Roberto Calasso - K.

The Castle is woven through with conversations — exciting ones, exhausting ones. Sometimes they read like the arguments of sophists. Often they lead us into areas that bear little relation to the conversation’s point of departure. And then abandon us there, perplexed. But such is the subtlety and the specificity of these dialogues that we always forge ahead with the impression that something essential has been said — and has escaped us. Exasperation grows, in the reader as in K. But there is some relief: the comic. Like tears in the fabric of the dialogues, lively scenes intrude. K.’s first night as janitor-custodian in the school’s freezing gym, for example, is a grand pantomime, where the word gets stripped of its power and the gesture triumphs. As in a Busby Berkeley musical, the characters — K., Frieda, the assistants — take their turns at center stage, before a silent audience of gymnastic equipment, a few student desks, and the teacher’s desk on its platform. The secret, demonic director is a fat, old cat that jumps on Frieda in her sleep, terrifying her. And the wild, abstract scene of the distribution of records — toward the end of the novel — is equally evocative of the most penetrating spirit of the musical. In that scene Kafka seems to quote himself, returning to the root of every musical, which is the scene in The Missing Person (a.k.a. Amerika ) of the changing of the underporters at the Hotel Occidental, with its inexorable nexus of centrifugal and centripetal motions.

Comedy is in the details , that’s the rule. Kafka formulated it but then crossed out the passage in which it appeared. (We find it now in the critical apparatus to The Castle: “The truly comic is of course in the details.”) As for its applications, they are scattered through all his writings. In whatever he writes it’s enough for him to be meticulous and exacting in his description of developments and rigorous in observing their phases — and the comic erupts, invincible, sovereign.

In everyday life, K. discovers at a certain point, it’s wise to “look in all directions before taking a step.” That’s how people behave when they know they’re being watched from on high. But when Klamm, the prime and exemplary emanation from on high, is himself seen on the move, witnesses agree that “after coming outside, he looked around repeatedly.” And one reports that he did so with a very “uneasy” air. “Perhaps he was looking for me,” K. remarks — and his words spark general hilarity in the barroom. But then what was Klamm afraid of? Who did he fear was watching him? The secretary Momus suggests that, indeed, it was K.: “Once you quit standing guard, Klamm was able to leave.”

The low and the high mirror each other, according to the Tabula Smaragdina . But this doesn’t mean they must touch. Or that they could touch with impunity. The whole of The Castle is the story of an obstructed meeting, a meeting that, for reasons that are undeclared but vastly important, must not happen. For K., everything conspires to prevent him from introducing himself to Klamm. And nothing makes Gardena, guardian of secrets, as nervous as the idea that K. might pursue the matter “on his own.” As for Klamm himself, he must not even consider the possibility of meeting K. Indeed care is taken that Klamm’s gaze not light on any discernible trace of K.’s presence. Thus K.’s footprints in the snow-covered courtyard of the Gentlemen’s Inn are immediately erased. Such care should reassure Klamm, allow him to remain unaware of K. Or else — and this is the most daring hypothesis — someone wants to prevent Klamm from having any excuse for thinking that he might be able to meet K. The high and the low must not touch; this rule governs the course of the world. Yet Klamm and K. will continue to stand in relation to each other, even if never face-to-face. Minutes after Klamm’s exit from the Gentlemen’s Inn, K. receives a letter from him, delivered by Barnabas, that concludes with these words: “I won’t lose sight of you.”

More than a person, Klamm is an emanation, an element, like nitrogen. “There is already too much Klamm here,” says Frieda — and she seems to be speaking of the composition of the air. “You see Klamm everywhere,” K. tells her a little later, one theologian to another.

In the village below the Castle, much is imagined about power, but K. yearns to witness an epiphany of it. Only once is he granted his wish — and then by surprise. He skulks about in the snow-covered courtyard of the Gentlemen’s Inn, waiting for Klamm. He has the audacity to wait for Klamm. A coachman wrapped in fur is sitting up on the driver’s seat facing two horses. Behind him, like a dark, squatting animal: Klamm’s sleigh. With an unwarranted familiarity, the cold-numbed coachman invites K. to take a flask of cognac from an inside pocket of the sleigh and to share it with him. K. doesn’t even wonder at the coachman’s nerve. He’s drawn irresistibly to the sleigh. It’s the coffer of power, its portable tabernacle. When he sticks his head inside, he feels a warmth unlike any other — a warmth undiminished by the outside chill. In the sleigh, one doesn’t sit, one sinks — among blankets, cushions, furs: “no matter how one turned or stretched, one always sank down into softness and warmth.” Power is an engulfing element, like the warmth of Klamm’s sleigh. Something that allows one to sink into it, that makes every thought of returning to the outside world seem unimportant. The air that K. breathes inside Klamm’s sleigh is its aura.

K. begins to feel a little foggy. The obvious thought that it wouldn’t be a good idea for him to be surprised in that position no longer seems so obvious; it enters “his awareness only indistinctly, as a slight disturbance.” And then the cognac… Finally K. extracts a little flask from a pocket in the sleigh door. “Without meaning to, he had to smile, so sweet was its perfume, like a caress, like hearing praise and kind words from someone very dear to you, and you don’t even know exactly what’s being talked about and don’t even want to know and are just happy in the knowledge that that particular person is speaking in that way.” So profoundly enchanting is that perfume that K. wonders if it’s really cognac in the flask. And he dares to taste it. “Yes, it was cognac, strangely enough, and it burned and warmed him.” But “as he drank, it transformed from something that seemed merely the vehicle for a sweet perfume into a drink fit for coachmen.” K. doesn’t know it, but this is the last time he’ll be allowed to breathe the essence of power. Suddenly the courtyard is flooded, every corner of it, with harsh electric light. It turns out that the calm country inn is studded with lamps, “on the stairs, in the corridor, in the entryway, outside above the door,” making the courtyard look like a police barracks. With that shrill signal the vision ends.

Frieda, Pepi, Olga, Leni: female, disyllabic, subordinate, erotic — they are the only interlocutors with whom K. and Josef K. speak as if they were speaking with themselves. The sexual intimacy is merely a consequence of a prior psychic intimacy, as if each of these beings has always inhabited some niche in the minds of K. and Josef K., caryatids over whom the eye passes without lingering, with just a nod — and now they breathe and move like living flesh. Not only that: they speak and offer themselves as advisors, even if it isn’t clear just where their advice might lead.

Like Talleyrand, K. thinks that in order to get results, one must “faire marcher les femmes.” But this isn’t merely one of K.’s proclivities. It’s also the only way that appears open to him. In the village, the men’s activities have an uncertain contour. We know there is a cobbler, a tanner, a coachman, a schoolteacher. But we don’t see them on the job, and their work is never discussed. The first men K. encounters live — we quickly learn — in a state of subjection to the women beside them: the landlord dominated by Gardena, Schwarzer crouched at the foot of Gisa’s desk, “content to live in the proximity, in the air, in the heat of Gisa.”