Crucibles: The Orchestration of Surprise

This essay by William Pierce first appeared in AGNI 67

“Certainly, I am surprised, but I am by no means very much surprised.” “Not very much surprised?” asked the inspector. . . . “I mean . . . that I am very much surprised, of course, but when one has lived for thirty years in this world and had to fight one’s way through it, as I have had to do, one becomes hardened to surprises and doesn’t take them too seriously.”—Franz Kafka, The Trial (Muir translation)

I.

Each time I sit down to write, I first pick up a novel and read a few pages. The habit feels akin to turning on a grow light so that my mind’s cactuses and spider plants don’t pitch toward whatever randomness has lit up the day. It clears my thoughts, and it puts a sun in the sky. But like those who write with music on, choosing familiar pieces and repeating them like a soundtrack, I separate my writing-reading from my exploring-reading and, for the former, choose just a few novels that connect in some arcanely personal way to what I’m working on. Lately The Trial has been one of these. 

My collection of Kafka is a mismatched set of paperbacks picked up not just at different times but in different eras of my life. I’ve been particularly attached to my copy of The Trial, supersoft with some previous owner’s abuses. I found it outside a school building in tenth or eleventh grade, just as literature was beginning to take me over, and even when alternatives came along—a new translation, my greater experience with German—I continued to read The Trial in that classic 1937 translation by Willa and Edwin Muir.

Then, a couple of weeks back, I began to write about my favorite chapter, “K.’s Uncle / Leni,” which ranks for me with Flaubert’s Hippolyte chapter in Madame Bovary. Though just a part, it lives on in my mind as much, and in some ways as independently, as the entire novel does. In that section, Kafka fuses old-fashioned storytelling—a reliance on motives, histories, and consequences—with a dizzyingly open-ended creating that feels like the generative impulse itself. He writes like a guide with a candle in his hand, and each move to the side, or backwards, reveals not just some new thing, but a new thing as a thing-in-itself—not object, but subject, new being, a fresh bubble of unexpected substance and will.

Beginning to write about it, of course, made me read differently. And the closer I looked, the more I wondered how Kafka—not the Muirs, but Kafka himself—wrote these candlelit passages, how he handled the surprise of each new buffet that his protagonist wakes to. Something, after all these years, was finally driving me to the original. I promised my six-year-old a hot chocolate at a café in Cambridge, and off we went to Schoenhof ’s to buy Der Prozeß.

II.

At the start of The Trial, Joseph K. wakes to find himself under arrest. He still works as a banker, still occupies his room in a boarding house, but his ontological state has abruptly changed: he is no longer a man in control of his circumstances. The law courts that will dominate the rest of his life are makeshift, secretive, and capricious. Judges hold session in unmarked rooms in a crowded apartment building; their offices are beneath the rafters in the attic. No one can tell K. what he’s done wrong, no schedule is established. Yet he is unable to dismiss the whole thing as nonsense, and—like the rest of us—he is doomed.

The Trial is famously unfinished, requiring, as one book jacket says, “an international team of experts” to “restore . . . the sequence of chapters,” which even then can only approximate what Kafka might have been planning. I wonder if he considered that posterity would read The Trial and The Castle, and go on reading them, in part for the way their indeterminacy and fragmentariness suit their themes. He was sickly, yes, and his life was cut short, but maybe he suspected that finishing these books would destroy them. Like the law courts, The Trial is disordered, appendixed with deletions, starred and uncertain, yet it develops into a monolith, unknowable and seemingly all-encompassing.

III.

Partly because I’ve never spent more than a few weeks at a time in Europe, I’ve remained an American with a language infatuation, much slower at reading German than English. But over the years I’ve developed a method that overrides my hesitations. If I read quickly, or even just scan the pages—it helps tremendously if I’m drunk, I remember reading quite a lot of Heinrich Böll’s Billiard um halb zehn this way—and then the next day read again what I only passed my eye over the night before, I find that the language has become nearly transparent, as if I’d started learning it at, well, ten instead of thirteen
years old—as if I had no anxieties about it, no overweening desire to know it as a native speaker does. Some part of my brain, accessed while I’m asleep, must sort through the words, turn them like baubles, and prepare this ancestral charity for me, the beautiful illusion that, yes, this morning I’m German, it all makes sense now, this is easy and clear and mine—just what I’ve always needed it to be.

When I opened Der Prozeß that afternoon, it was as if the English had been my drunken read-through. Here were Kafka’s own words, even his sometimes unconventional punctuation and spelling. I felt the clarity and force of it immediately, the tunneling architecture of the prose, but more than that I felt sober now: I could see things without the murkiness and double vision I’d grown used to. Against Kafka’s, the Muirs’ sentences seemed artificially brightened, like a room seen through dilated pupils. Crucial details were distorted or missing. “But must you eternally be brooding over your case?” Leni asks K. in the Muir translation. Kafka didn’t choose ewig or brüten or lasten. He wrote something closer to: “But must you constantly be thinking about your case?” His playfulness, his deeply serious punning, his unexpected comfort in the world—my Vintage paperback suddenly looked like a funhouse mirror.

IV.

“K.’s Uncle / Leni” sits about a third of the way through the novel, just after the chapter that the Muirs call “The Whipper”—a greatly destabilizing scene in which Joseph K. hears noises behind a closet door at the bank, opens it, and discovers the two warders who arrested him being beaten by an enforcer under orders from the court. After a chapter like this, anything can happen. But there’s something comfortably old school about the way the sixth chapter starts. Here is the Muirs’ version: “One afternoon—it was just before the day’s letters went out and K. was very busy—two clerks bringing him some papers to sign were thrust aside and his Uncle Karl, a small landowner from the country, came striding into the room.” It’s a real opening, full of breezes from beyond the close air of K.’s predicament. K. is less alarmed than he might be at the sudden arrival of his uncle, because the idea of such a visit has alarmed him already. It’s a comic and typical moment, the visit’s power wearing off even as his uncle walks in. But we the readers are surprised—we didn’t know K. had an uncle, or any relatives at all.

The uncle is a well-meaning version of the Kafka father-figure, a visitor from the practical, concrete world about which, until the morning of the arrest, K. had not felt much hesitation or confusion. But now K. has lost his old accustomed sense that he can manage the unexpected—and even as he accurately foresees his uncle’s arrival, he anticipates recklessness, his uncle “upending everything in his path” (translations mine unless noted). Unlike the Diener at the bank—K.’s assistants; literally, those who serve—his uncle, with the rest of the aggressive world, is uncontrollable, not part of any smoothly functioning system, not part of any system at all unless it’s one whose membership, rules, and ranks have somehow eluded K. His uncle is alien, though also compelling and, in the oddest way, like water thundering over rocks, predictable.

The Muirs’ version continues:

K. was the less alarmed by the arrival of his uncle since for a long time he had been shrinking from it in anticipation. His uncle was bound to turn up, he had been convinced of that for about a month past. He had often pictured him just as he appeared now, his back slightly bent, his panama hat crushed in his left hand, stretching out his right hand from the very doorway, and then thrusting it recklessly across the desk, knocking over everything that came in its way. His uncle was always in a hurry, for he was harassed by the disastrous idea that whenever he came to town for the day he must get through all the program he had drawn up for himself, and must not miss . . .

For “alarmed,” Kafka uses the same word, erschrak, that he uses for “shrinking.” It’s an important word, which comes up again more than once. After K. and his uncle leave the bank, Uncle Karl stops abruptly on the sidewalk, and the people walking behind him startle. Much later in the chapter, when Uncle Karl curses at Leni, K. takes fright—erschrak again—“even though he’d expected something like this.” That’s the note the chapter begins on—the shock of suddenness, even when it’s expected.

I could see, playing with the passage in English, that the lack of a strong common equivalent of erschrecken would inevitably dilute the effect. Erschrecken contains more of fear than startle does, less of censure than shock. But other traits of the German carried over easily, and I was reminded of James Wood’s November 2007 essay in The New Yorker, in which he describes early translators’ tendency to “tidy up” repetitions in War and Peace—and thereby lose some of the force of the original.

This translation of mine isn’t beautiful, but it preserves a few things that the Muirs’ loses. It’s much closer to a literal rendering:

One afternoon—K. was very busy just before mail pickup—K.’s Uncle Karl, a small landowner from the country, pushed into the room between two clerks who were bringing in papers. K. startled at the sight less for having already been startled a while back at the thought of his uncle’s arrival. The uncle would come, that had already been firmly established in K.’s mind for about a month. Already at that time, K. thought he could see him just the way he now, a little bent, the crushed panama hat in his left hand, stretched his right to him already from afar and, with unthinking speed, reached it over the desk, upending everything in his path. The uncle was always in a hurry, because he was hounded by the unfortunate thought that during his always-just-one-day visits to the capital he had to be able to do everything he’d planned for himself and, beyond that, couldn’t let himself forgo . . .

Kafka wanted it fast. Shock and awe. “Bringing in papers” rather than the languorous, detail-laden “bringing him some papers to sign.” The uncle pushes in, and “K. erschrak.” Jumps out of his skin. He jumps less for having seen all of this already—accurately, down to the crushed panama hat. But even so, he jumps. And does it matter, really, if he jumps one time less than another, when we know that at first he gave the full startle?

V.

Fifteen years ago, when I read Kafka’s story “The Judgment,” I turned to the German very quickly—the opposite of my complacency with The Trial. How could the son rush outside, vault over a bridge railing, and jump into the river with only the most obscure motivation and little forewarning? But there it was. The English and the German felt very similar—both of them baffling.

So when Uncle Karl, after being briefed on K.’s predicament, hails a cab—or more nearly creates one—and he and K. set off to see the lawyer Huld, I expected to find the same awkwardness that the Muirs give us in English: “Before he had finished speaking he was already on tiptoe waiting for a taxi, and now, shouting an address to the driver, he dragged K. into the car after him.” The flow of physical-world details is uncomfortable here: the uncle waits and suddenly he’s giving instructions to a driver. Not in the German. The differences I found there demonstrate something telling about Kafka’s technique. The Muirs’ rendition not only adds to Kafka’s abruptness but also dilutes the purity of how it functions in his prose. A more literal translation might read: “Already while he was talking he had, standing on tiptoe, waved down an automobile, and now, while he simultaneously called an address to the driver, he pulled K. behind him into the car.” The implications of these two sentences are profoundly, if subtly, different. Here, Kafka follows the uncle meticulously. We don’t spin along with K. We witness Uncle Karl’s confidence in the world and by contrast feel K.’s confusion and disempowerment. K. thinks of his uncle as a country bumpkin, but the narrator doesn’t.

The disarming suddenness of what happens comes not from awkwardness, not from an elision of the real world’s sequences, but from the zagging, moment-to-moment creation of new worlds, or new directions, their sudden being-there intimately tied with noticing. The unpredictability is cosmological. As K. and his uncle stand outside Huld’s apartment, eyes peer at them twice through a window in the door. Then a second person materializes across the hall—a new universe: a door and a nightgown and the quietest possible voice. This neighbor tells them Huld is sick, and after pointing out that the lawyer’s door has now been opened, he disappears: the big bang that brought him into existence loses strength, and the new universe collapses back to nothing.

Surprise is simultaneously a technique, part of Kafka’s method, and a condition, a fundamental trait of the endlessly protean and extendable world K. faces. For the characters, not just the reader, space—physical and interpersonal—takes on sudden new dimensions. Inside the apartment, the lawyer asks Uncle Karl why he’s come, and Uncle Karl introduces K. “‘Oh,’ said the sick one, much more lively, and held out his hand toward K. ‘Excuse me, I didn’t notice you at all.’” Then comes the surprise most characteristic of the novel, which K. either doesn’t expect or doesn’t want to: that the advocate, who at first seemed only half aware of who his friend Uncle Karl was, now knows who K. himself is and that he and his uncle have come about K.’s trial. “But how do you know about me and my trial?” K. asks. “‘Ah,’ said the advocate smiling. ‘I’m a lawyer, I travel in legal circles. . . . No, that’s nothing strange.’” Kafka is at an advantage here, working in a language in which strange means “worthy of notice.” If you notice it, it exists. If it exists, it is strange. All is normal yet odd, natural yet abrupt. When K. and his uncle have already been in Huld’s bedroom for a long while, the lawyer suddenly introduces them to the man in charge of K.’s case, who Huld tells them has been sitting the whole time in the shadows:

“Just now I have a dear visitor, for example.” And he pointed into a dark corner. “Where?” asked K., almost coarse in his first surprise. He looked around uncertainly; the light of the small candle didn’t reach nearly to the opposite wall. And something really began to move there in the corner. In the light of the candle that the uncle now held high, one saw there at a small side table an old man sitting. He had probably not even breathed, to remain unnoticed for so long.

He had not even breathed. Which is to say, he had probably not even lived. Like a shy child, the Chief Clerk is “openly dissatisfied that anyone had taken notice of him. . . . It was . . . as if he wanted under no circumstances to disturb the others through his presence and as if he was urgently asking them to put him back in the darkness and forget his presence.” But it can’t be done. He exists now. The word presence (Anwesenheit, which contains the word Wesen, being,) even repeats, as it does in Breon Mitchell’s 1998 translation. The Chief Clerk, getting used to existing, “once brought to the fore, took over the conversation, as seemed to be his habit,” and here Kafka, describing the scene and maybe revealing some of the magic of the chapter, gives Uncle Karl the epithet “candle-bearer.”

Nowhere in The Trial is the tension stronger between a life lived in a world we recognize, with sickness and friendship and bedrooms, and a life lived in a world that has turned against stability and the possibility of knowledge. Anything can be lurking anywhere—just shine a candle, and it will be.

VI.

K. finds temporary refuge not in familiarity but in a girl he’s just met. Leni, Huld’s nurse—Uncle Karl takes an instant dislike to her and demands that she be ejected from the sickroom—smashes a dish to draw K.’s attention, and he goes off after her. The syntax here, masterful in the German, builds a quick tension that the girl’s touch releases: “Hardly had he walked into the antechamber and begun to find his bearings in the dark when, on the hand with which he still firmly held the doorknob,”—a killer could spring at him, but no, the tension washes away—“a small hand rested, much smaller than K.’s hand, and gently closed the door.” Kafka is characteristically equivocal, alternately putting the nurse in control (“Now you belong to me,” she tells him) and hinting at lasciviousness in K. (K. “still gaped at the girl even after she had already turned away”). But Leni knows more than K. expects, desires him more than he hoped, and she guides him, at least for a time, to relative leisure and comfort in Huld’s moonlit office.

“Maybe that’s my judge,” K. says, looking at a painting on the office wall. A judge sits on a throne of sorts, appearing ready to “jump up in the next second with a fierce and perhaps indignant turn to say something decisive or even to pronounce judgment.” A top step is visible, and we’re told the accused would probably be at the bottom—where in fact K. is sitting. “I know him,” Leni says. “He comes here all the time. . . . [H]e could never have been even vaguely similar to the painting, because he’s almost dwarfishly small.”

Leni is close to the cabal of those for whom everything is easy. It gives her knowledge, or something that feels a lot like it to outsiders like K., who is, for all his delegating and responsibility, a banker, whose fortunes rise and fall on his ability to get the job done, to follow the plan, to study the requirements, know the bank’s interests, and do the expected thing. How do others learn to negotiate in the realm of the unexpected? Or how is it, to them, not unexpected? Despite K.’s claim in an earlier scene that he doesn’t take surprises seriously, they upend him, and now that he has “lived in this world for thirty years,” his solution is to follow procedure unquestioningly—in thrall to conventions and categories that may not apply in this instance, this case, at all.

K. goes from Leni directly to the street, and another new world is called into being. “When he walked out of the front door, a light rain fell,” as if starting fresh, unneeded till now. And “there came, out of an automobile waiting in front of the house which in his distraction he hadn’t noticed at all, the uncle”—who yells at K., insisting that he has damaged his case horribly. “Creep off with a dirty little thing . . . and stay away for hours,” he says in disgust. It’s that word hours—stundenlang—that arrests me every time. Hours have passed without our knowing.

Is the car there before K. notices? Has the rain soaked his uncle, or is he brought back to life waterlogged? K. tries to glimpse Leni through a window, but Uncle Karl materializes instead, in a replay of his arrival at the beginning of the chapter. This time he comes on like an initiate, pronouncing judgment—and K. has no chance to answer.

Or so I thought. Until my latest readings of it, the evaporation of those hours felt particularly mystical: an uncoiling of relativity before Einstein. We’re with Leni and K. at every moment, it seems, yet out here, hours have passed. But something in the German—though I don’t think the Muirs missed it, or Breon Mitchell either—something in my new attention to the prose maybe, led me to find what surprises me most of all: a detail that underscores the deep sweetness of this mysterious chapter. K., the Hamlet of the arraigned, has just made love; I mean he and Leni have sex in Huld’s office. Time fastforwards not when we hear about it from Uncle Karl, but earlier, at the beginning of that same long paragraph, which closes the chapter, or more precisely in the space just before it:

Her knee slipped, and with a small cry she fell almost to the rug, K. reached around her to keep hold, and was pulled down after her. “Now you belong to me,” she said.

“Here you have the house key, come when you want” were her last words, and an aimless kiss reached him on the back as he was leaving.

It’s the most traditional ploy of all: a curtain pulled down over the trysting couple. Rain, uncle, and car flicker into being . . . but those mystical hours are something different. They’re no surprise to K.—he knows better than anyone where they went. As Uncle Karl harangues his nephew—the longest monologue in the book, I believe, and rare for closing a chapter—the surprise is purely ours. It’s not K.’s world, this time, but K. himself who is changed. Uncle Karl cries, “And me your uncle you leave here in the rain, just feel, I’m totally soaked through, waiting for hours.” With that word stundenlang again, Kafka winks at us, giving K.’s sly, unspoken answer. For just this moment, Joseph K. doesn’t give a damn.