If Josef K. had not been awakened one morning by a guard dressed in a “traveler’s outfit,” what would have become of him? Perhaps he would have continued his bank career until the day he died, without ever becoming any the wiser. Or perhaps one day he would have been visited by a dream that finally would have both illuminated and resolved his situation, a dream that Kafka dreamed seven years after the draft of The Triaclass="underline"
My brother has committed a crime, a murder I think, and I and others are accessories to his crime; punishment, resolution, liberation come from afar, they approach fearsomely, many signs point to their unstoppable advance, my sister, I think, announces each of these signs, and I greet them all with rapturous exclamations, my rapture increasing the closer they come. My exclamations were brief phrases, I thought that because of their obviousness I would never be able to forget them, and now I can’t remember any exactly. I could manage only exclamations because it took a huge effort for me to speak, I had to puff out my cheeks and twist my mouth at the same time, as with a toothache, before I could get a word out. Happiness consisted in this: that punishment was coming and I welcomed it so freely and with such conviction and joy, a sight that must have moved the gods, and I could feel the gods’ emotions almost to the point of tears.
In order for both the gods and the man contemplating them to be moved, punishment, announced by imperious signs, must arrive. Only then can one be sure that the gods and the man feel the same thing. And, since punishment is the consequence of a murder committed by a man, punishment — insofar as it is welcomed by both men and gods, indeed can move them both in exactly the same way — might be that which in other epochs was called sacrifice.
XIV. Nighttime Interrogations
In a narrow room of the Gentlemen’s Inn, a room filled mainly by his bed, the secretary Bürgel peeks out from under the covers. Except for the bed, there’s only a night table and a lamp. K. enters the room by mistake and sits on the edge of the bed. Bürgel’s words — more revealing than anything else we’ve heard about the Castle — get lost in the fog of exhaustion that envelops K. At a certain point, as K. tries to shift positions, heavy with sleep, he grabs one of Bürgel’s feet, “which was sticking out from under the covers.” This is the only contact he’ll have with a representative of the Castle, and hence with the Castle itself. And Bürgel doesn’t remove K.‘s hand, “no matter how irksome it must have been.” Then K. falls asleep, and Bürgel lights a cigarette. “He sprawled back on the pillows and looked at the ceiling, letting his smoke rise toward it”—Kafka added in a deleted passage. For K., this is the point of maximum proximity to his goal. He sleeps, squeezing an official’s foot, and neither the official nor the Castle denies him that contact. The Castle lets itself be touched, but only by one who has fallen into a deep sleep brought on by an obsessive quest for contact with the Castle.
Nothing has meaning except in relation to the Castle. One must therefore make contact with the Castle. But constant contact with it would make life unilivable. Castle representatives are in an analogous, if reversed, position. By means of incessant work that is difficult to distinguish from inertia, the officials concern themselves constantly with that party that is the world beyond the Castle. But they couldn’t stand it if the party were always right in front of them. Indeed, they flee the party in every possible way, resorting to every kind of guile. But there’s one block of time they can’t control, during which the unexpected or overwhelming may occur: that of the nighttime interrogations. It is essential, as a rule, that no contact take place even then.
The words with which Bürgel, from his bed, dismisses K. are also the only gentle — and hopeless — words that the Castle grants that party that is the world: “No, why should you ever need to make excuses for your sleepiness? Physical strength has its limit; can one help it if that particular limit also carries other kinds of meanings? No, one can’t help that. That’s how the world corrects its course and maintains its equilibrium. It’s an excellent system; in the end it always seems unimaginably excellent, though in a certain way unconsoling.” Here, suddenly, in the person of the chubby official Bürgel, the order of the world takes the floor. And it isn’t some generic order of things, but rather the Vedic rta that appears intact before us (The Castle is its novel). What could ever threaten that? What if, by chance, someone — and it won’t be K. — managed to “extricate himself from sleep”—what would happen then? The world, we infer from Bürgel’s words, would lose its equilibrium. Or at least would no longer be able to homeostatically correct its course. But why? Why should the world fear the wakefulness of a single man? Bürgel doesn’t say, though he makes it clear that the mechanism that regulates the order of the world is, in itself, an “excellent” thing. What more could one ask for: that it exceed excellence? Perennial wakefulness could only disturb that mechanism — perhaps leaving it out of order forever.
Of course, the “excellent system,” seen from a different viewpoint, is “unconsoling,” trostlos. Might he be thinking of the parties’ viewpoint (which is everyone’s viewpoint, since each person is equally a party)? Again, he doesn’t say. The order of the world declares itself laconically — and rarely. What matters to Bürgel is demonstrating, for the first time, that authority is no stranger to leniency. But it’s a special case; the Castle is gentle and understanding only toward those who are exhausted. The Castle asks for no excuses from those who have reached the limits of their physical strength — without having reached anything else.
One of the most mysterious aphorisms of Zürau: “The good is, in a certain sense, unconsoling (trostlos).” In gewissem Sinne, “in a certain sense.” Iva, the Vedic seers would have said.
The Castle organization is “gap-free,” according to Bürgel, the liaison secretary. And it’s a “great, living organization.” But his officials suffer from constant exhaustion. “Everyone here is tired,” Bürgel observes. Why? A worry is eating away at them: the thought that someone might find a gap, that “a peculiar, perfectly shaped, clever, tiny little grain” might succeed in slipping through the Castle’s “incomparable sieve.” This would be enough to hamper its ability to remain undamaged by the world, enough to bring about the unlikeliest of events: the “little grain,” which is to say the party, with his burden of “poor life,” could find himself suddenly “controlling everything.” Then he would have to do nothing more than “somehow present his request, whose fulfillment already awaits it, is indeed leaning toward it.” The organization’s very raison d’être, which is first of all to be diligent and vigilant in ensuring that no request gets granted, would thus fall away. An insuperable barrier must separate the mind that formulates a desire and the appearance of the object of desire. The need for such a barrier is what justifies the imposing nature of the organization, within which, as one who approaches it perceives, “many things seem predisposed to terrify.” But the approacher doesn’t know that his mere approach sows terror within the organization as well, among the ranks of officials. Upon those twin terrors, each parallel and indifferent to the other, the world’s course runs.