning from
past experiences “when against all his friends’ advice he had behaved
with deliberate recklessness and without the slightest regard for
possible consequences, and had had in the end to pay dearly for
it.”115 Even once his decidedly serious trial has gotten underway,
examples of reckless behavior by Joseph K. are neither few nor far
between. What nearly all of them have in common is some ecstatic
or even mystical interaction with promiscuous women. That is, K.
compromises his ‘advantage’ when he lets himself be seduced by
women that he cannot possess.
After hearing about how diligently K. undertakes his work at the
Bank, Kafka informs us that: “once a week K. visited a girl called
113 Brod,
The Blue Octavo Notebooks, 15.
114 Kafka,
The Trial, 4.
115 Ibid., 5.
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Elsa, who was on duty all night till early morning as a waitress in a
cabaret and during the day received her visitors in bed.”116 We should bear this in mind in evaluating his response to Frau Grubach’s
complaints that Fraulien Burstner is engaging in apparently
promiscuous behavior. According to the landlady, she comes home
very late and has been seen in disreputable “outlying” areas of town,
“each time with a different gentleman”. Joseph K. defends Fraulein
Burstner, a stranger whom he has hardly exchanged a few words
with, and responds in exasperation to his landlady’s intention to
restore respectability to her boarding house by saying: “if you want
to keep your house respectable you’ll have to begin by giving me
notice.”117 This reckless admission to being the greatest rogue of
the house stands in stark contrast with the landlady’s perception
of K., and her unflinching trust in him, as the most responsible
and respectable of her boarders. After this exchange, K. decides to
wa
it for Fraulein Burstner, whom he has just defended before the
landlady, ostensibly to inform her of the disarray that the Inspector
threw her room into during that day. He muses that after meeting
with her, he will still have time to go visit Elsa. Instead, a shocking exchange takes place between K. and Fraulein Burstner.
From the outset, Kafka evokes an air of secret liaison between
these two strangers. Joseph K. is sitting in his room, with the lights off and his door cracked open, awaiting her (for hours, we later find
out). When she enters the dark hal way, he whispers her name and
Kafka tel s us that: “It sounded like a prayer, not a summons.”118 He
then replies to her query by uttering “It is I”, as if he were her lover and had arrived at a secret prearranged meeting place. This elicits
a response of excited recognition from her: “Oh, Herr K!” Joseph
K. hardly knows her, but in the course of half an hour in her room,
the two become increasingly intimate. K. finds out that she is going
to work for a Law Office, and she offers to help him with his case.
When she sinks into the sofa in a surrendered position he kisses her
116 Ibid., 17.
117 Ibid., 22.
118 Ibid., 23.
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brow. Why does K. feel it is appropriate to take such license with a
stranger? Perhaps because, after hearing the landlady complain of
her apparently disreputable promiscuity, he realizes that Fraulein
Burstner is like him. After this first kiss, she feigns to shoo him away, but only because the Captain is next door and maybe listening:
“what are you thinking about, he’s listening at the door…” This is
less of a ‘no’ than it is a ‘yes, but…here, now?’ K. responds to this by telling her that the landlady takes him to be a scion of respectability, especial y since she is financial y indebted to him, and she will
believe him over the sailor. There should be little doubt that what
Kafka leaves unsaid is that the two are on the verge of an erotic act
of some sort, and ‘innocent’ Joseph K. is consciously advertising that his air of respectability allows him to engage in such misdemeanors
without consequence.
Final y, as Joseph K. leaves her room, Kafka presents us with the
following scene in the darkness of the hal way between their lodgings:
“Now, please do come! Look” – she pointed to the Captain’s door,
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