The articulation and the workings of the “invisible tribunal” can be seen on every page of Kafka, but only in The Trial and The Castle do they become the very substance of the narrative. The court of the big city, which must judge Josef K., is the invisible tribunal, as is the apparatus of Castle offices in the distant territories of Count Westwest. The “invisible tribunal” extends its reach over everything. The Castle offices, though administrative rather than judicial, use the same kind of language as the big-city court. For both the court and the Castle, the outside world, whatever that might be or represent, is in the legal sense a party, and they must constantly determine what relationships to allow with said party, if ever they must allow any. Their methods too are very similar, at times indistinguishable, and always exasperating, elusive, deceptive. Yet Kafka, when he in his despair dared to invoke an entity he named “invisible tribunal,” was asking nothing other than to be delivered into the hands of the court and the Castle, despite knowing what lay in store for him there. For only within such torments, he suspected, lay the life he could never have reached in any other way.
The Trial and The Castle take place on the same plane of the mundus imaginalis. They stick out there, isolated. And there exists no easy or direct way to make contact between that plane and others. Connections between the two books, however, are innumerable. Kafka wrote The Trial, incomplete but with an ending, in a few months in 1914. He wrote The Castle, incomplete and without an ending, in a few months in 1922. There are no indications that, in the time between, he ever went back to work on The Trial, and in 1920 he gave the manuscript to Max Brod. When he began to write The Castle, without recording any comments on the undertaking, it was as if he had been hurled back into that land that he alone inhabited. There, he was to behave like an expert surveyor. He had only to move a short distance — and yet that journey would be “endless”—from the city of Josef K., with its offices and staircases and attics, to the village where K. comes to offer his services to the Castle.
The court that must judge Josef K. and the Castle administration by whom K. wants to be appointed are contiguous organizations that resonate, each in the other. Both are populated by scrupulous, peevish officials. “A nervous people,” the Castle dwellers. “Irascible,” those of the court. They share an easily wounded sensibility, quick to detect the slightest changes — and to suffer from them. Like space, sensorium Dei, they form a delicate spiderweb the extent of which they themselves are not in a position to judge. But in each of them, even the lowliest, one senses the breathing of a “great organism.” In the court as in the Castle, the farther you go up the hierarchy toward the top, the easier it is to get lost. Common life always unfolds below, among secretaries and substitutes, if not among servants and waiters. But the divide between those who belong to the organism and the obscure parties who try to make contact with it is always unbridgeable. There’s a formless and perhaps meaningless life that is everyone’s life. And then there’s another life through which forms pass like a blade — like a flashing multiplicity of blades. Whoever has dealings with the court or the Castle gets a taste of it. This other life is overloaded with meanings that tend to cancel one another out. Such is the throng of meanings attributed, or attributable, to the proceedings—a word used to designate the physiology of the “great organism”—that these proceedings ultimately appear impenetrable. The imbalance between the two worlds is permanent and untreatable. Even those like Huld the lawyer, who have long been used to the company of magistrates, reach a point where “nothing seems certain anymore.” And then they may also ask themselves the more painful question: perhaps some trials that “in their natural course were proceeding well, later ended up on the wrong track, thanks precisely to our assistance,” that is, to the work of the lawyers. The implication is that any intervention, even when carried out with the best of intentions and a thorough knowledge of the case (it’s necessary to specify this), would be injurious, worse than useless. Only a total passivity, therefore, like that of a plant shaken by wind, would have even the faintest chance of leading to a successful outcome.
Between the administration of the court and that of the Castle there is also a difference of style, of manner. Corruption, for example, figures in both. But in the court it can take on crude, unseemly aspects. The lawyers throng around the “corruptible employees,” always with the aim of discovering “gaps” in the nearly airtight “rigorous isolation” of the court. On occasion—“in times past,” of course — there were actually cases of stolen records.
With the Castle employees, on the other hand, it seems that corruption is tolerated for reasons of elegance, in order to “avoid pointless conversations.” As if the employees know that, by allowing themselves to be corrupted, they are silencing the parties who continue to importune them, offering them the illusion of having taken a useful step, even if “nothing can be achieved that way.” For the Castle administration, corruption is not unlike the traffic in indulgences. But it seems to be practiced not out of self-interest but rather to impart a certain linearity and neatness to the proceedings, avoiding what must inspire profound distaste: “pointless conversations.”
From the start K.’s behavior seems “suspicious,” and not without reason. Awakened at an inn where he’s sleeping on a straw mattress, he says: “What village have I strayed into? Is there really a Castle here?” Yet moments later he admits that he knows perfectly well where he is and did not present himself at the Castle only because the hour was late. This behavior reminds us how Kafka’s readers feeclass="underline" displaced, disturbed, dismayed. And yet they know exactly where they are — and why.
Mizzi, the superintendent’s inconspicuous wife and assistant, has sat down on the edge of her husband’s bed (and how many other revelations will come, both to K. and to Josef K., from that position) in order to read him Klamm’s letter to K. “As soon as she had taken a look at the letter she clasped her hands softly—‘from Klamm,’ she said.” That brief aside, like a sigh, suffices to evoke the reverential fear inspired by Klamm’s name and the tremendous significance attached to it — but without having to specify any of it, almost as if even naming it might diminish it. Meanwhile, everything is concentrated in those two words, “from Klamm”—a whisper that floods the sentence, and in that gesture, barely signaled, of her clasped hands. At the end of the meeting, the superintendent recalls Mizzi’s presence only when his leg starts hurting again, but she has been sitting there all the time: “playing, as if lost in a dream, with Klamm’s letter, which she had made into a little boat.” K., “frightened,” grabs it from her hand. He fears his precious page will be damaged. But, more obscurely, he fears the childish, mocking vision of that little paper boat. Without admitting it to himself, he knows that this is one of many enigmas he will encounter on his way, enigmas that are always entrusted to feminine beings, that are very often not even noticed, that are never resolved.
K. desires only to be a “little land surveyor who worked quietly at his little drawing board.” He doesn’t ask for special aid or salvation. But his desire, precisely because of its modesty, has shattering potential. Above all because — as K. dares to tell the superintendent — he doesn’t want “gracious handouts from the Castle, but his rights.” His tone is that of the free man who intends to evade not only the oppression of the powers that be but their equally untrustworthy benevolence. And who makes, at the first opportunity, a pronouncement that is particularly insulting to the authorities. As soon as one enters the realm of one’s desires, and especially when these desires begin mixing with rights, the powerful apparatus of the Castle, with its procedural minutiae and its ramifying regulations, becomes ultrasensitive, ferociously rejecting every claim made by the individual — or rather, as one would say in the officials’ lexicon, by the party. Desire is the unknown — and one cannot lay claim to the unknown. It is the unknown that reigns, not he who, through the unknown, desires. This isn’t how Castle officials would put it — they are more delicate and are obliged to follow the usual formulas. But sometimes they let the word get out.