Josef K. quickly realizes, with dismay, that everyone knows about his trial. But that fact, as Huld explains to his client, doesn’t mean that the proceeding is public. It certainly may become so, “if the court deems it necessary, but the law doesn’t require it.”
At this point, Josef K. may glimpse the brand-new archaism of his situation. There have been periods, of course, when no distinction was made between public and private, and others when such concepts didn’t even exist. But over time, ever more precise rules and definitions arose to circumscribe the scope and meaning of those two words. Now, however, it seems they must again be applied to an indistinct situation, while at the same time the various distinctions elaborated over the centuries continue to be relied on. Everyone knows that Josef K. has been accused, but “the record of the accusation is not available to the defendant or his lawyers,” meaning that the defense’s initial memorial to the court would be able to address “matters relevant to the case only by chance.” Observed from a certain distance, and once its unnerving elusiveness is grasped, the situation undeniably reveals a striking coherence: in every trial the first priority is to guard the sovereignty of the unknown. Ignotum per ignotius seems to be the court’s motto. Any move on the defendant’s part to gain some control, however limited, over the case (Sache), which in German is also the thing, is at every step discouraged, rebuffed, derided. Huld continues talking, eventually revealing to his client the all-governing principle: “In general the proceeding is kept secret not only from the public but from the defendant as well.” The first thing excluded is knowledge itself. The proceeding is, by nature, an underground river. If it occasionally becomes visible to the defendant, his lawyer, or the public, it does so only by accident. The whole thing could begin and end without ever becoming manifest. The defendant could live and die without ever knowing that he’s on trial or that he has been sentenced. And perhaps even without realizing that the sentence is being carried out. As for the general state of things, little would change.
Huld must be in the revealing vein this day, since he even grants his client a few glimpses into the lives of the officials. To begin with, it isn’t true that their power makes their lives easy. One should remember, as a fact noteworthy in itself, how “extraordinarily seriously the gentlemen take their occupations,” how they can even fall into “great despair” when faced with “obstacles that, by their very nature, can’t be overcome.” But what of the nature of the officials, the gentlemen? Hard to say, since one has such a limited view of it from outside the court. But one thing is clear: “the officials lack contact with the common people.” That’s precisely why these gentlemen, paradoxically, sometimes show up in the offices of the lawyers, a group generally mistreated and despised. Evidently the gentlemen want to learn something about the world. They fear they lack “a proper sense of human relations,” perhaps because they are “constantly constricted, day and night, within their law.” It’s as if the officials, longing to have some relationship with the outside world, have ventured, with understandable caution, into a clearly ambiguous and treacherous middle ground: lawyers’ offices. But if their approach to the outside world reflects uncertainty and bewilderment, their experience within the court proves equally vexing. And here once again, with magnanimous indulgence, Huld explains a general principle, which helps us get our bearings: “The court’s hierarchies and ever-increasing ranks are infinite and, even for initiates, ungraspable.” To belong to the court is simply to find oneself on one of its steps, without knowing how many come before and especially how many come after. The same state of obligatory ignorance that is peculiar to the defendant is replicated to some (also uncertain) degree within the court. Thus the proceeding that is usually hidden from the defendant, as Huld has already revealed, may also be hidden from “the lower officials.” For them too (again: as for the defendant) “the legal case appears within their field of vision often without their knowing where it came from, and it continues on without their knowing where it’s headed.”
The more Huld refers to the narrowness of the visual field of individuals — be they defendants, lawyers, or low-ranking officials — the greater our sense, by contrast, of the immensity of the whole. The court is truly a “great organism,” a vast cosmic animal whose imposing nature we may grasp, but not its overall shape. Whatever happens, “this great judicial organism remains somehow eternally suspended” (but where? one wonders; in which regions of the sky?), and if anything ever damages or wounds one part of it, “it easily compensates for the slight disturbance in some other part — after all, everything is interconnected — and it remains unchanged; indeed it becomes, if anything, and this is quite likely, even more closed, even more watchful, even more severe, even more cruel.” These lines might refer, point by point, to the self-regulating capacities of a brain, to the emanations of a divine pleroma, to the operating procedures of an information network, or to a secret cipher. But even before we pause to wonder about the identity of the object that Huld is describing, we are struck by the hints of its psychological characteristics. The “great organism” he speaks of is, above all, a closed system that rebuffs every “suggestion for improvement,” which indeed only the most ingenuous creatures — unfailingly defendants, especially the fresh ones still in the first phases of their trials — would dare offer. Huld here has the delicacy not to mention, as an example of one who has engaged in this ill-advised behavior, his own client, Josef K. But the description fits him to a T.
Further, the “great organism” is attentive. Constant wakefulness is its supreme quality, the one on which all others depend. The great organism is conscious, acutely conscious, perennially conscious. Each attack on it can only enhance its powers of mental acuity. Thus — and this is Huld’s most useful piece of advice — one must “above all not attract attention.” Those who know the great organism best are distinguished, as the Greeks were with regard to their deities, by their ability to go unnoticed by it. If the officials are already “irascible,” we might suppose that the great organism of which they are only tiny cells is even more so. In speaking of its attention, one speaks of the keystone of the organism’s existence: its uninterrupted mental life. But this implies certain behavioral traits. First of all, the “great organism” will be “severe.” And why? Because there’s a pact between wakefulness and the law. Indeed one might even suppose that the law is the partner of wakefulness, as if wakefulness were inconceivable except in connection with some law. Pure contemplation, content with itself, without any governing purpose, is obviously out of the question, which brings us to the final characteristic of the great organism: a certain wickedness. Wakefulness is linked, by some obscure mechanism that Huld doesn’t even begin to address, to a punitive aspect, a sharp-eyed will to strike. Can there be a wakefulness that doesn’t punish? That doesn’t need to be accompanied by the rigor of law? Huld doesn’t say — he adds only the advice that concerns him, the foundations of which he has now laid: “Let’s let your lawyer work, then, instead of disturbing him.”