Roberto Calasso - K.

Another, more urgent question is raised: Why is K. attacking? Why would he need to, since he has only to take possession of a post that, despite some misunderstanding, could — it seems — be granted him? But the struggle is on, and its peculiar nature immediately becomes clear: on one side the authorities, who must “defend remote, invisible things, always and only in the name of remote, invisible gentlemen.” The crucial point of this stunning definition is the invisibility and distance not of the gentlemen but of the things that the authorities must defend. Things of what nature? And why is it that the first concern of these authorities is not to assert themselves, as one might expect, but rather to protect themselves from an obscure foreigner, from an aspiring “worker,” with all that word’s painful associations? With regard to the authorities — and to their exclusive relation with what is remote and invisible — K. is the extreme opposite: someone who “was struggling for something vitally close, for himself.” To struggle for oneself: this must have appeared unseemly, maybe even repugnant, to authorities who are so accustomed to other spaces.

Nevertheless the authorities have from the beginning shown K. a generic benevolence, allowing him to “prowl around wherever he wanted,” even if that language already betrays a certain deprecatory tone. But at the same time, in so doing, “they spoiled and weakened him.” Perhaps that benevolence, then, is a higher form of malice, which serves to push K. ever further into a “non-official, completely uncontrollable, murky, strange life.” And what sort of “life” is that, if not life itself, without qualifiers, in its raw, amorphous, frayed state? Thus K., caught in that amorphous life, might have been driven to self-destruction. And then one might have been able to witness this spectacle: “The authorities, gentle and friendly as ever, would have had to intervene, as if against their will, yet in the name of some public ordinance unknown to him, in order to haul him away.” In these lines for the first time the stakes are declared — and one realizes that the game may be terrifying, that the authorities, while maintaining their “gentle and friendly” manner, may from one moment to the next, and perhaps reluctantly, “haul him away” like a wreck that’s blocking the road. One would then conclude that theological subtlety and police brutality do not belong to separate worlds. That they can cohabitate. That each can even presuppose the other. Perhaps only in this fashion, with just such a display of gentleness, would it be possible to “haul away” someone who, after all, can be charged only with having “proceeded recklessly” along a certain stretch, however brief, of his “other life” (as opposed to his official life). This would already be sufficient to sow terror. But there isn’t time to stop here. K. presses on, rightly asking himself: “What was it really, here, that other life?” And he quickly hastens toward an ominous observation: “Nowhere else had K. seen one’s professional service and one’s life so intertwined as here, so intertwined that at times it seemed that service and life had switched places.” Now terror gives way to vertigo. Could the shabby life of the village be the true service, concerned only with “remote, invisible” things? And perhaps service is life itself, as always “completely uncontrollable, murky, strange”? And finally, what does it mean, this intertwining of two extremes, so intimate that each apes the other’s features? For example: till now authority has been for K. above all a name: Klamm. But where does Klamm’s power manifest itself? In the signature at the bottom of the letter from the director of Bureau No. 10, a letter in which K. is addressed now with words of respect and recognition, now with imperiousness and veiled threats? Or is it in the air, much more solemnly, when Gardena, the landlady of the Bridge Inn, with her “gigantic figure that nearly darkened the room,” sits beside K.’s bed in that maid’s room that K. calls a “repugnant hole” and explains, “as if this explanation were not a last favor but rather the first of the punishments she would inflict,” that K.’s proposed visit to Klamm is “impossible” (“What an idea!”—and then: “You’re asking the impossible”)? Yes, there in that sordid, suffocating place, where the maids’ dirty laundry and the curled-up bodies of K.’s assistants blur together on the floor, it can be said that, for the first time since his arrival in the village, K. hears a speech of vast importance, which blends abstraction and gossip into a single amalgam — a speech furthermore rich with allusions to what could or could not be done, in accordance with rules unknown to K. And as for him, in those moments he sees himself for the first time imprisoned in a definition: “You are the most ignorant person here, and be careful,” Gardena says. But perhaps it is this last thrust of hers that gives K. the chance to begin the game again, since after all “to the ignorant everything seems possible.” This is the moment (a reckless one) when K., already opening the door to leave, says to Gardena: “But what is it you’re afraid of?… Surely you’re not afraid for Klamm’s sake?”

K.’s audacious hypothesis, that “service” and “life” might actually swap “positions,” implies consequences that only gradually become apparent. The first has to do with modes of behavior —a fundamental matter, crucial to K.’s story. And regarding precisely this matter a reversal is proposed that will be rather difficult to put into practice, as it runs counter to common sense: “here”—K. reflects, meaning the area surrounding the Castle, and this adverb is as pregnant as Plato’s “down here”—perhaps it would be “appropriate” ( am Platze , “in its place”) to maintain “a rather carefree attitude, a certain ease of manner only when dealing directly with the authorities, while everything else always called for great caution, looking in all directions before taking a step.” Nothing is more dangerous — we must understand — than everyday life. There, even when performing the most casual, inconsequential acts, we must remember we are continuously under surveillance. We must watch our every step, looking in all directions, as if under siege. As soon as we come before the authorities, on the other hand, where the usual response is to stiffen for fear of doing something wrong, of committing some infraction prejudicial to our cause, we are advised to adopt instead a casual attitude, a certain recklessness we would ordinarily rule out on the grounds that it might easily appear careless, disrespectful, frivolous. In a single sentence, K. has outlined nothing less than a Copemican revolution in behavior, a revolution he glimpses even before he has managed to meet with his first authority, the village superintendent. It is in this very meeting that K. is able to confirm just how far the promiscuity between “service” and “life” goes: the superintendent keeps the official records, those pages that are the very embodiment of service, crammed in a cabinet in his bedroom. When those great sheaves spill onto the floor “tied together in bundles like kindling,” the superintendent’s wife, Mizzi, jumps aside “with fright.” Apparently Mizzi knows that these pages are irradiant and corrosive, even at a distance of years.

K.’s primary characteristic is a certain insolence. The insolence of the ignorant, some will suggest, until Gardena puts it to him as bluntly as possible. But K. can’t help himself. When the superintendent explains the story of his file, in which the word surveyor is underlined in blue, a file that was held up for a long time by a variety of circumstances and the occasional mistake, K. finds the story “amusing”—and elaborates: “It amuses me only because it allows me some insight into the ridiculous muddle that at times can determine a man’s life.” This is certainly not the kind of language with which one would generally address an official. But the superintendent forges on, implacable and “serious.” He objects at once that if K. supposes he has gained any “insight” from his story he is mistaken, because the story has just begun — and K. doesn’t know that yet.