Roberto Calasso - K.

Klamm is an official of a certain age, a man of habits, always dressed in a “black frock-coat with long tails.” He wanders about with an air somewhere between dreamy and sleepy, and sometimes “he’ll go for hours apparently without uttering a single word and then suddenly say something so vulgar it makes you shudder.” A flash of pure comedy. But do we think that with such details we’ve plumbed Klamm’s depths? In the words of Olga, who does know something of the subject: “What can we know about the thoughts of gentlemen!”

Of all the gentlemen, only Klamm inspires exaltation and sacred awe. Not only in the landlady of the Bridge Inn and in Frieda, who are in charge of his cult, but also in Pepi, the incendiary servant. That Klamm doesn’t make an appearance during the days when Pepi lends her services to the bar is the greatest blow to her. She waits, expecting him “at any moment, even at night.” Her disappointment exhausts her. She even dares wait for him in a recess of the forbidden corridor, thinking: “Ah, if only Klamm would come now, if only I could take the gentleman from his room and carry him in my arms down to the public room. I wouldn’t collapse beneath that weight, no matter how great it was.” Klamm, this gentleman similar in appearance to other gentlemen who are “elderly and attached to their habits,” appears here helpless as a baby, lovingly transported in the firm arms of the servant Pepi, protected by that flighty, fervent Magdalene. After all, for Klamm even this will merely be another of his many metamorphoses.

During her vain wait for Klamm, Pepi becomes aware of the quality of the silence that reigns in the gentlemen’s corridor. This silence is such “that you can’t stand it there for long”—it’s a silence that “drives you away.” Nevertheless Pepi doesn’t give up. “Ten times she was driven away, ten times she went back up.” Why? Pepi, who has a gift for direct expression, knows how to explain it: “It didn’t make sense, but if [Klamm] didn’t come, then almost everything was senseless.” To wait for Klamm makes no sense. But it is Klamm alone who imbues “almost everything” with sense. And so to wait for Klamm is practically the only thing that does make sense. This is Pepi’s paradox , which merits inclusion in logical treatises. One of its applications is The Castle .

It’s only the morning after his arrival when K. gives up the idea of presenting himself at the Castle. A sudden weariness descends upon him, such as he never felt during his long journey (“How he kept forging ahead for days, calmly, step after step!”). He starts out thinking that if he can “push himself to walk at least as far as the Castle entrance, he will have done more than enough.” But he quickly realizes that he doesn’t know which street leads to the Castle entrance. The village’s main street, flanked with low, snow-covered houses, their doors all closed, a long street, an endless street, merely gives the illusion of leading to the Castle. Then it suddenly veers away — maintaining, from that point on, a constant distance from the Castle.

In these initial steps, in these initial observations, the whole of K.’s story is already prefigured. His movements seem to him casual, even capricious, like those of a traveler taking a look around in an unknown place. But that’s not how it is. Every detail, every remark addressed to him, circles around him, cages him. To linger over some of these phrases is enough to become alarmed. K. always takes them as ordinary phrases, tossed off by people to whom he clearly attaches no importance: the landlord, the schoolteacher he meets on the street, the tanner whose house he enters. And yet their words are quite clear. “I don’t think you have any power,” the landlord says. “Strangers never like the Castle,” says the schoolteacher, and then: “There is no difference between the peasants and the Castle.” Finally: “Hospitality is not our custom here,” says the tanner; “we have no need for guests.” Frightening words. In the dark, smoky hovel where two bearded men soak in a huge washtub, where a young woman with “tired blue eyes” languishes on a “tall armchair,” holding an infant to her breast, “inert,” staring upward “toward some indefinite place” like a Madonna of melancholy, while from the one tiny window on the back wall a pale snow-light casts a “silky sheen” on her dress — in this archaic, torpid penumbra where the only recognized law might well be the law of hospitality, we encounter these brutal, resolute words: “Hospitality is not our custom here.” And further: “We have no need for guests.” These last words are the harshest K. will hear, but he quickly passes over them: “Of course not; why would you ever need guests?” His reply actually attempts to establish complicity, allowing K. to raise the point that he holds dearest: that he is the exception, the chosen one. He continues: “But every so often, you must have need of someone, of myself for instance, a land surveyor.” And so K. rushes headlong past an opportunity to understand. A mist still surrounds him, protects him, mocks him.

The villagers know — for them it goes without saying — that their laws are different from those that hold sway in the rest of the world. First of all because the village is as close to the Castle as it’s possible to be. But also for another reason: the village has a different constitution than the rest of the world, a different physiology. In the village, religion is reduced to a topographical reference: we infer that there is a church simply because a “church square” is mentioned, but other than that nothing religious is ever spoken of. And perhaps such talk would sound impious and incongruous, since the village is utterly absorbed in its proximity to the Castle. As for books, no one speaks of them. Only in the novel’s last lines is reference made to a particular book: the old mother of the coachman Gerstäcker is hunched over it, reading, in a hut faintly illumined by firelight. But we won’t learn anything more about that book, because that’s where the novel breaks off, as the old woman reaches a trembling hand toward K. and whispers something incomprehensible to him. Books in the plural, on the other hand, appear only in the Castle, in a vast office. They are arranged on a wide, tall reading stand that divides the room in two. Only the officials consult them, only they know what is written in those books — and whether they’re related in any way to the words those same officials dictate in a whisper to their copyists. As K. once obliquely remarks, with his usual mix of perspicacity and cheek: “A lot of writing goes on there.” No act has been fully completed, as we can infer from the behavior of the secretary Momus, until it has been logged in the records. Thus, sitting at a table in the barroom, Momus zealously fills out his report on events that happened a few minutes earlier, crumbling his pretzel with caraway seeds onto the pages of the document as he does so. But apart from the records , with which the Castle officials are constantly occupied — either in compiling them or in consulting them or in preserving them or even in keeping them out of sight, as Klamm does — apart from these countless handwritten pages, sometimes underlined in blue, no other writings are mentioned. And above all: there’s no trace of any sort of printed material. Perhaps none exists. It’s hard to imagine shelves in the peasants’ dark hovels. The barroom contains tables, chairs, and barrels. The servants’ rooms, heaps of dirty clothes. The only gentleman’s room in which K. will spend much time, Bürgel’s room, is bare. The single example of represented reality is an unusual portrait at the Bridge Inn, which K. supposes to be a likeness of Count Westwest — his first and one of his worst gaffes, since it is instead a portrait of the Castle steward.