Roberto Calasso - K.

Bürgel’s monologue is so effective because he always speaks from within the Castle and the thought of sabotaging it never even occurs to him. His admissions are all the more eloquent — and all the more probative. When Bürgel approaches the final threshold, even his language changes. It suddenly becomes simple, direct:

Of course, when the party is in the room, the situation is already an ugly one. It tugs at one’s heart. “How long can you resist?” one asks oneself. But there won’t be any resistance, we know that. You just have to imagine the situation properly. Before us sits the party, the party on whom we’ve never laid eyes, for whom we’ve always been waiting, and with real thirst, but whom we have always, and quite reasonably, considered unreachable. His mute presence alone is an invitation to penetrate his poor life, to make oneself at home in it and to partake of the suffering born of his vain demands. Such an invitation in the dead of night is enthralling. One accepts it and in that moment one ceases to be an official.

Indeed, one is no longer an official but rather a great mystic.

What Bürgel in the end reveals is the great order’s hidden helplessness. To grant the party’s request “truly tears the official organization apart,” which is the deepest misfortune — and shame — an official can know. The party forces the order, hence the official, to perform some task that goes beyond the order itself. And here Bürgel returns to the evangelical image of the “thief in the night”: now the party is described as a “robber in the woods who in the night exacts from us sacrifices we would never otherwise have been capable of making.” The official at this point feels hopeless but also happy. “How suicidal happiness can be,” Bürgel says — you’d think he was quoting a line from Kafka’s Diaries .

But could the world go forward, were such a thing to happen? On one condition only: if the party, also overcome with weariness, remains unaware of all this, lost in other thoughts, thoughts of his “error” or his “weariness,” since he has “entered a room other than the one he wanted.” And, thanks to his oblivion, the order remains intact. Bürgel is now describing what’s happening in that very moment between himself and K. But the scene isn’t over. The extreme tension has produced an excess: the “loquaciousness of the happy.”

In Bürgel’s case, it’s a hopeless happiness. The party cannot be left to himself, to his distraction and his weariness, but must be shown “precisely what has happened and why it happened”—and above all how the party himself, on that rarest of occasions, passes briefly from that deeply rooted state of utter helplessness into a condition wherein he “can control everything,” provided that he can “somehow present his request, whose fulfillment already awaits it.” Indeed — Bürgel explains — the fulfillment is by now “leaning toward” the request. With this passage, “that which is most necessary has taken place,” in the sense that necessity has been stretched to the breaking point, to the point of transferring to the party the power that has always been denied him — a translatio imperii that would shake the world to its foundations. But there’s no proof that such a thing has taken place, or that it could. At this point, Bürgel concludes, there’s nothing left to do but “be content and wait.” How could this scene be defined? It’s “the official’s most trying hour.” Nothing implies that the scene takes place. But “all this must be shown.” The parties must at least be told the story. The Castle must at least be written.

Kafka spent eight months in Zürau, in the Bohemian countryside, at his sister Ottla’s house, between September 1917 and April 1918. The tuberculosis had declared itself a month before, when he coughed up blood in the night. The sick man didn’t hide a certain sense of relief. Writing to Felix Weltsch, he compared himself to the “happy lover” who exclaims: “All the previous times were but illusions, only now do I truly love.” Illness was the final lover, which allowed him to close the old accounts. The first of those accounts was the idea of marriage, which had tortured him (and Felice) for five years. Another was his business career. Another was Prague and his family.

After arriving in Zürau, Kafka chose not to write anything the first day, because the place was “too pleasing” and he feared his every word would be “evil’s cue.” Whatever he wrote, before he thought of the reader he thought of demons — and of his unsettled account with them. Not even illness was enough to settle it.

Zürau was a tiny village among rolling hills, surrounded by scattered woods and meadows. The focal point of life there was the hop harvest. As for its inhabitants, animals were more in evidence than people. Kafka immediately saw the place as “a zoo organized according to new principles.” Ottla’s house was on the market square, beside the church. Except for the friends and relatives who threatened constantly to visit, the situation approached that reduction to the minimum number of elements toward which Kafka naturally tended in his writing — and which he would have liked to extend to his life in general.

In his only period of near happiness, he found himself surrounded by semi-free animals. Theirs, after all, was a condition quite familiar to him. There exists an invisible chain, of a generous length, that allows one to wander here and there without noticing it, as long as one doesn’t go too far in any single direction. If one does, the chain will suddenly make itself felt. But Kafka was never self-indulgent enough to view this state of affairs, as many do, as a dirty trick played on him alone. This is how he expressed it in the sixty-sixth Zürau aphorism, describing a “he” who signifies “anyone”:

He is a free and secure citizen of the earth, since he is bound by a chain long enough to allow free access to every place on earth, yet short enough that nothing can drag him beyond the earth’s confines. But at the same time he is also a free and secure citizen of heaven, since he is bound also by a heavenly chain that functions similarly. Thus he is choked if he tries to move toward the earth by his heavenly collar, and if he tries to move toward heaven, by his earthly one. And despite this, every possibility is his, he can feel it, indeed he refuses to trace this all back to an error made by chaining him in the first place.

Never does Kafka seem to find his situation as agreeable as he does during those months in Zürau. Only there can he escape everything: family, office, women — the principal powers that have always hounded him. Further, he is protected by the barrier of illness, which, as if by magic, now shows no “visible signs.” Indeed, Kafka will write to Oskar Baum, in a provocative parenthesis: “(on the other hand I’ve never felt better, as far as my health is concerned).” In Zürau the world has been nearly emptied of human beings. It’s this emptiness, above all else, that gives rise in Kafka to a feeling of slight euphoria. The animals remain: “A goose was fattened to death, the sorrel has mange, the nanny goats have been taken to the billy goat (who must have been quite a handsome fellow; one of the nannies, after having already been taken to him once, had a sudden flash of memory and ran the long road from our house back to the billy), and the pig will no doubt be butchered at any moment.” These words are enough to suggest the superimposed scenes of an ongoing tragicomedy. Kafka added: “This is a compressed image of life and death.” The reduction to the prime elements has been completed in a Bohemian village where the theater of life is left to the animals — and to the commonest of them. And it’s a relief. But, just as Strindberg had experienced, hell is ready to burst forth at any moment, heralded by noise. In Zürau, it will be the noise of mice.