K.

XIV. Nighttime Interrogations

In a narrow room of the Gentlemen’s Inn, a room filled mainly by his bed, the secretary Bürgel peeks out from under the covers. Except for the bed, there’s only a night table and a lamp. K. enters the room by mistake and sits on the edge of the bed. Bürgel’s words — more revealing than anything else we’ve heard about the Castle — get lost in the fog of exhaustion that envelops K. At a certain point, as K. tries to shift positions, heavy with sleep, he grabs one of Bürgel’s feet, “which was sticking out from under the covers.” This is the only contact he’ll have with a representative of the Castle, and hence with the Castle itself. And Bürgel doesn’t remove K.‘s hand, “no matter how irksome it must have been.” Then K. falls asleep, and Bürgel lights a cigarette. “He sprawled back on the pillows and looked at the ceiling, letting his smoke rise toward it”—Kafka added in a deleted passage. For K., this is the point of maximum proximity to his goal. He sleeps, squeezing an official’s foot, and neither the official nor the Castle denies him that contact. The Castle lets itself be touched, but only by one who has fallen into a deep sleep brought on by an obsessive quest for contact with the Castle.

Nothing has meaning except in relation to the Castle. One must therefore make contact with the Castle. But constant contact with it would make life unilivable. Castle representatives are in an analogous, if reversed, position. By means of incessant work that is difficult to distinguish from inertia, the officials concern themselves constantly with that party that is the world beyond the Castle. But they couldn’t stand it if the party were always right in front of them. Indeed, they flee the party in every possible way, resorting to every kind of guile. But there’s one block of time they can’t control, during which the unexpected or overwhelming may occur: that of the nighttime interrogations. It is essential, as a rule, that no contact take place even then.

The words with which Bürgel, from his bed, dismisses K. are also the only gentle — and hopeless — words that the Castle grants that party that is the world: “No, why should you ever need to make excuses for your sleepiness? Physical strength has its limit; can one help it if that particular limit also carries other kinds of meanings? No, one can’t help that. That’s how the world corrects its course and maintains its equilibrium. It’s an excellent system; in the end it always seems unimaginably excellent, though in a certain way unconsoling.” Here, suddenly, in the person of the chubby official Bürgel, the order of the world takes the floor. And it isn’t some generic order of things, but rather the Vedic rta that appears intact before us (The Castle is its novel). What could ever threaten that? What if, by chance, someone — and it won’t be K. — managed to “extricate himself from sleep”—what would happen then? The world, we infer from Bürgel’s words, would lose its equilibrium. Or at least would no longer be able to homeostatically correct its course. But why? Why should the world fear the wakefulness of a single man? Bürgel doesn’t say, though he makes it clear that the mechanism that regulates the order of the world is, in itself, an “excellent” thing. What more could one ask for: that it exceed excellence? Perennial wakefulness could only disturb that mechanism — perhaps leaving it out of order forever.

Of course, the “excellent system,” seen from a different viewpoint, is “unconsoling,” trostlos. Might he be thinking of the parties’ viewpoint (which is everyone’s viewpoint, since each person is equally a party)? Again, he doesn’t say. The order of the world declares itself laconically — and rarely. What matters to Bürgel is demonstrating, for the first time, that authority is no stranger to leniency. But it’s a special case; the Castle is gentle and understanding only toward those who are exhausted. The Castle asks for no excuses from those who have reached the limits of their physical strength — without having reached anything else.

One of the most mysterious aphorisms of Zürau: “The good is, in a certain sense, unconsoling (trostlos).” In gewissem Sinne, “in a certain sense.” Iva, the Vedic seers would have said.

The Castle organization is “gap-free,” according to Bürgel, the liaison secretary. And it’s a “great, living organization.” But his officials suffer from constant exhaustion. “Everyone here is tired,” Bürgel observes. Why? A worry is eating away at them: the thought that someone might find a gap, that “a peculiar, perfectly shaped, clever, tiny little grain” might succeed in slipping through the Castle’s “incomparable sieve.” This would be enough to hamper its ability to remain undamaged by the world, enough to bring about the unlikeliest of events: the “little grain,” which is to say the party, with his burden of “poor life,” could find himself suddenly “controlling everything.” Then he would have to do nothing more than “somehow present his request, whose fulfillment already awaits it, is indeed leaning toward it.” The organization’s very raison d’être, which is first of all to be diligent and vigilant in ensuring that no request gets granted, would thus fall away. An insuperable barrier must separate the mind that formulates a desire and the appearance of the object of desire. The need for such a barrier is what justifies the imposing nature of the organization, within which, as one who approaches it perceives, “many things seem predisposed to terrify.” But the approacher doesn’t know that his mere approach sows terror within the organization as well, among the ranks of officials. Upon those twin terrors, each parallel and indifferent to the other, the world’s course runs.

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 level: “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.

With his head leaning on his arm and his arm stretched toward the post of Bürgel’s large bed (the only object in the room apart from the night table and lamp), K. listens to the most lucid, most precise words that he’s yet heard about the Castle. They are also the only words spoken about the Castle from within. Cautious words, they make explicit the doubts and the sense of impotence about resolving them that the Castle produces among its own officials, who feel they lack “the proper distance” for answering certain questions. But who, then, would have the “proper distance”? The landlady of the Gentlemen’s Inn? Or Count Westwest? Or perhaps K. himself?

Nonetheless, drunk with weariness, K. finds Bürgel “amateurish” and so must strive not to “underestimate him,” as he is instinctively inclined to do — much as Josef K. instinctively mistrusts Titorelli. Meanwhile, Bürgel’s words tumble toward the secret. They reveal to K. things that no one has told him before, things on which everything depends. Why, for example, are the secretaries required “to conduct most village interrogations at night”?

The great danger of the “nighttime interrogations” arises because, on such occasions, the barriers between parties and officials tend to come down. Previously inadmissible considerations begin to filter in, such as the parties’ “troubles and fears,” and resistances weaken, until in the end there may be “an absolutely inappropriate trading of places between the persons involved”—parties becoming officials and vice versa. In the middle of the night, the parties would find themselves, as if after a dance step, in the places previously occupied by the secretaries they had been besieging daily. An unheard-of reversal would take place, wounding the great order: that which is perennially external to it would infiltrate its most delicate mechanisms. The pure chance nature of the individual party would take on the voice of necessity. There can be no greater risk.

The nighttime interrogations are not necessarily harmful — Bürgel himself speaks of their “perhaps only apparent disadvantages”—but they are certainly frightening. They are the perpetual shadow of the regulations. The officials, then, take “measures” to fortify themselves against the interrogations. And because they occupy the lowest ranks of the hierarchy — those closest to the parties — the secretaries in particular develop an “extraordinary sensibility in such matters,” constantly inventing tricks to reduce their risk. They are “as resistant as they are vulnerable.” In their border outposts, they understand that every order — no matter how ubiquitous and flexible — contains a vulnerable point, which is exposed in those rare moments when a party becomes able to “achieve more through a word, through a glance, through a show of trust, than through a lifetime of arduous effort.” Of course, Bürgel adds, those opportunities “are never taken advantage of”—a fact that surely plays a part in the general scheme of things. But to the heightened sensibility of a secretary, it’s enough that such “opportunities” exist. They have something in common with K., “a surveyor without surveying work,” who nevertheless exists and has the potential to disturb. His situation is considered “surprising” and perhaps unsettling, since — as Bürgel makes clear—“our circumstances here are certainly not such that we can let technical ability go to waste.”

What is the relationship between the regulations and the nighttime interrogations? It’s true that nighttime interrogations are not prescribed by any regulation, but it’s also true that the very nature of things—“the over-abundance of work, the manner in which the officials are employed at the Castle, their lack of accessibility, the requirement that the interrogations of the parties happen only after the usual investigations have been completed, but then immediately”—makes nighttime interrogations an “unavoidable necessity.” Bürgel even dares to make a claim that some of his colleagues might consider impious: “But if they have now become a necessity — as I say — that is still, albeit indirectly, a result of the regulations.”

As soon as necessity is named, we enter the realm of the regulations. Thus “finding fault with the nature of the nighttime interrogations,” Bürgel adds, as if shocked at his own audacity, would be like “finding fault with the regulations.” The nighttime interrogations, these abnormal, pernicious entities, are therefore themselves the offspring of the regulations. They are members of the same family. For this reason alone we can see as baseless the claim that the regulations reach into every corner, that nothing exists beyond the regulations and their “iron-clad observance and execution,” as Bürgel puts it. Alongside them, the nighttime interrogations will always manage to persist. And K. has, without knowing it, sought out that dark, amorphous, elusive zone, which is the only place that could welcome him, despite his less than limpid past and his burden of “troubles and fears.” Only “during the night” would it be possible “to judge things from a private point of view,” thus doing justice to the peculiarity of the person and of his difficult circumstances — a peculiarity that the person could then, at last, describe in all its strangeness. In just that moment, however, overcome by exhaustion, K. finds that he can no longer even recognize the voice of the man who is revealing all this; he doesn’t even see him as a person now but rather as “a something that prevented him from sleeping and whose deeper significance he couldn’t fathom.”

Bürgel is the psychopomp who introduces K. to the secret of nighttime interrogations. But every secret looks different depending on the point of view. Seen from the highly significant viewpoint of the landlady of the Gentlemen’s Inn, hence from the viewpoint of officialdom, the nighttime interrogations have a completely different nature and purpose. According to the landlady, they have “the sole purpose of allowing those parties whom the gentlemen couldn’t bear to see by day to be quickly interrogated by artificial light at night, so that the gentlemen had the chance immediately after the interrogation to forget all the ugliness in sleep.”

Mysteries are always a little shady. That’s why the early Christian Fathers used Eleusis as a principal argument for defaming pagans. But the landlady’s view, as always the view of the orthodoxy, isn’t merely reductive. It’s true that the “gentlemen’s boundless delicacy” is sorely tested by the nighttime interrogations. And it’s quite possible that they feel a certain disgust when faced with that shapeless mass of singularity, as party after party scurries past them, each one potentially capable of upsetting them, making it “difficult or downright impossible to maintain fully the official character of the hearings.” And K., according to the landlady, is one of the worst examples of that sort of thing. Not only does he make a “mockery of all the security measures.” Not only does he hang around like a ghost where he doesn’t belong, but — unlike ghosts — he refuses to vanish in the morning, indeed he “remained there, hands in his pockets,” as if everything else — the gentlemen and their rooms — was just some apparition and he himself the only reality. And that’s not all: in the end he even witnessed the distribution of records, a ceremony that must be conducted behind “nearly closed doors,” such an “important, fundamental” task that not even “the landlord and landlady had ever been allowed to watch, though it took place in their own house.” K., that disrespectful, inconsiderate, sneaky foreigner, had thus managed, as if accidentally but really through perverse insistence, to witness the true mystery: the distribution of records, of fates — a scene that once upon a time was spoken of only in legends, and that no one had dared to watch. The last one to speak of it was Er the Pamphylian, and Plato has left us his story.

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.

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.