Roberto Calasso - K.

The landlady of the Gentlemen’s Inn, who knows the Castle officials well, bows to their will, and is able to appreciate the reasons behind it, when they let her know that they won’t be accepting her proposal to transfer the interviews and interrogations of the parties to a new building, separated by only a few meters from the Gentlemen’s Inn and conceived expressly in order to prevent the parties from setting foot in the Gentlemen’s Inn. Every deviation is bothersome, every change a rupture in the delicate sequence of their acts.

Like the two heads of opposed secret-service agencies, K. and the landlady of the Gentlemen’s Inn are each capable of anything except believing the other. The game is encoded by both parties. To the landlady, K. isn’t a land surveyor or even an aspiring land surveyor (not that she knows anything about that trade; it “made her yawn”). To K., the landlady isn’t “merely a landlady.” Her clothes alone prove it: ill suited to her position, embellished “with frills and pleats,” as overdone as a Byzantine dignitary’s. If the two principal adversaries are not what they claim — and at the same time can’t say what else they are (“What are you really?” the landlady asks K.) — then doubt hangs over everything. Even the village might be an improvisation, like a Potemkin village. Even the Castle.

Of course, one might be tempted to consider K.’s vicissitudes as the frantic and fruitless attempts of an aspiring land surveyor, on finding himself in the position of school janitor, to assert himself. That is, in short, as a fairly inconsequential series of events. But the landlady of the Gentlemen’s Inn, who knows how the world works, thinks differently. She has “had to deal with unruly people of various sorts” and considers K. the worst case she has encountered. With his irresponsible and disrespectful behavior, which leaves her “trembling with indignation,” K. has succeeded in making happen “that which had never happened before.” If the danger that K. poses is so frightening, if the gentlemen are reduced to wanting to be “finally free of K.,” that implies that what has happened around him up to then — the pathetic skirmishes, the mocking equivocations, the long, meandering conversations — must have touched in some obscure way the nerve centers of the Castle’s admirable organization, as “gap-free” as Hilbert had wanted the axiomatization of mathematics to be. The landlady and landlord, like true police, are quick to point out that K. will “certainly have to answer” for all this. And his punishment might be as simple as the protraction of his torturous life in that village. But the fact remains, and it is as troubling as ever, that by retracing step by step K.’s course of action, others too might find a way to discover the Castle’s various delicate, arcane points. And perhaps to make happen again “that which had never happened before.”

Some part of what is, a sizable part, must not be accessible as knowledge. It isn’t clear whether that’s the case because the knowledge would lead to breakdowns or simply because it would, at a certain point, become inconvenient. In any case, knowledge is the first enemy. This is the premise of the landlady of the Gentlemen’s Inn. This is the sanctuary she wants to protect. To her, K. is the interloper, he who — out of thoughtlessness, curiosity, self-interest, arrogance, defiance — wants access to everything. And so must be excluded from everything. In the clash between the landlady and K., every word has a double resonance. From the start, with the complicity of monomaniacs, they address one question only — as they well know. But they address it by speaking incessantly of other things. Even clothes.

In the same octavo notebook, a few lines apart, Kafka drafted two untitled apologues, the first twelve lines long, the second around fifty, which take as their protagonists respectively Sancho Panza and Odysseus. They constitute Kafka’s highest tribute to Western literature as well as to Western survival skills. Like all stories about essential matters, these have to do with demons.

Sancho Panza and Odysseus have this in common: both saved themselves using “inadequate, even childish means.” Don Quixote, however, was lost. But we will discover through Kafka’s story that Don Quixote was a puppet. It wasn’t he who spent years reading chivalric romances and losing himself in feverish daydreams. It was Sancho Panza, who quickly grasped that those stories, with all the demons they roused, would soon have killed him. So he concocted the figure of Don Quixote. That’s what he chose to call the “devil” that dwelt within him and whose destructive rage he wanted “to divert from himself.” Once he had found a name and it had become a character, it could be observed from a certain distance rather than simply endured. And above all he’d get a chance to think about other things. Sancho Panza knew perfectly well that nothing in life was as gripping as one’s relations with demons. Demons, however, soon caused one to undertake “the craziest exploits,” as indeed would one day happen with Don Quixote. Better then, for Sancho Panza, to redirect the actions of his demons onto another being. He could then resume his own life of modest interest while still following Don Quixote on his expeditions, mainly because he felt a certain “sense of responsibility,” since, after all, the knight was his creature. But also because Don Quixote was forever dealing with demons, and Sancho Panza recognized at once that such a situation would provide him “great and useful entertainment.” Thus Sancho Panza survived and, among other things, told us the story of Don Quixote.

In more ancient times, when people could still appear beautiful and bold, before it became obligatory to take on a clumsy, scruffy appearance, we find a precursor to Sancho Panza in Odysseus. In those days, it was common knowledge — and not just the domain of the few who went off by themselves to read adventure stories and daydream about them — that life consisted above all in waiting to be possessed by other voices, which brought with them every happiness and every grief. It had been passed down that the most irresistible of these voices, which offered supreme happiness followed at once by certain ruin, were those of the Sirens. Everyone knew that living meant being exposed — someday — to the Sirens’ song. Men employed a wide range of stratagems in their attempts to pass by the Sirens and survive. A few succeeded. They sailed by the Sirens’ rocks and saw them pass before their eyes. In the air, a perfect silence. They concluded that the Siren song had been only a superstition. But this discovery provoked in them such “arrogance” that they quickly committed some rash act and perished. Thus humanity never learned that the Sirens’ song simply didn’t exist, and people persisted in their erroneous belief that it was fatal.

Then Odysseus appeared. Common knowledge had it that no expedient, such as stopping the ears with wax or lashing oneself to the mast, was effective against the Sirens. But Odysseus placed his faith in those “poor tricks” alone. (And here Kafka’s version departs from Homer’s, according to which Odysseus was the only one among his crew not to stop his ears with wax.) When his ship passed before them, the Sirens — knowing full well that they were dealing with a powerful adversary — resorted to the weapon that was “even more terrible than their song, namely their silence.” And so Odysseus passed unscathed before them, believing that the Sirens’ song had failed to penetrate the wax in his ears. The weapon of silence couldn’t do its work, because Odysseus was convinced that the Sirens had been singing. He remembered their chests heaving, “their eyes brimming with tears, their mouths half-opened,” and believed those signals to be the accompaniments of “arias that were ringing out, unheard, around him.” If the Sirens let him pass unharmed, it was probably out of admiration for the man who had endured their silence while lashed to a mast with wax in his ears. A childish image, certainly, perhaps ridiculous. And yet Odysseus was the only one who, having passed before the Sirens, didn’t go off on a rampage pretending to have conquered powers that no one by this time could have overcome. Not just that: of all those who passed before the Sirens and survived, Odysseus was also the only one who didn’t doubt the power of their song. Perhaps the Sirens cast a benevolent eye on that tribute. And finally the last, most daring hypothesis, seemingly blasphemous but in truth the most devout: Odysseus “actually realized that the Sirens were silent and held up the fictitious version described above simply, so to speak, as a kind of shield, against both them and the gods.” If this hypothesis is true, it doesn’t conflict with the previous version of events: Odysseus would have been so complicit with the gods and the Sirens that their benevolence would seem to go without saying. In fact, Odysseus would appear to have collaborated with them to elaborate the legend of the Sirens’ song, an extreme metamorphosis of the song itself.