The exchange between Joseph K. and the priest near the end of Franz Kafka's The Trial reminds me of a painting by Rembrandt (here is a link to this famous passage from the novel). In this painting, a young artist
stands before an easel, the contents of which are hidden from the viewer.
From the few interpretations I am familiar with, Rembrandt painted this to
represent the power of concealment within artistic works, and that through the
simple act of hiding the artist’s painting from the viewer it is made that much
more powerful in its effect.
A similar idea of concealment is prevalent within The Trial,
including everything from the glaring absence of the cause of K.’s arrest to
the ambiguous notion of “the law” that appears in the priest’s story. For me,
Kafka’s conception of what constitutes the law is similar to Derrida’s notion
of the meaning of language in that they are both tautologies constituted by the
fundamental binary of presence/absence: “It [the law] receives you when you
come and dismisses you when you go” (278). The only thing that constitutes “the
law” (for K. and presumably for the rest
of us) is the movement amongst those entities that have been designated as the
law’s representatives (police, papers, tickets, sirens, politicians, bills, a
public reading of the US constitution on The Plaza of the Americas, etc.) which
attempt to define yet perpetually re-inscribe its parameters. The Law has no
“the,” only acts of constitution. However, much like the logocentricism
inherent to language, this does not prevent The Law from exerting its influence
within these various actions/manifestations.
Returning to my metaphor provided by the painting,
it seems that the concealment of the artist’s painting does not simply create
the possibility of an artwork that will eventually be revealed, because it
never will, yet it still remains “art.” Through this, Rembrandt is making a claim
about the ontology of art as a kind of arche-trace of all artworks that does
exist in any single physical manifestation or abstract formulation. It is
everywhere and nowhere, created and substantiated though perception: “The right
perception of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not
wholly exclude each other” (271).
Derrida’s alludes to something similar in his essay “Beforethe Law” when he writes that “the intangibility of that which we confront stems
not from some concealed essence but from its very possibility.” The singular actualization
of the law is the reality of law in the sense that it is our only means of
accessing it; or, more accurately, it is our means of accessing its unique
notion of origination.
Derrida seems to link this singular/general binary
to his concept of differance when he refers to the fact that the countryman’s
entrance to the door of the law has not been permanently denied but merely
“delayed, adjourned, deferred” (202). It is this slim possibility of access to
the law (to logos as meaning) that sustains its existence.
Interestingly,
Derrida’s discussion of this text reverts back to ontology of literature. I
find this interesting because he does not seem to explicitly deconstruct the
apparent binary (literature/non-literature) that is operative in this
discussion like he does in other works. Instead of abandoning this taxonomy,
Derrida proposes several formulations for the constitution of literature. One
such place is when he writes that the literary happens when “the categorical
engages the idiomatic” (213). I take this to mean not those stories which are
particularly illustrative examples of a larger set, but rather those
“relations” which subvert the very notion of a synthetic continuity of “a
larger set.”
Derrida figures as much when he writes “What would
be a literature that would only be what it is, literature? It would no longer
be itself if it were itself” (215). This “itself” is not the text itself but
“literature” as a governing body that writes the parameters through which the
singular text has been permitted to speak it (the literary).
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