The Castle (1926) by Franz Kafka

If memory serves me correctly, in The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus writes of Kafka as a writer of the absurd, which describes the unrelenting tension between human thirst for clarity in a silent, unresponsive, and Godless world. In The Castle, K. the land surveyor is called to the Castle to engage in land survey work—the land surveyor, one who imposes rational cartesian order?—almost 300 pages and five days later, K. makes no progress towards gaining admittance to the Castle. Throughout the five days, K plods along, stuck in restless snowfall, trapped in small dark homes and labyrinthine tunnels, mired in senseless bureaucratic procedures to which, he, as an outsider, finds incomprehensible, and meeting (and engaging in relations) with the town’s inhabitants, who follow the Castle’s absurd logic.
 
To them, K the stranger is outside of their categorizations of the world, his fruitless journey is one that strives to earn bureaucratic and “categorical” recognition. Un-cultured and un-disciplined in their ways, he is dirt or matter out of place (Mary Douglas’ famous phrase in Purity and Danger)—his complete powerlessness is a source of generative power, of danger to the purity of their set categories.
 
What is the Castle? Shrouded at times in fog and snow, perched upon a hill, the Castle is an undetermined signifier, at times a metaphor, an image, a symbol; never is it the case that the Castle is a castle is a castle. The Castle is the fountain from which the bureaucracy stems; however, it is foolish to reduce Kafka and the Castle to a libertarian nightmare and read it as a critique of the government as limiting individual freedoms. As in some of Kafka’s other works (e.g., The Trial, Before the Law), transgression against the bureaucracy is also a sin: there is a layering of religious and juridical meanings. The Barnabas family exemplifies these dual meanings: they were once well-to-do family that fell from grace and repute after the slightest mark of transgression in a dispute with a Castle official.
 
Kafka never managed to complete The Castle, it is perhaps for this reason that, stylistically, The Castle is wordy and is full of paragraphs stretching dozens of pages—we are in a different territory from his taut and terse short stories, some of which are only a few sentences. (These short stories are potent: I watched a video of Judith Butler lecturing for 45 minutes on one two/three paragraph story.) The congested writing works for the purposes of the novel—as K. plods along, we, the readers plod along with him in Kafka’s dense writing.
 
In the excellent introduction to the novel by Idris Parry, Parry writes that Kafka “understands the Fall as a present situation, our condition of self-awareness, not as an event which took place on a particular day in the remote past… ‘Only our concept of time,’ he says in one of his notes, ‘leads us to call the Last Judgement by that name. In fact, it’s a court in standing session.’ In other words, it’s taking place now, all the time” (p. xviii). Reading The Castle is like experiencing the Fall, the state of disintegration, the loss of harmony. Or perhaps it could be read as an exemplification of the secular, God-less state, if we return to Camus’ concept of the Absurd. With the death of God, there is no more hope for the redemptive power of transcendental meaning.
 
The manuscript of The Castle ends mid-sentence: “She held a trembling hand out to K. and made him sit down beside her, she spoke with an effort, it was an effort to understand her, but what she said” (p. 297). Kafka’s unfinished manuscript denies any meaningful closure—it ends in the tritone—the readers are imprisoned without resolution just as K is trapped in
 
 

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