and hearings become a mere formality and may be conducted at one’s
own leisure, and “the case will never pass beyond its first stages.”207
What could this mean in the context of the transmigration of the
soul? One is ‘arrested’, therefore incarnated, but one is indefinitely prevented from departing from this physical embodiment and being
newly reincarnated (“ostensible acquittal”), or alternatively, being
permanently liberated from the physical plane and annihilated as an
individual (“permanent acquittal”). Metaphorical y, there is only one
condition of being that would allow for this: indefinitely prolonged
childhood.
The theme of an artificial eternal childhood surfaces repeatedly
throughout The Trial. We have already seen how Leni exhibits
childish behavior in her encounter with K. in the Lawyer’s study. The
initial mention of children occurs when K. arrives at the Courthouse
for the first time. Children and adolescents are everywhere, and we
see the duality of Joseph K. yet again in his split reaction to them:
On his way up he disturbed many children who were playing on
the stairs and looked at him angrily as he strode through their
ranks. “If I ever come here again,” he told himself, “I must either
bring sweets to cajole them with or else a stick to beat them.”
Just before he reached the first floor he had actual y to wait for
a moment until a marble came to rest, two children with the
205 Ibid., 24.
206 Ibid., 29.
207 Kafka,
The Trial, 160.
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lovers of sophia
lined, pinched faces of adult rogues holding him meanwhile by
his trousers; if he had shaken them off he must have hurt them,
and he feared their outcries…His real search began on the first
floor…almost all the doors stood open, with children running
out and in…Many of the women were holding babies in one arm
and working over the stove with the arm that was left free. Half-
grown girls who seemed to be dressed in nothing but an apron
kept busily rushing about. In all the rooms the beds were still
occupied, sick people were lying in them, or men who had not
wakened yet, or others who were resting in their clothes.208
Final y, when K. meets the Usher’s wife for the first time, Kafka
describes her as “a young woman with sparkling black eyes, who
was washing children’s clothes in a tub…”209 On his second encounter with the Usher’s wife, after the Student has carried her up the narrow flight of stairs to the garret of the Examining Magistrate, K. notices that there are indeed law offices upstairs, as indicated by a sign on
the stairway, written in children’s handwriting: “K. noticed a small card pinned up… he read in childish, unpracticed handwriting: ‘Law
Court Offices upstairs.’”210 The “half-grown girls” are running around half-naked as if they were still little girls who had no shame. Note
the juxtaposition of old age and childhood in the description of the
playing children’s faces. It is not that their faces show the maturity of adulthood, but rather, the aspect of “adult rogues.” Later on, as he walks up another stairway to Titorelli’s studio, located in a similar
poor house, Joseph K. is met by three adolescent girls. According
to K. “All their faces betrayed the same mixture of childishness and
depravity which had prompted this idea of making him run the
gauntlet between them.”211 This is the same combination of child-like
innocence, and a debauchery that is tempered and transformed by
it, which is characteristic of Leni’s bizarre behavior. Also, like the 208 Ibid., 37.
209 Ibid.
210 Ibid., 59.
211 Ibid., 142.
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elderly children in the Courthouse’s stairway, the leader of the band
of three adolescent girls has a mark of old age – she is hunchbacked:
“The girl who was slightly hunchbacked and seemed scarcely
thirteen years old, nudged him with her elbow and peered up at him
knowingly. Neither her youth nor her deformity had saved her from
being prematurely debauched. She did not even smile, but stared
unwinkingly at K. with shrewd, bold eyes.”212 The girl has already
learned the soul-piercing stare that Leni gives K. in the study, as she clasps her hands around his head and looks at him “for a long time.”
Like Leni, the three girls outside Titorelli’s studio also “belong to the Court.”213
The method of “indefinite postponement” seems to render
the Court proceedings a farce or joke, as one aspect of Joseph K.
is tempted to interpret them from the very outset of his arrest.
Indeed, if this postponement is a metaphor for someone indefinitely
retaining or returning to a state of childhood, despite one’s wisdom and one’s debauchery, then it cal s for the kind of ‘wise innocence’ or grave playfulness that the Lawyer claims is often the only behavior
to which the Court officials are responsive:
But then, suddenly, in the most surprising fashion and without
any particular reason, they would be moved to laughter by some
small jest which you only dared to make because you felt you had
nothing to lose, and then they were your friends again. In fact it
was both easy and difficult to handle them, you could hardly lay
down any fixed principles for dealing with them. Sometimes you
felt astonished to think that one single ordinary lifetime sufficed
to gather all the knowledge needed for a fair degree of success in
such a profession.214
Instead of being perpetual y reincarnated, or annihilating themselves
together with their guilt in “permanent acquittal”, these beings have
chosen to live an extraordinary lifetime, where as old wise men of
212 Ibid.
213 Ibid., 150.
214 Ibid., 122.
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knowledge they have become children again. In his Blue Octavo
Notebooks, Kafka writes: “There is a down-and-outness under true knowledge and a childlike happy arising from it!”215 This is the same
paradox involved in the fact that, like the Goddess Artemis, the
three women of the Law remain virgins despite their promiscuity.
It seems that in being offered “indefinite postponement”, K.
is being given the chance to be reborn into childhood the way
that the Court officials have been. The three women, especial y
Leni, in the guise of Artemis-Hecate, are the midwives of this
spiritual rebirth and the nursemaids of the soul reborn into playful
innocence, despite the burden of knowledge. K. would then indeed
playful y remain engaged with the Court, but in recognition of it as
a kind of farce. That K. recognizes this as an option from the very
start is Kafka’s way of telling us that he is at the crossroads of this transformation of consciousness, and that is why he is called before
the Law and offered the assistance of the Triune Goddess – who is
also the nursemaid presiding over childbirth.
So much for “ostensible acquittal” and “indefinite postponement.”
What of the third path that is watched over by the Triune Goddess of
the Crossroads? For an understanding of “definite acquittal�
� we must
look to Kafka’s parable “Before the Law”. It should not surprise us
that K. agrees with the third interpretation of the parable conveyed
by the Priest. Not only is it the most detailed and thoroughly argued
of the interpretations, it also offers K. what he had been seeking
from this prison chaplain. Before the latter descends from his pulpit
to speak privately to K. and relate the parable to him, Kafka tel s us that:
…it was not impossible that K. could obtain decisive and
acceptable counsel from him which might, for instance, point
the way, not toward some influential manipulation of the case,
but toward a circumvention of it, a breaking away from it
altogether, a mode of living completely outside the jurisdiction
of the Court.216
215 Brod,
The Blue Octavo Notebooks, 33.
216 Kafka,
The Trial, 212.
310
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The third interpretation of the parable elaborates the many reasons
why the doorkeeper is himself deceived, and perhaps even inferior
to the man from the country. K. is convinced by these reasons
and asserts that the doorkeeper should be dismissed from his
duty. Whereupon the Priest tel s him that, according to certain
interpreters, to criticize the doorkeeper, who, deceived as he may be, is nonetheless an employee of the Law “is to doubt the Law itself.”
Joseph’s response to this, and the Priest’s rejoinder, is one of the key passages of the novel:
“I don’t agree with that point of view,” said K., shaking his
head, “for if one accepts it, one must accept as true everything
the doorkeeper says. But you yourself have sufficiently proved
how impossible it is to do that.” “No,” said the priest, “it is not
necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it
as necessary.” “A melancholy conclusion,” said K. “It turns lying
into a universal principle.”217
The last statement by K. is of course intended to be paradoxical.
Lying cannot be a universal principle. For lying to be a universal
principle, would, in fact, mean that there are no universal principles at al . There is a link between this passage and the scene of “The
Whipper”, early in the novel. The injustice of Joseph’s willingness to judge others in order to preserve his advantage is forceful y depicted by Kafka in this scene. The men who seem to be perpetual y
damned to punishment in the lumber room of the Bank, are only
there because K. judged them. His horrified regret shows that he
was not in command of himself, he did not even know himself,
when in the course of the First Interrogation he nonetheless felt
confident in judging others. The excessive and interminable nature
of the punishment is meant to emphasize the arbitrariness of such
deadly judgments that we make of others without even knowing
ourselves. The whipping is another sign of Hecate, who carries a
217 Ibid., 220.
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lovers of sophia
whip as one of her trademark sacred implements.218 The priestesses
of Artemis were also armed with flagel ating whips.219 The rites of
Artemis Scythia involved whipping men until blood flowed freely from their wounds and could be smeared onto her altar.220 In Sparta,
so as to prove themselves courageous enough to be warriors, young
men had to endure a ritual known as diamastigosis, where they were scourged so severely that they bled onto the altar of Artemis Orthia. The priestesses of Artemis would encourage those who administered the initiation not to be lenient to the boys seeking to
enter manhood.221
Joseph K. defends his criticism of the two warders who wind up
being whipped on his account in the following words: “I had no idea
of all this, nor did I ever demand that you should be punished, I
was only defending a principle.”222 There are numerous passages in Kafka’s Blue Ocatvo Notebooks that are relevant to the idea of the relationship between universal principles, truth, and deception:
Everything is deception…223 Can you know anything other than
deception? If ever the deception is annihilated, you must not
look in that direction or you will turn into a pil ar of salt.224
Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself; anyone who
wants to recognize it has to be a lie.225
Believing means liberating the indestructible element in oneself,
or, more accurately, liberating oneself, or, more accurately, being
indestructible, or, more accurately, being.226
218 D’Este,
Hekate, 62, 70, 165.
219 Wilde,
The Amazons in Myth and History, 92.
220 D’Este,
Artemis, 56.
221 Ibid., 125.
222 Kafka,
The Trial, 84.
223 Brod,
The Blue Octavo Notebooks, 91.
224 Ibid., 97.
225 Ibid., 94.
226 Ibid., 27.
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The indestructible is one: it is each individual human being and,
at the same time, it is common to al , hence the incomparably
indivisible union that exists between human beings.227
One can disintegrate the world by means of very strong light. For
weak eyes the world becomes solid, for still weaker eyes it seems
to develop fists, for eyes weaker still it becomes shamefaced and
smashes anyone who dares to gaze upon it.228
Since the Fall we have been essential y equal in our capacity to
know Good and Evil; nevertheless it is precisely here we look for
our special merits. But only on the far side of this knowledge do
the real differences begin. The contrary appearance is caused by
the following fact: nobody can be content with knowledge alone,
but must strive to act in accordance with it. But he is not endowed
with the strength for this, hence he must destroy himself, even
at the risk of in that way not acquiring the necessary strength,
but there is nothing else he can do except make this last attempt.
(This is also the meaning of the threat of death associated with
the ban on eating from the Tree of Knowledge; perhaps this
is also the original meaning of natural death.) Now this is an
attempt he is afraid to make; he prefers to undo the knowledge
of Good and Evil (the term ‘the Fal ’ has its origin in this fear);
but what has once happened cannot be undone, it can only be
made turbid. It is for this purpose that motivations arise. The
whole world is full of them: indeed the whole visible world is
perhaps nothing other than a motivation of man’s wish to rest for
a moment – an attempt to falsify the fact of knowledge, to try to
turn the knowledge into the goal.229
All individuals, as beings with a unique ego, are a lie in the sense
that they have only a relative, dependent, and temporal y transient
character. They are not unified within themselves, as exemplified by
227 Ibid., 93.
228 Ibid., 91.
229 Ibid., 95.
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the duality of Joseph K., and they are firmly intertwined with others
who appear to be outside them. This sheds light on the innuendo
> of the mutual recognition of secret lovers, and the intimacy of
perfect strangers, that we see between K. and Fraulein Burstner,
and K. and Leni. The women, especial y Leni, invite K. to recognize
the guilt of his imprisonment in the lies of duality, and to win his
Trial by becoming One with them. Yet the attainment to Oneness,
and the passage beyond il usory knowledge, is tantamount to
self-destruction (as the last quote above suggests). It is also “the
liberation of the indestructible element in oneself”, which is again
the same as realization of “the incomparably indivisible union that
exists between human beings.”
This self-destruction is what the man from the country is
threatened with if he disobeys the commands of the doorkeeper
and tries to enter into the Law by force. The third interpretation,
which K. accepts, is correct to discern that the doorkeeper has no
interior knowledge of the Law. If he did, he could not maintain his
post. This is because the interior of the Law is the Truth of the One, which denies consciousness of multiplicity. The Priest tel s Joseph
K. that “the scriptures are unalterable”,230 but this parable, which is
“a preface” to the Law, suggests that the interior of the Law destroys all of the principles of the scriptures in which knowledge of the Law
is enshrined. We should remember that in observing their strange
sense of humor, the Lawyer tel s K. that one could not “lay down
any fixed principles” in dealing with the Court officials.231 The Priest is right in reproaching K. for suggesting that the doorkeeper’s
ignorance should be grounds for his dismissal and the appointment
of a wiser man to his post. The doorkeeper can only fulfill his
position because he is ignorant. Only the self-deluded can preserve the principles of the Law, and only by contrived force. This does not
mean that its principles should not be preserved. Should they be
abandoned altogether, the world would not exist.
230 Kafka,
The Trial, 217.
231 Ibid., 122.
314
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Entry into the interior of the Law is synonymous with the
metaphor of “definite acquittal”, one of the three ways proposed
by Titorelli. It is final liberation from reincarnation in the merely
apparent manifest world of ceaseless flux. In connection to Titorelli, it should also be noted that the metaphor of entering unbidden is
Lovers of Sophia Page 39
