K. quickly adopts the tone of one victimized by an abuse of power. If, however, he were really incontrovertibly within his rights, he ought at least to have in hand an official letter of appointment to the post of land surveyor. But it seems that he never received such a letter. A haze of mystification hovers around K., as around everything done or said by Castle officials. So if the village peasants have a grim, distrustful air, it’s because they’re always having to deal with suspicious behavior, about which many contrasting hypotheses are admissible, whether it involves officials come down from the Castle or a stranger such as K. who shows up at the village inn. And to the villagers it appears suspicious in the extreme that K. shows himself ignorant of the ways of the Castle. Yet K. also seems one of them, if by that word we mean anyone who doesn’t belong to the village. Or rather, K. seems a parody of them, a cardboard cutout stripped of every whiff of power.
K. almost never speaks of his past; only with the superintendent does he indulge himself a little. He insists on the “long, difficult journey” that he had to undertake — having already, moments earlier, referred to his “endless journey.” The power of the Castle, which had summoned him, must therefore have extended to very distant places — and through time too, perhaps, if the traveler who approached the Castle was like an ancient wanderer, a lone figure in the snow. It is probably in order to render his situation more pathetic — we can’t say for sure, not knowing anything else about the matter — and certainly in order to make the superintendent understand how urgent it is that he obtain the land-surveyor appointment, that K. alludes to the “sacrifices [he] made in leaving home” and to the “reasonable hopes [he] had of being taken on down here.” Up to this point, his words are no different from those of any worker who has left home in search of fortune. But now something else crops up: K. speaks of his “total lack of means and the impossibility of now finding suitable work back home.” But why? In the village K. always tried to give the impression of being a capable, knowledgeable person who would have no trouble finding work elsewhere. One infers from this discrepancy that only for some reason that’s left unsaid, but that must weigh heavily, K. is no longer able to go back. On the other hand, as the superintendent observes, the Castle is not in the habit of chasing people away: “No one is keeping you here, but that doesn’t mean you’re being chased away either.” K. doesn’t press the matter — perhaps he realizes he has said too much. Indeed he immediately wishes to muddy the waters, making reference, in order to explain the precariousness of his situation, to something close at hand: Frieda, his “fiancée who is from here.” He doesn’t mention that Frieda has been his fiancée for only a few hours. In any case, the argument is a pretext, as the superintendent observes with quiet irony: “Frieda would follow you anywhere.” K. is exposed — and it’s perhaps to avoid embarrassing him that the superintendent changes the subject. By hinting at his former life, K. has come close to revealing something that could harm him: his total dependence on the Castle. For him, no return is possible. The fifth of the Zürau aphorisms says: “Beyond a certain point there’s no return. That’s the point that must be reached.” K.’s story begins one step beyond that point.
In Kafka’s handwriting, the letter K plunged downward with a showy swoop the writer detested: “I find Ks ugly, almost repugnant, and yet I keep on writing them; they must be very characteristic of myself.” Choosing the name K., Kafka obligated himself to trace hundreds of times in front of his own eyes a mark that vexed him and in which he recognized some part of himself. If he had narrated The Castle in the first person, as he started out doing, the story would have been less profoundly immersed in his physiology, in zones liberated from the empire of the will.
Did Kafka ever allude to his process of rigorous reduction to the prime elements, as if he sought to fix them in a periodic table? Perhaps in a notebook entry written in 1922, during a moment of stasis in the elaboration of The Castle—and of strong doubt about everything. “Writing denies itself to me” is the fragment’s first sentence. Then he mentions a “project of autobiographical investigations.” It’s not clear what he’s referring to — perhaps “Investigations of a Dog,” which appears soon afterward in his notebook? Then he is more specific: “investigation and discovery of the smallest possible components.” To what end? “Out of these [components], I then want to construct myself.” Here he is no longer speaking of writing but of self-construction. And right after that we find the phosphorescent trail of a short story:
Like a man who has an unsafe house and wants to build himself a safe one beside it, using the materials of the old one if possible. But it’s a terrible business if, during construction, his strength wanes and now instead of an unsafe but whole house he has one that’s half torn down and one that’s half built, which is nothing. What follows is madness, a kind of Cossack dance between the two houses, during which the Cossack scrapes and hollows out the ground with the heels of his boots until his own grave takes shape beneath him.
A Cossack dance between Kafka and the literature that had preceded him.
Certainly it’s not the case, as some continue to maintain, that the religious or the sacred or the divine has been shattered, dissolved, obviated, by some outside agent, by the light of the Enlightenment. That would have resulted in a world made of secular funerals, in all their awful bleakness. What happened instead is that such things as the religious or the sacred or the divine, by an obscure process of osmosis, were absorbed and hidden in something alien, which no longer has need of such names because it is self-sufficient and is content to be described as society. All the rest is, at best, its object of study, its guinea pig — even all of nature.
With Kafka a phenomenon bursts onto the scene: the commixture. There is no sordid corner that can’t be treated as a vast abstraction, and no vast abstraction that can’t be treated as a sordid corner. This phenomenon isn’t a reflection of the writer’s personal inclinations. It’s a matter of fact. Svidrigailov, in Crime and Punishment, observes that for him eternity looks like a village bathhouse full of spiderwebs. It’s a peculiarity of the period, a sign of the times.
When the secretary Bürgel speaks of the officials’ “inconsiderate” behavior toward both the parties and themselves alike, he explains that their lack of consideration is also the supreme “consideration,” because it consists of “the iron-clad execution and completion of their duty.” But his words inevitably have a sinister resonance, even if Bürgel is perhaps the most benevolent of the Castle officials and pronounces them after having stretched and yawned — behavior “which was in troubling contrast to the gravity of his words.”