Roberto Calasso: K.

K. appeals to two other pieces of evidence to support his appointment: the letter from the official Klamm, addressed to him, and the phone call from the Castle the night he first arrived at the Bridge Inn, and these also — indeed these above all — are cast into doubt. The letter from Klamm is (as the salutation alone makes plain) a personal letter, and thus worthless as an official declaration, even if it might be invaluable for other reasons. And the telephone communication can’t be anything other than misleading, since “there is no definite telephone connection to the Castle.” The murmur, the song that issues audibly from the phone as soon as any receiver is lifted in the village, is the Castle’s only acoustic manifestation. It is indistinct and, moreover, nonlinguistic, a music composed of words gone back to their source in pure sonic matter, prior to and stripped of all meaning. The Castle communicates with the outside world through a continuous, indecipherable sound. “All the rest is misleading,” says the superintendent. Starting, then, with the clear and limpid word. At this point, like a great academic who ends a seminar by sending the students off to other places and classes to continue their debates, the superintendent tells K.: “You should know by now that the question of your being called here is too difficult for us to answer for you in the course of one little conversation.” But all of life is no more than a “little conversation.” And so the principle of the irrepressible uncertainty of election is once again affirmed.

The worlds of The Trial and The Castle run parallel to all other worlds but not to each other. Each is, rather, the extension of the other. Josef K. becomes K. Between them, a sentence and an execution. But the story is the same — and it keeps going. Now it’s not someone else who comes looking for Josef K., but K. who goes looking for something. The terms are reversed. The climate changes but remains familiar. Women, officials, clothes. Long conversations, often terribly intimate, with strangers. A nagging feeling of estrangement. “I don’t yet know a great deal about your legal system,” says Josef K. — despite the fact that at that moment he’s in a suburb of his own city, whose legal system he, as chief officer of a bank, is used to dealing with every day. It’s as if two incompatible laws hold sway simultaneously. This is strange, but for Josef K. it will quickly cease to seem so, and not just for him, but for the reader too — which is stranger still. Nothing is further from The Trial than the sense of the fantastic, the visionary, the “extraordinary” that we might associate with Poe. Indeed for the reader the ever present suspicion is that it’s a kind of verism. The reading catches the reader by surprise, just as the guard Franz, wearing his “travel clothes,” catches Josef K. by surprise in the “riskiest moment of all”: that of waking. The moment when one can be easily “dragged off,” if one isn’t prepared. And no one, on waking, is prepared. To be so, one would need to find oneself already in an office. As K. says to Mrs. Grubach, “For example, in the bank I’m prepared; something like this could never happen to me there.”

The Trial and The Castle take place within the same psychic life. After the execution of his sentence, Josef K. reappears under the name K. and distances himself from the large city. The Castle is Josef K.’s bardo .

The world of the bardo —that “intermediate state” that the Tibetan Book of the Dead teaches how to traverse — doesn’t look drastically different from the world of the living. But it doesn’t easily permit return. Frieda’s fantasy of running away with K. — maybe “to the south of France or to Spain”—seems as far-fetched and unattainable as a longing to live in the Egypt of the pharaohs. Entering the bardo , like entering a dream, requires only a slight twist of what is, but it’s irreversible and skews all relations. The procedures of the court in Josef K.’s city bear an obvious kinship to those of the Castle administration, but nothing assures us that their objectives coincide. The only sure things are certain differences of style: at the Castle there is no need to expel or to kill, practices that The Trial ’s court, perhaps more primitive, still engages in. At the Castle, it’s enough that life goes on. The simple passing of time is the judgment.

What distinguishes both The Trial and The Castle is that, from the first line to the last, they unfold on the threshold of a hidden world that one suspects is implicit in this world. Never had that threshold been such a thin line or so ubiquitous. Never had those two worlds been brought so terrifyingly close as to seem to touch. We can’t say for sure whether that hidden world is good or evil, heavenly or hellish. The only evidence is something that overwhelms and envelops us. Like K., we alternate between flashes of lucidity and bouts of torpor, sometimes mistaking one for the other, with no one having the authority to correct us.

Compared with all other fictional characters, K. is potentiality itself. That’s why his physical appearance can never be described, directly or indirectly. We don’t even know whether he has “dark eyes” like his precursor, Josef K. And it isn’t because K. undergoes, as Klamm does, continuous metamorphoses, but rather because K. is the shape of what happens.

December 1910—a barren, sullen time. Kafka uses his diary now mainly to record observations on his own inability to write. “With what can I justify the fact that so far today I’ve written nothing? With nothing,” we read in a fragment. And immediately after: “I hear in my head a continuous incantation: ‘O were you to come, invisible tribunal!’”

With these words, as if he’d resorted to a powerful left-handed spell, Kafka crosses the threshold into the enclosed space of The Trial and The Castle —and indeed of all the rest of his work. This is the site of his writing, where one awaits one’s sentence, endures the delays of a never-ending case. It’s an agonizing place, but the only one where Kafka knows he belongs. Newly arrived in the village beneath the Castle, having already been rebuffed and harassed, K. knows only that he has “come here to stay,” as if any other kind of life were already closed to him. And he repeats: “I will stay here.” Then, as if “talking to himself,” he adds: “What could have drawn me to this wasteland, if not the desire to stay here.” The “wasteland” is the Promised Land. And the Promised Land is the only land about which one can say, as K. does: “I cannot emigrate.”

To be put on trial or to have dealings with the Castle is to enter into that hidden, dangerous, elusive life from which every other life issues — and of which every other life is only a poor counterfeit. The operation of a great bank, like the one where Josef K. works, with its bright offices, its spacious lobbies, and its corridors, imitates the sordid attic that houses the court offices — not the other way around. And one needs only to open the door to a junk room, in the bank’s own offices, to find the court at work, as represented by a persecutor (“the flogger”) and two victims. It is the court that encompasses daily life — not daily life that accommodates the court.

Writing begins when one enters into a relationship with the court or the Castle, a relationship that always will be, literally, a lost cause. Even Josef K.’s Uncle Karl said as much, when he arrived from the country to lend his nephew a hand: “A trial like this is always lost from the start.” And proverbs, they say, are always true.

The articulation and the workings of the “invisible tribunal” can be seen on every page of Kafka, but only in The Trial and The Castle do they become the very substance of the narrative. The court of the big city, which must judge Josef K., is the invisible tribunal, as is the apparatus of Castle offices in the distant territories of Count Westwest. The “invisible tribunal” extends its reach over everything. The Castle offices, though administrative rather than judicial, use the same kind of language as the big-city court. For both the court and the Castle, the outside world, whatever that might be or represent, is in the legal sense a party , and they must constantly determine what relationships to allow with said party, if ever they must allow any. Their methods too are very similar, at times indistinguishable, and always exasperating, elusive, deceptive. Yet Kafka, when he in his despair dared to invoke an entity he named “invisible tribunal,” was asking nothing other than to be delivered into the hands of the court and the Castle, despite knowing what lay in store for him there. For only within such torments, he suspected, lay the life he could never have reached in any other way.