Kafka's 'The Castle' And Rejection

There are so many neat-fit interpretations of Franz Kafka's The Castle, as there are of most of Kafka's work. The 'religious search' neat fit; the 'Freudian struggle' neat fit; the 'Jewish diaspora' neat fit; the 'alienation' neat fit. And if you read these interpretations in depth and not just the one that attracts you, you'll find them all, all, equally convincing. That is their problem. So reading The Castle 'plain' - what's interesting?

* Franz Kafka's 'The Castle' - laying out a predicament and then failing to complete his stories.  Surely, Kafka is fascinated in almost all of his writing, with a predicament? And once he's got that down, in all the tangled detail that Kafka is capable of, doesn't he sometimes lose interest in any traditional story resolution? For he has already done what he came here to do.

And right there does he lose a certain readership and keep a different one. These predicaments are shocking and astonishingly imaginative; he peels them apart bit by bit, and explains (not alludes to) the complexities within them. And that's it. The predicament within The Castle is the predicament of a land-surveyor summoned by a remote authority to work for it and to live within the community that dwells at the base of its Castle walls, who finds once he gets there that nobody knows anything about his summons and worse has little interest in him. Once Kafka has fully, and in a detachedly amusing way, laid out his predicament, does he often lose his impulse, that in a sense for him the job has already been done, and does he have a tendency to put the writing aside for later?

And when a Kafka story does have its resolution, is somehow the resolution clearly nowhere near as important as it is in other authors' writings? Very often the stories that stretch to a length that would normally attract a resolution, merely end in the death of the creature in the predicament - the man still struggling to get the name of the crime he is accused of, is executed; the metamorphosed insect in its bed, simply fades and dies; the man waiting to be let in at the first of many guarded gates to 'The Law' simply gets old and dies; the Hunger Artist withers away to virtually nothing in the straw of his cage. There are many other examples of this ending.

For some of us of course it can be more than enough to push some predicament into the slightly surreal, to peel it apart, and to weight it down with - guilt, ugliness, hunger . . . and in the case of The Castle, rejection.

* Franz Kafka's 'The Castle' - rejected people. Oh the rejection! It might be easy to miss just how much rejection there is within the pages of this story. Front-of-stage the villagers, then the Castle bureaucracy, and later on Frieda, all reject K. in their individual ways; the villagers' rejection of the Barnabas family is taking its course; Frieda undergoes her rejections, Klamm is rejected, K. himself rejects his assistants and many of the peasants; and almost equally front-of-stage sings over the telephone lines the surreal distancing the Castle maintains from all the villagers. Rejection surely is everywhere.

For some readers there can be a comedy to K.'s predicament, a slightly cruel one admittedly. But there's a quiet horror to it also. These two different responses to rejection can sit most comfortably alongside one another. From the villagers, from the 'community', K. is quietly refused permission to ever 'be' one of them, and from the Castle bureaucracy he is ditheringly refused his status. He is 'the other' and that can ring true with any readership. For some of us what's interesting of course is the detail, the very words of rejection that come out of people's mouths, and Kafka's matter-of-fact tone despite the disquieting horror of it.

'Gestacker greeted him with the enquiry: 'You're still in the village?'  'Yes,' replied K. 'I've come here for good.'  'That doesn't matter to me,' said Gestacker, breaking out into a fit of coughing, and turning away to the others.'

Above everything lies the detailed and casual rejection meted out by the Castle bureaucracy. It lies there both in an understanding of how the Castle operates, and in the very words of an employee in some degree linked to the Castle.

'The night interrogations ( - ) had after all only the purpose of examining applicants, the sight of whom by day would be unendurable to the gentlemen, and this quickly, at night, by artificial light, with the possibility of, immediately after the interrogations, forgetting all the ugliness of it in sleep.'

'"It might be a long time yet," said a rough voice suddenly, so near to him that K. started. It was the coachman, who, as if waking up, stretched himself and yawned loudly. "What must be a long time yet?" asked K., not ungrateful at being disturbed, for the perpetual silence and tension had already become a burden. "Before you go away," said the coachman.'

And the universal rejection, something more akin to being overlooked, that the plain in appearance or the plain in words are subject to - Kafka won't leave them alone either. He writes a short but a withering sketch of just this predicament, something worth duplicating here in its entirety:

'A really beautiful, lovable girl, once she has settled down in the taproom, does not need to display any arts; as long as she is beautiful, she will remain taproom maid unless some particularly unfortunate accident occurs. But a girl like Frieda must be continually worried about her situation, naturally she has enough sense not to show it, on the contrary, she is in the habit of complaining and cursing the situation. But in secret she keeps a weather-eye open all the time. And so she saw how people were becoming indifferent, Frieda's appearance on the scene was no longer anything that made it worth anyone's while even to glance up, not even the men-servants bothered about her any more, they had enough sense to stick to Olga and girls of that sort, from the landlord's behaviour, too, she noticed that she was becoming less and less indispensable, one could not go on for ever inventing new stories about Klamm, everything has its limits, and so dear Frieda decided to try something new.'

* Franz Kafka's 'The Castle' -  the ignorance of people who simplify rather than face complication. And lastly there sits that eternal gulf between those who complicate and those who simplify. The problem within the world of The Castle is the problem of understanding what's going on around you. Is The Castle the novel that, above all others, most unpacks the complications within all events and even within all statements that people utter? The book is a swollen bag of the minutiae of interaction.

All understanding requires (so The Castle is claiming) oh so much hard thought and hard research and hard imagination. Problems really are not as simple as you think they are, at best you only partly understand what someone else is saying and often you completely misunderstand it, what you think you 'see' is never the complete picture and often is, frankly, ignorant. All things in the world of The Castle are capable of being pulled apart, strand by strand, and their complexity revealed. There is a readership that never gets a quarter of the way through this novel, but, to be fair, the book does itself no favours. Kafka never did a final completion nor a final edit, and this does make it hard-going in places surely.

Pulling events apart strand by strand, in laborious detail. Take just one example in The Castle. A man and a woman have broken-up; the woman is now with one of the former assistants to the couple: why did it happen? Kafka runs through the possibilities.

You might think that had the man not dismissed his assistant, the break-up would never have happened.
You might think that the assistant, far from being moved by a strong love, has always been moved by the lure of an affair with his employer's fiancé.
You might think that indeed this woman's feelings for her assistant are so strong that this marriage is definitely off.
You might think that this woman does not really love her assistant, she only thinks she does; that she is bothered by the grown-up work needed for her future marriage, and that this assistant is the very opposite of that, being a merry irresponsible youth 'fallen from the sky'.

No matter which explanation you choose - you're wrong. There are oh so many people who credit themselves with a superior intelligence above the academics' intelligence, a grasp of what is the case that doesn't require hard learning and that. Practical Intelligence it might be called. Of course they are wrong: they are very ordinary souls unaware of  'confirmation bias'. The actual truth of things is found after time-consuming found facts - data - in all their multiplicity and contradictions and inconsistencies, not any supposed 'understanding' of people. The truth of things is also that there is never one reason for anything, there are always fifty seven. This is one of Kafka's clear (and admittedly laboured) messages, grasped all those years ago and made much of within The Castle.

Kafka is a hypersensitive man shocked by what he can see. He is a man vividly, and sometimes with dry humour, trying to set it down. That is one part of his technique. And Kafka's world is one in which nobody should feel sure that they have a clear understanding of anything.