Roberto Calasso - K.

K., no less tenacious and implacable than the superintendent, lets him keep talking, lets him describe in ever greater detail the error — though “who can ever say for sure that it’s an error?”—that concerns K. But then K. immediately returns to his distinction. On the one hand, he says, there are the services, the offices and what happens within them: a self-sufficient world that can be understood only in “official” terms. On the other, there is a being who exists “outside those offices” and is an “actual person” and is “threatened by those offices”—and what’s more, the threat is “so senseless” that K. finds it hard to “believe in the gravity of the danger.” Once again, K.’s remarks are pointed and terse, in sharp contrast with the undulating, winding course of the superintendent’s arguments. But K.’s brusqueness doesn’t prevent him from following — perhaps even ironically — a certain protocol of compliments and praise, for he is quick to extol the “amazing, extraordinary knowledge of these matters” that the superintendent has just displayed. This prelude renders all the more effective the zinger that follows: “However at this point I would also like to hear a word or two about me.”

The superintendent loves, more than anything else, to talk about Sordini. K.’s presence at his bedside gives him a good excuse for returning again and again to the subject of that Italian, “famous for his conscientiousness,” who works in Department B as a relator—“virtually the lowest position of all,” observes the superintendent thoughtfully. Even to an “insider” like him, it seems “inconceivable” that “a man of [Sordini’s] abilities” is being made use of in that way. Nonetheless, despite his lowly position there’s something intimidating about him, as those who’ve had the experience of being attacked by him know all too well. He then becomes “terrifying for the person under attack, but splendid for that person’s enemies.” Something feral infuses his high capacity for “attention, energy, presence of mind,” as if some spring inside him is always about to pop. Of course, the superintendent himself has two cabinets, in addition to a barn, full of papers. But he remains a peasant who sometimes acts as an official, knowing full well that he isn’t up to the task. While Sordini… The superintendent recalls, dreamily, the descriptions he’s heard of Sordini’s office. He’s never seen this office — just as he’s never seen Sordini, who never comes down, being always “overburdened with work.” Thus: “all the walls are lined with columns made from stacks of bundled files,” and those are only the records Sordini is working on at that moment. It’s often necessary, therefore, to extract documents and reinsert them. Since this happens “in a great hurry,” muffled thuds are constantly emanating from Sordini’s office: the sounds of columns of documents giving way, collapsing one after another. This sound is considered characteristic of Sordini’s office. Having arrived at this point in his story, the superintendent, enthralled, adds a general observation: “Yes, Sordini is a worker and devotes the same care to the smallest cases as to the biggest ones.”

Even in the face of this majestic vision, which seems to call for silence, K. doesn’t abandon his impudence. And like a good adversary, he quickly latches onto the use of small and big in order to suggest to the superintendent that his own case, though originally “one of the smallest,” as he has been told on more than one occasion, perhaps in part to keep him at bay, “has now become, thanks to the zeal of officials like Mr. Sordini, a big case.” Already in these words we recognize a certain lack of respect, but those that follow are obviously provocative. He isn’t at all happy about becoming a “big case,” says K., “since my ambition is not to have great columns of records concerning me rise up and then collapse, but rather to work in peace, a little land surveyor at his little drawing table.” Nothing could be simpler, and nothing further from the somber frenzy of Sordini’s office. Nor could anything be more unrenounceable, if we recall what Kafka wrote in a letter, during the time he was drafting The Castle , about the relationship between writers and their desks: “The writer’s existence truly depends on his desk, if he wants to avoid madness he can never really stray from his desk, he must hold fast to it with his teeth.” Holding fast with his teeth to something — the possibility of a desk — is also an apt description of K.’s behavior.

The tension is evident. But even an official who is “not enough of an official” like the superintendent knows how to dodge such a provocation. Almost reassuringly, he emphasizes: “No, [yours] is not a big case, on this score you have no cause to complain, it’s one of the smallest of the small. It isn’t the volume of work that determines the rank of the case.” This sentence sounds like a general rule about how the offices work — and also serves, once again, to knock K., the attacker, back on his heels. The official’s most powerful weapon against the foreigner is implicit humiliation.

At the beginning of The Castle , when official “recognition” of K.’s surveyor title is at issue, the text describes that recognition as “certainly spiritually superior.” But Kafka’s deletions reveal a wavering: before coming to that “spiritually superior,” he had written: “like everything that is spiritually superior, it’s also a little oppressive.” He vacillated here too, between “oppressive” and “mysterious.” And this wavering between something crushing and something secret, with each understood as a prime characteristic of that which is “spiritually superior,” points to the very substance of the “struggle” that K. has taken up. Why must the “spiritually superior” also be a weight that oppresses whoever approaches it? Why must its modus operandi be so similar to persecution, even — and perhaps above all — when it comes to the highest of its prerogatives: recognition? K.‘s most disconcerting thought takes shape immediately after he learns, indirectly as usual and via the telephone, that he has been “named land surveyor.” Instead of cheering up and calming down, K. thinks: “And if they believed that with their recognition of his surveyor title, recognition that in itself was certainly spiritually superior, they could keep him in constant fear, they were deceiving themselves; he felt a slight shudder, but that was all.” It’s easy to pass over this early sentence on our first reading of the novel, as if it were a normal claim. But if we pause to examine it, it’s like a lunar landscape pocked with craters.

To the villagers, K. is a nuisance. He has the air of one who doesn’t know how life works. But he is also a romantic figure, shrouded in the breath of another world. At least he is for women, for Frieda and Pepi and Olga; they all respond to him immediately, as if with an ancient familiarity. And K. is always confident and direct when he speaks to them. The first positive confirmation of this romantic aura, however, comes from a child, Hans. When Frieda asks him what he wants to become, Hans tells her: “A man like K.” But what is K. in this moment? A janitor who’s just been fired. Sitting at the teacher’s desk, he’s finishing his breakfast in a freezing room that is at once a gym with some gymnastic equipment, a classroom with a few desks, and a makeshift bedroom, signaled by a straw mattress on the floor and “two stiff, scratchy blankets.” The remains of dinner too are scattered on the floor, along with sardine oil, shards of a coffeepot, and clothes. Hans, an observant child, has seen this wretchedness, but K. remains his ideal. Why? Hans has grasped that K. is not a person but rather potentiality itself. He is the kingdom of the possible, encroaching upon the compulsory automatism of the Castle. Thus Hans could “believe that, though K. found himself in a low, despicable condition now, he would eventually, albeit in the almost inconceivably distant future, surpass everyone else.” Little Hans, with his tone of “dark gravity,” shows himself to be highly astute. He’s the first to recognize that K., despite the meanness of his present state, is in some way “vaster” and even younger than anyone else in the village. For it’s a place where babies are born old — or at least they’re immediately forced to adopt, like Hans himself, an “ altklug ” tone — the tone of sententious old men.