The villagers know — for them it goes without saying — that their laws are different from those that hold sway in the rest of the world. First of all because the village is as close to the Castle as it’s possible to be. But also for another reason: the village has a different constitution than the rest of the world, a different physiology. In the village, religion is reduced to a topographical reference: we infer that there is a church simply because a “church square” is mentioned, but other than that nothing religious is ever spoken of. And perhaps such talk would sound impious and incongruous, since the village is utterly absorbed in its proximity to the Castle. As for books, no one speaks of them. Only in the novel’s last lines is reference made to a particular book: the old mother of the coachman Gerstäcker is hunched over it, reading, in a hut faintly illumined by firelight. But we won’t learn anything more about that book, because that’s where the novel breaks off, as the old woman reaches a trembling hand toward K. and whispers something incomprehensible to him. Books in the plural, on the other hand, appear only in the Castle, in a vast office. They are arranged on a wide, tall reading stand that divides the room in two. Only the officials consult them, only they know what is written in those books — and whether they’re related in any way to the words those same officials dictate in a whisper to their copyists. As K. once obliquely remarks, with his usual mix of perspicacity and cheek: “A lot of writing goes on there.” No act has been fully completed, as we can infer from the behavior of the secretary Momus, until it has been logged in the records. Thus, sitting at a table in the barroom, Momus zealously fills out his report on events that happened a few minutes earlier, crumbling his pretzel with caraway seeds onto the pages of the document as he does so. But apart from the records, with which the Castle officials are constantly occupied — either in compiling them or in consulting them or in preserving them or even in keeping them out of sight, as Klamm does — apart from these countless handwritten pages, sometimes underlined in blue, no other writings are mentioned. And above alclass="underline" there’s no trace of any sort of printed material. Perhaps none exists. It’s hard to imagine shelves in the peasants’ dark hovels. The barroom contains tables, chairs, and barrels. The servants’ rooms, heaps of dirty clothes. The only gentleman’s room in which K. will spend much time, Bürgel’s room, is bare. The single example of represented reality is an unusual portrait at the Bridge Inn, which K. supposes to be a likeness of Count Westwest — his first and one of his worst gaffes, since it is instead a portrait of the Castle steward.
One therefore might suppose that, in the village, religion and culture subsist as mere backdrop, since life there must have some family resemblance with the rest of the world. But in essence they have been stripped away. And so, lacking any sort of mediation, the village proves to be the last outpost of the manifest, which almost yields to the unmanifest. This lack of mediation is the origin of the oppressive, suffocating, chronically distressing atmosphere that weighs on the village. It’s behind the look one sees on the faces of its inhabitants, the look of creatures who are subject to something stronger than themselves, to an unbearable tension, out of proportion for a village in which so little apparently happens. It’s also why K., like every foreigner, is considered abysmally “ignorant”—and as such is not only despised but also envied, secretly, because he’s still enveloped in the blissful breath of unconsciousness. And when Frieda hints at the possibility of “going away” with K., of leaving that village where after all nothing is forcing her to stay, we detect in her voice an uncontrollable euphoria.
Were the villagers to see the exegetes of The Castle talking long-windedly of deities and of God and of how they interfere in their lives, they would probably act indignant. How simple it would be to have dealings with the deities or with God. It would be enough to study a little theology and to rely upon the heart’s devotion — they would think. But the Castle officials are rather more complicated. No science or discipline can help in dealing with them. Only experience might help — the kind that’s passed in whispers from house to house or from table to table in the barroom.
When it comes to reduction, no one has equaled the mastery of Yajnavalkya. Questioned by the cunning Sakalya, he was able to reduce the 3,306 deities to the one brahman. But the brahman, whatever that might be, must necessarily be divided into two parts: the “unmanifest” and the “manifest,” avyakta and vyakta. The one is therefore always two. And among the two, its first part is always the largest. Three fourths of the brahman is unmanifest, one fourth is manifest. The brahman is the wild goose, the hamsa about which the texts say that “in rising from the water, it does not extract one foot. If it did, neither today nor tomorrow would exist.” The water is the unmanifest brahman, the wild goose that emerges from it is the manifest brahman.
Kafka was born into a world where the unmanifest part — the greater part of what is — was increasingly being ignored or denied. The world was said to have been born out of nothingness, but the enormity and the blasphemy of these words were not yet understood. Blasphemy with respect not to a God but to the whole. At the same time, the world was being reduced to the visible, to the vyakta. This was said to be physics plus chemistry. Everything, then, was visible: either to the naked eye or to the eyes of cumbersome machines lurking in labs. This was the world in which Kafka was born and raised, as an affluent, assimilated Prague Jew who spoke German and would learn early that the world by then, in its normal course of operation, could do without every type of God, every type of deity. In that world, the distinction between vyakta and avyakta was not, to be sure, formulated in those terms, but accessible and immediate translations were at hand whenever the visible and the invisible were invoked. And these were after all the terms most familiar to the Christian liturgy. The wall of the barroom in the Gentlemen’s Inn, in which Frieda has made a tiny hole that allows K. to gaze upon Klamm, immobile and perhaps dozing — that wall is the iconostasis.