Roberto Calasso: K.

Kafka can’t be understood if he isn’t taken literally. But the literal must be grasped in all its power and in the vastness of its implications. One such implication is this: the records ( Akten ) with which the Castle gentlemen incessantly concern themselves must be the acta , that is to say the record of actions of every kind. The Castle maintains the archive of actions, the immense record of all actions that is karma . That’s why the officials must always be on the job: actions never stop taking place. As Krishna explained to Arjuna on his war chariot, even when you think you’re not acting, you’re acting. That’s why the secretary Momus is in such a hurry to fill in the last blanks of a report describing the events of the previous few minutes. Castle activity consists above all in taking down what already automatically happens: the accumulation of karma .

But one mustn’t think that the records that pile up in columns in Sordini’s room or those crammed into the superintendent’s cabinets or those continually offered to Klamm and waved away by him pertain only to the villagers. Though poor and wretched, they nonetheless have been granted the dismal privilege of sharing a border with the Castle. And that’s enough to mark their destiny. But the Castle records all actions, even those of foreigners, like K., who thinks he recognizes, in a little sheet of paper left on a records cart, his own file, the record of his own acts, as it is about to be distributed or dispersed in one of the officials’ rooms. Karma is terrible even because of this: it exists independent of every faith and every cult. We may be irreverent or disbelieving, even in the extreme, but our actions accumulate and are filed, beyond our reach, just as with true believers. For karma not to exist, every action would have to dissolve immediately — as if without a trace. Were that the case, no premeditated, interrelated actions would be feasible. And if we observe village life, we can assert that such is not the case: it proceeds in a sensible way, like the dull, consequent lives everyone leads.

On one side, the progeny of the archons: the magistrates of the court that judges Josef K. and the officials of the Castle by whom K. wishes to be appointed. They are preoccupied by something known only to them, with respect to which every outside fact is a potential disturbance. And among those outside facts, on the opposite side, is the incessant, unstoppable swarm of defendants, or parties. Each day they swell toward the archons like a vast army, driven forward in a tidelike motion. Looking closely, we may discover that there exists also a counter-movement, more irregular and barely perceptible, like an undertow that flows from the archons back toward the parties (if we use that word as a generic term to indicate whoever waits to be processed and judged by a higher authority). The archons are subject to erotic obsession, which draws them outward. The court’s obsession is crude, marked by the harshness of the penal code; the magistrates are a pack of “womanizers,” and their reference books overflow with obscene images. Among Castle officials, who wait to be surprised and overwhelmed by the parties in the dead of night, the obsession is more lyrical and vague: they yearn to be forced to do something, they who spend their lives forcing others. Archons behave toward the world as the mind behaves toward what’s external to it. They think themselves sovereign and self-sufficient, but they are continually drawn toward something foreign and refractory that resists them and that they want to dominate. They always fear, even if they never admit it, that a little grain of the outside world will penetrate their inaccessible regions, there where they gather only among themselves, and devastate them.

The celestial hierarchies — even the terrestrial or infernal ones, even hierarchies in general, even simply beings that occupy concentric circles — present themselves like this: “I was helpless in the face of that figure, who was sitting quietly at her table looking at the tabletop. I circled around her and felt as if I were being strangled by her. Around me circled a third who felt strangled by me. Around the third circled a fourth, who felt strangled by the third. And so it continued outward as far as the motions of the heavenly bodies and beyond. Everything felt that grip on the neck.” That “grip on the neck” is the feeling through which beings communicate. As Canetti observes, “the Pythagorean harmony of the spheres has become a violence of the spheres.” This is Kafka’s cosmological tableau, implicit in his every word.

Everything is made of concentric circles. Each circle contains, next to something else, an exact reproduction of the preceding circle. For this reason it’s easy to overlook the existence of the circles.

Each circle is self-sufficient. It offers a foundation and a justification to whatever belongs to it. The circles do not communicate, at least not officially. There is no constant or guaranteed means of access from one to another. In special circumstances — or, more commonly, by mistake — temporary passages open between them. Then they close again, leaving no trace.

Canetti observes: “Of all writers, Kafka is the greatest expert on power ( Macht ).” And here power must be understood in its fullest range of meaning, referring simultaneously to the powers whose applications are limited, and generally limited to society, as well as to the Macht that, as Kafka describes, invests all the celestial spheres and beyond (“as far as the motions of the heavenly bodies and beyond”). But what is there in that “beyond”? The “celestial ocean,” the Vedic seers used to say: samudrá , which overflows with light.

Architectonic features of the Castle: it isn’t a citadel, it doesn’t belong to a feudal past, it isn’t ostentatious. Nothing there is new , as in Alfred Kubin’s city of Pearl. Everything is already pregnant with preexisting psychic life. A strip of low buildings, squatting on the slope of a hill. Paint long ago flaked off. It could be a military installation, a monastery, a hospital — or even the edge of a “small town” that is, in truth, “rather paltry.” There’s just one tower, which has something a bit “crazy” about it when its little windows glint in the sun. And it doesn’t give the impression of a noble ascent toward the heights. It looks, rather, as though some “gloomy” inhabitant of the place had “smashed a hole in the roof”—perhaps to escape suffocation. A saturnine dwelling.

The saturnine sovereign, Count Westwest — who is concealed in the tower that rises up from among the Castle’s dilapidated buildings and whom no one has ever seen, whom no one may ask to see — resembles no one so much as a character Kafka described in a fragment, a character who sat at his desk with his head in his hands. Outside, a crowd was waiting for him. And they all had “special requests.” Perhaps they were phantasms. Or demons. Or simply random people one might meet in the street. The unknown character was prepared “to listen to them and then respond.” But he didn’t want to show himself on the balcony. In fact, “he couldn’t, even if he wanted to. In winter the balcony door is locked and the key is nowhere to be found.” And winter lasts forever.

If the inhabitant of the tower showed himself on the balcony or at the window, he would be nothing more than a medium. Life would be a flux of powers colliding like electrical discharges. But it wouldn’t be able to tell its story . Everything would be reduced to a play of forces that clash, visibly and invisibly. Instead everything is much more opaque, uncertain, incalculable. The forces might even pretend to be unaware of one another. Each constructs a theater of its own, which one day will be annihilated by some random force among the forces it has ignored. But the fiction may well be maintained for a long time, long enough to be thought of as nature. Closed in his bare room, his elbows on the table, the unknown inhabitant of the tower is the guarantor of the world’s opacity. He’s the one to whom we’re indebted if life at every turn is an adventure. He’s the one from whom we await, at every moment, some kind of answer. And he’s the one to whom we’re grateful that it never comes.