Papier-mâché Perdition
One sticks a finger into the ground to smell what country one is in; I stick my finger into the world-it has no smell. Where am I? What does it mean to say: the world? What is the meaning of the world? Who tricked me into this whole thing and leaves me standing here? Who am I? How did I get into the world? Why was I not asked about it, why was I not informed of the rules and regulations and just thrust into the ranks as if I had been bought from a peddling shanghaier of human beings? How did I get involved in the big enterprise called actuality? Why should I be involved? Isn’t it a matter of choice? If I am compelled to be involved, where is the manager—I have something to say about this. Is there no manager? Will no one answer me?
Sōren Kierkegaard, Repetition.1
Such is the ironic, symbolic nature of Franz Kafka’s art that to describe the plot of The Castle, which provides no suspense and quite literally goes nowhere, does not diminish its effect. A man called ‘K.’ arrives in an Alpine town in the middle of the night and announces that he is a land-surveyor hired by the eponymous castle which overlooks the village. K. is taken to be a land-surveyor, but there is2 ample evidence that he is a pretender, that he has not been hired by the castle and does not belong in the village. Be that as it may, he is provisionally taken on by the authorities, but finds himself unable to start work, or to establish his position, or to contact the castle, or even to reach it. He spends the novel entangled in the perverse, irrational bureaucratic demands of the castle and the bewildering, alienating personal demands of the village, unable to find relief from either except, on two occasions only, by accident. The story ends, mid-sentence, with K. having advanced barely a step. He does achieve a kind of freedom, or rather license, to remain in the village, but this strikes K. as a hollow victory:
…it seemed to K. as if they had broken off all contact with him, but as if he were freer than ever and could wait as long as he wanted here in this place where he was generally not allowed, and as if he had fought for this freedom for himself in a manner nobody else could have done and as if nobody could touch him or drive him away, or even speak to him, yet—and this conviction was at least equally strong—as if there were nothing more senseless, nothing more desperate, than this freedom, this waiting, this invulnerability.3
K., like many of Kafka’s heroes, is alienated from the symbolic, or manifest reality of the world, which has no meaning for him, and apparently never can. K.’s position is of constant, chilling, irony, an eternally unresolvable contradiction between what he senses, or desires, or subjectively intuits, and reality as it appears to him. He never seriously questions this reality though, never asks why the village is so strange, never doubts the customs of the Castle. He lies forever under the weight of juridical scrutiny4, and that is as it should be. He is constantly exposed to all, and that is as it should be. The ways of the world are strange, painful and arbitrary to K., and that is as it should be.
Instead of challenging the fundamental nature or reality of his dreamlike predicament, K. obsessively analyses its internal laws and logic. Long passages are devoted to his, and other character’s, interpretations and reinterpretations of his case, a kind of compulsive mentation which takes the place of experience, action, understanding, resolution and meaning, none of which, to the frustration of both K. and the reader, appear in The Castle. Things happen, people appear, ideas and images swim into view, but they do not form a whole, an integrated continuum, a lived experience, either for K., or for us. He theorises and counter-theorises, but he is sculpting in snow. Everything that presents itself to K. appears to have an autonomous reality, a symbolic significance, a compulsive interest, and yet, at the same time, is instantly forgettable, absolutely arbitrary and, ultimately, evanescent and meaningless.