A story of human isolation, of man's quest for freedom and validation

books:

	• The Castle: A new translation based on the restored text Franz Kafka Schocken, 1998 - 352 pages average customer review:based on 73 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A story of human isolation, of man's quest for freedom and validation

Franz Kafka is rightly regarded as one of the great writers of the 20th century. His relatively few works have been reviewed and studied ad infinitum, so it may seem rather pointless for me to write yet another review.

But I must confess to a personal bias: Kafka is one of the handful of writers that I can read over and over again, especially his shorter stories. His novels, such as The Castle, are harder going. Complex sentences make the reader focus on the words and the meaning of phrases. It is a bit like savouring the flavours and textures of a delicious meal - not like Homer Simpson wolfing down his food.

The Castle was unfinished when Kafka died. The first edition published in 1927 was finished by the editor based on prior discussions with Kafka.

"K," the principal character in the book, arrives as a stranger in the village below the Castle to take up an official position as Land Surveyor for the region. But he faces an illogical sequence of events and fearful uncertainty, pushed and pulled by the mysterious, all-powerful officials in the Castle that prevent him from either knowing his duties or even taking them up. He never gets to meet the officials who appointed him, but even his contacts with their subordinates is through ambiguous intermediaries.

Moreover, as a stranger in the village, K also faces the petty enmities and opposition of the villagers that increase his isolation and provide a sub-text to the main themes - or, as K would say - is it actually the main theme? These kinds of contradictions recur frequently throughout the narrative.

On a more fundamental level the story is one of human isolation, of man's quest for freedom and validation. That is the uplifting part. But there is a deep pessimism in the book as well. Everything that K attempts seems to fail. The mysterious Castle seems to emerge triumphant in every encounter.

The world has changed immensely since "The Castle" was written early in the 20th century. But Kafka deals with themes that are still with us - and which, in fact, may have become more relevant today.

Governments and bureaucracies still oppress the powerless. Life is still subject to the caprices of fate and officialdom that form central themes in this book. We still encounter pettiness as well as nobility of humanity in our individual lives.

It is not so much the broad story line that fascinates me in this book (although the reader does want to know the ultimate fate of K), but rather the flow of words and the imagery that they conjure up as one reads. In fact, you can enjoy short passages almost as stand-alone stories.

The Castle is a deeply provocative book for readers who care to reflect on the universalities of the human condition and the universalities of bureaucratic desires to control the citizenry.

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a dreamy, utterly inscrutable masterpiece

i'm sitting in a cold, lonely room, headphones on, a lamp dimly gleaming on the nightstand next to me. i've just finished harman's translation of the castle, which i picked up from the library after finishing a muir translation i bought for 50 cents.

the novel tells of the struggle of K., who believes that he's been invited to a town to do some land surveying, only to realize upon his arrival that his invitation was the result of a bureaucratic mishap. he wants answers from the officials at the castle that overlooks the town, but that can never happen - how K. deals with this stark reality constitutes the subsequent "action" of the novel.

reading and thinking about this novel, i feel like K himself gazing upon the castle, doomed to forever struggle against forces beyond his control. i've now read this book twice in a month, and i still don't know what it means, and i don't think i ever will, and i still can't understand K's motivations, and i can't comprehend the workings of the castle or the village or the other characters K encounters. i'll let scholars try to pin down these things, because achieving any kind of certainty is not what this novel is about - if you're someone who'd be frustrated by something like this, don't bother reading. (besides - and i'm no philosopher - i think someone like kafka would resist attempts to assign concrete meanings to events, places, and people.)

why does't K just go back to where he came from? why does he try to marry a village girl only a few days after his arrival even though he has a wife and child back at home? who are his textlinks">new assistants, and what happened to his old assistants? is this village on earth? are the castle officials human? what is happening here?

there are no answers to these questions. and yet - even though the world of the castle is but a blurred reflection of ours - the ways in which they are asked reveals an absolute truth about how our universe works.
i think in many respects, K's unending, doomed struggles to understand his situation and assign meaning to his unfamiliar surroundings mirror our own struggles to not only understand his predicament, but to understand our own lives and perhaps discover the purpose they hold. maybe there's nothing there at the end of our struggles, or maybe there's everything, or maybe we'll be cut off in mid-sentence on the most mundane of days, just like K., simply hoping for one more chance.

in 2001: a space odyssey, arthur c. clarke imagines a world in which the transformation from ape to man was caused by utterly opaque, alien monoliths. despite their central importance to the ascension of humankind, their inner workings and their purpose and their function were mostly hidden, their mystery and necessary knowledge forever obscured. i think the castle is much like one of these monoliths - utterly inscrutable, and yet in the end, absolutely necessary.

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I offer the startling proposal that Franz Kafka's The Castle is

I offer the startling proposal that Franz Kafka's The Castle is, after all, about life as it is lived by all of us.

The novel is difficult for us "post post moderns" for several reasons.

The first is that the action is set in a time and place which no longer exist: Prague in the Austro-Hungarian Empire before and possibly during World War I.

Kafka's readers were familiar with the social structure and physical description of the village and Castle of his story. But it is not easy for us to understand the relative rank and relationships between the Count Westwest, the Count's authorities, the villagers, peasants, officials, stewards, substewards, lawyers, domestics, gentlemen, chairmen, chamber maids, coachmen, school teachers, innkeepers, land surveyors, gentleman's servants, fire chiefs, shoe makers, and so forth. But we have to form an imaginative relationship with and between all of them so that we can enter into the complex of social and psychological relationships presented in the book.

The geography of the village and especially of the Inn, with its corridors, tap room, etc. is presented in vivid detail but is unlike anything we are likely to encounter in modern life, and therefore it seems almost dreamlike even though it was obviously part of Kafka's daily experience and is in no way "Kafkaesque."

A third difficulty is the extraordinarily dense nature of the story. The plot of The Castle has been described as simple, and in fact it is simple. But the story has layers and layers of detailed information that interweave, are clarified and sometimes contradicted by the skein of events, and detailed reactions to the events, that run through 25 chapters. We need a map of characters and their relationships with each other to separate the planned ambiguities from the unplanned. Otherwise we quickly become lost in maze of detail, which was not Kafka's intention.

A fourth difficulty is the humor. Humor does not usually travel well, either in time or space. But whether we get all the jokes or not, it is obvious that The Castle is full of humor, from slapstick and pranks all the way to paradox, the absurd, high irony and self-mockery. We need to be on the lookout for humor, everywhere.

Kafka loved Charlie Chaplin and we should not forget that fact while reading The Castle. Chaplin's film, The Tramp, opens with tramp walking down a dusty road with a walking stick and a small -- do we dare say "rucksack?" I would bet that Kafka was inspired to open The Castle with the same image. Chaplin's film, A Dog's life, opens with a tramp gazing up at what looks like a castle with a flag flowing over its crest, and I would wager that Kafka's The Castle was influenced by that film and its opening image as well. To get into the right mood for reading The Castle, I recommend watching both of these silent movies.

Ludwig Wittgenstein once said that "a serious philosophical work could be written that would consist entirely of jokes." The Mathematician John Allen Paulos points out a relationship between the humor of Groucho Marx and the philosophical work of Bertrand Russell and George Pitcher in "Wittgenstein, Nonsense, and Lewis Carroll" shows the same relationship between the humor of Carroll and the philosophy of Wittgenstein. I propose, for someone else to show with quotations, that Kafka does the same with the thought of the Danish thinker Soren Kierkegaard. In fact, the entire novel, The Castle, seems to me to be an absurd and often humorous meditation on the famous saying of Kierkegaard "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards."

As an example of high irony and self-mockery, one of the characters, Amalia asks K, in response to his professed interest in the Castle,

"The influence of the castle? ... do you really care about such stories? ... there are people who feed on such stories ... but you do not strike me as one of them." "Yes I am," said K, "I am indeed one of them, whereas I am not greatly taken by those who do not concern themselves with such stories and simply make others concern themselves with them." "Well yes," said Amalia, "but people are interested in different ways, I once heard of a young man whose mind was taken up day and night with thoughts of the Castle, he neglected everything else, people feared for his ordinary faculty of reason since all his faculties were always up at the Castle, but in the end it turned out that it wasn't actually the Castle he was thinking of but only the daughter of a scullery maid at the offices, he got her, and then all was fine again." "I would like that man, I think," said K, "As for your liking that man," said Amalia, "I'm not so sure about that, but you might like his wife. Now don't let me disturb you, but I am going to bed ..." p. 205 (All quotes are from the Harman translation published by Shocken Books.)

There are many examples of prankish, almost slapstick humor such as the following,

"Erlanger .. he's known for his memory and for his ability to judge people, he simply knits his brow, that's all it takes for him to recognize anyone, often even people whom he's never seen before, whom he has only heard or read about, and in my case, for instance, he could hardly have seen me before. But though he recognizes everyone right away, he asks first (who you are) as though he were unsure."
p. 238

"[Brunswick] is actually quite quick. It's one form his stupidity takes." p.68

"So you are merely acquainted with the office furnishings at the Castle?" K asked [the chairman] rudely. "Yes," said the chairman, with an ironic and yet grateful smile, "they're the most important things about it." p.67

"... and since the chair stood by the bed they stumbled over it and fell down ... She sought something and he sought something, in a fury, grimacing, they sought with their heads boring into each other's [...]; their embraces and arched bodies, far from making them forget, reminded them of their duty to keep searching, like dogs desperately pawing at the earth they pawed at each other's bodies, and then, helpless and disappointed, in an effort to catch one last bit of happiness, their tongues occasionally ran all over each other's faces. Only weariness made them lie still, and be grateful to each other. Then the maids came up, "Look at the way they're lying there," one of them said, and out of pity she threw a sheet over them. p. 46

Another difficulty that must be overcome is that there are many long speeches where it isn't certain which character is talking. Sometimes it seems as if an omnipotent narrator is telling the story but then it becomes clear, or we recall, that it is one of the characters presenting his unique point of view of events and people. Also, it is important never to forget that K (the main character) and the narrator are not the same person (and, of course, that neither is Kafka!)

Then there is the planned ambiguity. For example K has been called to the village by the Castle to be a land surveyor. But in the first chapter, this is cast into doubt by a telephone call from the Bridge Inn to the Castle, which fails to corroborate this important "fact." A few minutes later, a call comes from the Castle to the Bridge Inn to report that an error has been made and that K was, in fact, called by the Castle to be a land surveyor.

It is crucial for understanding the story that we separate the planned confusion from our own confusion that results from not understanding what we are reading. A typical reader simply concludes that his own confusion and Kafka's planned confusions are the same.

The Castle is very complex. The complexity is impossible to clarify here, obviously, but most of the complexity is not in actions and events, such as Amalia tearing up a piece of paper and throwing it at a messenger, but in the emotions and reactions produced in a family, in the entire village and even the officials of the Castle by seemingly trivial actions. Unraveling these complex emotions and relationships is the most challenging task presented to us by The Castle.

The last difficulty that I would like to point out, and perhaps the hardest one for many readers, is the problem of thinking that Kafka is not describing the world as it is but only a surrealistic, crazy world where nothing makes sense. But, in fact, Kafka is describing the world as it still exists today. He is describing the psychology of real people who are still alive and functioning in corporations, schools, churches, universities and governments in America and the rest of the world.

We must enter into the world of The Castle expecting to find ourselves and the people we've encountered in our own lives if we want to make sense of it, to appreciate it for the great work of art that it is and to appropriate it for our own needs which are immense.

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hilarious, you really need to read it yourself

Hearing about Kafka's work is not enough: you really need to read it and experience it yourself. It's hilarious, and unfortunately all too true.

In this book, a surveyor, named K., arrives in a village and tries to get in to the castle in order to get permission to stay there and do his work, but falls into a quagmire of disfunctional bureaucracy. This may sound like a dreary read, but the book is really very funny, and reminded me too much of the real world. K spends most of the book on a fruitless quest to meet an official named Klamm who might be able to help him get into the castle. I laughed out loud at some of the ridiculous conversations he has with some of the villagers, and later I gasped in amusement and dismay as I learned more about this twisted world.

Kafka never finished writing this book, and the restored text, of which this is a translation, ends in the middle of a sentence. However this doesn't really make it any less satisfying to read. While it is not clear where the last couple of pages are going, just before that there is a long paranoid rant by one of the villagers which is great.

This translation seems to be more accurate than the older, Muir translation. There are some things that sound kind of weird here, but they sound weird in the original too.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

Based on the restored text of Kafka's masterpiece, Mark Harman's acclaimed translation is "the closest to Kafka's original novel and intention that any translation could get . . . eminently readable" (Egon Schwartz, Washington University in St. Louis).

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