Rites of Melancholy
This realization of the impossibility of salvation matches the unrelated condition of melancholy which, in developing its own rituals, promises some relief but not release from suffering and the “feral deseases” so often mentioned in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.36 Among these rituals, in the narrator’s case, are the nocturnal reading of telephone directories and timetables, the unfolding of maps, and the making of plans for imaginary journeys to the most distant of lands, countries that might well lie beyond the sea shown in the background of Dürer’s Melencolia. Like Robert Burton, who was familiar with melancholy all his life, the narrator is a man “who delights in cosmography … but has never travelled except by map and card.”37 And the summer bed with room enough for seven sleepers where he meditates on stories such as that of the Black Death, with all its paths and coincidences, is of the same century as Burton’s compendium, an era of anxiety when the fear was first uttered “that the great mutations of the world are acted, or time may be too short for our designes.”38 The narrator’s digressive excursions from the starting point of this realization open up the view — again, a reminiscence from Hamlet—of a world lying far below melancholy, a “dead globe crawling with parasites” whose power of attraction is spent and forfeit.39 The icy sense of distance as the narrator turns away from all earthly life represents a vanishing point in the dialectic of melancholy.
However, the other dimension of the Saturnian circumstances responsible for melancholy does point, as Benjamin has said and in the context of the heavy, dry nature of that planet, to the type of man predestined to hard and fruitless agricultural labor.40 It is probably no coincidence that the narrator’s only utilitarian occupation seems to be growing herbs. He sends these herbs, dried and in carefully adjusted mixtures, to various delicatessens in Milan and Amsterdam as well as to Germany, to Hamburg and Hannover. Perhaps they bear the words “Rosemary, that’s for remembrance” written in Ophelia’s hand.41
The Ideal of Lightlessness
This last, tenuous connection with the outside world also expresses the wish for a progressive and gradual removal from the society of mankind. It is complemented by a tendency toward dematerialization that in the text has its symbolical counterpart in a painting — a work that ranks very high in the narrator’s estimation — so dark and black “that it gives not the slightest idea of what it may once have shown.”42 The “ideal of blackness” of which this picture, signed by one Jean Gaspard Muller, is an example, is, as Adorno remarked in his Ästhetische Theorie, “one of the deepest impulses of abstraction.”43 To follow that impulse, to reach a place “where no star, no light is visible, where there is nothing, where nothing is forgotten because nothing is remembered, where it is night, where it is nothing, nothing, void,” is the deepest emotion to move the narrator when, in the darkness, he explores the spaces between the stars with his telescope.44
But as the narrator well knows, the search for the ideal of absolute lightlessness remains a hopeless undertaking, for the more he reduces the angle of his lens to exclude the stars still perceptible in his field of vision, the farther he sees into the depths of space from which heavenly bodies previously darkened by distance now shine out. Here, then, we are dealing with something far from nihilism in the usual sense of the word; it is more like an approximation to death, that black point which, in the narrator’s imagination, is always becoming “blacker and thicker, ever thicker and ever longer,” and to which his melancholy clings like “the fat weed / that roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf,” a provocative gesture of resignation.45
Melancholy, of all entities, will make no pact with death, for it knows him as “the most gloomy representative of a gloomy reality” and therefore, like the traveler who, at the beginning of The Castle, voluntarily crosses the bridge into unsurveyed country, speculates on whether death might not be vulnerable to an invasion of his own territory.46
The area that melancholy thus sets out to explore stretches out before us in The Castle as a snowy, frozen landscape, and its exact counterpart is Tynset, a place in the north of Norway that the narrator ventures to visit. Tynset is the penultimate stage on his journey. After it comes Röros, which “[lies] like a last camp on the way to the end of the world, before that way is lost in inhospitable regions, a territory so incalculable, so menacing, that its exploration has been postponed year after year, until the camp has become eternal autumn quarters inhabited by aging explorers who have lost sight of their goal; have forgotten it, and now look vaguely for the geographical origins of a melancholy … that they have long been seeking, but on which they can never lay hands.”47
The Cold Mamsell
The inhospitable region that the melancholy disposition adopts as its home in this reflection is its idea not just of the anteroom of death, but also of the place where we are all continually entertained by a sinister lady who, as Hildesheimer confided to his friend Max in a recently published letter, regularly awaits us after midnight. She is “the cold Mamsell,” a name accurately denoting her profession, similarly remembered by Grass in evoking Dürer’s Melencolia. Among her avocations — as Hildesheimer describes them with some malice — are rolling up salami slices and wrapping cold asparagus in strips of ham, arranging olives on savory breadsticks, slicing cheese thinly, cutting gherkins into fan shapes, carving tomatoes into eighths and radishes into water lily shapes, splitting onions into rings, and laying cubed brawn on platters and sliced cold meats on a bed of lettuce. So that Max will know just who he is dealing with, Hildesheimer adds to this description: “You see, she comes from Germany. In line with her name, she is rather cold, especially her shoulders.”48
If anyone needs further information to identify this lady, let us add that we are already familiar with one of her sisters-in-law from Kafka’s novel quoted above; she keeps house in the castle and “it is usually cold in castles and always winter / for the sun of righteousness is far from them … so courtiers shiver with cold, / fear and sadness.”49 That sister-in-law of the Cold Mamsell who presides over this drafty place can boast several chests of grand dresses, and whenever she, this Madame la Mort, goes to fetch someone she has a new one made, which she then adds to those already in her wardrobe, and consequently she also gives the surveyor the opportunity of entering her service as a tailor: a compromising offer, which in view of his own mission he must decline.