A reading from Kafka’s The Castle
Like so much of Kafka, it’s a tale of the everyday black magic of life under the State.
Topic: literature
Thesis: Kafka’s uniqueness comes from the way he writes like a realist while the neurotic logic of his plots connects us to the absurd.
I had great fun with my reading of a passage from Kafka’s The Castle, where K. meets an intriguing secretary named Bürgel who may have the key to all of his problems:
I’ve been an avid student of Kafka for a long time. In writing, his hypnotic tone has a way of pulling a reader through long passages of text: one feels like a climber urged up a ladder, stopping after hours have passed to look down in horror at the heights one has reached. What draws me to him, and what causes me to always hold a space for him in my mind, is the struggle of his character’s against the law, an entity which seems to have near-supernatural significance for Kafka.
In Metamorphosis, K. is transformed into a vermin, but for much of the story his overriding concern remains how to obey the law of his employer and father despite his wretched state. In The Trial, K. is wanted by the law—accused—yet the law will not hear his defense. In The Castle, K. travels to the castle to find work as a land surveyor, but on arrival finds that he cannot arrange the circumstances for his hearing to even be considered. It is like The Trial in reverse, where instead of trying to prove his innocence before the law and protect himself from consequences, his aim is to prove himself worthy to the law and build a good life.
As an interpretive tool, “the law” is symbolic of many things, all of which come to the fore to greater or lesser degrees in Kafka’s writing. It can be interpreted as family approval, as social belonging, as “having one’s papers in order” with respect to the State, or even as living in the grace of God.
I refer to Kafka’s writing as a model in my forthcoming book, How to Do Things With Stories. Kafka is notable for blending a realistic style, with regular, spare, rational prose of a kind that would not be out of place in hard science fiction, with a kind of narrative magic. In The Castle especially, the blank face of the law is surreal in its blankness. The lengths to which K. will go to penetrate its bureaucracy, combined with the reverence which the villagers show for it, and the sheer unintelligibility and copiousness of the process itself, all add up to something more than a mere satire of bureaucratic dysfunction. The law with its absurdity is nonetheless perfect, its apparent imperfections driving us to contort ourselves into union with it.
To me, the passage I read in the video is an example of narrative magic. By this I mean it is Kafka penetrating the logic of his story to transfigure it according to his intention. In this case, that intention is to bind K.’s physiology to the absurdity of his struggle, and then to bind K.’s physiology to the reader’s physiology as he struggles to stay awake through the tortuous passages of Bürgel’s monologue, interspersed with the half-dreaming ruminations of K. In this moment, the veil of K.’s conscious struggles are nearly pulled back and we see the absurd riddle underneath: he must struggle, for to give up is to reject salvation, to reject, in some sense, one’s personhood; but in this struggle he cannot succeed, salvation is always his horizon. In this case, it is the horizon of stamina, the point at which consciousness is no longer possible with any degree of effort, where he is almost shown deliverance from all his wretched strivings.
In How to Do Things With Stories, I present the idea that Kafka’s stories have an unusual structure: the worst tensions are at the beginning, before the numbness of absurdity gradually seeps in, both to the narration and to the protagonist himself. In being crafted this way, Kafka’s stories serve a destructive role. They do not call us to rebel against the law, but they eerily portray the impossibility of measuring up. They portray a law that cruelly foreordains us to failure. This structure makes Kafka, despite an apparent dryness of humour (although I hope I show through the reading that he can indeed be very funny), an excellent satirist. He is a satirist of life in a state where personhood is measured, judged, and regulated from afar.
How to Do Things With Stories will be published end of August, 2021.