Roberto Calasso - K.

One therefore might suppose that, in the village, religion and culture subsist as mere backdrop, since life there must have some family resemblance with the rest of the world. But in essence they have been stripped away. And so, lacking any sort of mediation, the village proves to be the last outpost of the manifest, which almost yields to the unmanifest. This lack of mediation is the origin of the oppressive, suffocating, chronically distressing atmosphere that weighs on the village. It’s behind the look one sees on the faces of its inhabitants, the look of creatures who are subject to something stronger than themselves, to an unbearable tension, out of proportion for a village in which so little apparently happens. It’s also why K., like every foreigner, is considered abysmally “ignorant”—and as such is not only despised but also envied, secretly, because he’s still enveloped in the blissful breath of unconsciousness. And when Frieda hints at the possibility of “going away” with K., of leaving that village where after all nothing is forcing her to stay, we detect in her voice an uncontrollable euphoria.

Were the villagers to see the exegetes of The Castle talking long-windedly of deities and of God and of how they interfere in their lives, they would probably act indignant. How simple it would be to have dealings with the deities or with God. It would be enough to study a little theology and to rely upon the heart’s devotion — they would think. But the Castle officials are rather more complicated. No science or discipline can help in dealing with them. Only experience might help — the kind that’s passed in whispers from house to house or from table to table in the barroom.

When it comes to reduction, no one has equaled the mastery of Yajnavalkya. Questioned by the cunning Sakalya, he was able to reduce the 3,306 deities to the one brahman . But the brahman , whatever that might be, must necessarily be divided into two parts: the “unmanifest” and the “manifest,” avyakta and vyakta . The one is therefore always two . And among the two, its first part is always the largest. Three fourths of the brahman is unmanifest, one fourth is manifest. The brahman is the wild goose, the hamsa about which the texts say that “in rising from the water, it does not extract one foot. If it did, neither today nor tomorrow would exist.” The water is the unmanifest brahman , the wild goose that emerges from it is the manifest brahman .

Kafka was born into a world where the unmanifest part — the greater part of what is — was increasingly being ignored or denied. The world was said to have been born out of nothingness, but the enormity and the blasphemy of these words were not yet understood. Blasphemy with respect not to a God but to the whole. At the same time, the world was being reduced to the visible, to the vyakta . This was said to be physics plus chemistry. Everything, then, was visible: either to the naked eye or to the eyes of cumbersome machines lurking in labs. This was the world in which Kafka was born and raised, as an affluent, assimilated Prague Jew who spoke German and would learn early that the world by then, in its normal course of operation, could do without every type of God, every type of deity. In that world, the distinction between vyakta and avyakta was not, to be sure, formulated in those terms, but accessible and immediate translations were at hand whenever the visible and the invisible were invoked. And these were after all the terms most familiar to the Christian liturgy. The wall of the barroom in the Gentlemen’s Inn, in which Frieda has made a tiny hole that allows K. to gaze upon Klamm, immobile and perhaps dozing — that wall is the iconostasis.

To speak of deities, of God, and of the divine in regard to The Castle is a serious breach of decorum, because nothing of the sort is ever mentioned there, unless the whole of The Castle is taken as an Aesopian fable. But is that what it is really? The literary newness of The Castle consists first and foremost in its not being a fable, whereas many of Kafka’s other stories — from “Investigations of a Dog” to “The Burrow” to “The Great Wall of China”—can (and perhaps must) be understood at least as apologues. Indeed they derive their force from that form. But the narrative force of The Castle lies elsewhere. The Castle is akin to the novels of Dickens or Dostoevsky, writers Kafka venerated. The difference lies in the place where this novel unfolds, which is the dividing line between vyakta and avyakta . No one had dared to write a novel about that boundary, which doesn’t in the end manage to become a true boundary, since the village street never reaches the Castle, but rather veers away and proceeds parallel to it without getting closer than a certain distance. This is only one of the various oddities one encounters in these places.

The Castle , even more than The Trial , has provoked chronic vertigo in its exegetes. No novel is better suited for initiating its readers into the “torment of endless commentary,” which, however, few can bear for long — the fiber of the Talmudist is rare. Most readers, unable to withstand that “torment,” seek rest in an all-encompassing interpretation. Surely no novel is more scrupulously chaperoned, as if by sharp-eyed duennas, by its interpretations. For the most part these interpretations are tolerant and magnanimous, ready to admit of numerous others, even incompatible ones, provided that they be interpretations. And they are often eager to beat their breasts and declare their own inadequacy. Yet still they are voluble and intrusive.

At the beginning, K. is a land surveyor who arrives in a village to take up his post. By the end, he’s the janitor at the village school. And the coachman Gerstäcker offers to let him take care of his horses, even though K. “doesn’t know anything about horses.” No matter, says Gerstäcker. Then why the offer? Because Gerstäcker is counting on K. to exert a certain influence on one of the Castle secretaries, Erlanger. From K.’s point of view, everything since his arrival has been a constant regression toward inadequacy, combined with escalating humiliations. Yet it’s also true that influence is now for the first time attributed to him, as if by now he formed part of the Castle’s web of relations, which extends over all the territory of the village. At the very beginning it was said that anyone who “lives or lodges here [in the village] is in some sense ( gewissermassen ) living or lodging in the Castle.” That gewissermassen corresponds to the particle iva so often encountered in the Brahmanas, and it signals entry into the most secret realms of thought, where everything is understood as if preceded by that iva : “in some sense,” “so to speak.” Gerstäcker’s offer is the last stage we are shown of K.’s peregrinations. At this point, as so often happens around the Castle, certain words that have long been buried in piles of irrelevant ones suddenly ring out again, rich with meaning and sarcasm. When K. and the coachman meet, that first day, before they even know each other’s names, they exchange these lines:

“Who are you waiting for?” “A sleigh that will take me,” said K. “Sleighs don’t come by here,” said the man; “there’s no traffic here.” “But this is the road that leads to the Castle,” objected K. “Just the same, just the same,” said the man rather adamantly, “there’s no traffic here.”

K. prepares to visit the village superintendent. It’s the fourth day since his arrival, and he hasn’t had a single direct encounter with a representative of the Count’s authority. Now he must begin — and clearly not at a high level. Nevertheless he feels “little concern.” An unfounded intimacy has already been established between K. and the power of the Castle, thus far dormant. He feels that power, as a pianist feels the keys. His observations about the Castle’s “service” are extremely acute; he has already perceived that it displays an “admirable unity,” an operational continuity not found elsewhere. And even “in cases where that appeared lacking, one suspected that it achieved a special perfection.” Is this a Taoist speaking? Not exactly, because Taoists don’t struggle, whereas K. does, is even the “attacker” who assails those same “authorities,” though they have “for the most part been obliging.” If only in “trivial matters.” But what other dealings has he had with them in those first hours?