394
PARTISAN REVIEW
passages in which the narrator or the protagonist halts before the
fa~ade
of
an imposing building or at the threshold of an unfamiliar interior and in–
spects it, through attention to minute detail and with the interpretive
pressure of metaphor, as the social-thematic-psychological space he or she
is about to enter. We might recall Dickens's representation of the exterior
of Marshelsea Prison near the beginning of
Little Dorrit,
or Pip's first per–
ception of Miss Havisham's grand and musty house in
Great Expectations,
or the plebian Lucien's initial view of the interior of the de Bargeton
chateau in
Lost Illusions,
or Emma Bovary taking in the array of ancestral
portraits as she mounts the great staircase of the chateau at Vaubyessard. It
is instructive to keep this general background in mind as one notes the
disorienting oddness of K.'s first clear sighting - or as much of a clear
sighting as he will get - of the Castle. Benjamin had contended in his es–
say on the storyteller, "To write a novel means to carry the incommen–
surable to extremes in the representation of human life." That is a sugges–
tive half-truth (as are many of his aphorisms) which needs to be qualified
by the fact that nineteenth-century novelists in their very techniques of
representation quite often evinced a supreme confidence in the
"communicability of experience," which Benjamin associated with the
storyteller as opposed to the novelist. But Kafka represents the ultimate
implementation of the baffied narrative epistemology that Benjamin saw
beginning in Cervantes, and K. 's view of the Castle vividly demonstrates
how far the genre had traveled in the eight or so decades since the peak
achievements ofBalzac:
Now he could see the Castle above him, clearly defined in the
glittering air, its outline made still more definite by the thin layer of
snow covering up everything. There seemed to be much less snow up
there on the
hill
than down in the village, where K. found progress as
laborious as on the main road the previous day. Here the heavy
snowdrifts reached right up to the cottage windows and began again
on the low roofs, but up on the hill everything soared light and free
into the air, or at least so it appeared from below.
On the whole this distant prospect of the Castle satisfied K.'s ex–
pectations. It was neither an old stronghold nor a new mansion, but a
rambling pile consisting of innumerable small buildings closely packed
together and of one or two stories; if
K.
had not known that it was a
castle he might have taken it for a little town. There was only one
tower as far as he could see; whether it belonged to a dwelling-house
or a church he could not determine. Swarms of crows were circling
round it.
