The Castle gentlemen — at least those officials who occasionally make appearances in the village — often behave more like artists or eccentrics than employees of a vast administration. They always regard themselves as just passing through. Something impels them, makes them appear to be thinking about something other than what’s in front of them. Even at the lowest level, that of the secretaries, they are easily irritated, because they lead “an uneasy life, not fit for everyone.” But even if it’s true that “the job is hard on the nerves,” they won’t give it up for anything, for they can “no longer do without this kind of work.” Any other job “would seem insipid” to them. Like all artists, they don’t know the “difference between ordinary time and work time.” Even when sleeping, they keep a notebook under the covers. They deal with business-related matters seated in the barroom or in bed, letting it be understood that these are the best, most fitting moments for doing so. At times, they take those matters up just before falling asleep, as if they can’t disengage from them and want to carry them even into slumber. Some — like Bürgel — admit that they slip directly from office conversations into sleep, and vice versa. They are loath to move “with all their papers” to another location, as if a swirling wake of words adheres to them, has by now become part of their bodies. Some obscure, unending toil seems to be taking place within them. And it must be exhaustion that sometimes leads them — in order to distract themselves, redirect their energies, exercise their limbs, and above all “recover from the constant intellectual exertion”—to take up “carpentry, fine mechanics, and the like.” In this they are much like Kafka, who at various times sought refuge from the obsessive nature of his thoughts in carpentry and gardening. Certainly the Castle characters are more persistent, since even at night hammering can be heard coming from their windowless rooms in the Gentlemen’s Inn.
The landlady of the Gentlemen’s Inn, who knows the Castle officials well, bows to their will, and is able to appreciate the reasons behind it, when they let her know that they won’t be accepting her proposal to transfer the interviews and interrogations of the parties to a new building, separated by only a few meters from the Gentlemen’s Inn and conceived expressly in order to prevent the parties from setting foot in the Gentlemen’s Inn. Every deviation is bothersome, every change a rupture in the delicate sequence of their acts.
Like the two heads of opposed secret-service agencies, K. and the landlady of the Gentlemen’s Inn are each capable of anything except believing the other. The game is encoded by both parties. To the landlady, K. isn’t a land surveyor or even an aspiring land surveyor (not that she knows anything about that trade; it “made her yawn”). To K., the landlady isn’t “merely a landlady.” Her clothes alone prove it: ill suited to her position, embellished “with frills and pleats,” as overdone as a Byzantine dignitary’s. If the two principal adversaries are not what they claim — and at the same time can’t say what else they are (“What are you really?” the landlady asks K.) — then doubt hangs over everything. Even the village might be an improvisation, like a Potemkin village. Even the Castle.
Of course, one might be tempted to consider K.’s vicissitudes as the frantic and fruitless attempts of an aspiring land surveyor, on finding himself in the position of school janitor, to assert himself. That is, in short, as a fairly inconsequential series of events. But the landlady of the Gentlemen’s Inn, who knows how the world works, thinks differently. She has “had to deal with unruly people of various sorts” and considers K. the worst case she has encountered. With his irresponsible and disrespectful behavior, which leaves her “trembling with indignation,” K. has succeeded in making happen “that which had never happened before.” If the danger that K. poses is so frightening, if the gentlemen are reduced to wanting to be “finally free of K.,” that implies that what has happened around him up to then — the pathetic skirmishes, the mocking equivocations, the long, meandering conversations — must have touched in some obscure way the nerve centers of the Castle’s admirable organization, as “gap-free” as Hilbert had wanted the axiomatization of mathematics to be. The landlady and landlord, like true police, are quick to point out that K. will “certainly have to answer” for all this. And his punishment might be as simple as the protraction of his torturous life in that village. But the fact remains, and it is as troubling as ever, that by retracing step by step K.’s course of action, others too might find a way to discover the Castle’s various delicate, arcane points. And perhaps to make happen again “that which had never happened before.”
Some part of what is, a sizable part, must not be accessible as knowledge. It isn’t clear whether that’s the case because the knowledge would lead to breakdowns or simply because it would, at a certain point, become inconvenient. In any case, knowledge is the first enemy. This is the premise of the landlady of the Gentlemen’s Inn. This is the sanctuary she wants to protect. To her, K. is the interloper, he who — out of thoughtlessness, curiosity, self-interest, arrogance, defiance — wants access to everything. And so must be excluded from everything. In the clash between the landlady and K., every word has a double resonance. From the start, with the complicity of monomaniacs, they address one question only — as they well know. But they address it by speaking incessantly of other things. Even clothes.
V. Powers
I have the privilege, as it were, not only of seeing the night’s phantasms during the helpless and blissful abandon of sleep, but also of meeting them in reality, when I have all the force of wakefulness and a calm capacity for judgment.
In the same octavo notebook, a few lines apart, Kafka drafted two untitled apologues, the first twelve lines long, the second around fifty, which take as their protagonists respectively Sancho Panza and Odysseus. They constitute Kafka’s highest tribute to Western literature as well as to Western survival skills. Like all stories about essential matters, these have to do with demons.
Sancho Panza and Odysseus have this in common: both saved themselves using “inadequate, even childish means.” Don Quixote, however, was lost. But we will discover through Kafka’s story that Don Quixote was a puppet. It wasn’t he who spent years reading chivalric romances and losing himself in feverish daydreams. It was Sancho Panza, who quickly grasped that those stories, with all the demons they roused, would soon have killed him. So he concocted the figure of Don Quixote. That’s what he chose to call the “devil” that dwelt within him and whose destructive rage he wanted “to divert from himself.” Once he had found a name and it had become a character, it could be observed from a certain distance rather than simply endured. And above all he’d get a chance to think about other things. Sancho Panza knew perfectly well that nothing in life was as gripping as one’s relations with demons. Demons, however, soon caused one to undertake “the craziest exploits,” as indeed would one day happen with Don Quixote. Better then, for Sancho Panza, to redirect the actions of his demons onto another being. He could then resume his own life of modest interest while still following Don Quixote on his expeditions, mainly because he felt a certain “sense of responsibility,” since, after all, the knight was his creature. But also because Don Quixote was forever dealing with demons, and Sancho Panza recognized at once that such a situation would provide him “great and useful entertainment.” Thus Sancho Panza survived and, among other things, told us the story of Don Quixote.