My enquiry into Kafka’s Castle, and the haunting postmodern nightmare it expresses continues. Part one, here.
K. Within K. Without
The strangeness of Kafka’s world is the result of a time and space produced by a self which can refer to nothing beyond itself. There is an objective world ‘out there’, but it is out of reach, and therefore horribly unstable. Days pass in hours, hours in days. People move absurdly quickly, as in a Tex Avery cartoon, or with freakish slowness, or the condition of scenes appears to loop back on themselves and reset.1 Cause and effect are confused and spatial and temporal distinctions are blurred and effaced. Borders and boundaries are broken everywhere, both in the world — officials receive clients in bed,2 sex occurs in public, there is no place to rest — and between the world and the self, which lies exposed in a manner all too familiar to schizoid man. Everyone appears to knows all about you except you yourself3 who knows nothing at all about anyone.4
The borderless self manifests in the world as a total lack of individuality. K. is continually confused by the similarity of the characters of the village: ‘“But they do bother me,’ he says, ‘letting his eyes wander from the assistants to the chairman and back again to the assistants; he found the smiles of all three indistinguishable.’5 Everyone he encounters from the castle appears interchangeable, ‘usually the officials fill in for one another and so it’s difficult to determine the responsibility of this or that official…’6 Notably, the only real individuals in the novel are women, the most striking example of which, Amelia, is the only character who refuses to submit to the arbitrary laws of the spectral castle.
All this seems to be entirely ‘subjective’, the madness of irrational man, but as Kafka demonstrates, the schizoid self has two complementary poles, that of solipsistic subjectivism and of equally solipsistic objectivism. K.’s heroes are not artists, writers, flamboyant originals or inmates of mental asylums. They are functionaries, lawyers, surveyors and architects. The solipsistic state is at home in the sober-minded realist, the modern scientist, mathematician, statistician and rational functionary, who appear to be focused on an external world, but in truth are no less bounded by the projections of their own minds than the schizophrenic, postmodern artist or entheogenic drug user are.
The rational mind is useful, as the rational world of science, maths, statistics and management amply demonstrates, but it cannot experience that in reality which is un-mind-like—non-causal and non-factual. It is thus confined by precisely the same solipsism as the irrational madness it derides, but to which it is bound. The only difference between the modern scientist and the postmodern artist is that the former is focused on the outer world while latter looks inwards; but both are alienated from a unifying consciousness which is why neither one is able to find the truth, any more than K. can.