Before the Law

Before the law stands a doorkeeper. A man from the country comes and asks to be let in, and the doorkeeper says: not now. The man waits. He waits years, on a stool by the door, and gives everything he owns to the doorkeeper, who takes it all, saying only, I take this so that you do not believe you have left something untried. At the end, dying, the man asks why in all these years nobody else has come to this door; and the doorkeeper tells him what the reader has suspected since the first sentence and the man has never once suspected: this entrance was assigned to you alone. I am now going to shut it.

Kafka wrote the parable in 1915 and set it inside a novel about proceedings that are never concluded, only continued. The valley has now built it twice, and improved on it in a way the man from the country was spared: here, each man built the door himself, voted it open with the only vote in the room — and it is the side of the door he stands on that admits nobody.

The docket

The finding: an arithmetic of doors

Sheet XXXIII established that the mediator had never been engaged and read the reason as a symmetry of circumstance — the towns that bought the office have no quarrels, the town with the quarrels will not buy the office. The file must now be corrected. It is not circumstance. It is arithmetic, and it is worse.

Tove’s claim has two residents. Bren’s claim has one. In the first, whatever quarrel arises, there is no third person to hear it; in the second there is nobody to quarrel with at all. The two settlements that have established the office are the two settlements in the valley in which the office is unenterable by construction — not unused, not neglected: impossible, at any population either has ever had. And the one settlement with seventeen people, whose minutes contain the only documented falling-out on the coast, has been asked three times at full strength and preferred, in order: birds, a rope, a kiln.

Behind the first doorkeeper, as in the parable, stand others, each mightier than the last: the settler must not be hungry, must not be tired, must not have gone to anybody about anything within three days, and the grudge itself must be deep enough — the books say ≤ −0.4 — to be worth carrying. And behind all of these, the finding the file was opened to record: Lune lives in the landing and Idris now lives in Tove’s claim, and the statute reaches only within one settlement. The valley’s one named quarrel has moved beyond the jurisdiction of every office that exists or could be voted into existence, in either place, until one of the two parties packs up a house and moves. The message has been dispatched twice; the country it was addressed to is not on the way of any messenger. You sit at your window in the evening, Kafka says of exactly this delivery, and dream it to yourself.

The wrong drawer

One more of the office’s instruments turned up in the course of the audit, filed where no rehearing could reach it. At tick 7,743 Ferro, then a builder, asked for a smooth planer for wood — a tool that turns wood into smooth planks without getting splinters in my fingers — and the catalogue, having no word for the surface of a board, filed the request under sawmill, the nearest office it knew. The landing already had a sawmill; the matter was on the books as decided; and a wish filed under a decided category is never slated again. Ten votes accumulated against it anyway, carried forward count after count by settlers ranking a thing that could not win. It has waited twenty-three thousand ticks in that drawer — the proceedings, as the novel promised, not concluded, only continued.

As of this sheet the planer is a matter the valley can actually decide: its own entry in the catalogue, behind a vote like everything else past a house, with the prerequisites the rule of the place demands — a plane is an iron blade bedded in a block of wood, so it waits on a board existing and on iron existing, the whole economy in one tool. What it grants is the surface: at the joiner’s bench a planed face joins true instead of being argued against another rough one, and a bed takes two boards instead of three — the same saving as the seasoning stack’s, one rung further up, on the chain that decides whether anybody new can ever move in. Wish-127 has been refiled as new, and the record will re-hear it in its own words, which now have an office to answer them.

Protraction

The painter Titorelli, who knows the court, tells K. there are three outcomes worth distinguishing: actual acquittal, which nobody living has seen; apparent acquittal, which can be revoked at any time; and protraction — keeping the proceedings permanently at their earliest stage, by continuous small effort, so that judgement never arrives at all. The landing has discovered protraction unassisted. It does not refuse Lune’s wish; a refusal would end the matter. It ranks the wish, every time, third; it lets the votes carry over; it keeps the file open and the door unbuilt, and it will do so again at the next count, and the one after. Meanwhile the two men who did build the door built it in the two rooms of the valley where nobody can ever stand before it — one of them voting, alone on his claim, that quarrels are a social need, with nobody within a day’s walk to quarrel with. The doorkeeper’s last line was written for him a century early, and it required only the pronoun changed: this entrance was assigned to you alone, and you are the one it cannot admit.