Page 58 - GALIET KAFKABEL JOB, KANT AND MILTON: Omnipotence, Impotence and Rebellion IV+

Galiet & Galiet
If no iron or bronze weapons 3⁄4 swords, arrows and lances or spears and javelins can harm Leviathan (41:20-22), no logic can harm the Court’s power to defend Josef K’s rights (T231). If Leviathan stirs up the sea (41:23),324 Josef K feels seasick in the attics (T73, 78). If Leviathan leaves a trail in the mud like a threshing sledge (41:22), the Court’s breaking waves roar and pound against the attic wooden walls (T78). If Leviathan leaves a glistening wake behind it (41:24), the Court’s hallways pitch and roll, lifting and lowering clients (T78).
If nothing on earth is Leviathan’s fearless equal (41:25), no defendant is the Court’s match (T78). If Josef K, the proud rebel (T14-5, 50-1, 213),325 is at the Court’s mercy (T78), it is because Leviathan, looking down on the haughty, is king over all the proud (41:26). Josef K will discern what Job adumbrates in Yahweh’s speech, “If you dare lay your hand upon him, not long will you remember the battle! Indeed, he who attacks Leviathan loses all hope, since at the mere sight of him, he is laid low. No one is fierce enough to stir him up, and no one can stand up to him in battle, or confront him and emerge unscathed. Under all the heavens, says Yahweh, there is no one!” (40:32-41:1-3). Leviathan, the force of chaos wrecking-havoc, illegitimately tries and abases the proud, humbling defendants.
If Behemoth symbolizes the Court’s mighty body politick, Leviathan emblemizes the Court’s inaccessibility and its terrifying power. Leviathan’s scales are the tightly knit Court officials, and the Court’s ill-fitting doors. They form the ever-reaching spine and the infinite attic-corridors backbones. Forever in tension with humans, it confronts them with Job’s Yahweh: The Trial’s Judge, and with the absurd: the baffling paradox that Yahweh authorizes Job’s sufferings and creates the immoral forces of chaos in Behemoth and Leviathan.326 Behemoth’s iron bars imprison, and Leviathan’s mighty body, subdues, ruins, humiliates. Both bring forth political and spiritual illness. If Behemoth drinks the spiritual rivers of the soul, Leviathan stirs the seas of the spirit. As the terrifying titan of tempests 3⁄4 shipwrecks and naufragio are his dominion.
It is not Lady Justice who mediates between Josef K and the oblivious Judge, but the infernal Court attics. The shabby Court, the escort between a bleak justice and a horrid execution, demonstrates Leviathan’s sinister, cruel and terrifying power. It devours justice and metaphysical salvation. The Court’s causeways 3⁄4 Leviathan’s spine, destined to oppress, not liberate, intimidates and smokes defendants, turning them into canines or ash. To remain in a state of eternal equilibrium (T119) and ensure nothing changes (T120), it victimizes to humiliate. To slaughter Josef K, the outcast, is to preserve Leviathan’s malefic spine, a mise en abyme of Apophis or Seth, of Milton’s Satan, or Dante’s three-headed evil of the icy abyss.
It explains why man, to Kafka, cannot fathom Behemoth and Leviathan’s ethics and aesthetics.327 It is incomprehensible that they be Yahweh’s magnificent and powerful works, as praised in Job.328 Their chaotic, yet
324 The sea is often linked to tempests; yet the sea needs to be kept under bounds so it may not disturb the heavens. In Job 38:8, “the sea first burst from the womb of chaos,” and Yahweh sternly repressed it. See footnote 8. Peake, A.S. The Century Bible. Job. Ed. By Walter F. Adeney. Edinburgh: T.C. & E.C. Jack, 1904. 315
325 When arrested, Josef K does not accept the wardens’ lectures, reprimands, and threatens to call the public prosecutor, Hasterer (T14-5). He also behaves proudly at the Court of Inquiry (T50-1), and at the cathedral when he declares the Parable of the Law to be a universal lie (T213).
326 Gunkel identifies Leviathan with Tiamat, the chaos monster, and Behemoth, with Kingu, her consort, but other scholars dispute his findings. Peake, A.S. The Century Bible. Job. Ed. By Walter F. Adeney. Edinburgh: T.C. & E.C. Jack, 1904. 335
327 Brod, Max. Franz Kafka. A Biography. Trans. By G. Humphreys Roberts (Chapter I to VII) and by Richard Winston (Chapter VIII). New York, Schocken Books, 1937. 175
328 Indeed, Yahweh “will not keep silent concerning Leviathan’s limbs, or his mighty strength or the grace of its form” (41:4) and neither will He cease to glorify Behemoth as the first of His works. Insatiable, Behemoth, the King of draughts, can empty entire rivers without haste (40:23-24), and thus bring forth
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