K.’s audacious hypothesis, that “service” and “life” might actually swap “positions,” implies consequences that only gradually become apparent. The first has to do with modes of behavior—a fundamental matter, crucial to K.’s story. And regarding precisely this matter a reversal is proposed that will be rather difficult to put into practice, as it runs counter to common sense: “here”—K. reflects, meaning the area surrounding the Castle, and this adverb is as pregnant as Plato’s “down here”—perhaps it would be “appropriate” (am Platze, “in its place”) to maintain “a rather carefree attitude, a certain ease of manner only when dealing directly with the authorities, while everything else always called for great caution, looking in all directions before taking a step.” Nothing is more dangerous — we must understand — than everyday life. There, even when performing the most casual, inconsequential acts, we must remember we are continuously under surveillance. We must watch our every step, looking in all directions, as if under siege. As soon as we come before the authorities, on the other hand, where the usual response is to stiffen for fear of doing something wrong, of committing some infraction prejudicial to our cause, we are advised to adopt instead a casual attitude, a certain recklessness we would ordinarily rule out on the grounds that it might easily appear careless, disrespectful, frivolous. In a single sentence, K. has outlined nothing less than a Copemican revolution in behavior, a revolution he glimpses even before he has managed to meet with his first authority, the village superintendent. It is in this very meeting that K. is able to confirm just how far the promiscuity between “service” and “life” goes: the superintendent keeps the official records, those pages that are the very embodiment of service, crammed in a cabinet in his bedroom. When those great sheaves spill onto the floor “tied together in bundles like kindling,” the superintendent’s wife, Mizzi, jumps aside “with fright.” Apparently Mizzi knows that these pages are irradiant and corrosive, even at a distance of years.
K.’s primary characteristic is a certain insolence. The insolence of the ignorant, some will suggest, until Gardena puts it to him as bluntly as possible. But K. can’t help himself. When the superintendent explains the story of his file, in which the word surveyor is underlined in blue, a file that was held up for a long time by a variety of circumstances and the occasional mistake, K. finds the story “amusing”—and elaborates: “It amuses me only because it allows me some insight into the ridiculous muddle that at times can determine a man’s life.” This is certainly not the kind of language with which one would generally address an official. But the superintendent forges on, implacable and “serious.” He objects at once that if K. supposes he has gained any “insight” from his story he is mistaken, because the story has just begun — and K. doesn’t know that yet.
K., no less tenacious and implacable than the superintendent, lets him keep talking, lets him describe in ever greater detail the error — though “who can ever say for sure that it’s an error?”—that concerns K. But then K. immediately returns to his distinction. On the one hand, he says, there are the services, the offices and what happens within them: a self-sufficient world that can be understood only in “official” terms. On the other, there is a being who exists “outside those offices” and is an “actual person” and is “threatened by those offices”—and what’s more, the threat is “so senseless” that K. finds it hard to “believe in the gravity of the danger.” Once again, K.’s remarks are pointed and terse, in sharp contrast with the undulating, winding course of the superintendent’s arguments. But K.’s brusqueness doesn’t prevent him from following — perhaps even ironically — a certain protocol of compliments and praise, for he is quick to extol the “amazing, extraordinary knowledge of these matters” that the superintendent has just displayed. This prelude renders all the more effective the zinger that follows: “However at this point I would also like to hear a word or two about me.”
The superintendent loves, more than anything else, to talk about Sordini. K.’s presence at his bedside gives him a good excuse for returning again and again to the subject of that Italian, “famous for his conscientiousness,” who works in Department B as a relator—“virtually the lowest position of all,” observes the superintendent thoughtfully. Even to an “insider” like him, it seems “inconceivable” that “a man of [Sordini’s] abilities” is being made use of in that way. Nonetheless, despite his lowly position there’s something intimidating about him, as those who’ve had the experience of being attacked by him know all too well. He then becomes “terrifying for the person under attack, but splendid for that person’s enemies.” Something feral infuses his high capacity for “attention, energy, presence of mind,” as if some spring inside him is always about to pop. Of course, the superintendent himself has two cabinets, in addition to a barn, full of papers. But he remains a peasant who sometimes acts as an official, knowing full well that he isn’t up to the task. While Sordini… The superintendent recalls, dreamily, the descriptions he’s heard of Sordini’s office. He’s never seen this office — just as he’s never seen Sordini, who never comes down, being always “overburdened with work.” Thus: “all the walls are lined with columns made from stacks of bundled files,” and those are only the records Sordini is working on at that moment. It’s often necessary, therefore, to extract documents and reinsert them. Since this happens “in a great hurry,” muffled thuds are constantly emanating from Sordini’s office: the sounds of columns of documents giving way, collapsing one after another. This sound is considered characteristic of Sordini’s office. Having arrived at this point in his story, the superintendent, enthralled, adds a general observation: “Yes, Sordini is a worker and devotes the same care to the smallest cases as to the biggest ones.”