Customer Reviews

The Castle (Modern Library, 388.1)

5 star:		(45)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Franz Kafka was obsessed with dreams, and THE CASTLE is his attempt to depict the modern world of corporate and governmental bureaucracy as a crazed nightmare. The novel possesses the logic of dreams, and there is a dreamlike quality to everything that happens in the book. As in a dream, people and situations transform effortlessly into something entirely different, as when one of the young, silly assistants of the protagonist K. suddenly appears to be a much older, decrepit man. Though his transformation is absurd, it is part and parcel of the logic of the village dominated by The Castle.

I first read this novel years ago when the only option in translation was the Muir translation. This new complete translation, which includes a large section that Kafka's friend and literary executor Max Brod decided to excise, transforms the novel into an entirely different book. For one thing, the section that Brod left out indicates even more vividly the degree to which the novel is concerned with depicting the more horrific aspects of modern bureaucratic life. For another, the manner in which the text simply breaks off in mid-sentence reinforces the nightmarish quality of the book, for just as we wake up from a dream, never able to complete the tale, so we break away from the narrative, never knowing what K.'s fate is.

The novel contains more a situation than a plot. K., a surveyor, arrives in a village having been hired by the local Castle, presumably to survey. Instead, K. quickly learns that he may not have been hired at all, and manages to break rapidly a number of laws of which he was utterly unaware and whose logic is far from obvious. In this way we see Kafka exploring one of the great themes of his literature: that all individuals are guilty until proven innocent, and that we have no idea what it means to be innocent. K.'s plight becomes more and more absurd and confused all the way until the point at which Kafka ceased working on the novel.

That Kafka gave up working on the novel isn't completely surprising. His method of writing was to growth the text like one would a plant, not necessarily knowing where the story was going, but instead allowing it to develop as it wished. Unlike virtually every other great writer of the past two hundred years, Kafka was almost completely unconcerned with either character development or with plot. It wasn't that he was bad at character: it simply didn't concern him. He was far more interested in pure situations, as if they were thought experiments. For instance, what would happen if a man awoke one morning to find that he had been transformed into a giant beetle? Or, what would happen if someone were accused of a crime, but knew neither accuser, the crime of which he is being accused, or where his trial was to be held? Or, what would happen if a man showed up in a village to work as a surveyor, but discovered that he had neither a position nor means to contact those who had hired him?

One reading this novel should keep in mind that Kafka spent his entire professional life working as a risk manager in an insurance company. He was acutely aware of the nature of corporate bureaucracy, and the myriad of silly rules and the amount of red tape inundating modern corporate and political life. Some tend towards a metaphysical reading of the novel, and while the book is not immune to such a reading, I think it can be better read on a more concrete social level. Kafka worked in an office his entire adult life, until his tuberculosis forced him to retire on what today would be workers' disability. He knew first hand the degrading, callous, and inhuman nature of the bureaucratic culture that was threatening to engulf modern urban living. Unfortunately, he did not, like K. in the novel, know how to escape the nightmare himself, or give us advice on how we could escape it ourselves.

Those like myself who seldom read fiction but enjoy looking at the world through different lenses may find the reading of this work rewarding. K's travails evoked memories of my time in the military (in Southeast Asia): nothing is as it appears, days of boredom are interrupted by moments of bewildering activity, people have whole menus of hidden agendae, one struggles to attain goals that later prove empty of significance, chance meetings turn out to have been pivotal, and apparently chance meetings turn out to have been carefully staged for one's benefit (or detriment!). K lives in a world very much like ours... where the puppetmasters are unknown strangers, and our companions turn out to be very unlike what they appear. If this novel has any practical value (heresy!) it is as a manual on techniques of 'how to navigate in the dark.' For those who doubt it, one can navigate in the dark, but one must use one's ears (distant sounds of crashing waves, the echoes of thunder, the direction of the seabreezes). The biggest obstacle to finding one's way is a full moon -- one can see the sea, but the stars (far more important!) disappear from view. ... All in all, I liked Kafka's book. As each of the characters around him reveal the reasons behind their bizarre behaviors, they become 'normal' humans, disappointing but less weird. K is in some ways a lightning rod, provoking his very upset neighbors into revealing the reasons for their anger and frustration with him. After awhile one doesn't even care any more about The Castle and its occupants; the village is more real and surviving in it is a lot more important than escaping from it.

Review of "The Castle" by Franz Kafka

This book made me into a Kafka admirer. He brings life to characters in otherwise drab situations and makes them seem very real. The reader feels the frustration, absurdity, the pettiness and the powerlessness in a personal way. You feel the haughtiness and aloofness of the Castle staff as if they were a part of your own community. You feel the pettiness and delusional gossip of the townspeople as if you were seeing it first hand. The story is riveting and the pace seems fast even when there is little action.

The story starts with the protagonist (identified only by his initial, K.) walking to what sounds like a routine surveying job. Soon he is frustrated by a very confusing series of obstacles. As the story develops the obstacles become more chaotic. K.'s original purpose in going to the castle is never fully elaborated and his motives seem lost or stolen. The forces acting upon K. are shrouded. It seems as if some invisible force has plotted to test K. to the limit of human endurance of tolerance of ambiguity.

Kafka combines the themes of:
social class commentary,
alienation from a heartless social system,
absence of any protective power,
salvation,
redemption,
fear of strangers,
fear of change,
search for the meaning of life,
inscrutability of authorities,
indifference of forces ruling human fate,
persistence in the face lost purpose,
abuse of power
and
acceptance of pointlessness goals.

As the plot progresses it takes on a surreal nightmare quality. Is the protagonist having a nightmare, going insane or confronting the reality of his situation?

There is no end to the frustration. We are never told if K. is having a nightmare or going insane. We never discover why K. is so determined to enter the castle that he would tolerate and even join in to the absurdity. His original purpose of doing a surveying job could never justify his struggle to gain admittance. We are left seeing K. as a perpetual outsider. Perhaps Kafka is telling us that there is no end or limit to frustration, alienation and absurdity. Those seeking an answer to the ageless enigma of existence will never find a simple resolution.

This is a disturbing work that challenges conventional notions of plot and character development while testing the readers conception of his/her purpose in life. The Castle will confront the reader in unexpected ways and raise emotional personal issues that would otherwise be repressed.

See:

The Metamorphosis

The Trial

Amerika

Collections:

The Diaries of Franz Kafka (Schocken Classics Series)

Collected Stories (Everyman's Library)

The Zürau Aphorisms of Franz Kafka

Blue Octavo Notebooks

Kafka's Selected Stories (Norton Critical Edition)

Give It Up: And Other Short Stories

Great German Short Stories (Dover Thrift Editions)

I highly recommend this book.

I read somewhere that Kafka used to read the newly-written chapters of THE CASTLE to his friends who would laugh uproariously along with the author. I found this the scariest thing about the book, indeed one of the strongest clues that late 20th century America is immeasurably distant from early 20th century Austria-Hungary. This book will give you nightmares. It is nothing so childish as a Hollywood horror movie, but a somehow crumpled, twisted, horrifying view of human nature, especially as manifest in bureaucracies. K needs to speak to someone to get something done. He approaches the castle where the lord lives. The whole story involves his endless efforts to speak to someone, anyone, who can help him contact the servant who has the ear of the clerk who can speak to the courtier who might be able to talk to the cousin who occasionally is known to have the ear of the lord. And of course, K is continually frustrated. Not to mention you, the reader. It is the stuff of the worst nightmares. Thus, though it is extremely unpleasant,without any hint of beauty, love, or human feeling, THE CASTLE is a most powerful novel, one of the best I have ever read. I can't say I liked it, but it impressed me no end. If you have ever read anything else by Kafka and liked it, you will definitely like this one. It was never finished, but then such a novel can have no finish.

There are so many levels to Kafka's writing, it's hard to write about his masterpiece in such a small space. The Castle is a book that shows a political system the people cannot get in touch with, never really see, and can only guess at. This was written around 1920, pre-Orwell, pre-Huxley, even pre-Anthem, a distopia novel that is better than any others. Kafka's citizens, like America's, can never really contact the Castle like how we cannot ever really contact our castle, the white house, directly. This book may even be considered a work of prophesy by one of the greatest geniuses to ever live.

Another great thing about this book is how is shows nothing ever beginning or ending. K. tries to get to the Castle, doesn't; K. fires his assistants, he sees them again; K. is accepted as the surveyor, he is denied... Nothing seems to have a point, but that in itself is the point. Life is just and endless round of disappoints and no no clear cut endings or beginnings. Life is absurd, and while we may laugh at the antics of the assistants at first, doesn't it get kind of creepy after a while, kind of like you KNOW people like that, people who you can see through but everyone else loves for some reason?

This book is dense, long, and very dark. It may also be (next to Ulysses) the most important work of fiction of the twentieth century, showing us how absurd and useless are lives really are. No one can ever reach the castle, it stands in sight, but we can never achieve the enlighenment or promminence nessicary to get inside. Kafka's genius will astound you, but I would suggest reading The Trial and some of the short stories before attempting to tackle this difficult work. It pays to be "in the Kafka know" when reading The Castle, it'll be much more enjoyable.

Probably not the most recommendable place to start for someone unfamiliar with Kafka, but if you've read other works by Kafka and have enjoyed them, you'll need to get around to this one eventually. Personally, I think it's one of the best books I've ever read. It is true that nothing much really happens, in the typical sense, and that the book is distinctly unfinished and probably flawed on a number of levels. But in some senses this only enhances the mysterious nature of the book. It is utterly surreal and ultimately pointless as a conventional narrative, but rather resembles an epic, highly detailed, inherently meaningful, yet hopelessly ambiguous dream. I find this mix and this atmosphere extremely appealing, and I have never seen it in a purer, more innocently perfect form than here. A book full of magic.

With its labyrinthine backdrop and its claustrophobic atmosphere, "The Castle" is, above all, a novel about frustration: irritation at ignorance, exasperation with complacency, and above all, annoyance with bureaucracy.

And it can be frustrating for readers, too. The book was unfinished; it ends mid-sentence; and the new Harman translation (which is the one I read) attempts to restore the book to its raw, unpunctuated state. Because its themes center on the mindlessness of officialdom and the repetitiveness of red tape, Kafka's portrayal can seem mindless and repetitive. (Nowhere is this more apparent than in the scene where K. visits with Burgel, whose interminable monologue lulls K. to sleep. It worked like a charm on me, too, and I had to reread the chapter.)

Yet the book contains passages both memorable and quotable, characters that are recognizable, and mysteries (however unsolved) that can be fascinating. As a result, it's a book best read in small doses to appreciate both the author's dry (and even slapstick) humor and, even more, the work's satirical bite.

The plot, such as it is, can be summarized in a brief description. Called to work as a land surveyor for village, K. arrives only to discover that the request was a mistake, that none of the officials in the Castle will take responsibility for their mistake or meet with him to discuss it, and that the townsfolk neither know nor care what it is that the officials and their secretaries do. In short, nobody gets into the Castle. Instead, K. is given a job as a janitor in a school, falls in love with a barmaid, and attempts to meet with Klamm, the official who has allegedly been assigned to his "case."

The Castle's functionless bureaucrats cannot be said to impede K.'s quest; they are hardly seen during the course of his stay. K.'s frustration is amplified not by their active interference but rather by their negligence and obfuscation. The result is far worse, since K. can't even identify with whom he should be struggling or how he should proceed. The officials and their secretaries are so busy with their own paperwork and routines that they really don't have time to attend to anything else, least of all concern themselves with problems that have nothing to do with the nothing they themselves do.

"True, they say that all of us belong to the Castle," admits a young village woman named Olga, who sympathizes with K.'s pursuit and who describes how the Castle's insouciance destroyed her own family. "But where in all this do you see the influence of the Castle?" K. responds. "It doesn't seem to have intervened yet. What you have told me up to now is nothing more than the mindless timidity of the people." Not fully comprehending his own revelation, K. identifies that the problem lies not in the Castle; instead it lies without.

This is perhaps one of the hardest books I've read. The sentences stretch for lines, and the paragraphs take entire chapters. but don't let these deterr you: this style only helps to create this existential nightmare, makes it more dream-like. Absurdity abounds this book: K.'s struggle to get to talk to Klamm is rebuked countless times, making him start over again. Pepi's dream to have Frieda's position is merely taken away by Fireda, thus making her start over. And Frieda's plans of are merely thrown away. Martin Buber's philosophy is, perhaps, a greater theme in this book. If you are not familiar with I AND THOU, I recomend reading it, because his philosophy gives the greatest explanation as to why nothing was accomplished. And being familiar with Kierkegaard greatly helps to lead tyo some sort of an understanding behind this enigmatic work. I loved this book and hated alll at once. I may not call it Kafka's masterpeice, though, because I still have to read THE TRIAL. THE CASTLE is hard to get through, but it is worth the effort.

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.

Translation means everything! Over the years I've read much of Kafka especially during adolescence and into my early twenties when his worldview spoke most directly to my own attempts to understand how the world really worked. Of all his books only The Castle totally defeated me. I must have begun it five times in my life, only to abandon it partway through. Now I know why. It wasn't Kafka. It was the translation.

Mark Harmon's translation brought Kafka close to my ear and heart, the way he used to when I was younger. I could see the darkness of his interiors, feel the cold of his snow covered wind blown exteriors, smell the stale beer of the taproom, taste the small meals and strong coffee served, sense the animal []attractions of his characters. Most of all I could really hear the voices of his people as they simultaneously revealed and concealed themselves through their stories.

Sometimes I laughed out loud. Sometimes my hair stood on end at the dark realities which this book unveils. The Barnabas family stories in particular chilled me. Especially in this time of fear and shunning by powerful majorities of the 'others'in our societies and in the exhaustion of the 'cleansings' and genocides of the last century, the fall of that family made me feel like I was inside a hateful part of our past, present and future.

I've now lived part of my life within bureaucratic organizations, even as an 'official' and I understand as I couldn't as a youth how absolutely Kafka has gotten to the deepest truths about how our power structures work. What it's like to be enmeshed as part of them, and-or to be at their mercy. It is hard to find free space in the world.

I used to think Kafka was a genius and an artist of the highest rank. Now, reading him in an excellent translation I understand that he was also a prophet.