Ihr Zimmermädchen seid gewohnt, durch das Schlüsselloch zu spionieren, und davon behaltet ihr die Denkweise, von einer Kleinigkeit, die ihr wirklich seht, ebenso großartig wie falsch auf das Ganze zu schließen.
Franz Kafka, Das Schloß
Ours is a world of hierarchies. A world partitioned by social differences so that it is fairly unlikely for a female, low class, rural area born person to get access to the upper, ruling urban perspectives. It is as if we were looking at the world from Kafka’s Schlüsselloch mentioned above: only decontextualized hints reach our eyes, and our imagination, our unbridled fantasy is the only resource we can rely on to build ourselves a vision. Even if we later in life get the opportunity to see a bigger picture of the world, our ways of thinking and, above all, feeling, that lay deep down inside our minds and behavior, are unchangeably molded into the shape of that Schlüsselloch and its distorting, concealing edges. We can’t get out from our dark and narrow dormitory on our own – and it is the dim consciousness of this that makes us crave ein Held, ein Mädchenbefreier. Most of the times he comes to our rescue, like K. in Kafka’s novel, unwittingly. He does a random thing without noticing or even without giving a shit, a bit of attention out of mere curiosity, a polite smile, and act of kindness, a joke. A spark is lit in us, though: the vague desire of a different life starts burning and spreading fast and strong in the brush of our psyche. The desire turns into hope, the hope turns into confidence. We start feeling entitled to what earlier looked altogether unattainable. We are transformed, transfigured. But, alas, we are not ready. Too short a notice has been given, for such a big and difficult enterprise. Like the waitress Pepi when she receives the announcement that she shall start in the capacity of head waitress in a couple of hours, and rushes in the search for appropriate clothes and hairdressing – before it was meaningless to her to make efforts to be good looking, because nobody was going to see them waitresses except for the even ruder kitchen personnel; we, who have never before cared in the least for our beauty, begin now frantically to try and improve our looks in any way that our lack of experience and naiveness make us see fit. Like in her case, the result is very far from satisfactory: we lack the resources to make a good job in this field. At first, like Pepi, we think that the result is pretty dignified, even if not perfect. We might, as Pepi does, complain about a bad pair of shoes, wishfully implying that that is the worst defect in our persona. We think that we are almost there, we’ve almost done it! We don’t yet suspect how much there was still left undone. Proud of our achievements, which are indeed remarkable given our point of departure and the short time taken, we step into the main room feeling like soon to be princesses. An imagined sound of triumph fills our ears and makes us dumb to the murmurs and the giggles. We’re being a success! We are breezy and very kind to everybody. We feel light, free from the past, our own and that of the world, free to criticize it and to play with it. Pepi’s honeymoon lasted four days. When it was over, she imputed its abrupt end to bad luck – had this and that not happened, I would certainly have done it, I would have realized my dream and never, never had had to go back to the dark and narrow dormitory. We use a similar strategy sometimes: it makes it less painful, it makes it possible for us to retain some of the self-esteem that the great adventure had endowed us with. But often, and maybe luckily, we cannot be content with that. We look for a better explanation, we place ourselves, like Pepi does, in a situation where more about the causes of our failures will be revealed. As if pushed by an unacknowledged desire for truth, she finds herself telling her hero, K., all her story as she saw it. She starts by saying she is reconciled with her fate now, because it was not due to her lack of capability or effort that she failed. K. ruthlessly contradicts her. What a wild fantasy you have, he tells her. Her way of thinking, cultivated in the dark and narrow dormitory, is at best weird in the free air. Not a wonder that she failed to keep the head waitress job, considering that she held similar ideas. Even the dress and the hairstyle of which she is so proud of, he continues, are but hideous products of that dark narrow dormitory: they might have looked beautiful there, but here, in the free air, everybody laughs at them. Many times Reality has rebuked me with similar words when I looked back more cooly at one of my past enterprises. Unfortunately, we’ll never know what happened to Pepi in the end, because Kafka’s novel is unfinished. She proposes to bring a disgraced K. in the dark and narrow dormitory with her and her fellow waitresses, without success. So, we can assume that she goes back to the stale air and the miserable life to which the waitresses are destined to. She would hide the dress in a corner never to see it again, lest she be painfully reminded of her short and forever gone days of glory. But in the real world, there is no going back. Once the intoxication of freedom and love and self-enhancement is experienced, no matter how much unsuccessful its endeavors and painful its hangover, a whole new perspective opens up in front of us. We realize our limitations, we see how far we are from the top, but now, curiously, we also feel that we have a right to get there, because we had the ardor to desire it.
All the German quotes are drawn from chapter 20 of Das Schloß, the text of which can be found at this link: http://www.zeno.org/Literatur/M/Kafka,+Franz/Romane/Das+Schlo%C3%9F/Das+zwanzigste+Kapitel