Sanaphay Rattanavong | November 2021

Sanaphay Rattanavong

K. is for consciousness. K. is the protagonist of an unfinished novel, The Castle, by Franz Kafka. In the alphabet, K leads to L. L is for literature—but not just any literature: rather, literature made of M, for mind, memory, and mimesis. Which leads to N, for narrative. Pattern recognition: you can guess what came before, and what comes after. It’s all part of the movement of human consciousness.

As with Kafka’s Castle, there are no obvious walls surrounding the phenomenon of human consciousness. In relatively healthy individuals, consciousness is unitary. Though one is bombarded at any given moment by any number of external stimuli of varying intensity, as well as by subtle internal shifts, one retains that unity. As neurobiologist Gerald Edelman puts it, “Looked at from the inside, consciousness seems continually to change, yet at each moment it is all of [a] piece—what I have called ‘the remembered present’—reflecting the fact that all my past experience is engaged in forming my integrated awareness of this single moment.”¹ A unitary but not a closed system, Edelman could’ve been describing modern literature, the modern novel.

Whatever the merit of this proposition, it’s worth noting that humanity continues to explore the immanence and expression of consciousness through literature, seeking to understand how the two phenomena in-form and even re-form each other—from 19th- and early 20th-century “stream of consciousness” to the Freudian “sub/unconscious” realm to more recent ongoing psychological studies and even more recent neuroscience investigations. Once mainly a concern for philosophers and practitioners of the “soft sciences” and humanities, consciousness and literature, or narrative more broadly, now looms as large in labs as in lecture halls.

Consciousness is a hard field of inquiry for science, an intractable problem. Perhaps it’s the polysemic nature of the phenomenon that gets in the way. For over a century, scientists have been looking for a language with which to describe consciousness. Their attempts have taken on both the mathematical-computational and abstract-symbolic forms. The main point: scientists need a language in order to describe consciousness to themselves, and to each other. In a way, though, literature has been offering a hand the entire time—describing what consciousness is like, what self-awareness is like, what being alive is like. Yet, literature ends up at the same dead end: we can describe consciousness only by analogy and representation. Words can tell what it’s like but can’t tell about it itself.

Within this very weakness, however, science and literature can work together and, like prisoners sharing a jail cell, collectively dig a path to freedom. Language allows us to imagine what consciousness is like; to—as linguist Steven Pinker has put it—“eff” (spelled E-F-F) the ineffable.² It’s an unspoken assumption that we all live our lives stuck in our own minds. But we can imagine what it’s like to be someone else, even if there is no sure way to know whether or not the reality matches up with our conception of it. So, consciousness F’s us in a different way: that which is closest to us cannot be seen unless mediated, unless held at language’s length.

Kafka originally conceived of The Castle as a first-person novel. While working on the third chapter, he decided to go back, cross out each “I,” and replace it with a “K.” As Mark Harman, a recent English-language translator of the novel has noted, that “original conception left an imprint on his style,” so that “[a]s in much first-person fiction, the tempo of the prose charts the state of the central character.”³

Early 20th-century novels were usually written longhand; The Castle was no exception. Italian writer Roberto Calasso notes that Kafka hated the way he wrote the letter K yet kept writing it. In his notebook, Kafka started to suspect these K.s saying, “they must be very characteristic of myself,” which Calasso interprets as Kafka recognizing “some part of himself” in the letter K. Thus, writes Calasso, “[i]f he had narrated The Castle in the first person, as he started out doing, the story would have been less profoundly immersed in his physiology, in zones liberated from the empire of the will.”⁴

The historical records, then, seem to indicate that K. came after “I” during the writing of The Castle. But if you take Kafka at his word—as well as take the hint from Calasso’s interpretation of his words—you will see that this more embodied K. precedes that (first person) I, in Kafka’s alphabet, anyway.

Consciousness and narrative, by which I mean an artful way of relating a series of interconnected events or story, have this in common: they are reflexive two-way streets (at a bare minimum). We are conscious, in large part, because we’re aware of our own consciousness: we are self-consciousness. As active listeners to a narrative, we begin automatically to anticipate story lines while we are being narrated to. For example, when a story starts with a stranger arriving at a village with some business to transact at the Castle, we safely bet he will either get to the Castle or will be prevented from achieving this goal. But if instead of being detained by villagers or guards, let’s say, or being shown into the Castle, a winged shark swoops down to carry the stranger off to the North Pole to help with the construction of a Japanese shopping mall—you get the point, it’s repeated in workshops everywhere: fiction has to make sense, even if it’s magical. Especially if it’s magical.

But this platitude of the creative writing workshop is structurally consonant with some of the most basic workings of the human mind, as evidenced by a recent line of scientific research. Princeton University researchers’ findings published in the June 2010 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, under the title “Speaker-Listener Neural Coupling Underlies Successful Communication,” show the link between story comprehension and what we in the creative writing community like to call engagement with the story. The researchers had someone tell a story to a group of people. Both the speaker’s and the listeners’ brains were scanned in real time using fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging). As the researchers explained: “We used the speaker’s spatiotemporal brain activity to model listeners’ brain activity and found that the speaker’s activity is spatially and temporally coupled with the listener’s activity.” That is, the listeners’ brain activity mirrors, albeit with a delay, the storyteller’s brain activity. But when listeners were highly engaged with the story—actively listening, so to speak—certain areas of their brains were found to exhibit “predictive anticipatory responses.”⁵ In short, listeners were guessing what was going to happen next, how would this or that person react, etc.

Here’s what the researchers took away from these engaged listeners: “We connected the extent of neural coupling to a quantitative measure of story comprehension and find that the greater the anticipatory speaker-listener coupling, the greater the understanding.”⁶ Of course, there’s nothing startling about such a finding. Writers have long seen that one coming: the more engaged the listener, the greater the understanding. But here’s what we writers didn’t anticipate: “Our analysis also identifies a subset of brain regions in which the activity in the listener’s brain precedes the activity in the speaker’s brain. The listener’s anticipatory responses were localized to areas known to be involved in predictions and value representation.”⁷ In a subset of a region of your brain, you’ve already anticipated where I’m headed with this, even before I’ve had a chance to run the scenario through my mind and form the words with my mouth.

The researchers speculate that this is so because listeners’ brains are trying to give themselves “more time to process an input and… compensate for problems with noisy or ambiguous input.”⁸ In other words, the stranger will either gain admittance to the Castle or not: a framework of possibility has been established so that the details of the stranger’s journey may be processed and not come off merely as noise. This added nuance to the mimetic nature of the human mind within the context of story structure should especially interest writers and producers of stories in any and all media.

In fact, a subsequent 2014 study further refined this line of inquiry to, in part, adjust for temporal variability in the speaker: the speaker could reasonably be said to have been listening to herself speak, and thus take on the brain activity of one who listens. Once ruled out by an innovative set of research methodologies, a broader picture started to emerge, with the “results suggest[ing] that only a subset of the human communication system is dedicated to either the production or the comprehension of speech, whereas the majority of brain areas exhibit responses that are shared, hence similar, across the speakers and the listeners.”⁹ That is, production and comprehension taken together evidence more coupling, or correlation, in both brain space and time.

They argued for further research to be conducted outside the confines of the isolated brain within a proposed “unified framework” of the human communication system, the proposed terms of which have cropped up in this and related research papers but have yet to settle into a discernible conceptual architecture. They argue: “Just as one cannot study the processes by which information is transmitted at the synaptic level by focusing solely on the presynaptic or postsynaptic compartments, one cannot fully characterize the communication system by focusing on the processes within the border of an isolated brain.”¹⁰

Expanding on this line of research, a 2019 study led by Mai Nguyen, entitled “Shared understanding of narratives is correlated with shared neural responses,” looks into the ongoing interpretation required to navigate day-to-day narrative ambiguity—the way narrative elicits neural coupling responses in areas of what is called the Default Mode Network, commonly referred to as the DMN. The researchers had the same story told in two different modes: told in shapes (in a novel animation), as well as a verbal telling (words). They concluded that their study “provides evidence that shared understanding results in shared neural responses within and across forms of communication.” In this case, animated shapes in a novel video versus spoken words. This, they argued, “demonstrates the remarkable modality invariance and strong social nature of the default mode network,” areas in the brain associated with which literally lit up in the scans. And thus, further implicates the DMN’s role “representing subtle differences in interpretation of complex narratives.”¹¹ At some point, regardless of medium, narratives get turned into meaningful stories in our cognitive systems, and it seems the DMN plays a significant role.

Thus, it’s no surprise that the role of the DMN has increasingly become a battleground for debates about the nature of human consciousness.

While the cited research was restricted to verbal and animated storytelling and auditory reception, I imagine similar findings from the reading of a text. After all, who hasn’t been tempted to flip to the end of a book or chapter to see what ultimately happens? As Mark Harman notes, Kafka “was highly conscious of the impact punctuation—or its absence—can have on listeners.”¹² Kafka’s unorthodox punctuation serves the text’s being read aloud, as rests and dynamic expression markers in musical notation do. (Flaubert, to whom Kafka looked up as a model for writing, famously put his work to the final critical test of his “gueuloir,” his “screech room,” or mouth.)

The funny thing about Franz Kafka’s The Castle is that, as an unfinished novel, it doesn’t have a real conclusion. The text ends in mid-sentence: “She held out her trembling hand to K. and had him sit down beside her, she spoke with great difficulty, it was difficult to understand her, but what she said.” And as Malcolm Pasley tells us in the Afterword to the German Critical Edition, no one knows how Kafka intended to finish the book, since he wrote “open-endedly” on principle—that is, without advance planning.¹³

One may rightly ask, “Why read a story that doesn’t have a proper ending—what’s the payoff?” In response, another platitude comes to mind, something about the journey being the reward and not the destination. Yet, for decades now, The Castle has been read avidly; readers (and not just scholars) have been deeply engaged in K.’s inconclusive story. This, I’d say, tells something about how we value literature as an ongoing process, and not as a means to an end.

K. is for consciousness. “Compared with all other fictional characters,” writes Calasso, “K. is potentiality itself. That’s why his physical appearance can never be described, directly or indirectly. We don’t even know whether he has ‘dark eyes’ like his precursor, Joseph K. And it isn’t because K. undergoes… continuous metamorphoses, but rather because K. is the shape of what happens” (emphasis added).¹⁴ Potentiality, the shape of what happens. As Harman describes, The Castle is “largely made up of K.’s endlessly proliferating interpretations.”¹⁵ The mysterious procedures that make up the activity of the Castle’s representatives, the manner in which the villagers accommodate the unspoken, inscrutable rules and regulations of the Castle—all these things dumbfound K., and the ensuing misunderstandings (or rather mal-understandings) are the stuff of pure comedy and its twin, tragedy.

Every little thing in the world of the novel, this world stripped down to its bare elements, takes on the greatest significance. Calasso again: “For Kafka, the metaphorical and the literal had the same weight. The passage from one to the other was smooth. The metaphorical could take the place of the literal and transform the literal into metaphor.”¹⁶ Calasso also tells us that Kafka “can’t be understood if he isn’t taken literally. But the literal must be grasped in all its power and in the vastness of its implications.”¹⁷ Potentiality—the shape of what happens, the inscrutable workings of the Castle: what’s the literalized metaphor here? Whatever it is, it suffuses every aspect of the villagers’ lives, including K.’s.

If you’ve read the novel, you’ll recall that the clerks’ and the Castle gentlemens’ work consist of keeping records. As Calasso puts it: “Castle activity consists above all in taking down what already automatically happens.”¹⁸ Is all this not the movement of consciousness itself: being aware that you are aware—with the shape of your awareness having no shape at all, but rather being pure potentiality?

Many years ago, I read in Kafka’s diaries this phrase: only that which is possible happens. It stuck with me, but I never understood what Kafka meant by it. Now, studying K. within the framework of consciousness, I think I get at least part of what Kafka may have meant. The part I get is the “possible” part—that there are no limits to the possible, with the sole exception of its negation.

Steven Pinker has labored to delineate the inscrutable workings of living language. In his book The Stuff of Thought, he notes that analogies can function as “the mechanism that the mind uses to understand otherwise inaccessible concepts.”¹⁹ In much the same way, K. attempts to understand the workings of the Castle by relating it to his immediate concrete experiences in the village. For K., everything takes place in the village; yet the main business (the only business, really) that he has is with the Castle. For K., the land surveyor, metaphor is literalized in contiguity: that is, everything that happens in the village is of the utmost importance to the Castle, while at the same time it’s all of no apparent significance to the Castle. In this way, we may say that the Castle is a real abstraction. That is, the Castle is a literal metaphor.

Pinker gives an account of a psychological experiment testing how people process metaphorical expressions. “The psychologists concluded that people can read through a metaphorical expression to its underlying concepts, but only when the metaphor is fresh. When the metaphor is conventional… people go directly to the abstract meaning.”²⁰ If the metaphor is dead as a doornail, readers don’t stop to consider the concept of death and its relation to doornails and doors as passageways between one space and another—they look through it without seeing it. Here’s Pinker’s extrapolation from the experiment: “[P]eople could not analyze their metaphors if they didn’t command an underlying medium of thought that is more abstract than the metaphors themselves.”²¹ Pinker doesn’t go into what the precise nature of this “underlying medium of thought” may be, though we can safely say it’s part of our consciousness—the very thing we can’t get away from, yet can’t adequately describe and explain.

Without the Castle, K. couldn’t understand the village, at least not the little of it he does understand. The Castle is a sort of illegible tabula rasa: it’s the key to interpreting everything but is itself un-interpretable.

Near the very end of The Castle—or at least near where the text ends—K. conducts his own experiment. It’s four in the morning at the Herrenhof Inn, and K. is supposed to appear before Castle secretary Erlanger, who is staying in one of the rooms. After downing a small carafe of rum (presumably to keep his strength up), K. ambles into the hall, only to discover that all the doors are identical. K. decides to guess, based on where he thinks he recalls seeing Erlanger before. If he picks Erlanger’s room, good; if not, he’ll excuse himself and leave; and if the occupant is sleeping, then all the better, no harm, no foul.

This experiment leads K. to a singular place in which the specific instance and the category of an event collapse into each other: that is, the nighttime interrogations. During these interrogations, Castle representatives are at their most vulnerable to what Kafka terms the parties (that is, supplicants and petitioners, the polis). So, K. knocks at a door and opens it with “extreme caution.” He is “greeted by a low cry. It was a small room, more than half of it occupied by a wide bed, the electric lamp on the night table was still on, next to it was a travel bag. Lying in bed but completely hidden under the blanket, someone was stirring uneasily and whispering through an opening between the blanket and the sheet: ‘Who is it?’”²²

There’s something primeval about a “low cry” at four in the morning. Of the large bed in the small room, the occupant explains to K.: “I chose the large bed, for, after all, the main thing in a bedroom surely is the bed.”²³ That unassailable, childlike logic is both funny and redolent of animal nests and burrows. The lamp is lit, so the occupant isn’t asleep, or at least no longer asleep after K.’s soft knocking. The travel bag reminds us that this room is a space of transience, relatively neutral territory. Hidden animal-like under the blanket, “stirring uneasily,” the

occupant speaks—and because of this human speech, “K. couldn’t leave that easily now.”²⁴ He is obliged to respond in kind, as if by dint of an unspoken socio-linguistic contract.

K. comes to learn that the occupant is Bürgel, secretary to one of the Castle officials, Friedrich. The occupant unveils himself gradually, first with a tentative gesture: “[T]he man in bed pushed the blanket off his face a little, but fearfully, prepared to cover himself immediately again if everything wasn’t quite right outside,” then he makes a literally sweeping gesture: “[W]ithout hesitation he threw off the blanket and sat up.”²⁵

Bürgel attempts to put K. at ease, as if it were K. and not he who had just been huddled under a blanket. After all, Bürgel notes, the door wasn’t locked. He even empathizes with K.: “[A]ccording to an old saying, the doors of the secretaries should be open at all times. But there is no need to take that literally.”²⁶ Bürgel thereby collapses the metaphorical and the literal. As in the experiment Pinker discussed earlier, the conventional metaphor leads Bürgel directly to the abstract meaning—closing off the possibility of a new conceptualization.

Bürgel invites K. to take a seat on the corner of his big bed. K., who is utterly exhausted, thinks of nothing but sleep. But he has woken Bürgel, so must help him fall back asleep if possible. Bürgel, however, has a strange relationship to sleepiness: “‘[U]nfortunately I cannot fall asleep simply upon request, such opportunities can arise only during a conversation, a conversation is the likeliest means of putting me to sleep.’”²⁷

So far, we have seen the desire for sleep, the interruption of sleep, and the strange sleep-inducement found only in conversation—situations all comical in their own way. But the true significance of this thematic play with sleep becomes apparent with the next bit of information. Bürgel goes on to say to K.: “‘Yes, indeed, this business affects our nerves. Take me, for instance, I am a connecting secretary. You don’t know what that is? Well, I’m the strongest connection’—just then he rubbed his hands quickly in unintentional mirth—‘between Friedrich and the village, I’m the connection between his Castle and village secretaries and am stationed in the village, though not permanently; at any moment I must be prepared to journey to the Castle, you see the travel bag, it is an unsettled life, not suitable for everyone.’”²⁸

Between wakefulness and dream, then, there is the connecting secretary. Between the Castle and the village, Bürgel connects officialdom of one realm to the other. This loquacious Hermes ends up telling K. about the Castle’s one fatal weakness: the true nature of the nighttime interrogations. Essentially, the threat to the Castle during these interrogations has to do with the Castle representatives’ tendency, during the nighttime, to view the parties as human beings in the totality of their existence, not simply as parties petitioning for something or other. The real danger sets in when Castle officials start to empathize with the parties. The Castle normally functions because no petition by any party has ever been granted. But during a nighttime interrogation—who knows?

But this tendency to empathy, didn’t we see it in the beginning, with Bürgel talking about how a secretary’s door is always open, his I-see-it-from-your-point-of-view attitude? But here’s where the neural coupling really begins:

‘No,’ said Bürgel, as if he were responding to a thought of K.’s and out of consideration wanted to save him the trouble of formulating it, ‘you shouldn’t let those disappointments frighten you off. Here some things seem to be arranged in such a way as to frighten people off, and when one is new to the place those obstacles seem absolutely impenetrable. I don’t want to get into the question of the true state of affairs, the illusion may actually correspond to reality, in my position I lack the distance that is necessary to establish that, but listen carefully to what I am saying, sometimes opportunities do arise that aren’t altogether in keeping with the situation in general, opportunities through which more can be achieved with a word, with a glance, with a sign of trust, than with a lifetime of grueling effort.’²⁹

It’s important to note that K. is just about ready to fade into sleep here. And as if to illustrate to K. what Bürgel means by that one gesture—word, glance, sign of trust—the functionary punctuates his next words by “turning his head sideways a little,” “stretching his arms out” and “yawning”—all in complete sympathy with K.’s one immediate desire, which is to exit from the officially awake world.

So where does this scene leave us? When the barriers between high and low, officials and parties—between one consciousness and another—disappear, anything is possible. This is the true danger to the Castle: that it would no longer be able to distinguish itself from the village.

Bürgel goes on, unfolding the labyrinthine workings, consequences, sub-consequences of his labors, interspersed with deflecting asides, rationalizations, conditional scenarios, and counterfactuals. K. eventually falls into a state between waking and sleeping, in which he is more or less asleep yet still hears Bürgel’s words, “perhaps better than earlier when he was still awake though dead tired.”³⁰ He feels no longer contained, or detained, by his host. Rather, it’s K. who actively “groped about for Bürgel,” as if the man at the other end of the bed was disintegrating into the night air.

K. then falls into a dream. There is a Greek god, an enigmatic moment (which I’ll leave to all of you to go reread or read for the first time)—and then an even stranger moment, in which Bürgel begins to narrate the general way by which a nighttime interrogation would conceivably come about. He brings this point-for-point in alignment with what actually transpired to bring K. to the very situation in which he currently finds himself—that is, Bürgel narrates the present situation in which they find themselves, in all its awful significance.

The nighttime interrogation—a nighttime interrogation, specifically K.’s—is full of the greatest risk, and thus the greatest possible gain. But Bürgel sends K. on his way to his originally intended meeting, that with Erlanger. “[G]et going now,” he says, “who knows what awaits you there; here everything is full of opportunities. Except that some opportunities are, as it were, too great to be acted upon; there are things that fail through nothing other than themselves.”³¹

If K. is the shape of what happens, then what stands out in this nighttime interrogation is what fails to happen. As Calasso trenchantly observes:

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.”³²

Ultimately, writers and scientists start their generative processes from the same place: our imaginations. Which, in turn, ply the tools at our disposal, as we ask questions that can only be asked by us, attempt to find answers that, like K.’s Castle, continually elude our grasp. Despite all the permutations of living languages and the unprecedented details proffered by brain scans, we run up against the same hard problem of consciousness, the ineffable “remembered present.”

Whether or not the hard questions are answered, we have as a species flourished because we are empathetic and have imagination. We transgress both physical and phenomenological boundaries. Literary, pedagogical, and scientific disciplines are no exception to this movement.

Perhaps, in this way, it’s not too much a stretch to propose that K. is for consciousness, which must recruit, connect to, ingest, other letters of this alphabet, such as D; D for desire. One’s innermost self is this desire, one “too great to be acted upon,” which requires no external influence to fail or succeed. The desire is ontological, yet takes up no space—just some words, a gesture, consciousness gathering itself into the shape of what happens next.

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Sanaphay Rattanavong holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the Bennington Writing Seminars. He has had work nominated for inclusion in the Best American Short Stories anthology, and he has received grant support for his fiction from the Minnesota State Arts Board and the Walker Art Center. He is currently working on a short story manuscript and a novel. https://wordsbyrattanavong.com/

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Notes