The Castle—Franz Kafka
You can’t get there from here
A few years ago I spent about an hour chatting with at least twelve Amazon representatives, one after another. Every one had a friendly, sympathetic attitude and a good sense of humor. I would have enjoyed getting to know some of them better, even though I never did get my question answered. I fear that endearing moments such as these will soon disappear as all those delightfully bumbling humans get replaced by upbeat, prim AI assistants that run me through tight loops of useless information without so much as a chuckle. Many people in my situation would have grown frustrated and chewed out one of the poor service reps or quit in disgust. Frankly, I found the whole experience amusing and pleasant. But then, I also enjoy reading Kafka.
The protagonist of this week’s book, The Castle, referred to only as K., arrives at an unnamed village near an unnamed Castle claiming that a Count West-west has engaged him as a Land Surveyor.1 K. then spends the rest of the novel trying to get into the Castle. In terms of its plot, The Castle reminds me of Chutes and Ladders, one of the most sadistic board games every marketed for children.2 A messenger named Barnabas delivers a letter to K. who gives Barnabas a response to take back to the Castle. Thinking himself clever, K. follows Barnabas, but instead of delivering the message to the Castle, he goes home. So K. gets to meet Barnabas’s sisters and parents. At one point, he catches a glimpse of Klamm, an important official, through a peephole, but never can meet him in person, despite many attempts. He interacts with quite a few characters, and mostly tries to use them as means to reach the castle, although he does take the time to fall madly in love with Frieda, a barmaid.
Overall, The Castle reminds me of an elaborate Monty Python skit. The genius of Monty Python lies in pitting a seemingly normal person against a representative: a sales clerk, a policeman, an office secretary, or the Spanish Inquisition. The normal person just wants things to go normally, but the representative delivers up varying degrees of zaniness. Something similar happens throughout The Castle as K. tries one ploy after another to get an audience with someone in charge. In a comedy skit, the persistence of the supposedly normal person itself gradually becomes outrageous. So too with this novel, as K.’s efforts to sneak into the Castle begin to look more like an obsession than a reasonable goal.
On his first full day, K. meets two young men who claim that the Castle authorities have assigned them to K. as his assistants. At first they seem eager but useless, since, without any assignment, K. has no need for help. Soon, however, they become annoying and ridiculous. At one point, K. insists they go away while he talks to his new girlfriend, Frieda.
[The assistants] were not at all exacting, they had simply settled down in a corner on two old skirts spread out on the floor. They made it a point of honour, as they repeatedly assured Frieda, not to disturb the Land Surveyor and to take up as little room as possible, and in pursuit of this intention, although with a good deal of whispering and giggling, they kept on trying to squeeze themselves into smaller compass, crouching together in the corner so that in the dim light they looked like one large bundle.
In almost every scene, they engage in some sort of cartoonish behavior. The assistants don’t have a monopoly on oddness. The unpredictable words and actions of everyone gives the novel a dreamlike, nightmarish, or darkly comic quality. Sometimes K. gets surprised, but sometimes K.’s own actions surprised me. The narrator deliberately withholds the inner thoughts and the backgrounds of the characters, which means that the reader may learn of a surprising action, but only later find out what motivated it. Even in the simplest things, the effect often precedes the cause. K. might hear a noise, and later the narrator gives its cause.
The village lies at the foot of the Castle’s hill, and they both operate by their own complex rules, which everyone seems to understand except K. Often when he complains or expresses frustration to others, they call him an ignorant stranger, an outsider, who has no knowledge of local customs, histories, or rules. He arrives as a stranger and will apparently always remain so. K'.s alienation did frustrate me, but I also felt it could shift at any moment into either quiet horror or absurdity. That uncertainty kept me on edge throughout.
At one point, K. learns that he must to talk to the Village Superintendent for detailed instructions, so K. arranges to meet with him. Unfortunately, the Superintendent has gout and so he conducts the whole interview from his bed. It seems that the Castle once did need a Land Surveyor many years ago, but no longer. The call for K., however, had apparently resulted from a long lost piece of paper somehow reemerging from a mountain of paperwork. As if to prove this point, the Superintendent asks the help of a woman, later identified as his wife, Mizzi. He asks her to look for the paper in a cabinet.
The woman opened the cabinet at once. K. and the Superintendent looked on. The cabinet was crammed full of papers. When it was opened two large packages of papers rolled out, tied in round bundles, as one usually binds firewood; the woman sprang back in alarm. “It must be down below, at the bottom,” said the Superintendent, directing operations from the bed. Gathering the papers in both arms the woman obediently threw them all out of the cabinet so as to read those at the bottom. The papers now covered half the floor. “A great deal of work is got through here,” said the Superintendent nodding his head, “and that’s only a small fraction of it. I’ve put away the most important pile in the shed, but the great mass of it has simply gone astray. Who could keep it all together? But there’s piles and piles more in the shed.”
Much later, after we get the whole history of the land-surveyor mix-up, K. and the Superintendent look across the room to see the progress of the document search.
Mizzi and the assistants, left so long unnoticed, had clearly not found the paper they were looking for, and had then tried to shut everything up again in the cabinet, but on account of the confusion and superabundance of papers had not succeeded. Then the assistants had hit upon the idea which they were carrying out now. They had laid the cabinet on its back on the floor, crammed all the documents in, then along with Mizzi had knelt on the cabinet door and were trying now in this way to get it shut.
I think we all have at least one such cabinet in our homes. (We find out later that Mizzi, despite appearances, actually runs the town.) The Superintendent apologetically insists the Castle does not need K.’s services as a Land Surveyor; however, he may work as a janitor at the village school, if he so wishes. Even though his continued presence in the village no longer makes sense, K. agrees to hire on as a janitor, and keeps doggedly trying to get into the Castle. After many other ups and downs, the novel breaks off in mid-sentence with K. having made no appreciable progress toward the goal that has become totally pointless.
Kafka died of tuberculosis in 1924, at the age of forty, before finishing, and in his will he directed Max Brod, his friend and the executor of his estate, to destroy this manuscript as well as many more. Brod did not do so, fortunately, and instead took the draft of Das Schloss, and edited it extensively to make it publishable. The first German edition came out in 1926, and the first English translation, by Willa and Edwin Muir, appeared in 1930. Kafka, a German-speaking Jew, must have known all about the petty and arbitrary policies that bureaucrats could hide behind as the world around him grew increasingly hostile. His sisters outlived him by a few years but died in German concentration camps, which presumably operated with a high degree of bureaucratic efficiency.
A fellow Substacker, Leonard Gaya, suggested I get a copy of Reiner Stach’s magisterial, three-volume biography of Kafka. I didn’t need much urging, and so it now sits on my shelf, calling to me. I plan to begin as soon as I finish reading about Paul Gauguin. I encourage you to check out Gaya’s newsletter, Paper Knife, in which he plans to spend a full year exploring the life and writings of Kafka.
This novel begs for interpretation, and indeed many people have offered their own. Therefore, perversely, I offer none. I don’t mind sharing my reaction to it, though. After the initial shock at how absurdly everyone, including K., behaves, I began noticing and eventually enjoying the comedy. Perhaps, as some people think, Kafka wanted to present an allegory of the our endless search for God and His purpose for us; perhaps he wanted to encapsulate the tragedy of the individual trapped in a bureaucratic horror; perhaps he wanted to share the agony of isolation from deep human relationships. Whatever interpretation you try to give it, the fact remains that K. takes himself far too seriously, like the straight man in a comedy skit always does. You must judge for yourself the proper level of irony in the narrator’s voice. You must choose whether to feel outraged or amused. As for myself, if I had identified too strongly with the straight man, I know I would have missed all the jokes.
§ § §
Next week, I think I’ll get back to reading the Mahābhārata, since I’ve let that slide for too long. I’ll tackle Volume 6, which will take us almost to the end of the Kurukshetra War.
Thank you for reading these reflections on great works of literature. If you haven’t already subscribed, please consider doing so for free and receive each reflection in your in-box as soon as it comes out (I shoot for once a week, but sometimes I just can’t manage that). If you already have a free subscription and wish to support me further, consider upgrading to a paid subscription. I try to buy only hardback copies, and I much prefer used books, so I can promise to put your paid subscriptions to work right away.
Works mentioned in this post
The Castle, by Franz Kafka
Kafka: The Early Years, by Reiner Stach
Kafka: The Decisive Years, by Reiner Stach
Kafka: The Years of Insight, by Reiner Stach
Mahābhārata 6, translated by Bibek Debroy
The translators capitalize “Castle,” “Land Surveyor,” “Superintendent,” and other words, so I try to stay consistent with them.
This diabolical game, sometimes called “Snakes and Ladders,” has one hundred squares that you must traverse to win. In the version I played as a child, you determine how many squares to move on your turn with a spinner that lands on a number between one and six. Some squares are marked as one end or the other of a chute or a ladder. If you land on the bottom of a ladder, you get to move ahead a lot of squares; if you land on the top of a chute, you move backward a lot of squares. I believe the phrase, “back to square one,” originated with this game.
From your description, it makes me think not only of Monty Python but also of Through the Looking Glass. I would expect the Mad Hatter to come through at any moment.