Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

Windows

No one can go further than Kafka in The Trial; he created the extremely poetic image of an extremely non-poetic world. By 'extremely nonpoetic world' 1 mean: a world where there is no longer a place for individual freedom, for the uniqueness of the individual, where man is only the instrument of extrahuman forces: of bureaucracy, technology, History. By 'extremely poetic image' I mean: without changing its essence and its nonpoetic nature, Kafka has transformed, reshaped that world by his immense poetic imagination.

K. is completely absorbed by the predicament of this trial that has been imposed upon him; he hasn't a moment to think about anything else. And yet, even in this no-way-out predicament, there are windows that open suddenly, for a brief instant. He cannot escape through these windows; they edge open and then shut

instantly; but for a flash at least, he can see the poetry of the world outside, the poetry that, despite everything, exists as an ever present possibility and sends a small silvery glint into his life as a hunted man.

Some such brief openings are K.s glances, for instance: he reaches the suburban street where he has been called for his first interrogation. A moment before, he was still running to get there on time. Now he stops. Standing in the street, he forgets the trial for a few seconds and looks around: 'Most of the windows were occupied, men in shirtsleeves were leaning there smoking or holding little children carefully and tenderly on the windowsills. Other windows were piled high with bedding, above which the disheveled head of a woman would appear for a moment.' Then he enters the courtyard: 'Near him a barefooted man was sitting on a crate reading a newspaper. Two boys were seesawing on a handcart. A frail young girl was standing at a pump in her nightdress and gazing at K. while she filled her jug with water.'

These sentences remind me of Flaubert's descriptions: concise; visually rich; a sense of detail, none of which is cliched. That power of description makes clear how thirsty K. is for reality, how avidly he drinks up the world that, just a moment earlier, was eclipsed by worries about the trial. Alas, the pause is short; the next instant K. no longer has eyes for the frail young girl in her nightdress filling her jug with water: the torrent of the trial takes him up again.

The few erotic situations in the novel are also like windows briefly ajar-very briefly: K. meets only women who are connected in one way or another to his trial: for instance, his neighbor Fraulein Biirstner, in whose room he had been arrested; troubled, K. tells her what happened and finally, at her door, he manages to kiss her: 'He seized her and kissed her on the mouth, and then all over the face, like some thirsty animal lapping greedily at a long-sought spring.' I emphasize the word 'thirsty,' which gives the sense of a man who has lost his normal life and can contact it only furtively, through a window.

During the first interrogation, K. is making a speech but is thrown off track by a curious event: the bailiffs wife is in the room, and a scrawny, ugly student gets her down on the floor and is making love to her in the midst of the audience. With this amazing interplay of incompatible events (that sublime Kafkan poetry, grotesque and implausible!), a new window opens onto the landscape far from the trial, onto exuberant vulgarity, the exuberant vulgar freedom that has been confiscated from K.

That Kafkan poetry reminds me, by contrast, of another novel that is also about an arrest and a trial: Orwell's 1984. the book that for decades served as a constant reference for antitotalitarianism professionals. In this novel, which means to be the horrifying portrayal of an imaginary totalitarian society, there are no windows; in it no one glimpses a frail young girl filling a jug with water; Orwell's novel is firmly closed to poetry; did I say novel? it is political thought disguised as a novel; the thinking is certainly lucid and correct, but it is distorted by its guise as a novel, which renders it imprecise and vague. So if the novel form obscures Orwell's thought, does it give something in return? Does it throw light on the mystery of human situations that sociology or political science cannot get at? No:

the situations and the characters are as flat as a poster. Then is it justified at least as a popularization of good ideas? Not that either. For ideas made into a novel function no longer as ideas but as a novel instead- and in the case of 1984, as a bad novel, with all the pernicious influence a bad novel can exert.

The pernicious influence of Orwell's novel resides in its implacable reduction of a reality to its political dimension alone, and in its reduction of that dimension to what is exemplarily negative about it. I refuse to forgive this reduction on the grounds that it was useful as propaganda in the struggle against totalitarian evil. For that evil is, precisely, the reduction of life to politics and of politics to propaganda. So despite its intentions, Orwell's novel itself joins in the totalitarian spirit, the spirit of propaganda. It reduces (and teaches others to reduce) the life of a hated society to the simple listing of its crimes.

In talking with Czechs a year or two after the end of Communism, I would hear from every one of them that now-ritual turn of speech, that obligatory preamble to all their recollections, all their remarks: 'after those forty years of Communist horror' or: 'those horrible forty years' or especially: 'the forty lost years.' I looked at my interlocutors: they had been neither forced to emigrate, nor imprisoned, nor deprived of their jobs, nor even looked down on; all of them had lived their lives in their own country, in their apartments, had done their work and had their vacations, their friendships and their loves; with the expression 'forty horrible years' they were reducing their lives to the political aspect alone. But even the political history of those forty years-did they really experience that only as an undifferentiated block of horrors? Have they forgotten the years when they were seeing Milos Forman's films, reading Bohuslav Hrabal's books, going to the little nonconformist theaters, and telling hundreds of jokes and cheerfully making fun of the regime? In their talk of forty horrible years, they were all Orwellizing the recollection of their own lives, which, a posteriori, in their memories and in their heads, were thereby devalued or even completely obliterated (forty lost years).

Even in his situation of extreme deprivation of freedom, K. is able to look at a frail young girl slowly filling her jug with water. I've said that such moments are windows that briefly open onto a landscape far away from K.'s trial. What landscape? To make the metaphor more precise: the windows in Kafka's novel open onto Tolstoys landscape: onto a world where, even at the harshest moments, characters retain a freedom of decision which gives life the happy incalcula-bility that is the source of poetry. The extremely poetic world of Tolstoy is the opposite of Kafka's world. But even so, because of the half-open window, it enters K.'s story like a breath of yearning, like a barely felt breeze, and stays there.

Tribunal and Trial

The philosophers of existence like to breathe philosophical significance into the words of everyday language. It is difficult for me to say the words anguish or talk without thinking of the meaning Heidegger gave them. On this score, the novelists preceded the philoso-

phers. In examining their characters' situations, they worked out their own vocabulary, often with key words that stand as concepts and go beyond the dictionary definitions. Thus Crebillon the younger used the word moment as a concept word for the libertine game (the moment of opportunity when a woman can be seduced) and bequeathed it to his time and to other writers. In the same way, Dostoyevsky spoke of humiliation and Stendhal of vanity. Thanks to The Trial, Kafka bequeathed to us at least two concept words that have become indispensable for understanding the modern world: tribunal and trial. He bequeathed them to us: meaning that he put them at our disposal, for us to use, consider, and reconsider in terms of our own experiences.

Tribunal: this does not signify the juridical institution intended for punishing people who have violated the laws of a state; the tribunal (or court) in Kafka's sense is a power that judges, that judges because it is a power; its power and nothing but its power is what confers legitimacy on the tribunal; when the two intruders enter his room, K. immediately recognizes that power, and he submits.

The trial brought by the tribunal is always absolute; meaning that it does not concern an isolated act, a specific crime (theft, fraud, rape), but rather concerns the character of the accused in its entirety: K. searches for his offense in 'the most minute events' of his whole life; in