But what of naughtiness? The assistants are perfectly naughty. K. can’t pin them down, they’re meant to be working for him, but they confuse things, worst of all, most treacherously and most cunningly of all, they appeal to Frieda’s sympathies, who in the end sides with them. But their machiavellian tendencies are construed as proleptic. Let me explain this. They behave in a fashion K. regards as cunning, but it is an utterly naïve, infantile or animalistic, cunningness. K.’s interpretations of what they get up to frame it as a kind of conceit, but their actions are no more or less conceited than his. They are perhaps more accurately described as ‘diabolically innocent’ – one of Kafka’s self-characterisations.
Frieda description of the assistants is an excellent account of naughtiness: ‘I am ashamed of them. I can’t stop looking at them, I can only laugh.’ It’s more interesting to figure this characterisation not as some hidden tension between manifest and un-manifest psychological urges, but as one particular account of the way we register activity.1 Perception here is a matter of sympathy, and even K., though he cares not to admit it, displays a resonant naughtiness similar to those mischievous beings he scolds and chases away with sticks.
There is a strong sense of a master disciple relationship that structures the speaking positions of the different characters. But it’s about the tension between power relations rather than their stability. K. even says to Jeremias, later in the narrative: ‘Our relationship is no longer that of master and servant, and I’m as pleased by that as you are, so we don’t have any reason to deceive each other.’ (237) The power is never localised, it doesn’t belong to the functionaries of the castle, its produced in the relations among those who speak of it. No one is a slave permanently; each being ruffles their feathers and slinks off, depending. Everyone is simultaneously guilty and innocent.
The assistants have a couple of most peculiar descendents: ‘two small white celluloid balls with blue stripes’ that appear mysteriously in Blumfled’s apartment, in the earlier short story ‘Blumfeld, An Elderly bachelor’ (344).2 Blumfeld has been thinking about how much he’d like a companion, a dog maybe. Instead, he gets floating balls, ‘jumping up and down side by side on the parquet; when one of them touches the floor the other is in the air, a game they continue ceaselessly to play’ (344). He likens them to ‘little pellets’ that he saw in a ‘well-known electrical experiment’ (344). The balls are said to give Blumfeld an ‘unpleasant feeling’ and he chases them around his apartment, before catching one: ‘It’s a cool ball, and it turns in his hand, clearly anxious to slip away. And the other ball, too, as though aware of its comrade’s distress, jumps higher than before, extending the leaps until it touches Blumfeld’s hand.’ (344-345) The balls are exemplary instances of discreet though expressively connected bodies. They are residual communicative noise, in-between being and expression. Kafka leaves it an open question as to whether the balls are innately ‘alert’, or whether they automatically follow the laws governing them (347). I see no reason to think these options as exclusive opposites. Blumfeld imagines a dog to get rid of the balls, but a dog would just be more balls, wouldn’t it? His sentiments regarding the balls alternates between sympathy and irritation, with the two continually overlapping:
If one looks at the whole thing with an unprejudiced eye, the balls behave modestly enough. From time to time, for instance, they could jump into the foreground, show themselves, and then return again to their positions, or they could jump higher so as to beat against the tabletop in order to compensate themselves for the muffling effect of the rug. But this they don’t do, they don’t want to irritate Blumfeld unduly, they are evidently confining themselves to what is absolutely necessary. (348)
And then Kafka adds a further complication, as though he, like his characters, can’t resist: ‘Even this measured necessity, however, is quite sufficient to spoil Blumfeld’s rest at the table.’ (348) After a night with the balls tapping away under his bed, Blumfeld manages to lock them in a cupboard. He then gives the keys to his room to the janitor’s two little girls, who he directs to the cupboard-bound balls. He then promptly leaves his house for work, noting that: ‘He would in fact far prefer to be several streets away when the girls first open the door to his room.’ (357)
Work, however, is no escape. Here we discover Blumfeld has two assistants that unmistakably carry on in the same manner as the balls. Like the assistants from The Castle they are pests, little time wasters, that make Blumfeld’s already difficult, verging on unmanageable job, more difficult. Instead of doing their work they harass a servant for the use of his broom. Kafka describes their efforts to coerce the servant into giving up his broom as follows: ‘The servant knows, of course, what it is about, glowers at the assistant, shakes his head, pulls the broom nearer, up to his chest. Whereupon the assistant folds his hands and pleads. Actually, he has no hope of achieving anything by pleading, but the pleading amuses him and so he pleads. The other assistant follows the goings-on with low laughter …’ (364). The story closes with the following line, regarding the inability of the assistants to learn from experience: ‘they are over-apprehensive, and without any tact keep trying to protect their real or imaginary rights.’ (365) The reference here to ‘low-laughter’ suggests the vague but exciting energies to which the activity of naughtiness appeals. It is an enveloping and contagious force, barely perceptible, but vivid. As Kafka also recommends, it is a coercive body or boundary, a protective layer for ‘real and imaginary rights.’
It is a risky thing to advocate naughtiness. As Hacking notes, with reference to the work of Herbert Butterfield, scholars that have attempted to theorise about alchemy often become enchanted by the object they seek to describe – their thinking becomes alchemical (Hacking, 1975: 39). In a similar fashion, thoughts about naughtiness have the tendency to drift towards a naughty kind of thinking. However, naughtiness and advocacy do not go together. One cannot argue for more naughty activity and expect to receive what they want. Naughtiness always constitutes itself in an oblique relation to authoritative forces, of which this essay is a kind. Naughtiness is an indirect, self-expressive kind of relation that inhabits the tension between confrontation and conviviality. It does not warm to open or explicit gestures of welcoming.
Another risk is that the category of ‘the naughty’ might become too diffuse and plastic to retain any internal specificity. That there is no agreement among speakers and writers who use the term as to what it is they are designating. This is the path trod by all categories that seek to account for the dynamic, mutable kinds of activity, exemplified by humans. The category of the naughty should not have the aspirations of a natural kind. It does not designate an object worthy of scientific investigation, at least in this context. Rather, thinking and writing about naughtiness represents an exercise in poetic reasoning, an opportunity to delight in the immanent transactions between ideas, happenings and language.
