K.

III. “There’s No Traffic Here”

It’s only the morning after his arrival when K. gives up the idea of presenting himself at the Castle. A sudden weariness descends upon him, such as he never felt during his long journey (“How he kept forging ahead for days, calmly, step after step!”). He starts out thinking that if he can “push himself to walk at least as far as the Castle entrance, he will have done more than enough.” But he quickly realizes that he doesn’t know which street leads to the Castle entrance. The village’s main street, flanked with low, snow-covered houses, their doors all closed, a long street, an endless street, merely gives the illusion of leading to the Castle. Then it suddenly veers away — maintaining, from that point on, a constant distance from the Castle.

In these initial steps, in these initial observations, the whole of K.’s story is already prefigured. His movements seem to him casual, even capricious, like those of a traveler taking a look around in an unknown place. But that’s not how it is. Every detail, every remark addressed to him, circles around him, cages him. To linger over some of these phrases is enough to become alarmed. K. always takes them as ordinary phrases, tossed off by people to whom he clearly attaches no importance: the landlord, the schoolteacher he meets on the street, the tanner whose house he enters. And yet their words are quite clear. “I don’t think you have any power,” the landlord says. “Strangers never like the Castle,” says the schoolteacher, and then: “There is no difference between the peasants and the Castle.” Finally: “Hospitality is not our custom here,” says the tanner; “we have no need for guests.” Frightening words. In the dark, smoky hovel where two bearded men soak in a huge washtub, where a young woman with “tired blue eyes” languishes on a “tall armchair,” holding an infant to her breast, “inert,” staring upward “toward some indefinite place” like a Madonna of melancholy, while from the one tiny window on the back wall a pale snow-light casts a “silky sheen” on her dress — in this archaic, torpid penumbra where the only recognized law might well be the law of hospitality, we encounter these brutal, resolute words: “Hospitality is not our custom here.” And further: “We have no need for guests.” These last words are the harshest K. will hear, but he quickly passes over them: “Of course not; why would you ever need guests?” His reply actually attempts to establish complicity, allowing K. to raise the point that he holds dearest: that he is the exception, the chosen one. He continues: “But every so often, you must have need of someone, of myself for instance, a land surveyor.” And so K. rushes headlong past an opportunity to understand. A mist still surrounds him, protects him, mocks him.

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 all: 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.

To speak of deities, of God, and of the divine in regard to The Castle is a serious breach of decorum, because nothing of the sort is ever mentioned there, unless the whole of The Castle is taken as an Aesopian fable. But is that what it is really? The literary newness of The Castle consists first and foremost in its not being a fable, whereas many of Kafka’s other stories — from “Investigations of a Dog” to “The Burrow” to “The Great Wall of China”—can (and perhaps must) be understood at least as apologues. Indeed they derive their force from that form. But the narrative force of The Castle lies elsewhere. The Castle is akin to the novels of Dickens or Dostoevsky, writers Kafka venerated. The difference lies in the place where this novel unfolds, which is the dividing line between vyakta and avyakta. No one had dared to write a novel about that boundary, which doesn’t in the end manage to become a true boundary, since the village street never reaches the Castle, but rather veers away and proceeds parallel to it without getting closer than a certain distance. This is only one of the various oddities one encounters in these places.

The Castle, even more than The Trial, has provoked chronic vertigo in its exegetes. No novel is better suited for initiating its readers into the “torment of endless commentary,” which, however, few can bear for long — the fiber of the Talmudist is rare. Most readers, unable to withstand that “torment,” seek rest in an all-encompassing interpretation. Surely no novel is more scrupulously chaperoned, as if by sharp-eyed duennas, by its interpretations. For the most part these interpretations are tolerant and magnanimous, ready to admit of numerous others, even incompatible ones, provided that they be interpretations. And they are often eager to beat their breasts and declare their own inadequacy. Yet still they are voluble and intrusive.

At the beginning, K. is a land surveyor who arrives in a village to take up his post. By the end, he’s the janitor at the village school. And the coachman Gerstäcker offers to let him take care of his horses, even though K. “doesn’t know anything about horses.” No matter, says Gerstäcker. Then why the offer? Because Gerstäcker is counting on K. to exert a certain influence on one of the Castle secretaries, Erlanger. From K.’s point of view, everything since his arrival has been a constant regression toward inadequacy, combined with escalating humiliations. Yet it’s also true that influence is now for the first time attributed to him, as if by now he formed part of the Castle’s web of relations, which extends over all the territory of the village. At the very beginning it was said that anyone who “lives or lodges here [in the village] is in some sense (gewissermassen) living or lodging in the Castle.” That gewissermassen corresponds to the particle iva so often encountered in the Brahmanas, and it signals entry into the most secret realms of thought, where everything is understood as if preceded by that iva: “in some sense,” “so to speak.” Gerstäcker’s offer is the last stage we are shown of K.’s peregrinations. At this point, as so often happens around the Castle, certain words that have long been buried in piles of irrelevant ones suddenly ring out again, rich with meaning and sarcasm. When K. and the coachman meet, that first day, before they even know each other’s names, they exchange these lines:

“Who are you waiting for?” “A sleigh that will take me,” said K. “Sleighs don’t come by here,” said the man; “there’s no traffic here.” “But this is the road that leads to the Castle,” objected K. “Just the same, just the same,” said the man rather adamantly, “there’s no traffic here.”

K. prepares to visit the village superintendent. It’s the fourth day since his arrival, and he hasn’t had a single direct encounter with a representative of the Count’s authority. Now he must begin — and clearly not at a high level. Nevertheless he feels “little concern.” An unfounded intimacy has already been established between K. and the power of the Castle, thus far dormant. He feels that power, as a pianist feels the keys. His observations about the Castle’s “service” are extremely acute; he has already perceived that it displays an “admirable unity,” an operational continuity not found elsewhere. And even “in cases where that appeared lacking, one suspected that it achieved a special perfection.” Is this a Taoist speaking? Not exactly, because Taoists don’t struggle, whereas K. does, is even the “attacker” who assails those same “authorities,” though they have “for the most part been obliging.” If only in “trivial matters.” But what other dealings has he had with them in those first hours?

Another, more urgent question is raised: Why is K. attacking? Why would he need to, since he has only to take possession of a post that, despite some misunderstanding, could — it seems — be granted him? But the struggle is on, and its peculiar nature immediately becomes clear: on one side the authorities, who must “defend remote, invisible things, always and only in the name of remote, invisible gentlemen.” The crucial point of this stunning definition is the invisibility and distance not of the gentlemen but of the things that the authorities must defend. Things of what nature? And why is it that the first concern of these authorities is not to assert themselves, as one might expect, but rather to protect themselves from an obscure foreigner, from an aspiring “worker,” with all that word’s painful associations? With regard to the authorities — and to their exclusive relation with what is remote and invisible — K. is the extreme opposite: someone who “was struggling for something vitally close, for himself.” To struggle for oneself: this must have appeared unseemly, maybe even repugnant, to authorities who are so accustomed to other spaces.

Nevertheless the authorities have from the beginning shown K. a generic benevolence, allowing him to “prowl around wherever he wanted,” even if that language already betrays a certain deprecatory tone. But at the same time, in so doing, “they spoiled and weakened him.” Perhaps that benevolence, then, is a higher form of malice, which serves to push K. ever further into a “non-official, completely uncontrollable, murky, strange life.” And what sort of “life” is that, if not life itself, without qualifiers, in its raw, amorphous, frayed state? Thus K., caught in that amorphous life, might have been driven to self-destruction. And then one might have been able to witness this spectacle: “The authorities, gentle and friendly as ever, would have had to intervene, as if against their will, yet in the name of some public ordinance unknown to him, in order to haul him away.” In these lines for the first time the stakes are declared — and one realizes that the game may be terrifying, that the authorities, while maintaining their “gentle and friendly” manner, may from one moment to the next, and perhaps reluctantly, “haul him away” like a wreck that’s blocking the road. One would then conclude that theological subtlety and police brutality do not belong to separate worlds. That they can cohabitate. That each can even presuppose the other. Perhaps only in this fashion, with just such a display of gentleness, would it be possible to “haul away” someone who, after all, can be charged only with having “proceeded recklessly” along a certain stretch, however brief, of his “other life” (as opposed to his official life). This would already be sufficient to sow terror. But there isn’t time to stop here. K. presses on, rightly asking himself: “What was it really, here, that other life?” And he quickly hastens toward an ominous observation: “Nowhere else had K. seen one’s professional service and one’s life so intertwined as here, so intertwined that at times it seemed that service and life had switched places.” Now terror gives way to vertigo. Could the shabby life of the village be the true service, concerned only with “remote, invisible” things? And perhaps service is life itself, as always “completely uncontrollable, murky, strange”? And finally, what does it mean, this intertwining of two extremes, so intimate that each apes the other’s features? For example: till now authority has been for K. above all a name: Klamm. But where does Klamm’s power manifest itself? In the signature at the bottom of the letter from the director of Bureau No. 10, a letter in which K. is addressed now with words of respect and recognition, now with imperiousness and veiled threats? Or is it in the air, much more solemnly, when Gardena, the landlady of the Bridge Inn, with her “gigantic figure that nearly darkened the room,” sits beside K.’s bed in that maid’s room that K. calls a “repugnant hole” and explains, “as if this explanation were not a last favor but rather the first of the punishments she would inflict,” that K.’s proposed visit to Klamm is “impossible” (“What an idea!”—and then: “You’re asking the impossible”)? Yes, there in that sordid, suffocating place, where the maids’ dirty laundry and the curled-up bodies of K.’s assistants blur together on the floor, it can be said that, for the first time since his arrival in the village, K. hears a speech of vast importance, which blends abstraction and gossip into a single amalgam — a speech furthermore rich with allusions to what could or could not be done, in accordance with rules unknown to K. And as for him, in those moments he sees himself for the first time imprisoned in a definition: “You are the most ignorant person here, and be careful,” Gardena says. But perhaps it is this last thrust of hers that gives K. the chance to begin the game again, since after all “to the ignorant everything seems possible.” This is the moment (a reckless one) when K., already opening the door to leave, says to Gardena: “But what is it you’re afraid of?… Surely you’re not afraid for Klamm’s sake?”

K.’s audacious hypothesis, that “service” and “life” might actually swap “positions,” implies consequences that only gradually become apparent. The first has to do with modes of behavior—a fundamental matter, crucial to K.’s story. And regarding precisely this matter a reversal is proposed that will be rather difficult to put into practice, as it runs counter to common sense: “here”—K. reflects, meaning the area surrounding the Castle, and this adverb is as pregnant as Plato’s “down here”—perhaps it would be “appropriate” (am Platze, “in its place”) to maintain “a rather carefree attitude, a certain ease of manner only when dealing directly with the authorities, while everything else always called for great caution, looking in all directions before taking a step.” Nothing is more dangerous — we must understand — than everyday life. There, even when performing the most casual, inconsequential acts, we must remember we are continuously under surveillance. We must watch our every step, looking in all directions, as if under siege. As soon as we come before the authorities, on the other hand, where the usual response is to stiffen for fear of doing something wrong, of committing some infraction prejudicial to our cause, we are advised to adopt instead a casual attitude, a certain recklessness we would ordinarily rule out on the grounds that it might easily appear careless, disrespectful, frivolous. In a single sentence, K. has outlined nothing less than a Copemican revolution in behavior, a revolution he glimpses even before he has managed to meet with his first authority, the village superintendent. It is in this very meeting that K. is able to confirm just how far the promiscuity between “service” and “life” goes: the superintendent keeps the official records, those pages that are the very embodiment of service, crammed in a cabinet in his bedroom. When those great sheaves spill onto the floor “tied together in bundles like kindling,” the superintendent’s wife, Mizzi, jumps aside “with fright.” Apparently Mizzi knows that these pages are irradiant and corrosive, even at a distance of years.

K.’s primary characteristic is a certain insolence. The insolence of the ignorant, some will suggest, until Gardena puts it to him as bluntly as possible. But K. can’t help himself. When the superintendent explains the story of his file, in which the word surveyor is underlined in blue, a file that was held up for a long time by a variety of circumstances and the occasional mistake, K. finds the story “amusing”—and elaborates: “It amuses me only because it allows me some insight into the ridiculous muddle that at times can determine a man’s life.” This is certainly not the kind of language with which one would generally address an official. But the superintendent forges on, implacable and “serious.” He objects at once that if K. supposes he has gained any “insight” from his story he is mistaken, because the story has just begun — and K. doesn’t know that yet.

K., no less tenacious and implacable than the superintendent, lets him keep talking, lets him describe in ever greater detail the error — though “who can ever say for sure that it’s an error?”—that concerns K. But then K. immediately returns to his distinction. On the one hand, he says, there are the services, the offices and what happens within them: a self-sufficient world that can be understood only in “official” terms. On the other, there is a being who exists “outside those offices” and is an “actual person” and is “threatened by those offices”—and what’s more, the threat is “so senseless” that K. finds it hard to “believe in the gravity of the danger.” Once again, K.’s remarks are pointed and terse, in sharp contrast with the undulating, winding course of the superintendent’s arguments. But K.’s brusqueness doesn’t prevent him from following — perhaps even ironically — a certain protocol of compliments and praise, for he is quick to extol the “amazing, extraordinary knowledge of these matters” that the superintendent has just displayed. This prelude renders all the more effective the zinger that follows: “However at this point I would also like to hear a word or two about me.”

The superintendent loves, more than anything else, to talk about Sordini. K.’s presence at his bedside gives him a good excuse for returning again and again to the subject of that Italian, “famous for his conscientiousness,” who works in Department B as a relator—“virtually the lowest position of all,” observes the superintendent thoughtfully. Even to an “insider” like him, it seems “inconceivable” that “a man of [Sordini’s] abilities” is being made use of in that way. Nonetheless, despite his lowly position there’s something intimidating about him, as those who’ve had the experience of being attacked by him know all too well. He then becomes “terrifying for the person under attack, but splendid for that person’s enemies.” Something feral infuses his high capacity for “attention, energy, presence of mind,” as if some spring inside him is always about to pop. Of course, the superintendent himself has two cabinets, in addition to a barn, full of papers. But he remains a peasant who sometimes acts as an official, knowing full well that he isn’t up to the task. While Sordini… The superintendent recalls, dreamily, the descriptions he’s heard of Sordini’s office. He’s never seen this office — just as he’s never seen Sordini, who never comes down, being always “overburdened with work.” Thus: “all the walls are lined with columns made from stacks of bundled files,” and those are only the records Sordini is working on at that moment. It’s often necessary, therefore, to extract documents and reinsert them. Since this happens “in a great hurry,” muffled thuds are constantly emanating from Sordini’s office: the sounds of columns of documents giving way, collapsing one after another. This sound is considered characteristic of Sordini’s office. Having arrived at this point in his story, the superintendent, enthralled, adds a general observation: “Yes, Sordini is a worker and devotes the same care to the smallest cases as to the biggest ones.”

Even in the face of this majestic vision, which seems to call for silence, K. doesn’t abandon his impudence. And like a good adversary, he quickly latches onto the use of small and big in order to suggest to the superintendent that his own case, though originally “one of the smallest,” as he has been told on more than one occasion, perhaps in part to keep him at bay, “has now become, thanks to the zeal of officials like Mr. Sordini, a big case.” Already in these words we recognize a certain lack of respect, but those that follow are obviously provocative. He isn’t at all happy about becoming a “big case,” says K., “since my ambition is not to have great columns of records concerning me rise up and then collapse, but rather to work in peace, a little land surveyor at his little drawing table.” Nothing could be simpler, and nothing further from the somber frenzy of Sordini’s office. Nor could anything be more unrenounceable, if we recall what Kafka wrote in a letter, during the time he was drafting The Castle, about the relationship between writers and their desks: “The writer’s existence truly depends on his desk, if he wants to avoid madness he can never really stray from his desk, he must hold fast to it with his teeth.” Holding fast with his teeth to something — the possibility of a desk — is also an apt description of K.’s behavior.

The tension is evident. But even an official who is “not enough of an official” like the superintendent knows how to dodge such a provocation. Almost reassuringly, he emphasizes: “No, [yours] is not a big case, on this score you have no cause to complain, it’s one of the smallest of the small. It isn’t the volume of work that determines the rank of the case.” This sentence sounds like a general rule about how the offices work — and also serves, once again, to knock K., the attacker, back on his heels. The official’s most powerful weapon against the foreigner is implicit humiliation.

At the beginning of The Castle, when official “recognition” of K.’s surveyor title is at issue, the text describes that recognition as “certainly spiritually superior.” But Kafka’s deletions reveal a wavering: before coming to that “spiritually superior,” he had written: “like everything that is spiritually superior, it’s also a little oppressive.” He vacillated here too, between “oppressive” and “mysterious.” And this wavering between something crushing and something secret, with each understood as a prime characteristic of that which is “spiritually superior,” points to the very substance of the “struggle” that K. has taken up. Why must the “spiritually superior” also be a weight that oppresses whoever approaches it? Why must its modus operandi be so similar to persecution, even — and perhaps above all — when it comes to the highest of its prerogatives: recognition? K.‘s most disconcerting thought takes shape immediately after he learns, indirectly as usual and via the telephone, that he has been “named land surveyor.” Instead of cheering up and calming down, K. thinks: “And if they believed that with their recognition of his surveyor title, recognition that in itself was certainly spiritually superior, they could keep him in constant fear, they were deceiving themselves; he felt a slight shudder, but that was all.” It’s easy to pass over this early sentence on our first reading of the novel, as if it were a normal claim. But if we pause to examine it, it’s like a lunar landscape pocked with craters.

To the villagers, K. is a nuisance. He has the air of one who doesn’t know how life works. But he is also a romantic figure, shrouded in the breath of another world. At least he is for women, for Frieda and Pepi and Olga; they all respond to him immediately, as if with an ancient familiarity. And K. is always confident and direct when he speaks to them. The first positive confirmation of this romantic aura, however, comes from a child, Hans. When Frieda asks him what he wants to become, Hans tells her: “A man like K.” But what is K. in this moment? A janitor who’s just been fired. Sitting at the teacher’s desk, he’s finishing his breakfast in a freezing room that is at once a gym with some gymnastic equipment, a classroom with a few desks, and a makeshift bedroom, signaled by a straw mattress on the floor and “two stiff, scratchy blankets.” The remains of dinner too are scattered on the floor, along with sardine oil, shards of a coffeepot, and clothes. Hans, an observant child, has seen this wretchedness, but K. remains his ideal. Why? Hans has grasped that K. is not a person but rather potentiality itself. He is the kingdom of the possible, encroaching upon the compulsory automatism of the Castle. Thus Hans could “believe that, though K. found himself in a low, despicable condition now, he would eventually, albeit in the almost inconceivably distant future, surpass everyone else.” Little Hans, with his tone of “dark gravity,” shows himself to be highly astute. He’s the first to recognize that K., despite the meanness of his present state, is in some way “vaster” and even younger than anyone else in the village. For it’s a place where babies are born old — or at least they’re immediately forced to adopt, like Hans himself, an “altklug” tone — the tone of sententious old men.

The Castle is woven through with conversations — exciting ones, exhausting ones. Sometimes they read like the arguments of sophists. Often they lead us into areas that bear little relation to the conversation’s point of departure. And then abandon us there, perplexed. But such is the subtlety and the specificity of these dialogues that we always forge ahead with the impression that something essential has been said — and has escaped us. Exasperation grows, in the reader as in K. But there is some relief: the comic. Like tears in the fabric of the dialogues, lively scenes intrude. K.’s first night as janitor-custodian in the school’s freezing gym, for example, is a grand pantomime, where the word gets stripped of its power and the gesture triumphs. As in a Busby Berkeley musical, the characters — K., Frieda, the assistants — take their turns at center stage, before a silent audience of gymnastic equipment, a few student desks, and the teacher’s desk on its platform. The secret, demonic director is a fat, old cat that jumps on Frieda in her sleep, terrifying her. And the wild, abstract scene of the distribution of records — toward the end of the novel — is equally evocative of the most penetrating spirit of the musical. In that scene Kafka seems to quote himself, returning to the root of every musical, which is the scene in The Missing Person (a.k.a. Amerika) of the changing of the underporters at the Hotel Occidental, with its inexorable nexus of centrifugal and centripetal motions.

Comedy is in the details, that’s the rule. Kafka formulated it but then crossed out the passage in which it appeared. (We find it now in the critical apparatus to The Castle: “The truly comic is of course in the details.”) As for its applications, they are scattered through all his writings. In whatever he writes it’s enough for him to be meticulous and exacting in his description of developments and rigorous in observing their phases — and the comic erupts, invincible, sovereign.

In everyday life, K. discovers at a certain point, it’s wise to “look in all directions before taking a step.” That’s how people behave when they know they’re being watched from on high. But when Klamm, the prime and exemplary emanation from on high, is himself seen on the move, witnesses agree that “after coming outside, he looked around repeatedly.” And one reports that he did so with a very “uneasy” air. “Perhaps he was looking for me,” K. remarks — and his words spark general hilarity in the barroom. But then what was Klamm afraid of? Who did he fear was watching him? The secretary Momus suggests that, indeed, it was K.: “Once you quit standing guard, Klamm was able to leave.”

The low and the high mirror each other, according to the Tabula Smaragdina. But this doesn’t mean they must touch. Or that they could touch with impunity. The whole of The Castle is the story of an obstructed meeting, a meeting that, for reasons that are undeclared but vastly important, must not happen. For K., everything conspires to prevent him from introducing himself to Klamm. And nothing makes Gardena, guardian of secrets, as nervous as the idea that K. might pursue the matter “on his own.” As for Klamm himself, he must not even consider the possibility of meeting K. Indeed care is taken that Klamm’s gaze not light on any discernible trace of K.’s presence. Thus K.’s footprints in the snow-covered courtyard of the Gentlemen’s Inn are immediately erased. Such care should reassure Klamm, allow him to remain unaware of K. Or else — and this is the most daring hypothesis — someone wants to prevent Klamm from having any excuse for thinking that he might be able to meet K. The high and the low must not touch; this rule governs the course of the world. Yet Klamm and K. will continue to stand in relation to each other, even if never face-to-face. Minutes after Klamm’s exit from the Gentlemen’s Inn, K. receives a letter from him, delivered by Barnabas, that concludes with these words: “I won’t lose sight of you.”

More than a person, Klamm is an emanation, an element, like nitrogen. “There is already too much Klamm here,” says Frieda — and she seems to be speaking of the composition of the air. “You see Klamm everywhere,” K. tells her a little later, one theologian to another.

In the village below the Castle, much is imagined about power, but K. yearns to witness an epiphany of it. Only once is he granted his wish — and then by surprise. He skulks about in the snow-covered courtyard of the Gentlemen’s Inn, waiting for Klamm. He has the audacity to wait for Klamm. A coachman wrapped in fur is sitting up on the driver’s seat facing two horses. Behind him, like a dark, squatting animal: Klamm’s sleigh. With an unwarranted familiarity, the cold-numbed coachman invites K. to take a flask of cognac from an inside pocket of the sleigh and to share it with him. K. doesn’t even wonder at the coachman’s nerve. He’s drawn irresistibly to the sleigh. It’s the coffer of power, its portable tabernacle. When he sticks his head inside, he feels a warmth unlike any other — a warmth undiminished by the outside chill. In the sleigh, one doesn’t sit, one sinks — among blankets, cushions, furs: “no matter how one turned or stretched, one always sank down into softness and warmth.” Power is an engulfing element, like the warmth of Klamm’s sleigh. Something that allows one to sink into it, that makes every thought of returning to the outside world seem unimportant. The air that K. breathes inside Klamm’s sleigh is its aura.

K. begins to feel a little foggy. The obvious thought that it wouldn’t be a good idea for him to be surprised in that position no longer seems so obvious; it enters “his awareness only indistinctly, as a slight disturbance.” And then the cognac… Finally K. extracts a little flask from a pocket in the sleigh door. “Without meaning to, he had to smile, so sweet was its perfume, like a caress, like hearing praise and kind words from someone very dear to you, and you don’t even know exactly what’s being talked about and don’t even want to know and are just happy in the knowledge that that particular person is speaking in that way.” So profoundly enchanting is that perfume that K. wonders if it’s really cognac in the flask. And he dares to taste it. “Yes, it was cognac, strangely enough, and it burned and warmed him.” But “as he drank, it transformed from something that seemed merely the vehicle for a sweet perfume into a drink fit for coachmen.” K. doesn’t know it, but this is the last time he’ll be allowed to breathe the essence of power. Suddenly the courtyard is flooded, every corner of it, with harsh electric light. It turns out that the calm country inn is studded with lamps, “on the stairs, in the corridor, in the entryway, outside above the door,” making the courtyard look like a police barracks. With that shrill signal the vision ends.