The most revelatory conversations for Josef K. and K. — those with Huld, with Titorelli, with Bürgel — are repeatedly counterpointed by something that alternates, contrasts, and mingles with the speaking voice. To begin with, there are the female spies. Every word uttered by Huld and Titorelli seems to require their presence. Behind Huld’s door we sense Leni’s soft breath. Through the cracks in Titorelli’s door we glimpse the eyes of the “corrupt” girls who infest his stairs — one of whom keeps moving “a piece of straw slowly up and down” through one of those cracks. Only Bürgel’s words seem undisturbed, except by K.’s sleepiness and his dreams. Here that phenomenon we can’t help associating with Kafka occurs before our eyes: the osmosis between dream and reality. As Bürgel speaks, K. falls into a sleep in which “he heard Bürgel’s words perhaps better than earlier when listening to them awake and exhausted.” Now that his “annoying consciousness had disappeared,” K. is listening to each word and, at the same time, celebrating a victory — even “raising a glass of champagne in honor of the victory.” But once again the revelatory words call for and call forth a counterpoint, even if only in sleep. At first it isn’t a woman, or a girl, but rather “a secretary, nude.” Is it Bürgel? One of his colleagues? Who knows. All we know for sure is that the secretary looks “very like the statue of a Greek god.” And K. attacks him, as the secretary, like some Artemis surprised during a bath, tries to hide his nakedness. Then we hear his voice, as Bürgel’s words continue crumbling into the background. And it’s a feminine voice: “This Greek god squeaked like a little girl being tickled.” This time, too, the counterpoint has a female voice.
No critic, from the dullest to the greatest, has failed to consider dreams when speaking of Kafka. But dream—like unconscious—is in this case a lifeless word. It interrupts the flow of thought rather than guiding it. Unless we’re talking about the type of dream that Kafka described once in his Diaries (and that could also be an excellent description of The Castle): “a wildly branching dream, which simultaneously contains a thousand correlations that all become clear in a flash.” Such dreams are one way the mind may represent a certain quality of wakefulness, a quality that wakefulness itself has difficulty attaining, clouded as it is by an indomitable will to control. But wakefulness is always the subject, even if — thanks to an irony encountered both in the world and in Kafka — its most precise, most effective image is attained not through continual, conscious effort but “in a flash” during a dream. This too is a trick of wakefulness.
As K. dreams, Bürgel continues his monologue, having now reached the point where he must address an extreme case, the only case in which the parties — despite all the “security measures”—might have the audacity to “take advantage” of the Castle. At issue is the “nighttime weakness of the secretaries,” which presents what is certainly “a very rare opportunity, which is to say it almost never arises.” But does its rarity diminish its gravity? Certainly not for the secretaries, whose lives are plagued by the thought of it. The opportunity “consists in this, that the party shows up unannounced in the middle of the night.” With this phrase, which immediately evokes the evangelical “thief in the night,” Bürgel seems to have exceeded the limits of what he is able to say. Immediately afterward, as if falling back on professional constraint in order to mask his excessive disclosures, he turns all his energies to a grueling bureaucratic exposition, probing the differences between competent and incompetent secretaries. As if shaken by a demon, he calms down only after a thirteen-line sentence. Now the words have gone back, for a moment, to spreading their thick protective fog.
K. nods and smiles, half asleep. “Now he believed he understood everything perfectly.” But this means only that he feels close to falling fast asleep again, “this time with no dreams or disturbances.” That “gap-free organization,” as Bürgel himself calls the Castle, with its swarms of secretaries, competent and otherwise, was too tedious and torturous. Maybe it would be better just to let things go, not to insist. And thus, finally, to “escape from them all.” This is the only time K. comes close to anything like liberation. But there’s never any respite. After retreating into the most rigorous official jargon, Bürgel seems to have regained his strength. His revelations are not yet at an end.
Bürgel is speaking of an extremely unlikely possibility, indeed “the unlikeliest of all.” Yet he is also describing, like a faithful chronicler, what’s happening in the very moment he is speaking. We come to this exercise of transcendental acrobatics after having passed through such numerous and surprising turns of argument that our attention is blunted and we have a hard time grasping the absolute newness of what’s taking place. Bürgel now tells K. that the party “can’t, on his own, figure anything out. Exhausted, disappointed, inconsiderate, and indifferent, he has, because of his fatigue and disappointment — though he probably attributes it to some indifferent, accidental cause — entered a room other than the one he wanted, and there he sits, ignorant, and his mind, if it is filled with anything at all, is filled with thoughts of his error and his weariness”: these words are the meticulous description of what’s happening in those very moments to K., as he sits on the edge of Bürgel’s bed — and, behind K., in the mind of the reader, who may be wondering how much longer this laborious digression will last. But Bürgel is at the same time describing that extremely rare opportunity for escape, around which gathers the imposing skein of regulations that govern the lives of the Castle officials. The greatest generality and the most irreducible singularity coincide for a moment. As do the unlikeliest thing in the world and the simple procedural recording of a fact. The event is so prodigious that Bürgel is overcome by the “loquaciousness of the happy.” And he asks himself: “But can one abandon the party at that point? No, one cannot.” Indeed, “one must explain everything to him.” This is the pinnacle of The Castle. But could the Castle survive a complete explanation of itself? Probably not. Or if it did, it would remain forever wounded, because the party’s request, when granted, “truly tears the official organization apart — and this is the worst thing that could happen in the course of one’s duty.” But it won’t happen, because K. is already sleeping deeply and is “cut off from everything around him.”
For a Castle official to be caught up in the “loquaciousness of the happy” is unheard of, if only because the allure of the Castle — and, by extension, of its representatives — resides first of all in silence. Each time K. lifts his eyes to look at the Castle itself, he fails to detect “the slightest sign of life.” It might be simply a matter of distance. But for some reason a sign is important: “his eyes demanded it and refused to tolerate the silence.” A risky demand.