Roberto Calasso - K.

K. almost never speaks of his past; only with the superintendent does he indulge himself a little. He insists on the “long, difficult journey” that he had to undertake — having already, moments earlier, referred to his “endless journey.” The power of the Castle, which had summoned him, must therefore have extended to very distant places — and through time too, perhaps, if the traveler who approached the Castle was like an ancient wanderer, a lone figure in the snow. It is probably in order to render his situation more pathetic — we can’t say for sure, not knowing anything else about the matter — and certainly in order to make the superintendent understand how urgent it is that he obtain the land-surveyor appointment, that K. alludes to the “sacrifices [he] made in leaving home” and to the “reasonable hopes [he] had of being taken on down here.” Up to this point, his words are no different from those of any worker who has left home in search of fortune. But now something else crops up: K. speaks of his “total lack of means and the impossibility of now finding suitable work back home.” But why? In the village K. always tried to give the impression of being a capable, knowledgeable person who would have no trouble finding work elsewhere. One infers from this discrepancy that only for some reason that’s left unsaid, but that must weigh heavily, K. is no longer able to go back. On the other hand, as the superintendent observes, the Castle is not in the habit of chasing people away: “No one is keeping you here, but that doesn’t mean you’re being chased away either.” K. doesn’t press the matter — perhaps he realizes he has said too much. Indeed he immediately wishes to muddy the waters, making reference, in order to explain the precariousness of his situation, to something close at hand: Frieda, his “fiancée who is from here.” He doesn’t mention that Frieda has been his fiancée for only a few hours. In any case, the argument is a pretext, as the superintendent observes with quiet irony: “Frieda would follow you anywhere.” K. is exposed — and it’s perhaps to avoid embarrassing him that the superintendent changes the subject. By hinting at his former life, K. has come close to revealing something that could harm him: his total dependence on the Castle. For him, no return is possible. The fifth of the Zürau aphorisms says: “Beyond a certain point there’s no return. That’s the point that must be reached.” K.’s story begins one step beyond that point.

In Kafka’s handwriting, the letter K plunged downward with a showy swoop the writer detested: “I find Ks ugly, almost repugnant, and yet I keep on writing them; they must be very characteristic of myself.” Choosing the name K., Kafka obligated himself to trace hundreds of times in front of his own eyes a mark that vexed him and in which he recognized some part of himself. If he had narrated The Castle in the first person, as he started out doing, the story would have been less profoundly immersed in his physiology, in zones liberated from the empire of the will.

Did Kafka ever allude to his process of rigorous reduction to the prime elements, as if he sought to fix them in a periodic table? Perhaps in a notebook entry written in 1922, during a moment of stasis in the elaboration of The Castle —and of strong doubt about everything. “Writing denies itself to me” is the fragment’s first sentence. Then he mentions a “project of autobiographical investigations.” It’s not clear what he’s referring to — perhaps “Investigations of a Dog,” which appears soon afterward in his notebook? Then he is more specific: “investigation and discovery of the smallest possible components.” To what end? “Out of these [components], I then want to construct myself.” Here he is no longer speaking of writing but of self-construction . And right after that we find the phosphorescent trail of a short story:

Like a man who has an unsafe house and wants to build himself a safe one beside it, using the materials of the old one if possible. But it’s a terrible business if, during construction, his strength wanes and now instead of an unsafe but whole house he has one that’s half torn down and one that’s half built, which is nothing. What follows is madness, a kind of Cossack dance between the two houses, during which the Cossack scrapes and hollows out the ground with the heels of his boots until his own grave takes shape beneath him.

A Cossack dance between Kafka and the literature that had preceded him.

Certainly it’s not the case, as some continue to maintain, that the religious or the sacred or the divine has been shattered, dissolved, obviated, by some outside agent, by the light of the Enlightenment. That would have resulted in a world made of secular funerals, in all their awful bleakness. What happened instead is that such things as the religious or the sacred or the divine, by an obscure process of osmosis, were absorbed and hidden in something alien, which no longer has need of such names because it is self-sufficient and is content to be described as society . All the rest is, at best, its object of study, its guinea pig — even all of nature.

With Kafka a phenomenon bursts onto the scene: the commixture . There is no sordid corner that can’t be treated as a vast abstraction, and no vast abstraction that can’t be treated as a sordid corner. This phenomenon isn’t a reflection of the writer’s personal inclinations. It’s a matter of fact. Svidrigailov, in Crime and Punishment , observes that for him eternity looks like a village bathhouse full of spiderwebs. It’s a peculiarity of the period, a sign of the times.

When the secretary Bürgel speaks of the officials’ “inconsiderate” behavior toward both the parties and themselves alike, he explains that their lack of consideration is also the supreme “consideration,” because it consists of “the iron-clad execution and completion of their duty.” But his words inevitably have a sinister resonance, even if Bürgel is perhaps the most benevolent of the Castle officials and pronounces them after having stretched and yawned — behavior “which was in troubling contrast to the gravity of his words.”

Commixture manifests itself above all in this: the social order is superimposed on the cosmic order, to the point of covering it and swallowing it. But the majesty and the articulations of the old order are retained even as the memory of it is erased. In the village no one of course speaks of the cosmos. Even nature might almost not exist at all. The only one who mentions it is Pepi, the servant girl. And the image is one of winter: “a long, terribly long monotonous winter.” Color too has been revoked. But no one seems to need or remember it. Differences express themselves in gradations from chiaro to scuro . The lavish wardrobe of the landlady of the Gentlemen’s Inn admits only shades of dark: “gray, brown, or black clothes,” as ordered and compact as a phalanx. The mythic landscape has lost its pigmentation.

The cosmic order, as it presents itself in myths, could vanish with the myths themselves. Scientific knowledge could supplant it with an image that is ever more complex, ever changing, in which dimensions multiply to the point of pointlessness. But that’s not how it happens. Camouflaged within the social order, the cosmic order continues to exist and operate. After all, it has dealt not only with stars and spheres but also with powers and archons. And those powers haven’t gone away. Indeed now, in the absence of names to call them forth, they can operate more freely and wildly, even in plain view. K. puts this to the test every day during his harrowing residence in the village.

The gentlemen ( Herren ) of the Castle are the archons. It isn’t that “archons” is an interpretation that accrues to or superimposes itself on Herren (“gentlemen,” “lords,” “rulers”) but rather that archon , if only we give the word enough room to resonate, means “ruler.” And this constantly happens in Kafka: behind the formulas of common speech a space suddenly opens where words reverberate and sprout meanings, acquiring an intensity that at times is paralyzing. The common speech par excellence is the language of the servants, hence of the servant girl Pepi. Accordingly, when it’s her turn to speak to K., her words sound overloaded with meaning and seem to ask what we are always, secretly, wondering about him: “What does he want? What strange sort of man is he?” And indeed out of Pepi’s mouth come what may be the most drastic words we’ll hear: she goads K. to find “the strength to set fire to the entire Gentlemen’s Inn and burn it to the ground, so that not a trace is left, to burn it like a piece of paper in a stove.” To burn it like that sheet of paper torn from a notepad and left on the records cart, which K. (only hours earlier, during the scene of the “distribution of records”) thought might be his record, that sheet on which would have been written his fate, because the record that concerns an individual can be nothing less than his fate.