ROBERT ALTER
395
K.'s stance as observer from below looking above is continuous with
that of Pip, Lucien, and Emma. The representation of the act of observa–
tion, like almost everything in Kafka, has a deceptive surface clarity. The
object of observation, however, for all its seeming to be "clearly defined
in the glittering air," begins to dissolve in a welter of contradictions, the
process of deconstruction enacted with an imaginative power that makes
it far more interesting than any of its programmatic formulations by con–
temporary theorists. There is perhaps a hint of a violation of meteorologi–
cal probability in the contrast between the snowdrifted village and the
lightly snowdusted Castle. In any case, the Castle does not present any
coherent structure that is really accessible to ocular inspection; unlike the
faryades and interiors of nineteenth-century fiction, it resists the gaze.
It
is
neither one thing nor the other, neither old nor new, neither stronghold
nor mansion, but rather a helter-skelter collection of indeterminate struc–
tures. The most subversive collapse of the binary oppositions that gener–
ally give us a handle on reality is that the Castle proves to be disconcert–
ingly like the Village: "If K. had not known that it was a castle he might
have taken it for a little town"; and in the next paragraph after the passage
I have quoted, ". . . it was after all only a wretched-looking town, a
huddle of village houses." This perception rather oddly triggers in K. a
memory of his native village, the longest piece of recollection in the
novel for this man who is virtually without a past, suggesting that the
most intent observation may amount to little more than the projection of
memory. The narrative technique Kafka uses (after an abortive experi–
ment in early drafts with first-person narration) is one he inherited from
the mainline of nineteenth-century realism -
style indirect libre,
or narrated
monologue. But where his predecessors had used that technique to work
out a rich interplay of narratorial authority and intense subjective experi–
ence, in Kafka it is repeatedly used for epistemological ends, to expose
beneath the sheerest veil of ostensible narratorial authority the radical du–
biety of subjective perception. "Seemed" and "appeared," as in our pas–
sage, are the keywords of Kafka's world, constantly opening perspectives
to epistemological vertigo. Such a perspective yawns menacingly in K.'s
view of the Castle (at the end of the paragraph following our excerpt)
when his usually non-figurative language is abandoned as the narrator
speaks of a "maniacal glitter" in the sun-reflecting windows of the Castle's
tower, and its irregular battlements "as if designed by the trembling or
careless hand of a child ... as if a melancholy-mad tenant who ought to
have been kept in the topmost chamber of the house had burst through
the roof and lifted himself up to the gaze of the world."
When the Castle is thus dominated by an image of the madman in
the attic - an imagined nexus of violence, incarceration, dementia, the
