Riffs on Franz Kafka’s The Castle (#11)

I’m going to borrow a format from a blog I admire - Edwin Turner’s Biblioklept. Turner writes some fantastic reviews. What I like the most about his blog, though, are his “riffs”, posts that are just written about some theme that caught his eye, or a collection of lightly polished notes about the book.

So instead of writing a full review on Franz Kafka’s The Castle - which I read for the first time in a decade(!) last week - I’ll be writing some riffs. I have a deadline to hit and I think that’s what Kafka would have wanted anyway. (Well, he actually wanted Max Brod to burn his manuscripts, but that’s another story…)

To set the stage, The Castle is an unfinished novel that describes the travails of a land surveyor, named K., who makes his way to a village that is adjacent to a castle. Upon arriving at the village, he is given a message that he is to report to the village mayor. The village mayor tells K. that he does not have any land surveying work for him to do, but he can fill in as the school janitor instead. K. - adamant that the powers that run The Castle actually summoned him for surveying work - attempts to penetrate The Castle’s bureaucracy. But he is completely frozen out of the power structure of The Castle and is unable to make contact with villagers who will help him. Along the way, he finds himself saddled with meddling, annoying assistants named Arthur and Jeremias, engaged to a barmaid named Frieda, and taken into the confidence of the village pariahs, the family of Barnabas, Olga and Amalia.

1. K.’s experience in the village is disorienting and frustrating because he is never given a map - or an org chart - that shows the political organization of the Castle. How easy would it have been, if there was an organizational chart with a clearly identified city planner that he could reference?
2. Yet, K. is a land surveyor - his job is map out the social territory of the village and castle.
3. Obviously, the Castle prefers to keep its interactions with the village disorganized to maintain its power and mystery. This allows each individual secretary (Klamm, Sortini, etc.) to bestow favor on villagers as they please.
4. The favor of the Castle is the main object of many villagers’ lives. They crave that recognition. All that is needed to gain the favor is to be useful.
5. Unfortunately, for the Castle, women primarily make themselves useful by submitting to the Castle officials’ sexual propositions. Barnabas’s family is thrown from grace because Amalia has the courage to refuse Sortini in public. The Bridge Inn landlady, on the other hand, lives a life made hollow by the end of her affair with the Castle official Klamm, spending her days asking, “Why did Klamm summon me three times, and not a fourth time, never again a fourth time?”
6. It is unclear what function the Castle actually does. So if the villagers simply stopped believing in the power of the Castle, it would cease to hold any power at all. But they cannot coordinate amongst themselves because, if they did, their neighbors would report the heretics to The Castle and have them made into pariahs just like Barnabas’s family.
7. K. himself is not above using people to attempt to get closer to the Castle either. His seduction of Frieda is partially motivated by the fact that she was Klamm’s lover. He cynically calculated that Klamm would talk to him to try and win Frieda back - but he was wrong.
8. K.’s assistants are potent symbols. K. has difficulty telling the two apart and they drive him to distraction. They are the foils to his skeptical rationality, making jokes when they shouldn’t, convincing Frieda to run off with one of them, and generally being nuisances.
9. Even though the assistants are there to help, K. is burdened by their presence; again, this places K. in the mode of a conscience or Freudian ego, while his assistants are id-like.
10. Finally, the assistants close the novel with versions of the life that K. wish he had - one runs off with Frieda, and the other is granted an audience in the Castle.
11. K.’s primary frustration is that he is not accepted by the Castle for being useful; it rejects his offering of land surveying as a useful skill. This prevents him from being able to assimilate into the village.
12. K.’s skepticism of the Castle and its power is the root of his problem. One could imagine another version of K. that happened upon the village and simply believed everything the villagers said about the Castle. Instead, K. launches an investigation of his own. This makes him a threat. He values truth and independence above community and tradition.