A Papier-mâché Mephistopheles
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
Kierkegaard was the first modern voice to spell out the confused logic of a bad dream which mankind had been thrashing around in for millennia but which, until modernity, had been unable to colonise his entire conscious experience entirely. It took seventy years until Kierkegaard’s haunted protégé, Franz Kafka, could give full artistic expression to a problem which we all now face. As the German philosopher Walter Benjamin realised, our predicament now ‘corresponds to that of Kafka.’ 2The pressing question, for those who are fully conscious of this horror, is how to wake up, but first of all, we need to come to grips with the nightmare itself, and there is no better place to start than Kafka’s fullest treatment of it, his schizoid masterpiece The Castle.
Such is the ironic, symbolic nature of Franz Kafka’s art, that to describe the plot of The Castle, which provides no suspense and 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 is3 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 emotional 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.4
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 scrutiny5, 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 to 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.
Take, as an example, K’s arrival in the house of Barnabas, a friendly and helpful young man appointed by the castle as a go-between for K.
He [K.] had let himself be spellbound by the shimmering, silky, tight-fitting jacket, which Barnabas now unbuttoned, revealing underneath a coarse, dirt-gray, often-mended shirt over the powerful square chest of a farmhand. And everything else was not only in keeping with this but even outdid it, the old gout-ridden father, who moved more with the help of his groping hands than of his stiff trailing legs, and the mother who, hands clasped on her breast, could because of her girth only take the tiniest of steps; ever since he had entered, Barnabas’s father and mother had been trying to approach him from their corner, but they were still nowhere near him.6
Time and space appear to slow down, the mother and father seem to be far away from K, unable to cross a weirdly elongated distance to him. This, the narrator tells us, is ‘in keeping with’ the meretricious surface of Barnabus, their son, underneath whose fine coat is a shabby, unbearably prosaic reality. Here as elsewhere K. reaches out to touch the papier-mâché walls of his world, but his fingers poke through, and7 he finds nothing but dust. Elsewhere, functionaries appear, infallible, formidable and enigmatic in their remoteness, but are shoddy, gouty, overweight and sadly normal when they come into focus. Rooms, previously unexceptional, suddenly become ‘indescribably desolate’ and ‘whether it had simply become so or had always been so, [K.] did not know.’8
The horror of K.’s predicament however is not, ultimately, that reality is concealing a threadbare foundation, but that there is no ‘underneath’ at all, no logic, no sense, no meaningful fate, nothing solid at all. Things happen, and they sometimes appear to be intensely significant, but they don’t thread together into a qualitative truth that K. can lay claim to, inhabit or ever confidently know. One begins to suspect that the castle, the towering citadel of oppressive perfection which looms over poor K. is, actually, completely unreal, a mirage created in the desert of the protagonist’s mind. Kafka’s finest — certainly his most thorough — biographer, Reiner Stach asks:
What, for example, do the unending, impenetrable hierarchies of the officials in The Trial and The Castle mean; what do they stand for? They are feared as powers, but they don’t act. They reflect what goes on without taking part in or governing life; at most, they archive it. If they are attacked, or their demands are ignored, they back away. They allow strangers to move in on their women, are incapable of enforcing their own directives, and do not react when they are rebuffed aggressively, as by Amalia. What kind of strange powers are these; where in the world would this be found?9
All of this strikes modern man as, at the very least, an intuitively recognisable state. He too is alienated from his experience, which appears before him as a series of uncanny but opaque symbols. He too feels that to lift the mask of the world is to be confronted with cheap plastic, masking tape and dust. He too has the sense that he is condemned to struggle towards a goal that is infinitely far away and constantly receding from his frantic, outstretched grasp. He too finds, when he looks up from the limitless draughtboard that he spends his life on, that the unseen hand that shunts him around is at once that of monstrous god and, at the same time, as ethereal and shadow-like as phantom. He too, trapped within a self-consuming bureaucratic illusion, has the uncanny feeling that it is not the world that has him in its coils, but his own self, projected outwards into the helpline, the complaints form, the care-plan, the chat window, the discussion thread, the incident report, the scheme of work and the visa application.
But if one asks him what he actually wants, he cannot answer for—this is one of his strongest pieces of evidence—he has no conception of freedom.
The K-Persona
Modern man is confined within a Kafkaesque non-experience which ranges from the postmodern condition we call schizoid through to the solipsistic limits of self-confinement, which we refer to as schizophrenic. This is why Kafka speaks to us, more and more eloquently, why we find Kafka’s stories so endlessly and grimly fascinating, why they have directly influenced so many of the great artists of our time (such as Camus, Borges and Lynch10), why his few novels and stories have spawned libraries of analysis and interpretation (far more, say, than his modernist equals, Conrad, Musil and Lawrence), and, following Benjamin, the point I wish to stress in my contribution to this Kafkaesque tower of interpretative literature, why the ravings of schizophrenics and the daily experience of the postmodern masses today share so many recognisable features with the strange predicament of K.
Let us posit a type, the K-persona (or Kp) — which, at the ‘near’ extreme, is recognisable as the everyday schizoid madness of postmodern man (that of the ‘one-dimensional’ people that surround us), and at the far limits, the more unsettlingly alien schizophrenic madness of ‘nightmare man’ (that of those undergoing the horrifying non-experience of real insanity11). For the K-persona, the intimate bond between objective, outer reality, and inner subjective thoughts and feelings, has been severed. This traps the Kp in its self, which becomes, thereby, the solipsistic centre of the universe and, consequently, the self-referential source of all meaning. This compels the Kp to oscillate between a cynical, intellectual confidence, because nothing is more certain and real to it than its own self, while, at the same time, it finds itself repeatedly gripped with terrible confusion, as there is nothing within its self that can validate its certainty and reality, no point of reference to make sense of it.
When the K-persona’s condition worsens, when the schizoid condition crosses over into outright schizophrenia, confidence becomes absurd grandiosity, as its experience seems to be entirely caused by its own self (‘I am Jesus!’ / ‘I am Napoleon!’), and confusion becomes paralysing paranoia, as its conceptions and perceptions appear to be caused by a chillingly mysterious Other which the self-confined self cannot grasp, even in principle (‘The government are controlling me through my fillings!’ / ‘The Devil has me!’). As in a nightmare, these delusions are not primarily conceptual, but emotional, which is why the feeling of them is out of all proportion to the fact. One explains a bad dream, but one never quite gets across how awful it was, because bad dreams are only ever mine.
The schizoid, solipsistic K-persona is unable to perceive or conceive of an exit from this intolerable bind, because it is searching for release with the perceiving-conceiving self, a predicament which Kafka’s heroes, like Kafka himself, never cease to fret and strain at, yet never succeed in setting themselves free from, except, as we shall see, by accident and in glimpses. Benjamin points out that there is no character in Kafka that is not halfway to eternity, exhausted, yet only having just begun an infinite journey, in the midst of a process, rising or falling, struggling from one level up to the next, and yet no closer to a destination which, one begins to suspect, is as illusory as the authorities which seem to prevent them from getting there. Everyone appears to be in the grip of a sickening fate which they never stop wrestling with, but which is eternally distant to them, hovering beyond their reach like the grapes of Tantalus.12
This might explain Kafka’s extraordinary indifference to publication and posterity—he famously told Max Brod, his literary executor, to burn his life’s work—for he felt he had failed, and perhaps even that he could never succeed, in reaching the castle. He was in a state of perpetual anguish at his estrangement from reality-in-itself. He said he felt that he understood ‘the fall of man better than anyone’, and wrote almost of nothing else. Only in the clarity of his presentation of man’s banishment from reality do we find consolation, or perhaps just comprehension, and this is profound enough to put Kafka on the same level as Dante and Shakespeare, but there appears to be no way for Kafka, or for K., to cross the infinite desert. Such is the eternal damnation of the solipsist who journeys, enquires, strives, but gets nowhere.13
He feels imprisoned on this earth, he feels cramped, the sorrow, the weakness, the illnesses, the delusions of prisoners break out in him, no consolation can console him, because it is indeed only consolation, delicate head-aching consolation in the face of the crude fact of imprisonment. But if one asks him what he actually wants, he cannot answer for—this is one of his strongest pieces of evidence—he has no conception of freedom.14
Consequently, there is no plot in Kafka, no expectation, no suspense; there cannot be, because there is nowhere to go. There is, therefore, no tragedy in his work, at least in the accepted sense of a god-like hero striving towards his own annihilation. Kafka, like D.H.Lawrence (indeed like many great modernist authors), had little interest in the isolated, idiosyncratic self struggling to realise itself in time, which is why neither of them focused on plot. Things happen, and they lead to other things happening, but each episode is self-contained to such an extent that, in Kafka’s case, the debated order of The Trial and the unfinished nature of The Castle do not detract in the slightest from the chilling impact of the whole. The books, like the mind of the schizophrenic, have no memory, no future, no fate.15 Observations are followed up by non-sequitors which makes sense in themselves, but are meaningless in context of the paragraph.
Anyone whom he no longer summons, he forgets, not only for the past but literally for all time. If I make an effort, I can even think my way into your thoughts, which make no sense here, but are perhaps valid in the foreign lands you come from.16
There is meaning here, but only in each isolated clause, which the reader, like the narrator, stares at in the same way that a schizophrenic stares at his strange life, isolating each thing from the whole, from the context, shattering it into a kaleidoscopic nightmare of strange forms, all of which seem to be at once pregnant with meaning while, at the same time, nothing more than a show of meaning. Characters in The Castle are just collections of features, bits, broken images which no unifying consciousness can take in as a whole. Take, as an example, this description of the central character of Klamm, the principal official who looms over K.’s fate, but whom K. never gets to see for himself:
…what emerges from this mixture of sightings, rumours, and distorting ulterior motives is a picture of Klamm that is probably correct in its essential features. But only in its essential features. Otherwise it is variable and perhaps not even as variable as Klamm’s real appearance. They say he looks completely different when he comes into the village and different when he leaves it, different before he has had a beer, different afterwards, different awake, different asleep, different alone, different in a conversation, and, quite understandably after all this, almost utterly different up there at the Castle…
K. explains away the freakish differences of opinion among those who have sighted the elusive Klamm, but it is clear that ordinary, sane, human perception itself is now freakish, that the people of the village, like K. himself, can only experience their own concentrated interpretations. They are fused with a timeless, spaceless present, yet at the same time eternally isolated from it, like Kafka himself, who complained of being ‘not definitively born’, of being ‘blocked by his own forehead bone’, of being ‘imprisoned’ by a ‘windowless and doorless cell’ and of being a ‘complete stranger’, not to society, but to existence itself, which appears, as it does in his work, as fragmented, broken and uncanny.
This is why K. is bored, a state which appeared with nineteenth century Romanticism, which (thanks in part to the influence of technology) fetishised dramatic subjectivity and detached it from fate, which then became boring. Kafka’s heroes do not express the kind of boredom that occurs in nineteenth century novels—for example in Oblamov, Ivan Goncharov’s dissection of ‘superfluous man’, or in Flaubert’s epic of provincial ennui, Madam Bovary or in J.K. Huysman’s flamboyant hymn to debauched apathy, À Rebours17—because they are not victims of their world, they are their world. The machine, which merely threatened and destabilised characters like Dickens’ Signalman, Shelley’s Frankenstein or Arthur Machen’s Clarke, has completely overwhelmed K., who doesn’t merely have nothing interesting to do, he is nothing, as we all now are. Each moment grips us, with its anxious promise of meaning, of relief, of knowledge, yet behind the moment an abyss of pointlessness yawns…
Part 2, How to Get out of Hell, Here.
Or rather ‘Constantin Constantius’. Kierkegaard published many of his books under pseudonyms, whom he wished to be credited as authors. In fact this passage is from a letter written by the unhappy protagonist of book, ‘the young man’.
Walter Benjamin, Some Reflections on Franz Kafka.
As Erwin R. Steinberg, in K. of The Castle: Ostensible Land-Surveyor persuasively argues.
Franz Kafka, The Castle. All quotes here are taken from the excellent Schocken translation by Mark Harman.
It is only our conception of time that makes us call the last judgement by that name. It is in fact a standing court-martial.
Franz Kafka, Aphorisms.
Franz Kafka, The Castle.
Like Marlow in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
Franz Kafka, The Castle.
Reiner Stach, Kafka: The Years of Insight.
Lynch said Kafka was ‘the one artist that I feel could be my brother.’
Not to mention bad dreams and bad trips, which can also be chillingly Kafkaesque.
Tantalus was a king, in ancient Greek mythology, who was condemned to spend eternity in a pool of water beneath a fruit tree with low branches. When he reached for the fruit, the branches moved away from his grasp and when he bent to quench his thirst, the water receded before he could get any. He was punished for other crimes, but his chief wrong was to have stolen the god’s secrets. Prometheus, tethered to a rock where he had his liver eternally eaten away by an eagle, was also punished for stealing the god’s secrets. One might also argue that K., like all of us, is also condemned to spend eternity in hell for a kind of theft.
Albert Camus also confronted the possibility that we are in a meaningless hell in his seminal essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, which asked how man can face a reality analogous to that of the tyrannical king, punished by the gods for his cruelty to guests, and forced to push an immense boulder to the top of a hill only for it to roll down every time he completed his task. Camus’ cold, comfortless solution, not unlike Kafka’s, was to laugh at the absurdity of it all.
Franz Kafka, Diaries.
Walter Benjamin stresses the importance of the gesture in Kafka which has become split from the body-in-context, which which is why so many movements are so uncanny in his novels, as they are in the films of Kafka’s disciple, David Lynch, who borrowed from his master the ability to make the isolated thing, and the frozen scene, so nightmarishly uncanny.
Franz Kafka, The Castle.
Huysman’s Against Nature, Jacobsen’s Neils Lyhne , Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Zola’s The Belly of Paris, and many other nineteenth and early twentieth century novels are saturated with boredom.