Miracles of Organization: Chance and Error in Kafka’s The Castle

Theatres of Chance

Kafka’s writings of the prolific autumn of 1914 – The Trial, ‘In the Penal Colony’ and the final chapter ‘The Nature Theatre of Oklahama’ in The Lost One (America) – explore different aspects of the miracle of organization through the institutional protagonists of Gericht (Court), Apparat and Nature Theatre. Each of these organizations is dedicated to the work of transforming contingency into necessity through the conjuration of the absolute by means of the sanction of the death penalty. The miraculous transformation of chance into necessity or error into truth is achieved through the act of institutionalized killing. Josef K’s efforts to vindicate himself by a law higher than the one applied by the Gericht in the The Trial fails repeatedly but no more so than in the ‘miraculous’ apparition of a witness to his execution from a lighted window at the end of the novel. The figure leaning out of the window is not the manifestation of messianic hope that is often assumed but a minion of the Gericht sent to photograph the execution and to introduce the image into the circuits of pornographic images that run parallel to the legal business of the Court, literally ensuring that Josef K’s shame will outlive him. All of Josef K’s errors are brought to vindicate the organization of the Gericht with his execution. And yet the Court is dependent on a supply of victims like Josef K, for their everlasting shame is the inverse of its immortal glory and their errors the eternal justification of its law. In The Trial the law itself would be a miracle, even if it is, as Josef K realizes too late, really no more than the ‘lie made a principle of world order’. The Apparat of ‘In the Penal Colony’ pursues a similar outcome, but this time according to an occasionalist manifestation of deadly power in the assignment of guilt and execution to randomly selected victims. Its victims are guilty by virtue of being selected and not selected because presumed guilty. Yet this miraculous assignment of guilt by the Apparat, just like that of the Gericht, presents itself as the vindication of a higher power, but one which this time collapses around the accidental attribution of a messianic vocation to the ‘Travelling Researcher’ who miraculously turns the machine of execution on itself. Finally, the Nature Theatre of the final chapter of The Lost One (America) appears to be a legal rational organization organized according to the socialist principle of full employment, leading critics such as Benjamin and Arendt to lend it utopian features but overlooking the insistent apparitions of the racial history of the USA – Karl Rossmann’s entry to the organization under a new name, photographs of racist lynchings, the assassination of Lincoln – and the final mystery train to oblivion. Being hired by the Nature Theatre turns out to be a sentence of death. ²

Kafka’s final novel, The Castle, differs from the writings of 1914 in not locating the miraculous justification of organizational necessity at the moment of execution. It is notoriously the description of a failing organization that nevertheless continues – moving in mysterious ways after the departure of its ruler Count Westwest – to organize its own administrative activity and the life of the village under its dominion. In it Kafka makes the miracle of organization the main theme of the narrative and even the subject of direct discussion and reflection among its protagonists. K’s ‘first glance’ at the Castle as he arrives in the village on a snowy night reveals an elevated and remote structure that subsequently, in the cold light of the morning-after, seems to have been designed by a madman. In many ways the novel can be read as a sardonic reply to the rational and hierarchical political organization described in Plato’s Republic, replacing the dialogues carefully set in ancient Athens’ cosmopolitan port of Piraeus with rambling tales about the great Organization on the Hill. Plato’s fervent justification of hierarchical organization as the essence of order ranging from cosmos to polis is systematically undermined in The Castle. ³ The outwardly compliant village at the foot of the Castle is full of storytellers, all telling tales about the Castle and its officials, all of them heard with varying degrees of attention and enthusiasm by the outsider and aspiring gadfly K who has arrived – according to him – in response to a summons to take up a post as land surveyor. Two of these stories are of particular interest in coming from narrators or ‘whistleblowers’ from within the Castle. They are stories inhabiting a peculiar narrative space in the novel that tell K the story of the Castle’s relationship with him and in doing so potentially transforming what appears to be the error that is K’s very existence into a function of organizational necessity. They are stories with the power miraculously to change the course of K’s history with and in the Castle even if in the end they seem to remain unheard and to leave little trace.

The Superintendent’s Testimony

The stories told to K by the village Superintendent (Vorsteher) or local representative of the Castle in the village early in the novel and by the Castle Secretary Bürgel at its end go to the heart of the Castle’s organization and the role played by miracle (or chance and error) in its functioning. Both tales are unusual in being told by men, which puts them in marked contrast to most of the stories about the Castle that are narrated to K by women who are largely victims of Castle officials, who are barred from public access to the Castle and from playing any official role in its organization. Both stories are machines serving to transform chance into necessity, irrational and unpredictable accidents and errors into miracles of organization. The first tells of the miraculous functioning of the organization as a whole – explaining how the organization is the miracle – while the second wonders at the role played by miracle within the organization and not so much tells as teaches Nietzsche’s (or Pasteur’s) lesson of having a mind open to be favoured by chance. ⁴ Both stories are remote from the Platonic rational hierarchy or – its modern expression – the Weberian myth of a legal-rational bureaucracy, telling instead strange tales of irregular, unpredictable and frankly illegal-irrational actions occurring within a context of organizational chaos. Both narratives nevertheless arrive at diverse but ultimately complementary accounts of the miracle of organization. Both the Superintendent and the official Bürgel take for granted that the organization of the Castle is corrupt, irrational and apparently dysfunctional, but tell nevertheless of a miraculous providence and higher power that informs even its most apparently irrational workings – what Josef K in The Trial saw as the lie made into a world order or an Apparat with the power to inscribe guilt on its victims – that emerges not in spite of, but because of the failures and shortcoming of the organization.

K’s dialogue with the Superintendent in chapter 5 is preceded by a strategic stream of consciousness provoked by his disquiet at the apparent ease with which he has gained access to a representative of the organization. K meditates on the puzzling fact that while he regards himself as resisting the organization on his own and on others’ behalf, the officials at all levels seem nevertheless to indulge or even to encourage him. He nevertheless senses the presence of extreme danger in this, but one that has to be met with ‘a certain deliberate carelessness’ that masks close attention. His approach to the outer limits of the Castle’s organization takes him to the barely lit bedroom of the Superintendent – described as a friendly, fat and close-shaven man – who is in bed suffering from gout. The close shave of the sick man is a warning that, in spite of the casual circumstances and his apparent joviality, this official is carefully prepared for his dialogue with the troublesome land surveyor. He is indeed very well informed about the facts of K’s case, especially his claim to have been summoned to the Castle as a land surveyor, and informs him, with seeming regret, that his existence is but an insignificant random error in the working of an otherwise seamless and miraculously effective organization. He explains that there is no conceivable need for a land surveyor: the borders of the small businesses in the village are all recorded and any small disputes that may arise between them are settled internally. The Superintendent speaks as one who is inside but in some sense also removed from the ethos of the Castle; not an official Official, he says he was once a farmer before being co-opted into the Castle as its local representative. This allows him to display a certain off-the-record frankness and insouciance in his narration of the history of K’s case and its implications for both K and the Castle.

Kafka’s mastery of indirect narrative means that his narrators’ voices and stories can never be taken at face value, but like the characters in Plato’s dialogues have to be approached forensically, with an eye to the speaker’s interests and close attention to the detail of how a story is framed. The Superintendent’s story is apparently told from memory, even though he immediately assigns his wife to search for a document concerning K’s case in his completely disordered archive. The Superintendent’s archive – or perhaps more accurately his arcanum – is a cabinet so crammed with papers that it proves impossible to recover any specific document; and as if this plethora of disordered records was not enough, he also refers to another store of papers outside in the shed, to others kept in another chest and to yet still more hopelessly lost pieces of paper who knows where. . . The archive, so essential to maintaining organizational consistency, seems in this case to be completely chaotic and unusable. Yet in spite of the confusion, the Superintendent refuses to let K help search for the document that announced his appointment: ‘I don’t have any official secrets from you, but I can’t go so far as to allow you to look through the documents yourself’ (Kafka, 1983, p. 499). The Superintendent then tells the story of K’s summons as if it happened so long ago that it could not possibly concern him, setting it first in the context of struggles between departments and officials within the Castle, then between the Castle and the village, and finally between struggling factions within the village. The epic account of the organizational struggles that apparently led to the ‘error’ of K’s summons reveals that Castle and village have an intricate and even violent political history that paradoxically underlies and disrupts the rational functioning of the organization.

The opening of the Superintendent’s story reveals that the apparently unquestionable hierarchical structure of the Castle/Village dyad is not only open to negotiation but can assume the character of violent political opposition. It assumes, in other words, that the organization is not rationally autonomous and above politics but is operating within the legacy of an apparently past but highly politicized context, of which the arrival of K the ‘land surveyor’ serves as an unwelcome echo and reminder. Yet this story itself is then revealed as but the prologue to another story of the infallibility of the Castle, a position announced early in the Superintendent’s narrative when he exclaims ‘Nothing is done here without taking thought’ (Kafka, 1983, p. 500). As the missing documents continue to elude the frantic efforts of the wife, now helped by K’s uncanny assistants, the Superintendent abandons the pretence of legal formalism to narrate once more from memory the story or history of the error that led to K’s presence there and then listening to his story: ‘I can still tell you the story (Geschichte) without the documents’ (Kafka, 1983, p. 500). He tells how the village replied to the initial order from the Castle appointing a land surveyor by saying they did not need one, and how their reply went to the wrong department and, even worse, arrived at the Castle incomplete. In the absence of a reply the first department that announced the appointment of a land surveyor took no further action, but a zealous official – ‘Sordini’ – in the second department, months if not years later, took an interest and replied requesting that the fragmentary reply from the village be properly completed. The original letter had meanwhile been lost, probably due to the hapless archival practices of the Superintendent, who perforce replied to Sordini that they knew nothing of the engagement of a land surveyor but in any case did not think there was any need for one. It now appears that the Superintendent has set his wife to searching for an original document appointing a land surveyor that has been long lost, that his claim that in the early months of his appointment he kept good records was untrue and that in fact his archival practices were always chaotic and dependent on personal memory.

On reaching this point in his story the Superintendent breaks off, worried that he had already ‘gone too far’ or might be going too far, asking K ‘doesn’t this story bore you?’ (Kafka, 1983, p. 503). K replies that it entertains him, and on earning the Superintendent’s reproach that it was not intended to entertain replies, probably on behalf of most readers of the novel: ‘It entertains me. . .because it gives me insight into the ludicrous confusion in which under certain circumstances the existence of a human being might be decided’ (Kafka, 1983, p. 502). The Superintendent’s response is disquieting; he is assured by this response that so far K has clearly understood nothing and that this means he can safely go on with the story without fear of compromising either himself or his organization. The story so far has been the tale of a misplaced and mutilated letter, an accident according to the Superintendent, that happened for reasons unknown but were not unconnected with political differences in the village. The conscientious Official Sordini however became preoccupied with investigating these reasons, asking why it was that the Superintendent could remember certain details but not others. But the Official’s inquiry was itself limited by the ‘working principle of the Head Bureau that the very possibility of error must be ruled out of account’ (Kafka, 1983, p. 503). Viewed from another perspective, the ‘working principle’ maintains of course that everything is necessary, for not only errors, but their very possibility, even imagining them, is not permitted. But how is it possible not to think that there may have been an error, especially since the very existence of the ‘working principle’ is a performative contradiction since ruling out the possibility of error assumes it had already been considered as a possibility to be ruled out.

The performative contradiction immediately starts to wreak its destructive effect on the organization. On the one hand the ‘working principle’ is ‘justified by the consummate organisation of the whole authority, and it is necessary if the maximum speed in transacting business is to be attained’ (Kafka, 1983, p. 503). But then it also has the effect of slowing everything down, since should the impossible take place and an error occur, it can never be recognized as such and its effects avoided or alleviated. The doctrine of official infallibility both enables and disables the working of the organization. K responds to the organizational principle by asking if there is a

body that polices it – a ‘control authority’. The Superintendent replies that there is no a discrete ‘control authority’ since the entire organization is a control authority – ‘There are only control authorities’ – so intimating that the entire organization is dedicated to policing its own infallibility. This simply raises the performative contradiction by a power, for now we have an infallible organization dedicating all its efforts to ensuring its infallibility. It is the supreme necessity machine, one dedicated to converting accidents into necessities before they even occur. It does not ‘hunt out errors in the vulgar sense, for errors don’t happen, and even if once in a while an error does happen, as in your case, who can finally say that it’s an error’ (Kafka, 1983, p. 503). The organization then not only pursues the goal of making errors impossible, but also forbids that the impossible errors that might and do occur be understood as ‘errors’. In this organization that all agree is beset by chance and error, everything is nevertheless necessary and the impossibility of error consists in the inability of anyone to ever say that there has been one.

And yet there in person listening to the Superintendent’s story stands the unwanted land surveyor K, error incarnate. The Superintendent suavely establishes a complicity between himself, the other officials in the Castle and the impossible error that is K: ‘Not unlike yourself, I’m convinced that an error has occurred, and as a result Sordini is quite ill with despair, and the first Control Officials, who we have to thank for discovering the source of this error, recognise there is an error. But who can guarantee that the second Control Officials will decide in the same way, and the third lot and all the others?’ (Kafka, 1983, pp. 503–4). At which point K confesses that now he is beginning to get bored with these organizational ‘speculations’ about himself and his predicament. The Superintendent however continues his epic narrative of the insignificance of K’s case that has nevertheless provoked an enormous amount of administrative work. The next stage in the account of how K came to arrive in the village involved village politics. The case of the unwanted land surveyor led to literally public hearings – since they were held in the Herrenhof pub – during which a significant group of the villagers, scenting ‘secret plots and injustices and what not, found a leader’ (Kafka, 1983, p. 505), a move that convinced the official that ‘if I had brought the question forward in the Town Council, every voice would not have been against the summoning of a Land Surveyor’ (Kafka, 1983, p. 505). The Superintendent concludes that a ‘commonplace – namely that a Land Surveyor wasn’t needed – was turned into a doubtful matter at least’ (Kafka, 1983, p. 505). The occasion of the appointment of a land surveyor exposed a political struggle within the village that appears to be a proxy for struggles within the organization itself.

The faction in favour of appointing a land surveyor was led by a certain Brunswick, who is encountered in various guises throughout The Castle, but most notably as the head of the family of tanners who benefitted from the destruction of a rival family by the Castle. ⁵ K unnerves the Superintendent by claiming to know Brunswick and to have met his wife, but most of all by asking ‘the half question’: ‘She comes, of course, from the Castle?’ (Kafka, 1983, p. 506). The Superintendent responds by looking at the clock and gulping some medicine – K has touched a nerve, but it is unclear why. It may be the revelation of a connection between Brunswick through his wife to the Castle, or the insinuation that the Castle operates through women and through family structures and not only through legal-rational channels. He is thus grateful when K gives him a way forward by saying ‘You only know the official side of the Castle’ (Kafka, 1983, p. 506) – thus hinting that he knows there is also an ‘unofficial side’. He continues with the story of Brunswick’s eventual defeat ‘a long time ago’ and his strategic abandoning of the land surveyor in favour of other pretexts for political intrigue.

It is at this point that the Superintendent returns to his explanation of the miracle of the Castle organization. After having described the steady escalation of the tension surrounding the case of the land surveyor he then describes how it was defused and diverted. It was accomplished he said, not without pride, by means of ‘a peculiar characteristic of our administrative apparatus’ that consists in its combination of ‘precision’ and sensitivity’ (Kafka, 1983, p. 506) or its capacity to generate administrative miracles. He then describes this characteristic through an analogy with meteorology and the build-up of a thunderstorm and its discharge through lightning: ‘When an affair has been weighed for a very long time, it may happen, even before the matter has been fully considered, that suddenly in a flash the decision comes in some unforeseen place, that, moreover, can’t be found any longer later on, a decision that settles the matter, if in most cases justly, yet all the same arbitrarily’ (Kafka, 1983, p. 506). The miracle – unforeseen, unlocatable, unrecorded in the archive – nevertheless achieves the impossible: a decision. The Superintendent quickly disabuses K of any sense that this might be a divine intervention by resorting to a mechanical analogy: ‘It’s as if the administrative apparatus were unable any longer to bear the tension, the year-long irritation caused by the same affair – probably trivial in itself – and had hit upon the decision by itself, without the assistance of the officials’ (Kafka, 1983, p. 507). Here Kafka anticipates the cybernetic model of organization – after lurching into positive feedback on the occasion of a minor catalyst, it self-corrects and re-establishes negative feedback automatically, apparently without intervention by the officials.

However, even this cybernetic version of the organizational miracle is itself immediately deflated as the Superintendent cheerfully concedes ‘Of course a miracle didn’t happen’ (Kafka, 1983, p. 507). Instead ‘certainly it was some clerk who hit upon the solution or the unwritten decision’ (Kafka, 1983, p. 507). Such an intervention certainly ultra vires changes everything within the organization, but as it is not directly attributable it does not immediately affect the treatment of the case. In this case, it was ‘discovered’ that a query sent earlier by department A to the Town Council regarding a land surveyor has not received a reply, and thus a reminder was sent and the due reply sufficed to close the case. Department A was happy, Sordini lost his pretext to inquire into its actions and the case of the land surveyor closed. A happy ending for everyone, except that now the disputed land surveyor has arrived in person: ‘Imagine to yourself, Land Surveyor, my dismay when after the fortunate end of the whole business. Suddenly you appear and it begins to look as if the whole thing must begin all over again’ (Kafka, 1983, p. 508). For according to the Superintendent’s view of the Castle, K’s presence did not just indicate that some thread was left hanging that resulted in the call to K, but rather that a higher ‘control authority’ must have corrected the original unattributed decision to close the issue of the land surveyor. The issue that seemed to be have been settled now appears to have been reopened by a higher power intervening in the workings of the lower reaches of the organization.

K then enters into open conflict with the Superintendent who has declared that he will do everything to prevent the case of the land surveyor being opened again. K will protect himself against the ‘abuse of his case’ although he will not reveal to the Superintendent his strategy, even though the latter quickly minimizes his achievements – an unofficial letter apparently from the official Klamm, and a telephone conversation with the Castle. The Superintendent says that the latter was probably with a minor clerk who knows nothing about the case, even though ‘once in a blue moon’ the Official Sordini will answer himself, and in that case, he ominously advises K ‘the best thing is to fly from the telephone before the first sound comes through’ (Kafka, 1983, p. 511). At the end of his conversation with the Superintendent K is left almost physically blocked by his case – ‘everything is uncertain and insoluble, including my being thrown out’ (Kafka, 1983, p. 512). The Superintendent ends their dialogue by resorting to the very legal-rational pretexts that he had devastated in the course of his conversation with K, promising to communicate what he has said to the Castle and to send for him should a decision arrive or further interrogation become necessary.

A Chance Meeting

It is clear that K’s case will require a miracle to be resolved, one that duly takes place after K’s sustained but unsuccessful struggle to have an audience with the Official Klamm. It is impossible to tell though whether this miracle was programmed by higher authorities or whether it was just another accident and also whether K’s inability to respond to it was part of the broader miracle of organization that will in the end leave him discussing fashion with the landlady of the Herrenhof. After a series of misadventures K finds himself at the Herrenhof at night hoping for an audience with the official Erlangen. The first published version of the novel breaks off after a difficult conversation between K and his estranged fiancee Frieda, but in a further section subsequently recovered by Brod (whose Kafka archive seems to resemble that of the Superintendent) and added to the ending, K stumbles into a room and finds instead of Erlangen a sleeper who seeing K enter his room leaps out of bed and begins a conversation. The meeting with this official is accidental but also a miracle, one that K however will, by accident or higher design, fail to see or grasp.

By way of introduction the gentleman asks K ‘Do you know Friedrich?’ and on his admitting that he did not, the gentleman smiles and says ‘But he knows you’, introducing himself as Friedrich’s secretary Bürgel. K apologizes for having mistaken his room for Erlangen’s and accepts his invitation to sit on his bed. He fails at first to notice that the secretary – who describes himself as a liaison secretary between Castle and Village – knows exactly who he is. When Bürgel asks ‘How do things stand with the land surveying?’ he replies absently that he is not being employed but ‘not really giving his mind to the matter’ (Kafka, 1983, p. 688). Bürgel takes a note and promises to take action, again prompting K’s weary cynicism that the offer was ‘utterly dilettante’. Bürgel however continues to show not only full awareness of K’s predicament but also of his actions and efforts to date, and warning him to ‘pay attention’ predicts and precisely describes the missed opportunity of the miraculous meeting that has come his way. There has been a miracle, the impossible has happened, but as impossible such miracles cannot be recognized or exploited:

There are sometimes after all opportunities that are almost not in accord with the general situation, opportunities in which by means of a word, a glance, a sign of trust, more can be achieved than by means of lifelong exhaustive efforts. Indeed, that is how it is. But then again of course, these opportunities are in accord with the general situation in so far as they are never made use of. But why are they never made use of? I ask myself time and time again. (Kafka, 1983, p. 690)

K is in precisely this position, but between sleep and waking he cannot perceive let alone understand the warning and the invitation he has just been given.

Instead of attending to Bürgel’s soliloquy on the advantages and disadvantages of night interrogations such as the one he is currently engaged in – notably their potential advantage to the petitioners – K slips into a homo-erotic reverie of being naked and doing battle with the secretary who is also naked like the statue of a Greek god. In the dream, while celebrating victory in the battle before it even took place – since it had already taken place – he realizes as the secretary disappears along with the crowd and champagne, that victory was not his. Trampling the champagne glasses he injures his feet and comes back from his dream to Bürgel, still talking but now bare-chested in bed. K listens but does not hear Bürgel’s description of the impossible miracle that is at this moment happening to him. Bürgel patiently but excitedly describes as an impossible event the encounter now taking place between he and K. He begins, ‘his face thoughtfully tilted towards the ceiling’ (Kafka, 1983, p. 694), by describing how

there is, however, nevertheless, in spite of all precautionary measures, a way in which it is possible for the applicants to exploit this nocturnal weakness of the secretaries. Admittedly a very rare possibility, or rather, one that almost never occurs. It consists in the applicant coming unannounced in the middle of the night. (Kafka, 1983, p. 694)

K has already fulfilled this first very rare, almost impossible, condition by arriving unannounced, by mistaking the room; the second is the even greater luck of surprising in this way an official who is aware of the details of his case.

What Bürgel describes as a ‘living organisation’ is dedicated to ensuring that such accidents never happen. And so, addressing the land surveyor directly, Bürgel invites him to

consider the possibility that through some circumstances or other, in spite of the obstacles already described to you, which are in general quite sufficient, an applicant does nevertheless, in the middle of the night, surprise the secretary who has a certain degree of competence with regard to the given case. I dare say you have never thought of such a possibility? I am quite prepared to believe it. Nor is it at all necessary to think of it, for it does, after all, practically never occur. What sort of oddly and quite specially constituted, small, skilful grain would such an applicant have to be to slip through the incomparable sieve. (Kafka, 1983, p. 697)

It cannot happen, but then one night it does happen and it has just happened to K. That it happens is only a rumour, for it is as miraculous for the official as for the applicant, ‘a very personal affair and one that in a sense gravely touches the official sense of shame’ (Kafka, 1983, p. 697). For an official to be touched by a miracle in this way is to transgress all the predictable procedures of the organization that he serves, hence the shame, but also Bürgel’s excitement that K dimly misinterprets in terms of homo-erotic desire.

There is, however, a final line of defence available to an official in this impossible predicament, which is to ‘positively render it harmless by proving to it, which is very easy, that there is no room for it in this world’ (Kafka, 1983, p. 697). Bürgel describes what is happening at this moment from his perspective: ‘The never-beheld, always expected applicant, truly thirstingly expected and always reasonably regarded as out of reach – there this applicant sits’ (Kafka, 1983, p. 698). The official may ask himself ‘How long will you be able to put up resistance?’ (Wie lang kannst du Widerstand leisten?) (Kafka, 2001, p. 324) but realizes that ‘it will be no resistance at all’ (Kafka, 1983, p. 698). The fact that it will be no resistance at all has two senses at this point. One is that an official is so happy that this impossible meeting has taken place against all the odds that they will do everything for the applicant, they can no longer resist. But in another sense, by their not resisting and telling the applicant that they have miraculously achieved their impossible goal they unwittingly disable the applicant. And so, as if according to plan, K falls into a deep sleep as Bürgel confesses:

With the loquacity of those who are happy one has to explain everything to him. Without being able to spare oneself in the slightest one must show him in detail what has happened and for what reasons this has happened, how extraordinarily rare and how uniquely great the opportunity is, one must show how the applicant, though he has stumbled into this opportunity in utter helplessness such as no other being is capable of than precisely an applicant, can, however, now, if he wants to, Land Surveyor, dominate everything and to that end has to do nothing but in some way or other put forward his plea, for which fulfilment is already waiting, which indeed it is already coming to meet, all this one must show; it is the official’s hour of travail. (Kafka, 1983, p. 699)

But Bürgel’s extended euphoric discourse, instead of prompting K to frame his plea, only sends him to sleep and it is we who are left listening and not the one for whom this miracle and confession might have mattered.

Having failed to seize the moment or recognize the kairos of his meeting with Bürgel, K awakes to a call from Erlangen, to whom he hastens with no sense of the miracle that befell and passed him by in Bürgel’s room. Bürgel tells him not to regret having fallen asleep, since this too was part of a larger miracle of organization:

One’s physical energies last only to a certain limit. Who can help the fact that precisely this limit is significant in other ways too? No, nobody can help it. This is how the world itself corrects the deviations in its course and maintains the balance. This is indeed an excellent, time and again unimaginably excellent arrangement, even if in other respects dismal and cheerless. (Kafka, 1983, p. 700)

The organization corrects itself by offering miraculous accidents that are too improbable to be recognized or grasped, as Bürgel sadly reflects while wishing K would leave, ‘there are, of course, opportunities that are, in a manner of speaking, too great to be made use of, there are things that are wrecked on nothing but themselves. Yes, that is astonishing’ (Kafka, 1983, p. 700).

Although the action continues, the novel effectively ends here, on a rueful note. The organization offered a miracle to one of its clients, one that was recognized by its official but not by the client. How far it predicted this misrecognition is difficult to say. Bürgel’s melancholy seems to arise from the knowledge that such miraculous events, far from being chance errors, serve to confirm the miraculous organization of the Castle. The exclusion of the land surveyor from his office is confirmed by his own inability to assume that office. K erred in pursuing his goal methodically but without any openness to miracle or any preparation to accept the chance opportunity when it arose. The organization in this way confirms its miraculously infallible functioning by miraculous exceptions or errors that correct themselves. By not recognizing the miracle that chance and organizational chaos seemed to grant him, K simply confirms the decision of the organization to continue to function without him. At the moment of trial he was proved indeed to be an error.