What, then, is that silence like? “Someone sitting calmly, looking straight ahead, not lost in thought and thus cut off from everything else, but free and indifferent, as if he were alone and unobserved; and yet he must have known he was being observed, but that didn’t in the least disturb his tranquility, and in fact — whether through cause or effect was uncertain — the observer’s gaze couldn’t hold and turned away.” This image of the Castle appears to K. one day as an early darkness falls, and it is the clearest image that the Castle has allowed of itself. But it’s still an image. Going beyond the image is like secretly drinking Klamm’s cognac, transforming “something that seemed merely the vehicle for a sweet perfume into a drink fit for coachmen.”
Not only is the Castle there in place of the apparent emptiness that K. perceives on his arrival in the village, but the Castle itself is like a being looking out into emptiness, or in any case staring at something that never clouds its “free and indifferent” gaze. Two different figures of emptiness confront each other. They can’t collide, because one emptiness can’t clash with another. But one emptiness could enter the other. Could let itself be absorbed by the other.
There’s only one way to win the game with the Castle. Contravening the perpetual elusiveness of his colleagues, Bürgel describes it to K. when he speaks of the possibility of becoming “a peculiar, perfectly shaped, clever, tiny little grain,” which, once it has assumed its shape, could slip through that “incomparable sieve” that is the Castle organization. These seem like instructions for escaping a maximum-security prison. Do they apply? On this point, Bürgel answers himself; in fact he gives two contradictory replies. The first: “You think this can never happen? You’re right, it can never happen.” But the other one follows immediately: “But one night — who can guarantee [bürgen] everything? — it does happen.” And this is the moment of greatest tension in his monologue. What follows is a series of further lucubrations outlining the gravity of the possible damages such an event would cause, an event, he emphasizes, whose existence is unconfirmed, except by “rumor.” But even this is not sufficiently reassuring. It’s much more effective “to prove, as is easily done,” that such an event has “no place in the world”—just as K. has always feared that there’s no place for him in the Castle.
Bürgel’s monologue is so effective because he always speaks from within the Castle and the thought of sabotaging it never even occurs to him. His admissions are all the more eloquent — and all the more probative. When Bürgel approaches the final threshold, even his language changes. It suddenly becomes simple, direct:
Of course, when the party is in the room, the situation is already an ugly one. It tugs at one’s heart. “How long can you resist?” one asks oneself. But there won’t be any resistance, we know that. You just have to imagine the situation properly. Before us sits the party, the party on whom we’ve never laid eyes, for whom we’ve always been waiting, and with real thirst, but whom we have always, and quite reasonably, considered unreachable. His mute presence alone is an invitation to penetrate his poor life, to make oneself at home in it and to partake of the suffering born of his vain demands. Such an invitation in the dead of night is enthralling. One accepts it and in that moment one ceases to be an official.
Indeed, one is no longer an official but rather a great mystic.
What Bürgel in the end reveals is the great order’s hidden helplessness. To grant the party’s request “truly tears the official organization apart,” which is the deepest misfortune — and shame — an official can know. The party forces the order, hence the official, to perform some task that goes beyond the order itself. And here Bürgel returns to the evangelical image of the “thief in the night”: now the party is described as a “robber in the woods who in the night exacts from us sacrifices we would never otherwise have been capable of making.” The official at this point feels hopeless but also happy. “How suicidal happiness can be,” Bürgel says — you’d think he was quoting a line from Kafka’s Diaries.
But could the world go forward, were such a thing to happen? On one condition only: if the party, also overcome with weariness, remains unaware of all this, lost in other thoughts, thoughts of his “error” or his “weariness,” since he has “entered a room other than the one he wanted.” And, thanks to his oblivion, the order remains intact. Bürgel is now describing what’s happening in that very moment between himself and K. But the scene isn’t over. The extreme tension has produced an excess: the “loquaciousness of the happy.”
In Bürgel’s case, it’s a hopeless happiness. The party cannot be left to himself, to his distraction and his weariness, but must be shown “precisely what has happened and why it happened”—and above all how the party himself, on that rarest of occasions, passes briefly from that deeply rooted state of utter helplessness into a condition wherein he “can control everything,” provided that he can “somehow present his request, whose fulfillment already awaits it.” Indeed — Bürgel explains — the fulfillment is by now “leaning toward” the request. With this passage, “that which is most necessary has taken place,” in the sense that necessity has been stretched to the breaking point, to the point of transferring to the party the power that has always been denied him — a translatio imperii that would shake the world to its foundations. But there’s no proof that such a thing has taken place, or that it could. At this point, Bürgel concludes, there’s nothing left to do but “be content and wait.” How could this scene be defined? It’s “the official’s most trying hour.” Nothing implies that the scene takes place. But “all this must be shown.” The parties must at least be told the story. The Castle must at least be written.
XV. Veiled Splendor
Kafka spent eight months in Zürau, in the Bohemian countryside, at his sister Ottla’s house, between September 1917 and April 1918. The tuberculosis had declared itself a month before, when he coughed up blood in the night. The sick man didn’t hide a certain sense of relief. Writing to Felix Weltsch, he compared himself to the “happy lover” who exclaims: “All the previous times were but illusions, only now do I truly love.” Illness was the final lover, which allowed him to close the old accounts. The first of those accounts was the idea of marriage, which had tortured him (and Felice) for five years. Another was his business career. Another was Prague and his family.
After arriving in Zürau, Kafka chose not to write anything the first day, because the place was “too pleasing” and he feared his every word would be “evil’s cue.” Whatever he wrote, before he thought of the reader he thought of demons — and of his unsettled account with them. Not even illness was enough to settle it.
Zürau was a tiny village among rolling hills, surrounded by scattered woods and meadows. The focal point of life there was the hop harvest. As for its inhabitants, animals were more in evidence than people. Kafka immediately saw the place as “a zoo organized according to new principles.” Ottla’s house was on the market square, beside the church. Except for the friends and relatives who threatened constantly to visit, the situation approached that reduction to the minimum number of elements toward which Kafka naturally tended in his writing — and which he would have liked to extend to his life in general.
In his only period of near happiness, he found himself surrounded by semi-free animals. Theirs, after all, was a condition quite familiar to him. There exists an invisible chain, of a generous length, that allows one to wander here and there without noticing it, as long as one doesn’t go too far in any single direction. If one does, the chain will suddenly make itself felt. But Kafka was never self-indulgent enough to view this state of affairs, as many do, as a dirty trick played on him alone. This is how he expressed it in the sixty-sixth Zürau aphorism, describing a “he” who signifies “anyone”: