Roberto Calasso - K.

No critic, from the dullest to the greatest, has failed to consider dreams when speaking of Kafka. But dream —like unconscious —is in this case a lifeless word. It interrupts the flow of thought rather than guiding it. Unless we’re talking about the type of dream that Kafka described once in his Diaries (and that could also be an excellent description of The Castle ): “a wildly branching dream, which simultaneously contains a thousand correlations that all become clear in a flash.” Such dreams are one way the mind may represent a certain quality of wakefulness, a quality that wakefulness itself has difficulty attaining, clouded as it is by an indomitable will to control. But wakefulness is always the subject, even if — thanks to an irony encountered both in the world and in Kafka — its most precise, most effective image is attained not through continual, conscious effort but “in a flash” during a dream. This too is a trick of wakefulness.

As K. dreams, Bürgel continues his monologue, having now reached the point where he must address an extreme case, the only case in which the parties — despite all the “security measures”—might have the audacity to “take advantage” of the Castle. At issue is the “nighttime weakness of the secretaries,” which presents what is certainly “a very rare opportunity, which is to say it almost never arises.” But does its rarity diminish its gravity? Certainly not for the secretaries, whose lives are plagued by the thought of it. The opportunity “consists in this, that the party shows up unannounced in the middle of the night.” With this phrase, which immediately evokes the evangelical “thief in the night,” Bürgel seems to have exceeded the limits of what he is able to say. Immediately afterward, as if falling back on professional constraint in order to mask his excessive disclosures, he turns all his energies to a grueling bureaucratic exposition, probing the differences between competent and incompetent secretaries. As if shaken by a demon, he calms down only after a thirteen-line sentence. Now the words have gone back, for a moment, to spreading their thick protective fog.

K. nods and smiles, half asleep. “Now he believed he understood everything perfectly.” But this means only that he feels close to falling fast asleep again, “this time with no dreams or disturbances.” That “gap-free organization,” as Bürgel himself calls the Castle, with its swarms of secretaries, competent and otherwise, was too tedious and torturous. Maybe it would be better just to let things go, not to insist. And thus, finally, to “escape from them all.” This is the only time K. comes close to anything like liberation. But there’s never any respite. After retreating into the most rigorous official jargon, Bürgel seems to have regained his strength. His revelations are not yet at an end.

Bürgel is speaking of an extremely unlikely possibility, indeed “the unlikeliest of all.” Yet he is also describing, like a faithful chronicler, what’s happening in the very moment he is speaking. We come to this exercise of transcendental acrobatics after having passed through such numerous and surprising turns of argument that our attention is blunted and we have a hard time grasping the absolute newness of what’s taking place. Bürgel now tells K. that the party “can’t, on his own, figure anything out. Exhausted, disappointed, inconsiderate, and indifferent, he has, because of his fatigue and disappointment — though he probably attributes it to some indifferent, accidental cause — entered a room other than the one he wanted, and there he sits, ignorant, and his mind, if it is filled with anything at all, is filled with thoughts of his error and his weariness”: these words are the meticulous description of what’s happening in those very moments to K., as he sits on the edge of Bürgel’s bed — and, behind K., in the mind of the reader, who may be wondering how much longer this laborious digression will last. But Bürgel is at the same time describing that extremely rare opportunity for escape, around which gathers the imposing skein of regulations that govern the lives of the Castle officials. The greatest generality and the most irreducible singularity coincide for a moment. As do the unlikeliest thing in the world and the simple procedural recording of a fact. The event is so prodigious that Bürgel is overcome by the “loquaciousness of the happy.” And he asks himself: “But can one abandon the party at that point? No, one cannot.” Indeed, “one must explain everything to him.” This is the pinnacle of The Castle . But could the Castle survive a complete explanation of itself? Probably not. Or if it did, it would remain forever wounded, because the party’s request, when granted, “truly tears the official organization apart — and this is the worst thing that could happen in the course of one’s duty.” But it won’t happen, because K. is already sleeping deeply and is “cut off from everything around him.”

For a Castle official to be caught up in the “loquaciousness of the happy” is unheard of, if only because the allure of the Castle — and, by extension, of its representatives — resides first of all in silence. Each time K. lifts his eyes to look at the Castle itself, he fails to detect “the slightest sign of life.” It might be simply a matter of distance. But for some reason a sign is important: “his eyes demanded it and refused to tolerate the silence.” A risky demand.

What, then, is that silence like? “Someone sitting calmly, looking straight ahead, not lost in thought and thus cut off from everything else, but free and indifferent, as if he were alone and unobserved; and yet he must have known he was being observed, but that didn’t in the least disturb his tranquility, and in fact — whether through cause or effect was uncertain — the observer’s gaze couldn’t hold and turned away.” This image of the Castle appears to K. one day as an early darkness falls, and it is the clearest image that the Castle has allowed of itself. But it’s still an image. Going beyond the image is like secretly drinking Klamm’s cognac, transforming “something that seemed merely the vehicle for a sweet perfume into a drink fit for coachmen.”

Not only is the Castle there in place of the apparent emptiness that K. perceives on his arrival in the village, but the Castle itself is like a being looking out into emptiness, or in any case staring at something that never clouds its “free and indifferent” gaze. Two different figures of emptiness confront each other. They can’t collide, because one emptiness can’t clash with another. But one emptiness could enter the other. Could let itself be absorbed by the other.

There’s only one way to win the game with the Castle. Contravening the perpetual elusiveness of his colleagues, Bürgel describes it to K. when he speaks of the possibility of becoming “a peculiar, perfectly shaped, clever, tiny little grain,” which, once it has assumed its shape, could slip through that “incomparable sieve” that is the Castle organization. These seem like instructions for escaping a maximum-security prison. Do they apply? On this point, Bürgel answers himself; in fact he gives two contradictory replies. The first: “You think this can never happen? You’re right, it can never happen.” But the other one follows immediately: “But one night — who can guarantee [ bürgen ] everything? — it does happen.” And this is the moment of greatest tension in his monologue. What follows is a series of further lucubrations outlining the gravity of the possible damages such an event would cause, an event, he emphasizes, whose existence is unconfirmed, except by “rumor.” But even this is not sufficiently reassuring. It’s much more effective “to prove, as is easily done,” that such an event has “no place in the world”—just as K. has always feared that there’s no place for him in the Castle.