Only when together do the assistants go around with a loose, “electrified,” nimble gait. If we happen to encounter them on their own, as we do Jeremias, they appear “older, wearier, more wrinkled.” Jeremias even “limps a little” and seems “elegantly infirm.” K. has trouble recognizing him. Why? “Because I’m alone,” says Jeremias, perfectly aware of the change. He knows that, by himself, he’s no longer animated by the disturbing force of the double.
Other writers, a German Romantic for instance, would have presented K.’s assistants as demonic offspring, creatures “as alike as snakes,” with a primordial nature not easily reconciled with civilized order. Not Kafka. Artur and Jeremias are fake youths, with their “reddened cheeks that seemed made of slack flesh.” They are “seemingly good-natured, childish, funny, irresponsible,” and they would be merely irritating but for a few details that give rise to graver suspicions. When the village superintendent smiles, K. discovers that his smile is “indistinguishable” from those of the assistants. As children, the assistants played with Frieda in the shadow of the Castle. Erotic games, no doubt, which they are now ready to resume, in order to wrest her away from K. To the villagers, Artur and Jeremias are “old acquaintances”—the landlord even respects them — and everyone’s familiarity with them confirms for K. his own irredeemable foreignness. If there is any radical change in K.‘s understanding of the Castle, it can be seen in his attitude toward the assistants. In the beginning, he treats them like gadflies that have been assigned to him in a “thoughtless” manner and need to be squashed. But the superintendent, patient and calm, explains: “Nothing here happens in a thoughtless manner.” In the end, K. realizes with frustration that he has always neglected the importance of the assistants. “I keep underestimating them, I’m afraid,” he whispers to Frieda, whom he has now lost. An unforeseen conclusion suggests itself: “Perhaps it would have been even shrewder to have kept them as his assistants, letting them torment him, rather than have them wandering about so recklessly, freely plotting their intrigues, for which they seemed to have a special knack.” To be tormented by some official or by Artur and Jeremias ultimately amounts to the same thing. Even those two mocking creatures have been “inspired from above, from the Castle.”
The story of Barnabas’s family takes up six of the twenty-five chapters, 115 pages of the German edition — a novel within the novel. In The Trial, no episode focusing on secondary characters expands to such an extent. Furthermore, direct connections between the story of Barnabas’s family and K.’s vicissitudes (connections that include the message Barnabas delivers and Frieda’s rancor toward the Barnabas women) are scarce. Taken together, it’s a story that stands alone — and on a slightly different level than the rest of the village stories.
If K. senses right away that there was “something special” about this family, that it is composed of “people for whom, at least on the surface, things were going much as they were going for himself, so that he could ally himself with them, and could agree with them about many things,” if K. notices a family resemblance in that family, it’s because their implicit hopes and relentless fears are much the same as those of Hermann Kafka’s family. The primary difference lay in the father figure, who in Barnabas’s family has lost every trace of imperiousness, becoming utterly pathetic and helpless. Aside from that, whether the head of the household manufactures excellent boots or sells wholesale fancy goods, the profile of the two little family groups, above all in their manners, their feelings, their fears, and their hopes, is extraordinarily similar. And K. is never so cruel, never so deeply involved, as in his relationships with Barnabas’s family. He is torn between a certain repugnance, which he feels most strongly toward the corner of the table where the parents sit moaning and incapable of moving, and an irresistible inclination to feel at home, like one who finds himself among his own. The idea of spending the night at their house thus seems to K. both “distressing” and “the most natural thing in the whole village.”
Even before anyone tells him that Barnabas’s family is condemned and execrated by the village community, K. seems to know it. As soon as he enters their house, he gets an “unpleasant impression.” And this only because he’s seen Amalia’s gaze, which “wasn’t unpleasant in itself, but rather proud.” If K. were to go a step further, he would realize that the house seems unpleasant to him because there’s something too familiar about it. With everyone else, he makes an effort to present himself in the best light, because he anticipates that any of them might turn out to be useful to him, and yet “with these people he didn’t bother at all.” Indeed, “where they were concerned he felt, as it were, no shame.” To Amalia, whom he barely knows, he has no qualms about saying: “You’re always so sad, Amalia. Is something tormenting you? Can’t you say what it is?” Yes, the torment exists — and no, she can’t name it.
In Olga’s house, K. senses and recognizes that feeling of familiarity that the assimilated Jew feels in the home of other assimilated Jews. Indeed the intimacy is greater stilclass="underline" like K. himself, this entire family is among those who are simultaneously assimilated and cast out. And they aren’t foreigners, but locals. The excessive ease and directness of his relationships with them, that disagreeable instant understanding that he feels in Olga’s house, repels him — as if he has been plunged into an element that is too familiar, that holds him back and draws him in, instead of giving him the support and energy to move forward. Whereas that is precisely what he expects women to provide.
Psychology is sharpened, honed to an exaggerated fineness — sometimes so painful as to seem unpresentable — when the Jewish family leaves the shtetl or some other remote place in central Europe and takes up residence in a bourgeois apartment in the big city. The transition spans roughly two generations, Freud’s to Joseph Roth’s: extreme, reckless perceptiveness, never again regained.
Kafka, with ill-concealed impatience, was drenched in it — to the point of loathing it. When he wrote: “For the last time psychology!” perhaps he meant that one had to go through psychology before it could be left behind. He could have made his way through its marshy wastes with an animal-like dexterity and expertise. Comparable perhaps only to that shown, in the same years, by another assimilated Jew: Marcel Proust.