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?
Another, more urgent question is raised: Why is K. attacking? Why would he need to, since he has only to take possession of a post that, despite some misunderstanding, could — it seems — be granted him? But the struggle is on, and its peculiar nature immediately becomes clear: on one side the authorities, who must “defend remote, invisible things, always and only in the name of remote, invisible gentlemen.” The crucial point of this stunning definition is the invisibility and distance not of the gentlemen but of the things that the authorities must defend. Things of what nature? And why is it that the first concern of these authorities is not to assert themselves, as one might expect, but rather to protect themselves from an obscure foreigner, from an aspiring “worker,” with all that word’s painful associations? With regard to the authorities — and to their exclusive relation with what is remote and invisible — K. is the extreme opposite: someone who “was struggling for something vitally close, for himself.” To struggle for oneself: this must have appeared unseemly, maybe even repugnant, to authorities who are so accustomed to other spaces.
Nevertheless the authorities have from the beginning shown K. a generic benevolence, allowing him to “prowl around wherever he wanted,” even if that language already betrays a certain deprecatory tone. But at the same time, in so doing, “they spoiled and weakened him.” Perhaps that benevolence, then, is a higher form of malice, which serves to push K. ever further into a “non-official, completely uncontrollable, murky, strange life.” And what sort of “life” is that, if not life itself, without qualifiers, in its raw, amorphous, frayed state? Thus K., caught in that amorphous life, might have been driven to self-destruction. And then one might have been able to witness this spectacle: “The authorities, gentle and friendly as ever, would have had to intervene, as if against their will, yet in the name of some public ordinance unknown to him, in order to haul him away.” In these lines for the first time the stakes are declared — and one realizes that the game may be terrifying, that the authorities, while maintaining their “gentle and friendly” manner, may from one moment to the next, and perhaps reluctantly, “haul him away” like a wreck that’s blocking the road. One would then conclude that theological subtlety and police brutality do not belong to separate worlds. That they can cohabitate. That each can even presuppose the other. Perhaps only in this fashion, with just such a display of gentleness, would it be possible to “haul away” someone who, after all, can be charged only with having “proceeded recklessly” along a certain stretch, however brief, of his “other life” (as opposed to his official life). This would already be sufficient to sow terror. But there isn’t time to stop here. K. presses on, rightly asking himself: “What was it really, here, that other life?” And he quickly hastens toward an ominous observation: “Nowhere else had K. seen one’s professional service and one’s life so intertwined as here, so intertwined that at times it seemed that service and life had switched places.” Now terror gives way to vertigo. Could the shabby life of the village be the true service, concerned only with “remote, invisible” things? And perhaps service is life itself, as always “completely uncontrollable, murky, strange”? And finally, what does it mean, this intertwining of two extremes, so intimate that each apes the other’s features? For example: till now authority has been for K. above all a name: Klamm. But where does Klamm’s power manifest itself? In the signature at the bottom of the letter from the director of Bureau No. 10, a letter in which K. is addressed now with words of respect and recognition, now with imperiousness and veiled threats? Or is it in the air, much more solemnly, when Gardena, the landlady of the Bridge Inn, with her “gigantic figure that nearly darkened the room,” sits beside K.’s bed in that maid’s room that K. calls a “repugnant hole” and explains, “as if this explanation were not a last favor but rather the first of the punishments she would inflict,” that K.’s proposed visit to Klamm is “impossible” (“What an idea!”—and then: “You’re asking the impossible”)? Yes, there in that sordid, suffocating place, where the maids’ dirty laundry and the curled-up bodies of K.’s assistants blur together on the floor, it can be said that, for the first time since his arrival in the village, K. hears a speech of vast importance, which blends abstraction and gossip into a single amalgam — a speech furthermore rich with allusions to what could or could not be done, in accordance with rules unknown to K. And as for him, in those moments he sees himself for the first time imprisoned in a definition: “You are the most ignorant person here, and be careful,” Gardena says. But perhaps it is this last thrust of hers that gives K. the chance to begin the game again, since after all “to the ignorant everything seems possible.” This is the moment (a reckless one) when K., already opening the door to leave, says to Gardena: “But what is it you’re afraid of?… Surely you’re not afraid for Klamm’s sake?”