Canetti observes: “Of all writers, Kafka is the greatest expert on power (Macht).” And here power must be understood in its fullest range of meaning, referring simultaneously to the powers whose applications are limited, and generally limited to society, as well as to the Macht that, as Kafka describes, invests all the celestial spheres and beyond (“as far as the motions of the heavenly bodies and beyond”). But what is there in that “beyond”? The “celestial ocean,” the Vedic seers used to say: samudrá, which overflows with light.
Architectonic features of the Castle: it isn’t a citadel, it doesn’t belong to a feudal past, it isn’t ostentatious. Nothing there is new, as in Alfred Kubin’s city of Pearl. Everything is already pregnant with preexisting psychic life. A strip of low buildings, squatting on the slope of a hill. Paint long ago flaked off. It could be a military installation, a monastery, a hospital — or even the edge of a “small town” that is, in truth, “rather paltry.” There’s just one tower, which has something a bit “crazy” about it when its little windows glint in the sun. And it doesn’t give the impression of a noble ascent toward the heights. It looks, rather, as though some “gloomy” inhabitant of the place had “smashed a hole in the roof”—perhaps to escape suffocation. A saturnine dwelling.
The saturnine sovereign, Count Westwest — who is concealed in the tower that rises up from among the Castle’s dilapidated buildings and whom no one has ever seen, whom no one may ask to see — resembles no one so much as a character Kafka described in a fragment, a character who sat at his desk with his head in his hands. Outside, a crowd was waiting for him. And they all had “special requests.” Perhaps they were phantasms. Or demons. Or simply random people one might meet in the street. The unknown character was prepared “to listen to them and then respond.” But he didn’t want to show himself on the balcony. In fact, “he couldn’t, even if he wanted to. In winter the balcony door is locked and the key is nowhere to be found.” And winter lasts forever.
If the inhabitant of the tower showed himself on the balcony or at the window, he would be nothing more than a medium. Life would be a flux of powers colliding like electrical discharges. But it wouldn’t be able to tell its story. Everything would be reduced to a play of forces that clash, visibly and invisibly. Instead everything is much more opaque, uncertain, incalculable. The forces might even pretend to be unaware of one another. Each constructs a theater of its own, which one day will be annihilated by some random force among the forces it has ignored. But the fiction may well be maintained for a long time, long enough to be thought of as nature. Closed in his bare room, his elbows on the table, the unknown inhabitant of the tower is the guarantor of the world’s opacity. He’s the one to whom we’re indebted if life at every turn is an adventure. He’s the one from whom we await, at every moment, some kind of answer. And he’s the one to whom we’re grateful that it never comes.
Josef K. and K. fundamentally await, the one a verdict, the other an appointment. Whatever they do, their lives wear them down. They both belong to that vast crowd of those “who wait,” who throng outside, in the world, in a “limitless mass that stretches into the darkness.” Inside, in the tower or in the edifice of the “invisible tribunal,” sit those whose job it is to respond. And perhaps they would like to respond. But something prevents their response from being direct. If the key to the balcony door reappeared, would anything be resolved? No, in fact the hidden intent of those who live inside would then reveal itself: to never show themselves at all and not to allow what’s outside to be shown to them. Closed in a room that resembles a cell, elbows propped on the desk, the unknown character holds his head in his hands. That desk is the only indispensable object, the only contact he’s permitted. He thinks: “I don’t want to see anyone, I don’t want to let any sight confuse me — my desk, that is my place.” Like Calderón’s Segismundo, he fantasizes about various figures and characters. Beyond the windows, the air teems with the tribes of the invisible.
II. From Pepi’s Dreams
At the Gentlemen’s Inn, the chambermaids stay shut in their room, which “is nothing more than a big closet with three shelves.” The claustrophobia is heightened by the rule that bars them, for many hours of the day and night, from going out into the halls, where they would run the risk of disturbing the gentlemen, or even of simply seeing them. “In fact we don’t know the gentlemen, we’ve hardly glimpsed them,” Pepi remarks.
Every now and then the chambermaids hear someone knocking at their door and giving orders. But the terror begins when “no order comes at all” and the chambermaids hear someone (or something) creeping just outside the door. The girls “press their ears to the door, they kneel down, they hold one another in anguish.” Then the terrifying sentence is sprung, which by now resembles Lautréamont: “And one constantly hears the creeper (den Schleicher) outside the door.” In Lautréamont, so prone to sneering and mockery, the corresponding sentence would be: “But a shapeless mass pursues him relentlessly, on his trail, amid the dust.” Kafka, as always, takes a more sober road. With a minimal expenditure of words he achieves maximum effect. Even the word Schleicher is both commonplace and alarming. Schleicher is the person (or entity) that creeps, but it has the additional meaning of “hypocrite,” or someone who acts deceptively, furtively. Here, however, the word is returned to its most literal meaning — and the effect is all the more violent. We can understand that then, shut in their room, “the girls faint from fear and, when it’s finally quiet again outside their door, they lean against the wall without the strength to climb back into their beds.” This somber, rending scene, like something out of an Elizabethan play, is not, however, the climax of some crisis in a deadly adventure. It’s merely the description of a day like any other day in the life of a chambermaid at the Gentlemen’s Inn. And it is understood as such by the reader. It is plain daily life, recounted by Pepi to the stranger she’s in love with.
Why are the chambermaids so worried? What is the danger that threatens them? That they might let themselves go. And why shouldn’t they? They are prisoners. No one sees them — unless, fleetingly, the kitchen staff. Accordingly, to enter the gentlemen’s rooms immaculately dressed is both “frivolous and a waste.” Since the chambermaids are forced to work amid such filth, they might as well live in it all the time. Artificial light, stale air, excessive heat (the heat is always on). And tremendous, constant fatigue. The oppression of the chambermaids is vicious and subtle. Seen from the outside, however, their life is utterly common. They have a duty, they carry it out. They spend their free time waiting to return to duty. When they have the afternoon off, once a week, their favorite way to spend it is “sleeping soundly and fearlessly in some nook of the kitchen.”
The barroom, where Frieda and Pepi roam and where the foreigner K. sometimes sits for a while, is a force field as lively and delicate and complex as any palace of government or strategic headquarters or imperial court. What goes on there is no easier to unravel or understand. In relations of power, the tension is not proportionate to the size of the elements in question. A room can be as charged as a continent. But in the room, the power relations will manifest themselves with maximum linearity, because potential distractions are minimal. Minimal, precious, and revelatory, like Pepi’s bows or Frieda’s rustling petticoat.