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 consequence of time and space being produced by an essentially solipsistic 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 spatio-temporal distinctions are blurred and effaced. Borders and boundaries are broken everywhere, both in K.’s 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 everything about you except you yourself3 who knows nothing at all about anyone else.4
The borderless K-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, perhaps most tellingly, 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 here, as in our world, in the sober-minded realist, the modern scientist, the ‘realistic’ mathematician, the ‘empirical’ statistician and the rational functionary, who all appear to be focused on an external world, but 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 that bridges the gap between the two, which is why neither one is able to find the truth, any more than K. can. They are bits in a world of bits.
There are, then, two poles to the K. persona—the objective and the subjective—and two corresponding motives. On the one hand it is obsessed with thinking, analysing, hypothesising, testing and gathering objective information, demands for which, in both The Trial and The Castle are infinite, as it must be to the solipsist who can only grasp reality through the rational apprehension of stared-at facts which, at the same time, can no more arrive at a definitive terminus than K. can himself. This explains Kafka’s obsession with bureaucracy and his presentation of nightmarish scenes in which mountains of paperwork literally overwhelm his characters.
Hidden behind columns of large bundles of files piled on top of one another, those are only the files Sordini is working on just then, and since files are constantly being taken from and added to the bundles, all this at great speed, the stacks are constantly falling down, and it’s precisely those endless thuds in rapid succession that have come to seem typical of Sordini’s study.7
This is much misunderstood by the superficial reader, who assumes that Kafka was concerned with an insane institutional proceduralism which seeks to oppress the individual through ceaseless demands for information. But his real target was not the bureaucratic world, but the bureaucratic self. Ultimately, Kafka is no more addressing the predicament of the modern office worker than he is that of ‘the modern self’, the ‘One Dimensional Man’ trapped in the alienating unworld of late capitalism. Kafka, like all artists, certainly spoke for his time, and for the hellish situation that those of us who inhabit this time are in, but ultimately the K-persona is not modern. It is, first of all, millennial, in that it traces the challenges it faces back to ‘the birth of purgatory’ in the West, the idea that the human soul is ‘involved in complex judicial proceedings concerning the possible mitigation of penalties, the possible commutation of sentences, subject to the influence of a variety of factors.’8 Such an analysis would have been just as comprehensible to the priests and bureaucrats of Mesopotamia, Egypt and Rome as it is to us.
Deeper than the belief that, at the point of death, the soul has to wrangle with an obscure chthonic bureaucracy, is the ‘existential’ bind which gives rise to such a strange idea.9 Following Søren Kierkegaard (who was probably the most important influence on Kafka’s work), Kafka recognised that all of us are trapped in a nightmare, for the mysterious, paradoxical soul is, at all times, confronted with the absurdity of its own manifest self. This self necessarily appears to it as a self-contradictory prison, a cosmic joke, an infinity of meaningless self-replicating forms without egress. This, for Kierkegaard, is the cause of existential despair, ‘the sickness unto death’, which is not merely a conscious fear of death, but an unconscious dread of not being able to die. This is what K. suffers from, which is why there are no monsters in the hell he is trapped in. The monster is the condition of K.’s being. As Kierkegaard says,
The most gruesome descriptions of something most terrible does not make immediacy as anxious as a subtle, almost carelessly, and yet deliberately and calculatingly dropped allusion to some indefinite something—in fact, immediacy is made most anxious by a subtle implication that it knows very well what is being talked about.10
Antagonists in The Trial and The Castle always casually let fall crucial information to Joseph K. and K. as if it were obvious and known to all. This strikes us as troubling, even nauseatingly creepy, for a reason that both Kierkegaard and Kafka (and to some extent Jean-Paul Sartre) well understood, because it suggests that the horror of life, the deathless void that reveals itself in true despair, is not something that comes from without, that happens to you.
You are it.
This isn’t to say that the day-to-day modern world ‘out there’ isn’t a nightmare to modern man. Kafka was keenly aware of the frustrating futility of life as we live it today, an awareness which achieved its most powerful and penetrating form when he faced the hollow pseudo-reality of the classroom and the office, both of which compel man to focus all his energy on attempting to achieve a goal which never arrives. Reiner Stach clarifies;
Josef K., the accused man in The Trial, is motivated by nebulous threats to focus all his energy on his trial and to comply with every one of the formalities, while being told that the law that underlies the procedure will remain unknowable even with a lifetime of effort. The surveyor K., the protagonist of The Castle, is ultimately undone by the same paradox; no matter how often he is told that he has no idea of how things actually work in the village, the explanations of the people he talks to keep revolving around mere procedural issues when K. tries to get to the bottom of things. It eventually becomes apparent that the villagers themselves are mystified by their world.11
This mystification however, as Gilles Deleuze points out,12 runs deeper than the mere lies of institutional indoctrination. Kafka’s work occupies a liminal space between modernist societies of discipline, the world of bounded, linear, institutional structures which Stach alludes to here—the family, the school, the hospital, the prison—and postmodern societies of control, a virtual nowhere of ghostly facts in which ‘one is never finished with anything’.
Kafka was raised in a productive factory world that had starting and finishing points, that fixed man into discrete stations, but he then passed into—and morbidly heralded—a non-productive corporate world that compelled him to be ‘in a continuous network’, perpetually ‘in orbit’. K.’s futile, self-defeating quest can be read as foreshadowing our own constant complaints that they don’t know what they are doing, when there is no they, no owner, no boss; just ghostlike, ‘deformable and transformable’, stockholders. There is no final destination at the end of the helpline, the course, the trial, the sentence, the treatment. You are constantly at work, because there is no work.13
Anyone who alive to the deep reality of the modern school, where one is instructed to spend a lifetime of gruelling effort on reaching a destination that nobody understands, that nobody has even witnessed, anyone who has sensed that their various identities as student, patient, criminal and employee have fused into a state of permanent, tractable, exposure and control, will recognise the plight of K. and Josef K. only too well, but the point here is not that Kafka’s potent nightmare does not exist in the world, it certainly and obviously does—in the perma-school, in the meta-office, in the omni-prison—but that for Kafka this is world is reflection of the nightmarish self, not the source of it.
The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked.
The reverse pole of the K-persona’s futile objectivism is its rootless subjectivism. There is, in The Castle, no beauty, no aesthetic truth anyone can agree on. ‘“Look,’ says one of the characters to K., ‘it’s a beautiful shawl, isn’t it?” To K. it seemed like an ordinary woollen shawl, he felt it once again merely to be obliging, but said nothing.’14 K. is continually misunderstanding events because he is unable to step beyond the objective-subjective self into a meaningful context, which forever appears elusively contradictory to him.15 Faces, as we have seen, are a flick-book of impressions to K., appearing from one angle aristocratic, from another hopelessly debased. Comments sound contemptuous and then, reinterpreted a moment later, seem charmingly self-deprecating. Glares are transformed into entreaties, then into childish innocence. And characters perpetually shift from helpful to scheming and then back again.
In fact, if there is one defining formal characteristic of the novel it is this complete inability of K. to ever define anything: ‘[Frieda’s hands] were certainly small and delicate, but they could quite as well have been called weak and characterless.’ / ‘Amalia’s act was remarkable enough, but the more you say about it the less clearly can it be decided whether it was noble or petty, clever or foolish, heroic or cowardly’. / ‘Ultimately one couldn’t tell whether one had held one’s ground or given way.’ / ‘It isn’t easy to understand exactly what she is saying, for one doesn’t know whether she is speaking ironically or seriously, it’s mostly serious, but sounds ironic.’
‘Stop interpreting everything!’ cries K. at one point, but he cannot stop himself, and is continually chastised for doing so. ‘You misinterpret everything, even the silence. You simply cannot help it.’ / ‘You yourself do recognize Frieda’s good qualities, only you’re interpreting everything incorrectly, you think she’s simply using all of this for her own purposes and to some evil end, or even as a weapon against you.’16
Does this sound familiar?
Unable to rest in anything beyond itself, the K-persona is always thinking, always judging, always distracted. ‘K. found it impossible to listen closely, he was distracted by rattling glass.’17 K.’s attention-span is reduced to a flat flickering seizing of images which pass out of his attention as quickly as they do the reader’s. Kafka’s books are curiously difficult to remember, sometimes even to concentrate on. One’s interpreting mind continually leaps above the text and wonders what it means, placing the reader in the same maddening situation as K., unable to settle, unable to belong. Just as K. is continually reminded that he is a stranger (‘You’re not from the Castle, you’re not from the village, you are nothing.’18), that, like Kafka himself, he hasn’t arrived yet, so too is the reader, who continually wonders what this thing is he holds in his hands.
What does it mean?
What Does it Mean?
Which brings us to the interpretation of the book itself, which eludes our grasp just as the facts within it elude K.’s. Is The Castle, as Max Brod and Thomas Mann had it, an inscrutable God, with unknowable ethical demands (or, with considerably more subtlety, as Walter Benjamin framed it, a ‘mystery to which the people have to bow—without reflection and even against their conscience’19)? Or is it, as Eric Heller claimed, a perverse illusion, dreamt into being by superstitious peasants? Is K., as Günther Anders maintained, a masochistic coward, striving to be accepted by a world which makes no moral sense, or is he, as Hannah Arendt insisted, a hero, whose insistence on fundamental dignity in an insane pseudo-reality marks him, to the villagers who accept it, as a baffling outsider, and a threat?
Such a multiplicity of interpretations is a clue that we are in the presence of one of a truly great work of art, that can never be exhausted by interpretation (and which, it goes without saying, I strongly recommend the reader engage with first-hand). In the end, Walter Benjamin’s warning strikes at the root of the matter. ‘There are two ways to miss the point of Kafka’s works. One is to interpret them naturally, the other is the supernatural interpretation.’20 If there is a truthful interpretation of The Castle, and there is, it is one which takes the alarming paradox at its heart as it is, as a mystery to the mind, as a horror which eludes rational apprehension. The book, like the rest of Kafka’s work, is not difficult because it places demands on the reader’s intellect, it is curiously simple, but because it compels the reader to abandon his interpreting mind and, as Kierkegaard pointed out, this is one of the most painful and, crucially, solitary acts a man or woman can make.
One of the peculiarities of The Castle, and of Kafka’s work more generally, is the unsettling manner in which he blurs worldly authority with divine authority.21 Are the law courts and councils of the world a mirror of heaven working to a divine plan or is God a bungling bureaucrat? Kierkegaard argued that the solution to this central quandary is not something that can be worked out through reason, or by applying the morality of the world, which can only paralyse consciousness just as the supplicant in one of Kafka’s most important stories, Before the Law, is paralysed before the palace of truth.
The castle, like the court in The Trial, is inaccessible to reason because only the individual knows what is right and wrong, only he knows what to do, and nobody else, no system, no book, no external intelligence, can ever tell him. Thus only total courage can reveal it. The castle and the court are inaccessible to argument, because justice means taking a leap into one’s own experience of the context. Knowledge, says Kafka, ‘is both a step towards eternal life and obstacle in the way of it. If, after gaining knowledge, you wish to attain to eternal life, then you will have to destroy yourself, the obstacle, in order to build the step, which is the destruction.’ Living in the world is virtually identical with being this obstacle — Kafka wrote of ‘the feeling that he is blocking the path by virtue of being alive. From this blockage he then derives the proof that he is in fact alive.’22 — which means only a radical renunciation of the world can overcome it.
It is telling that, although in The Castle K. receives help from no-one, and although he is chastised for asking for help, towards the end of the novel he stumbles, through sheer exhaustion, into the bedroom of a sleeping official who tells him that functionaries surprised in this manner are compelled to offer assistance. Elsewhere, he gains a taste of peace when, through spontaneous, mindless desperation, he crawls into the back of a covered sledge and rests. For K., as for Kafka himself, the sting of the world simply dissolves when the momentum of the restless mind is arrested. Abandoning hope is not, as Dante imagined, a prerequisite for entering hell, but a ticket to a higher destination.
It is not necessary for you to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen. Don’t even listen; just wait. Don’t even wait; be utterly still and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked; it cannot do otherwise; it will writhe before you in ecstasy.23
Kafka wrote that ‘our salvation is death, but not this one.’ His heroes are not alive, but neither are they dead. They appear to yearn for death, or for sleep, or for perfect stasis and security, but it is not granted them and never will be.24 They seek to arrive at eternity by travelling the road of time which, like the path that leads up to the castle, only goes ‘close to it but then curved away, as if on purpose, and although it took one no farther from the castle, nor did it come any nearer.’25 They are trapped in the same position as modern man, who spends his life picking over the ‘internal laws and logic’ of his dream—its facts, its news, its history, its opinions, its goods and services—yet never questioning the dream itself. Kafka intuits the illusion, and this intuition sends a radiance over his work—as he said to Max Brod, ‘our art consists of being dazzled by Truth. The light which rests on the distorted mask as it shrinks from it is true, nothing else is.’26 —and yet it slips away. The truth is always available to K., enlightenment is a single step away, but he is unable to quite see his way through, unable to take the decisive step over the threshold and, in ‘fear and trembling’ enter the gates of eternity. Why? What stopped him?
Kafka was unable to take the final step which his principle source, Søren Kierkegaard, presented. Like Sartre, Camus and the existentialists of the mid-twentieth century, Kafka took the vertiginously unsettling predicament of the spirit which Kierkegaard diagnosed and then, effectively… subtracted the soul. This left him with nothing but cosmic absurdity, condemned like Camus’ Sisyphus to eternal futility. Kafka, like the existentialists, took Kierkegaard’s diagnosis but refused his remedy, his solution to the diabolic bind; the radical faith of consciousness reaching beyond itself, into the unknown and the unknowable. This left Kafka bereft, isolated, tormented and with nothing more consoling than mere hope.
Kafka wrote to the woman he loved, Milena Jesenská, who was trapped in an unhappy marriage and unable to free herself:
‘Dear Milena, I wish the world were ending tomorrow. Then I could take the next train, arrive at your doorstep in Vienna, and say: “Come with me, Milena. We are going to love each other without scruples or fear or restraint. Because the world is ending, tomorrow.”' Perhaps we don't love unreasonably because we think we have time, or have to reckon with time. But what if we don't have time? Or what if time, as we know it, is irrelevant? Ah, if only the world were ending tomorrow. We could help each other very much.’27
Isn’t this beautiful? Isn’t it heart-breaking? Poor Milena. Poor Franz. Poor all of us. The world, many of us now feel, might well be ending tomorrow, but this is no help to us. The only means by which the veil can actually be lifted is to realise—not as mere knowledge, but as lived experience—that the world is always ending, that, as Kierkegaard wrote.
…when eternity comforts, it makes one joyful; its comfort truly is joy, is the true joy. It is with the human grounds of comfort as it is when the sick person, who has already had many physicians, has a new one who thinks of something new that temporarily produces a little change, but soon it is the same old story again. No, when eternity is brought in to the sick person, it not only cures him completely but makes him healthier than the healthy. It is with the human grounds of comfort as it is when the physician finds a new, perhaps more comfortable, kind of crutch for the person who uses crutches—give him healthy feet to walk on and strength in his knees, that the physician cannot do. But when eternity is brought in, the crutches are thrown away; then he can not only walk—oh no, in another sense we must say that he no longer walks—so lightly does he walk. Eternity provides feet to walk on. When in adversity it seems impossible to move from the spot, when in the powerlessness of suffering it seems as if one could not move a foot—then eternity makes adversity into prosperity.28
We find no such passages in Kafka or Sartre or Camus, who were mired in adversity, with no egress. Yet here, in the cultural source of their intellectual plight is the exit they all sensed and yearned for. Eternity. Not in the mind or emotions, which transform eternity into a warped, nauseating infinity of forms, but in Kierkegaard’s ‘infinitely passionate inwardness’, that which is conscious of the time and space which oppresses the K-persona. Here there is relief, here there is light, here we can help each other.
In The Castle… the time sequence is insignificant and… the various undertakings of the land surveyor represent not progress but repetitions of a single unchanging effort. Here, too, the events are thus only novelistic portrayals of a fundamentally unalterable situation.
Ingeborg Henel, The Legend of the Doorkeeper and Its Significance in Kafka’s Trial.
The bed is inordinately important to Kafka.
‘As for you, I know all about you…’
An inability to separate oneself from the world has its counterpart in the schizoid state of paranoia, the existential uncertainty of existing in a hostile universe. As in The Trial, where derisive laughter flows from strange windows and court guards pop up everywhere, so in The Castle everyone is an official and it is impossible to tell where the peasants end and the administration begins.
Franz Kafka, The Castle.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Jacques le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory.
One that has occurred in various times and places, including some decidedly Kafkaesque periods in ancient Egypt.
Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death. We might note here, in passing, that the world is roughly divided into subjects who are primarily afraid of objective monsters — killers, slashers, dragons and demons — and those, more in touch with their own panjective spirit, who are afraid of a monstrous reality that deprives them of it — the condition of Kafkaesque alienation that eerie horror films and stories put their finger on. Both types look upon the bad dream of the other in perplexity; ‘but that’s not scary!’
Reiner Stach, Kafka: The Early Years.
In Postscript on the Societies of Control; the recantation of technolotrous accelerationism he published just before he threw himself out of a window.
Ibid.
Franz Kafka, The Castle.
Kierkegaard, in Concluding Unscientific Remarks to the Philosophical Fragments, makes a similar point, that there are two forms of insanity, the subjective variety (exemplified by Don Quixote), and the objective, with the latter being far more terrible:
[Objective] insanity is more inhuman than the [subjective kind]. One shrinks from looking the first one in the eye, lest one discover the depth of his frantic state, but one does not dare to look at the other at all for fear of discovering that he does not have proper eyes but glass eyes and hair made from a floor mat, in short, that he is an artificial product. If one happens to meet a mentally deranged person of that [objective] sort… one listens to him in cold horror.
The horror of the K-persona!
K. is rebuked when he seeks to reduce the contradictory experience to one thing or another. At one point, his presence in a corridor prevents castle officials from emerging from their rooms; ‘Well now, since it had to be said: because of him, simply and solely because of him, the gentlemen couldn’t emerge from their rooms, for early in the morning, shortly after sleep, they are too modest, too vulnerable, to be able to expose themselves to the eyes of strangers; they feel too bare, even if they’re completely dressed, to show themselves. It’s certainly hard to say why they’re ashamed, perhaps they’re ashamed, these eternal workers, simply because they have slept. But perhaps they are even more ashamed of seeing strangers than of being seen; the very thing that they had happily overcome with the help of the nighttime interrogations, namely, the sight of the parties—whom they find hard to stand—they do not want intruding on them in the morning, suddenly, abruptly, in all of nature’s truth’.
Franz Kafka, The Castle.
Ibid.
Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka.
Ibid.
‘They say that all of us belong to the Castle and that there’s no distance between them and us, and that there’s nothing to bridge, and in general this may indeed be so, but unfortunately we had a chance to see that when everything is at stake it isn’t that way at all.’ Franz Kafka, The Castle.
Franz Kafka, Diaries.
Franz Kafka, Aphorisms.
‘You are always talking of death, yet you do not die’. Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena.
Franz Kafka, The Castle.
Max Brod, Franz Kafka, A Biography. Contrast Kafka’s brilliant darkness with that of second-rate cynics and satirists, such as Jonathan Swift, Guy de Maupassant, Samuel Beckett, and in our bleak age, Charlie Brooker, Boon Joon-ho, Yorgos Lanthimos and the like, for whom there is no light; it’s mask all the way down.
Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena.
Søren Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses. I don’t wish to suggest that the Danish saint was perfect, he certainly was not, but he saw far more clearly into the truth than the existentialists who betrayed him.