In his impassioned peroration, Bürgel responds to some of the rashest questions but avoids the one that’s at the root of all the others: why must the secretaries strive, using every trick in the book, to ensure that the nighttime interrogations don’t happen — and hence that there is no chance, however slim, for a party’s request to be satisfied? The party’s request is a desire, a mental act. If the desire’s fulfillment were guaranteed (gebürgt is Bürgel’s verb), the world would no longer be unresponsive to the mind. It would no longer present itself as a mysterious, opaque expanse. Each mental act would have an effect. Everything would be reduced to a nexus of theurgical whirlwinds. But wouldn’t the world thus lose its thrill, its supreme uncertainty that derives from the fact that it doesn’t obey the mind? Perhaps Bürgel, out of politeness, doesn’t want to say so explicitly, but that’s what he may be thinking when, just before dismissing K., he defines the world as an “excellent” and yet “unconsoling” system. The Castle, he implies, is neither benevolent nor malevolent. Or at least, it is no more so than the world itself.
Josef K.’s conversation with the chaplain in the cathedral corresponds to K.’s nighttime conversation in Bürgel’s bedroom. In both cases the key element is exhaustion, which comes on, in both cases, as soon as the acme of lucidity has been reached. K.’s exhaustion is like Arjuna’s dismay in the face of the epiphany of Krishna, like Job’s mute astonishment when Yahweh evokes the Leviathan. But in place of these silences before an overwhelming vision, we find an irresistible sleepiness, which is better suited to an epoch unable to bow to epiphanies and no longer accustomed to encountering them.
After the arguments are revealed comes that which reveals itself: epiphany. And that which reveals itself is vastly more powerful. And it might even be sleep. Because in this case what reveals itself is nothing less than the “world [that] corrects its course and maintains its equilibrium,” utilizing the occasional or constant torpor of its inhabitants.
The people who belong to the court are shady in various ways, skillful as tormentors, and thoroughly dubious in word and appearance. The only one to depart from this profile is the prison chaplain, a “young man with a smooth, dark face” and a “powerful, trained voice,” whose solemn words echo in the vast cavity of the cathedral. After listening to him, Josef K. says: “You are an exception among all those who belong to the court.” The chaplain doesn’t comment, but in his parting words to Josef K. he affirms: “I too belong to the court.” What, then, is the secret face of the court? Is it the austere, solitary face of the chaplain, or the face of the girls on Titorelli’s stairs, with their “mixture of childishness and abjection”? After all, even those girls are said to “belong to the court.”
Josef K.’s story turns on this point: is the court a deception? The chaplain denies that it is as soon as he comes down from the pulpit and begins speaking with Josef K. on his leveclass="underline" “You’re deceiving yourself about the court.” On the heels of these words comes the “story”—found “in the introductory writings to the Law”—about the man from the country and the doorkeeper. The story deals with precisely “such deception” (that into which Josef K. has fallen in considering the court itself a deception), and the chaplain presents it as an illustration of how one might avoid it. Josef K., however, sees deception at work in the story as well; above all, he thinks that the man from the country who presents himself at the door to the Law is deceived, but so is the doorkeeper himself. It is the chaplain’s “well-founded” argument that leads Josef K. to this last conclusion: “Now I too believe that the doorkeeper was deceived.” And this seems to him a confirmation of the other deception, because “if the doorkeeper is deceived, then his deception will necessarily be passed on to the man.” The chaplain, conceding nothing, observes that in “the letter of the text” of that story “nothing is said about deception.” The conversation proceeds now as if coaxed, by both parties, toward some end: “‘No,’ the chaplain said, ‘you don’t have to regard everything as true, you only have to regard it as necessary.’ ‘A gloomy opinion,’ says Josef K. ‘The lie becomes the order of the world.’” In the beginning, deception characterized the court, then the story of the doorkeeper of the Law, and now at last the order of the world; instead of diminishing, deception has spread to the far edge of the whole of things. But if the whole is deception, then what’s left?
The chaplain doesn’t object to Josef K.’s contemptuous statement, “though it certainly didn’t accord with his own opinion.” Thus the conversation dies away, inconclusive. The chaplain has already rebuked him for being unable to look two steps ahead, but with this statement — even though he didn’t consider it a “final judgment”—Josef K. takes another step forward, perhaps one step beyond those “two steps.” Now it’s no longer a matter of the court or of law, but of the “order of the world,” Weltordnung, an expression with an ordinary usage, referring to the rules of everyday life, and a metaphysical usage, referring to the order that holds together that which is. But at this very point, when everything, however it is understood, ought to change its name, Josef K. stops short.
What holds Josef K. back after his statement about the order of the world is an irresistible exhaustion, of the same kind that overcomes K. during his nighttime conversation with Bürgel. Bürgel dismisses K. with revealing words, which touch directly on the order of the world and which also apply to Josef K.’s situation in the cathedral. As soon as thought has gone far enough to confront “the order of the world,” that order shrouds it in a fog that’s invaluable to it; because “that’s how the world corrects its course and maintains its equilibrium.” The arrangement is one of “unimaginable excellence,” but it’s also “unconsoling,” says Bürgel, echoing Josef K., who describes as “gloomy” (trübselig) the chaplain’s view regarding the necessity that substitutes for truth. If K.’s mind could remain awake and vigilant, the world would be disturbed by it, just as Josef K. is disturbed when a stranger appears in his room to arrest him. And then it would be the world on trial. But doesn’t such a hypothesis negate itself? Or is it simply another novel? In any case, in realizing that he’s “too tired to follow all the consequences of the story” (the story of the doorkeeper of the Law), because “it led him down unfamiliar paths of thought,” Josef K. also recognizes that the court officials are much better prepared to venture down those paths than he. And yet, moments earlier he described them as biased (“they’re all prejudiced against me”) and so lascivious that “if you show an examining magistrate a woman in the distance, he’ll knock over his table and the defendant just to get to her first.”
Many are the glosses and commentaries on the story, which the priest tells Josef K. in the dark cathedral, about the doorkeeper of the Law. The longest, most persuasive gloss is by Kafka himself — it’s The Castle. To understand it, one must read all of The Castle, after having replaced each occurrence of the word Castle with the word Law.
The spell of The Castle also derives from the way it leaves law behind, from its ability to render that word superfluous, because implicit. Now one speaks not of laws but of regulations, as if such regulations constitute a further level, beyond the law. Compared with the dialogue between the chaplain and Josef K., Bürgel’s monologue is striking first of all because it doesn’t permit itself any reference to ancient stories and never abandons its apparently arid terrain: that of administrative practices. There is no philosophy or theology to appeal to — at most there is custom. And yet Bürgel’s words assume at times a pathos the priest can’t muster, even if he ought to be familiar with it: the pathos of the Gospels. As Bürgel speaks, the great order seems gradually to abandon its various defensive frameworks, choosing to show itself almost as it appears to itself, in its solitude and in its irrepressible desire to welcome something foreign into its tautological autism.