Book Reviews - Review 345

Kafka's masterwork? Some critics think so. It's unfinished, full of internal inconsistencies, and difficult to read, but in conception it is certainly Kafka's most ambitious novel. A man, K., arrives in a snow-bound village at night, expecting to be taken on as a land surveyor by the village's authorities. The villagers are suspicious of him and telephone the authorities in the castle above the village for confirmation of his role. On this first occasion, as on subsequent ones, the response from the Castle is ambiguous: somebody seems to have ordered the appointment of a land surveyor, but it is not clear that it was through the proper channels, or, if it was, that the land surveyor is still needed. K. finds himself in a situation of limbo that continues through the novel: neither accepted nor rejected in the locality, but convinced that he can eventually obtain acknowledgement of both his right of residence and his professional status.

K. bides his time, starts a relationship with a barmaid, Frieda, and gets work as a caretaker in the village school. He picks up information from the villagers about the mysterious, inscrutable and sometimes nefarious workings of the authorities, but with each explanation the situation becomes less clear. Sent from the Castle, ostensibly to help K., are two buffoonish "assistants", who are in fact no help, but clown around and intrude on K.'s privacy.

Later in the novel, K. gets to know a family that is ostracised by the villagers because one of its daughters, Amalia, angrily turned down the lecherous advances of a Castle official. In the village, disrespect to the Castle is unpardonable; to be singled out for sexual exploitation, in this inverted world, is not an insult but a privilege, and to reject the privilege an act of shamelessness.

For all the Castle's dubious motives and and incomprehensible machinery, K. is no less in thrall to it than the villagers are. He has a naive trust that he can approach it on his own terms, while the villagers submit sheepishly to its capricious authority; but his belief in it is as unwavering as its justification is vague.

Tome after academic tome has been written on the symbolism of The Castle. On a shallow level, the story can be seen as a parable of the search for "home". But this view doesn't get one very far: the villagers, under the surface, are no less lost and unhappy than K., accepting joyless subjugation as the price of stability. The Castle's rule is not even overtly authoritarian: the predatory sexual demands of its officials can be resisted, as the story of Amalia shows. Amalia's family is not punished by the Castle, but by the village, which rejects Amalia for putting her dignity before the good of her family. The punishment creates the crime: the villagers have the option of sparing the family, but do not do so, because that would sanction behaviour that holds up a mirror to their own shame.

The villagers, then, accept and perpetuate their own subjugation. Some critics have gone so far as to question whether the Castle has any actual authority, or even physical existence (*). Others consider the Castle a symbol of divine grace or elusive metaphysical understanding. It's all very intriguing. Unfortunately, something is lost between the novel's conception and its execution. Academics have proposed all sorts of explanations for the many continuity gaps. Early on we're told that K. has left behind a wife and family, yet within a couple of days he is betrothed to Frieda the barmaid; K.'s assistants are supposed to be following him to the village from outside, but when they appear they are natives of it; one of the assistants is described as young at one point, and middle-aged at another. There is even the question of whether K. is a land surveyor at all: on one occasion he comes close to saying that he is a fraud. But if that's the case, why do the authorities have records of his application? However you frame these inconsistencies, you can't arrive at interpretations that don't seem arbitrary.

The inconsistencies are irritating, but a bigger flaw is that much of The Castle is quite boring to read. Kafka is a great inventor of images and ideas, but not a great storyteller. This matters less in the short stories and the very linear narrative of The Trial; but by halfway through, The Castle is starting to lose momentum, taken up by the conjuring of new details of its fictional world - details relayed not through action, but through the words of the villagers in discourses that get more and more essayistic, less and less like the speech of real people, as the novel progresses. Parallel with this tendency is the gradual abandonment of paragraph breaks. The writing becomes a stream of consciousness, the author ceasing to follow a plan and yielding to the whims of his imagination.

Had Kafka finished the novel, he might have found an editor tactful and persuasive enough to tighten up the structure, organise it into paragraphs, and bring the erratic punctuation into line. As it is, we're left with the text of the manuscript, which, however one appeals to authorial intentions, can't be considered a wholly successful work of art.

At the time of writing this review, I have not read the final 60 pages. My reading rarely stalls so close to the end of a book, but the combination of the increasingly meandering, longwinded prose, and the feeling that its author has lost interest in his story, are discouraging me from continuing.

(*) Martin Seymour Smith; personally, I find this interpretation perverse.