Even in the face of this majestic vision, which seems to call for silence, K. doesn’t abandon his impudence. And like a good adversary, he quickly latches onto the use of small and big in order to suggest to the superintendent that his own case, though originally “one of the smallest,” as he has been told on more than one occasion, perhaps in part to keep him at bay, “has now become, thanks to the zeal of officials like Mr. Sordini, a big case.” Already in these words we recognize a certain lack of respect, but those that follow are obviously provocative. He isn’t at all happy about becoming a “big case,” says K., “since my ambition is not to have great columns of records concerning me rise up and then collapse, but rather to work in peace, a little land surveyor at his little drawing table.” Nothing could be simpler, and nothing further from the somber frenzy of Sordini’s office. Nor could anything be more unrenounceable, if we recall what Kafka wrote in a letter, during the time he was drafting The Castle, about the relationship between writers and their desks: “The writer’s existence truly depends on his desk, if he wants to avoid madness he can never really stray from his desk, he must hold fast to it with his teeth.” Holding fast with his teeth to something — the possibility of a desk — is also an apt description of K.’s behavior.
The tension is evident. But even an official who is “not enough of an official” like the superintendent knows how to dodge such a provocation. Almost reassuringly, he emphasizes: “No, [yours] is not a big case, on this score you have no cause to complain, it’s one of the smallest of the small. It isn’t the volume of work that determines the rank of the case.” This sentence sounds like a general rule about how the offices work — and also serves, once again, to knock K., the attacker, back on his heels. The official’s most powerful weapon against the foreigner is implicit humiliation.
At the beginning of The Castle, when official “recognition” of K.’s surveyor title is at issue, the text describes that recognition as “certainly spiritually superior.” But Kafka’s deletions reveal a wavering: before coming to that “spiritually superior,” he had written: “like everything that is spiritually superior, it’s also a little oppressive.” He vacillated here too, between “oppressive” and “mysterious.” And this wavering between something crushing and something secret, with each understood as a prime characteristic of that which is “spiritually superior,” points to the very substance of the “struggle” that K. has taken up. Why must the “spiritually superior” also be a weight that oppresses whoever approaches it? Why must its modus operandi be so similar to persecution, even — and perhaps above all — when it comes to the highest of its prerogatives: recognition? K.‘s most disconcerting thought takes shape immediately after he learns, indirectly as usual and via the telephone, that he has been “named land surveyor.” Instead of cheering up and calming down, K. thinks: “And if they believed that with their recognition of his surveyor title, recognition that in itself was certainly spiritually superior, they could keep him in constant fear, they were deceiving themselves; he felt a slight shudder, but that was all.” It’s easy to pass over this early sentence on our first reading of the novel, as if it were a normal claim. But if we pause to examine it, it’s like a lunar landscape pocked with craters.
To the villagers, K. is a nuisance. He has the air of one who doesn’t know how life works. But he is also a romantic figure, shrouded in the breath of another world. At least he is for women, for Frieda and Pepi and Olga; they all respond to him immediately, as if with an ancient familiarity. And K. is always confident and direct when he speaks to them. The first positive confirmation of this romantic aura, however, comes from a child, Hans. When Frieda asks him what he wants to become, Hans tells her: “A man like K.” But what is K. in this moment? A janitor who’s just been fired. Sitting at the teacher’s desk, he’s finishing his breakfast in a freezing room that is at once a gym with some gymnastic equipment, a classroom with a few desks, and a makeshift bedroom, signaled by a straw mattress on the floor and “two stiff, scratchy blankets.” The remains of dinner too are scattered on the floor, along with sardine oil, shards of a coffeepot, and clothes. Hans, an observant child, has seen this wretchedness, but K. remains his ideal. Why? Hans has grasped that K. is not a person but rather potentiality itself. He is the kingdom of the possible, encroaching upon the compulsory automatism of the Castle. Thus Hans could “believe that, though K. found himself in a low, despicable condition now, he would eventually, albeit in the almost inconceivably distant future, surpass everyone else.” Little Hans, with his tone of “dark gravity,” shows himself to be highly astute. He’s the first to recognize that K., despite the meanness of his present state, is in some way “vaster” and even younger than anyone else in the village. For it’s a place where babies are born old — or at least they’re immediately forced to adopt, like Hans himself, an “altklug” tone — the tone of sententious old men.
The Castle is woven through with conversations — exciting ones, exhausting ones. Sometimes they read like the arguments of sophists. Often they lead us into areas that bear little relation to the conversation’s point of departure. And then abandon us there, perplexed. But such is the subtlety and the specificity of these dialogues that we always forge ahead with the impression that something essential has been said — and has escaped us. Exasperation grows, in the reader as in K. But there is some relief: the comic. Like tears in the fabric of the dialogues, lively scenes intrude. K.’s first night as janitor-custodian in the school’s freezing gym, for example, is a grand pantomime, where the word gets stripped of its power and the gesture triumphs. As in a Busby Berkeley musical, the characters — K., Frieda, the assistants — take their turns at center stage, before a silent audience of gymnastic equipment, a few student desks, and the teacher’s desk on its platform. The secret, demonic director is a fat, old cat that jumps on Frieda in her sleep, terrifying her. And the wild, abstract scene of the distribution of records — toward the end of the novel — is equally evocative of the most penetrating spirit of the musical. In that scene Kafka seems to quote himself, returning to the root of every musical, which is the scene in The Missing Person (a.k.a. Amerika) of the changing of the underporters at the Hotel Occidental, with its inexorable nexus of centrifugal and centripetal motions.
Comedy is in the details, that’s the rule. Kafka formulated it but then crossed out the passage in which it appeared. (We find it now in the critical apparatus to The Castle: “The truly comic is of course in the details.”) As for its applications, they are scattered through all his writings. In whatever he writes it’s enough for him to be meticulous and exacting in his description of developments and rigorous in observing their phases — and the comic erupts, invincible, sovereign.