The final recreation of the concept model for Kafka’s Castle © Oak Taylor-Smith | Factum Foundation

In an essay that appeared in 1964 in the magazine Encounter, Erich Heller proclaimed:

Name almost any poet, man of letters, philosopher, who wrote in German during the 20th century and attained to stature and influence; name Rilke, George, Kafka, Thomas Mann, Ernst Junger, Musil, Benn, Heidegger or Jaspers — and you name at the same time Friedrich Nietzsche. He was to them all — whether or not they knew and acknowledged it (and most of them did) — what St. Thomas Aquinas was to Dante: the paradigmatic interpreter of a world, which they each contemplated poetically and/or philosophically without ever radically upsetting its Nietzschean structure.1

The range of this literature can easily be extended to encompass the Italian tradition of Moravia, the French tradition of Malraux, Sartre and Camus, the Anglo-American tradition of Hemingway, Durrell, Malcolm Lowry and John Hawkes, to mention but a few. What makes Nietzsche “paradigmatic” for this modern oeuvre is the theme that he sounded in The Gay Science: “God is dead.”

In On the Modern Element in Literature, his 1887 inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, Matthew Arnold specified the essential meaning of modernity as it came to expression in the literary culture of the day. It boiled down, he said, to “the eclipse and the virtual disappearance of God.” Karl Jaspers was saying the same when early in the 20th century he asserted that “something enormous has happened in the assumed intellectual and cultural reality of Western man.” And this happening, which has crept into the consciousness of the men and women of the century, is one that accompanies nothing less than the demise of what since the time of Constantine had given intellectual support and meaning to (as most understood it) human life. The death of God was the axis around which the thinking of the first seventy odd years of the twentieth century revolved. “We need a theme? Then let that be our theme,” Conrad Aiken declared in one of his poems. A great deal of modern Western literature has taken as its foundation stone the theme “that we have no foothold,”2 that we are, as Aiken put it, “poor grovellers between faith and doubt,” that our “heart’s weak engine [has] all but stopped.”

In the realm of imaginative writing Franz Kafka is, I contend, Nietzsche’s chief counterpart. This isn’t an original idea. Immediately following the Second World War, W.H. Auden advanced it. “Had one to name the artist, who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relation to our age that Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe bore to theirs, Kafka is the first we would think of.” From this gifted Jew, who died in 1924 at the age of forty-one, we get one of the 20th century’s archetypal presentations of the modern hero. In his stories and novels Kafka makes public a secret nightmare that has been dreamt over and over again on pummelled pillows. The man at the center of Kafka’s fiction is an individual lost.

Each man lost, in some blind lobby, hall, enclave, Crank cul-de-sac, couloir or corridor of Time. Of Time. Or self: and in that dark no thread …3

“We were fashioned to live in Paradise,” says Kafka in a note to the stories and parables collected in The Great Wall of China. “We were fashioned to live in Paradise, and Paradise was destined to serve us. Our destiny has been altered …” The blunt announcement summarizes his view of the human condition. Man has been banished from Paradise. In Kafka’s vision of the human predicament, this world is a world in which, try as they might to accommodate to it, men and women will never be entirely at home. “There is a goal,” Kafka writes, “but no [clearly marked] way: what we call the way is only wavering.” Mystery: black, malevolent, impenetrable, menacing. Mystery everywhere, reflecting the inaccessible secrets of the individual’s own soul and the unbridgeable gulf between each individual and every other. In the world in which we live, it is, to borrow a phrase of Scott Fitzgerald’s, “always three o’clock in the morning.”

This attitude to the human condition finds lighter hearted expression in Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights. The little tramp is picked up by a rich man. The man, on a drunken spree, brings him back to his palatial mansion. There he is treated as an honoured guest. When the inebriation passes, the host throws him out. The relationship between the pair is chronicled hilariously. Intoxicated, the rich man embraces his little friend. Emerging from his stupor, he shows him the door.

The arbitrariness that the tramp experiences expresses something like the senseless fatality that Kafka’s heroes experience as the sovereign principle of their existence. Following his seduction by a village girl, the protagonist of Amerika is dispatched from home to the USA. Upon arriving, he is installed in his wealthy uncle’s New York mansion. One night, as he is preparing to return to the city after visiting some friends of his uncle at their country residence, a messenger hands him an envelope. “To Karl Rossmann, to be delivered personally.” From that point on, young Karl moves around the United States, being taken in and ousted as if he was the ball in a game, hit from one player to another—the plaything of invisible and maleficent forces. This, for Franz Kafka, is the epitome of the world. In the Kafka perspective, which invites rendering in the spidery scrawling of a Paul Klee, insecurity and chance rule. Disorder so orders this world that it does not feel unnatural for a young man to wake up and find himself under sudden arrest for an unspecified crime, even transformed into a gigantic bug. Individuals are constantly trying, without success, to catch the ear of some scatter-brained official. The complaints never reach the right office. One is always alighting on the wrong train. If the right office is reached, one always turns out to have got there too late. It’s a kind of ghastly comic strip that an artist in whom are merged the abilities of a Sterne, a Picasso, a Pascal, a Daumier, a Dali and the early Walt Disney might produce.

“Our art,” exclaims Kafka in his sixty-first aphorism, “is a blindness before the truth …” What, however, is the general outline of this truth? My father used to tell the story of Einstein returning a novel of Kafka’s that Thomas Mann lent him. Kafka, Einstein said to Mann, was too complicated for his, Einstein’s, feeble mind to grasp. Many public intellectuals confessed to the same bafflement.

The various “readings” of those who vaunt their cleverness by asserting that they have found the key that unlocks the secret I will not canvass. On one general line of interpretation I do however need to remark. Over and above his exemplary status in European literature, Kafka has been regarded as an important religious figure; in effect, a “crisis-theologian” manqué. Having misconceived his vocation, he adopted, those who regard him so maintain, a cryptic form of allegorical fiction.

It’s wrong-headed to reduce the works of Kafka so that its explication becomes a matter of noting parallels with the Kabbalah and/or the theologies of Søren Kierkegaard and/or Karl Barth. To permit the exegetical eye to jump from a work of literature to extrinsic considerations is to forfeit the chance of saying anything literarily relevant. In Kafka studies, this approach has frequently prepared the way for another error: seeing Kafka as a modern Bunyan, relating fables of an essential, and in fact Christian, pilgrimage. This, I repeat, is wrong-headed. To approach the tortured martyr of modern agnosticism as a kind of closet Christian requires, indeed, an extraordinary degree of both sophistry and self-deception.

To understand that Kafka is a torchbearer of what came to be referred to as the post‑Christian age is not ipso facto to foreclose on the possibility that his art does give expression to a profoundly religious-like ordeal. Günter Anders, in Franz Kafka,4 takes the odd view that what is remote and mysterious in Kafka is an expression of how inaccessible the actual world of empirical time and commonplace history had come to be for him. In the efforts to exorcize all religiosity from Kafka’s fiction, Anders seems blind to the irony with which Kafka occasionally makes a pretense of the empirical actuality of the commonplace. It is particularly in the ironical character of the pretense that the religious-like depth of his skepticism most clearly emerges.

Stories such as “The Judgment,” “The Penal Colony” and “Metamorphosis,” and the novels Amerika and The Trial, all furnish evidence of what is characteristic of Kafka’s vision. In my view the novel which is Kafka’s summit gives the clearest and most powerful expression of the vision. Der Schloss, The Castle, was published in 1926, posthumously. How strange it is that a novel so limpidly clear and flowing and apparently uncomplicated in its prose should evoke a sense of mystery of such depth. The plot is of the slenderest sort. A young man whose name consists of a single letter arrives in a village. We do not know from where K. comes or, indeed, anything about his past. He is identified only as a land surveyor who believes that he has received a professional appointment from the village’s executive authorities. His arrival in the village is not expected, and so, as he finds, no place has been prepared for him. His task becomes that of securing some clear certification from the authorities, who govern from the Castle that overlooks the village. This “nod of recognition” proves exasperatingly elusive. Establishing any kind of contact with officials is a matter of protocols of vast convolution. Documents and proofs, dossiers, and endless reams of “papers” are required. The more K. presses his “case,” the more he finds the Castle to be one big question mark, a world that even long-time residents of the village cannot penetrate. When the locals speak of it, they contradict both themselves and one another. They cannot even say which of the roads between the Castle and the village are used by the officials: “now one of them is in fashion and most carriages go by that, now it’s another and everything drives pell-mell there. What governs this change of fashion has never been found out.” So much at variance with any commonsense view of things is the world of the Castle that even the appearance of the officials is unpredictable. Klamm, for example, who is highly placed in the Castle hierarchy, “after having his beers … looks different from what he does before it, when he’s talking to people …” And the inhabitants of the village can never agree about “his height, his bearing, his size and the cut of his beard …”

We feel that the man may have stumbled into a dark wood because his life has had no foundation, no real home and no deep allegiances. But a foundation is what he wants. The plot of the novel can be seen as deriving its coherence from K.’s efforts to base his life on what he now conceives to be its Ultimate Foundation.

Having no acknowledged place in the village, K. realizes that he needs to obtain from the Castle a formal certification of the appointment. But it’s one obstacle after another. The contacts that K. succeeds in establishing with the Castle—his meeting with the former mistress of an official, an occasional letter he receives from a minor functionary, an overheard telephone conversation, the two young men who are sent to be his assistants—turn out in the end to be worthless. In fact, the villagers dismiss the encounters as figments of his imagination. “You haven’t once … come into contact with our authorities.” “All those contacts [that you have told us about] are merely illusory, but, owing to your ignorance of the circumstances, you take them to be real.”

Despite all this, K. perseveres in his effort to extract from the Castle what he needs to validate his right to exist. His hope remains alive that a face-to-face meeting with the Castle’s chief executive will at least clarify his predicament. Despite that the actuality of it stares him in the face, he refuses to consider the possibility that a principle of arbitrariness is the governing principle.

While doing janitorial work in the village school, K. receives a letter from Klamm, “The surveying work, which you have carried out thus far, has my recognition … Do not slacken in your efforts! Bring your work to a successful conclusion. Any interruption would displease me … I shall not forget you.” From this it appears that a possibility exists of a direct unmediated relationship with the Castle. It never quite occurs, though.

Insecurity as well as uncertainty characterize the book’s universe. It is presided over by an ultimate Authority, but an Authority to the nature of which the Protestant conception of the religious enterprise is irrelevant. K. cannot be his own priest as he cannot personally reach this ultimate Authority. Mystery shrouds the Castle at every turn. This mystery is a sign of the elusiveness of the ultimate truth, the truth that could bring joy and gladness to the heart of K. The human situation as it is portrayed in The Castle mirrors that described in the 72nd Fragment of Pascal’s Pensées:

We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end. When any one of us thinks to attach ourselves to any point and to fasten to it, it wavers and leaves us; and, if we follow it, it eludes our grasp and slips past us and vanishes forever. Nothing stays [fixed] for us. This is our natural condition, and yet most contrary to our inclination; we burn with desire to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation whereon to build a tower reaching to the Infinite. But our whole groundwork cracks and the earth opens to abysses.

K., then, is utterly alone. The foreigner, the outsider, the alienated individual, he is perpetually baffled and thwarted and confused as to the location of the door marked “Enter.” To be sure, he is in a state of alienation from the world of his human neighbours. But defining his isolation in intra-human terms is effectively conceding an inability to account for it. I say this on the basis that K.’s estrangement from the villagers is a consequence of his inability to make contact with the Castle. He cannot secure a position in the human order—in the world of his mistress Frieda, of Pepi the little chambermaid at the Herrenhof, of the landlady of the Inn by the Bridge—until the Castle grants him validation. The Castle does not stand merely for some possibility within the human order. In the novel’s world, the Castle is for K. the source of the ultimate and absolute truth about himself and his condition; it is a source outside the village, outside the world. And the significant fact about the Castle is that it is closed and inaccessible to the human pilgrim. Erich Heller puts it well: “Kafka represents the absolute reversal of German idealism. If it is Hegel’s final belief that the Absolute truth and existence are one, for Kafka it is precisely through the Absolute that they are forever divided. Truth and existence are mutually exclusive.”5

Ricardo Bofill’s Kafka’s Castle (ca. 1970) © Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura (RBTA)

Like the hero of Amerika and the hero of The Trial, as well as the heroes of many of Kafka’s stories, K. faces the future with misgivings, with a lack of trust, and with a longing for something infinitely better. An unbridgeable chasm seems to yawn between the dreary inanity of the quotidian and the Radically Significant. It would therefore seem that anyone who purposes to give an account of the reality which Kafka expresses must focus on the term existence, which, by parts, means “standing-out-from.” The central message that emerges from Kafka’s fictional writings, is, I believe, that the human condition is a standing-outside-of, a standing-apart-from, the Ground of reality itself.

Consider the story of the relation between Klamm and the landlady of the Inn by the Bridge. In one of their conversations, she says this to K.: “Klamm once chose me as his mistress, can I ever lose that honor?... Three times [he] sent for me, but he never sent for me a fourth time!” She asks:

Why should he have concerned himself about me?... The fact that he ceased to summon me was a sign that he had forgotten me. When he stops summoning people, he forgets them completely … And it’s not forgetting, it’s something more than that. For anybody one has forgotten can come back to one’s memory, of course. With Klamm, that’s impossible. Anybody that he stops summoning, he has forgotten completely, not only as far as the past is concerned, but literally for the future as well.

She continues.

Where is the man who could hinder me from running to Klamm, if Klamm lifted his little finger? Madness, absolute madness, one begins to feel confused … when one plays with such mad ideas.

Brief though it was, her affair with Klamm was the most important event of the landlady’s life. The memory of this one illicit liaison enables her to endure the marriage to Hans and to bring the rest of her life to its natural conclusion.

The point seems clear. What gives an individual’s life meaning and/or renders it significant and/or even bearable is often exceedingly remote from how it is actually lived. “When he [Klamm] stops summoning people, he forgets them completely.” That Klamm “forgets” implies that no secure and clear relation with the Castle is possible. To be sure, unlike Amalia, a girl who angrily refused a sexual proposal of Sortini and who, in so refusing, called down upon herself and her family the wrath not just of the Castle but of the entire village, the landlady “surrendered.” The “surrender” did not however make possible any closure of the hiatus between that which renders her life meaningful and hence endurable—the divine—and human life as it is lived. It simply redeemed it from being unbearable.

The impossibility of any chance of closure of this hiatus K. cannot accept. He is adamant that the idea that Klamm forgets “is a legend, thought out moreover by the girlish minds of those who happen to have [once] been in Klamm’s favour.” When the landlady recalls the affair with Klamm, she cannot think of what followed it, especially that part consisting of her subsequent marriage. In that marriage, there is “no trace … of Klamm”; of anything that can be said to exhibit a divine-like quality, either for good or evil.

At one point K. even broaches the possibility that Klamm may have arranged the liaison between the landlady and Hans. Being married to such a man, his former mistress might therefore not be disinclined to come to him should he summon her again. “But,” says the landlady, an initiate and one who surrendered, “it’s next to madness to imagine such a thing, for to do so is to suppose that Klamm had really not forgotten.” To play with the idea of some type of stable relationship with the Transcendent is in her view “next to madness.”

K. does not, however, express and/or exhibit any doctrine or view of life that presupposes anything other than absolute ambiguity. Yet while being aware how remote the Castle’s principal is, K. believes that they can nevertheless come to some type of recognition of and understanding. Hence, he starts up a relationship with Klamm’s quondam mistress. The landlady tells K. that that ploy will not succeed and that the only chance of him getting “a nod of recognition” is by following the protocol of Momus.

Momus, the namesake of that Son of whom the Greek gods authorized to find fault with all things, is Klamm’s village secretary. “Herr Momus,” K.’s landlady explains, “is Klamm’s secretary, in the same sense as any [other] of Klamm’s secretaries, but his official province … is confined to the village … That’s how it’s arranged.” And it is in this official role, as Klamm’s secretary that Momus requests K. to give a report of his activities. He proposes to keep a strict record on K. for Klamm’s files simply “for the sake of order.” K. realizes that in all likelihood Klamm will never see the file. It is however the only means by which K. can hope to gain access. The file will at least appear in Klamm’s village register.

K. does not want to trust his fate to Momus’s depositions. Yet no product less doubtful is ever offered. Like the protagonists of Svevo’s The Confessions of Zeno and of Musil’s Man Without Qualities, like the two tramps of Beckett’s Godot, like Joseph of Saul Bellow’s Dangling Man, like Chaplin’s tramp and like many other modern fictional heroes, K. finally can do virtually nothing other than “wait.” This is so because K. resides in a world where the dominant experience is of the distance and/or even absence of God. And it may well be just that their commitment to such a world that many literary and religious scholars cite the heroes of Kafka’s fiction as conveying the central instances in modern literature of the malaise of our time. The theologian Paul Tillich remarked that ours “is a time of waiting; waiting is its special destiny.”6 Believers even more unorthodox than Tillich have fallen under the sway of the death in ourselves of any power to affirm many of the ways of thinking that belong to the Judeo-Christian religious tradition of the West. “It is,” as Heidegger said, “the theme of the gods that had fled and of the god that is coming. It is the time of need, because it lies under a double lack and a double Not: the No-more of the gods that have fled and the Not-yet of the god that is coming.”6

Heidegger’s formulation of the matter, perhaps even because of a characteristic turgidity, reminds us that for all its religious negativism the kind of sensibility that had been expressed in so much of the art and literature from the end of the First World War is mis-interpreted if interpreted as “sheer undialectical atheism.”8 To assert the absence of God is, in the word that Ronald Gregor coined,9 to “de-divinize” the world. It may well be that only when the world has been radically “de-divinized” that the question of God can be truly asked, as this ultimate question concerns “men as having to do as much with what is not themselves, as with what they do not and never can possess at all, as part of their self-equipment or as material for their self-mastery.”10 The question of God concerns “what comes to … [men] all the time from beyond themselves.”11 It is the question of the Ground of our ultimate dependence, the question of grace. This is a question that can seriously be asked only once the profound poverty of the world has been faced.

So, because of considerations of this magnitude, it is necessary that I approach with care the extreme religious negativism that finds expression in literature that has appeared since the First World War. A novel like The Castle or a play like Beckett’s Waiting for Godot does, to be sure, exhibit man as inhabiting a profanized world—as “waiting,” waiting, perhaps, for some disclosure of meaning and grace that will “redeem the time.” It is however to be remembered that

… although waiting is not having, it is also having. The fact that we wait for something shows in some way we already possess it. Waiting anticipates that, which is not yet real. If we wait in hope and power, that, for which we wait, is already effective within us. He, who waits, in an ultimate sense is not far from that for which he waits. He, who waits in absolute seriousness, is already grasped by that, for which he waits. He, who waits in patience, has already received the power of that, for which he waits. He, who waits passionately, is already an active power himself, the greatest power of transformation in personal and historical life. When we possess God, we reduce him to that small thing we knew and grasped of Him; we make an idol. Only in idol worship can one believe in the possession of God.12

If Tillich in this passage is approaching the truth of the matter, it may just be that such an artist as Franz Kafka, for all of the bleakness of his landscape, is a Heideggerian “shepherd of Being” who by the very resoluteness with which he plunges us into the Dark precipitates us out of our forgetfulness. In some paradoxical way our being deprived of the Transcendent brings us into proximity to its Mystery. This is not to gainsay those who deny the presence in Kafka’s work of any sort of affirmative religiosity. To what extent, after the full stringency of Kafka’s nihilism has been acknowledged, can nihilism itself be appropriated as a discipline of purgation? That is the question. It’s one of the most important questions to ask about the most representative literature not just of our time and place, but of all times and all places. 13

Haim Marantz taught for many years in the Department of Philosophy at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva, Israel. He has worked and written extensively (and continues to do so) in the area of Political Thought.

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This essay is a version of an address that was solicited for delivery at a Kafka conference in the Netherlands. When the organizers discovered that the author was Israeli, they promptly withdrew the invitation. Had Kafka, a self-described Jew who made an effort to teach himself Hebrew, turned up at the conference, he would have been turned away.

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OF RECONCILING BELIEF IN GOD WITH THE RECOGNITION OF THE EXISTENCE OF EVIL

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READING SOLZHENITSYN FOR THE FIRST TIME

The Montréal Review, May 2024

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