This was first presented as “The Power of Kafka’s Castle,” at the Conference on Retaliation, California State University Fullerton, January 28, 2011. It was later revised and presented as “Kafka’s Castle: Revisited,” at The Balancing Act Conference, Claremont Graduate University, March 26, 2011. It is now going to published as “Kafka’s Castle: Revisited,” in Voices of Claremont Graduate University: Student Research Journal Vol. I, August 2011.  Thank you to Stephanie Varnon-Hughes for reminding me of the role of literature and encouraging me by her own college studies of Kafka.

Franz Kafka’s Das Schloß (The Castle) is, in my humble opinion, one of the greatest existentialist fictions ever written.  It contains all of the primal emotions existentially minded readers look for: confusion, isolation, immobility, estrangement, and a dark sense of tragedy.  The protagonist in the story, K., who by all descriptions is a simple surveyor sent to measure the land, cannot reach the Count of the Castle (Count Westwest) no matter how hard he tries.  A play on words is evident here because Schloß can also be translated “lock” and one of the main Castle officials he desperately tries to meet is named Klamm, which in German means “to clamp” and in Czech means “illusion.”  K. soon realizes how desperate his state is, being sent to and fro, never being able to reach the Castle.  It may remind those who have read Kafka’s The Metamorphosis of the attempts of the cockroach to get out of bed.

As with most of Kafka’s writings one can interpret them in a whole host of ways.  They are not written in perspicuity and one has to “look behind the veil” to catch a glimpse of what Kafka may have had in mind.  Walter Kaufman notes this by saying that “ambiguity is of the essence of his art.”[1] Of the multitude of interpretations provided they usually break down into three possibilities: 1) The Castle is a metaphor for God and religion; 2) The Castle is a metaphor for Government and Political Bureaucracy; and 3) The Castle is a metaphor for Heimat, a homeland for people who, like Kafka, never felt at home or had a simple sense of identity.  As far as I can tell all three are possibilities and it is most likely that they are all parts of the multifaceted nature of the story.

One cannot ignore the tragic world Kafka presents in his works.  It is a dark world, devoid of passion, cold and grey, similar to the way he describes K.s entrance to the village surrounding the Castle: “The castle hill was hidden, veiled in mist and darkness…K. stood for a long time gazing into the illusory emptiness above him.”[2] If the Castle is a metaphor for God then Kafka portrays God as elusive, distant, and absconded.  God is like an evil Count who toys with you and keeps you in the dark to toil in futile human projects with an undying loyalty to your “role in life.”  God may be likened to Descartes’ evil demon, the Gnostic Demi-urge, a deus otiosos, but better likened to a dead God.  As Kaufmann has suggested, “in The Castle God is dead, and we are faced with a universe devoid of sense.”[3]

The Castle reminds one of Karl Jasper’s notion of “absolute and radical tragedy,” that “tragic sense of being trapped without chance of escape.”[4] The story of K. is the story of a person discovering the radical tragedy of being trapped in an endless, dream-like, maze.  At the opening K. is primarily occupied with the desire to survey the land and leave, but more and more K. discovers a village where people are scared, overly cautious, and paranoid as if hiding some important truth.  They do not know that their Count Westwest is dead (in German west means “decomposing”) and so continue in a state of mediocrity.

Nietzsche gives us guides on how to move past “the grieving state” of the death of God.  In the grieving state we question whether or not morality can still exist (Dostoevsky), whether or not there is still any meaning to our lives, and we ask absurd questions like  “is there any up or down left?”[5] One way to move past the death of God or the inability to reach the Castle is to take responsibility of your own existence and actions by affirming your life.  You then take the active role in fashioning yourself and not simply being a passive recipient, product of your circumstances, or subject to God’s whims.  Kafka’s tragic-hero, who is no hero at all, is always at the whims of others, be they officials, judges, authorities, etc.  Things happen to the protagonist, the protagonist does not make things happen.  In Nietzsche, on the other hand, we have a picture of the empowered individual “living dangerously” and willing the death of God.  This liberation a/theology is a way of freeing yourself from the wills of the gods and becoming the enactor of your own unique life story.  A classic example of this liberation—preached as if from a pulpit—is found in Thomas Altizer’s The Gospel of Christian Atheism: “the “good news” of the death of God can liberate us from our dread of an alien beyond, releasing us from all attachment to an opposing other, and freeing us for a total participation in the actuality of the immediate moment”[6](I have an earlier post addressing Altizer and Death-of-God theology).

This immediate moment is often overlooked and overshadowed when we are in the care (in this case employment) of some authority.  We, like dogs, wait for our Masters command, sit by her leg in obedience and loyalty, not knowing that this Master could easily do without us.  The legal contract between a servant and her Master is of much more concern to the servant than the Master, for the Master has the power to amend, redact, and even wholly replace the contract.  The power dynamics at work between the servant and the Master almost guarantee a natural confusion, sometimes based on the letter of the law and sometimes on its spirit.  K.’s Master, Count Westwest—or those whom he is thought to employ—send K. in circles, often changing their messages to him, and sometimes outright contradicting themselves.  Upon reading a letter of instruction from Barnabas, a messenger of the Chief of Department X, K. says of its contents “these were inconsistencies, no doubt about it.  They were so obvious that they had to be faced.”[7] This kind of inconsistency is evident anytime one has “power over” another.  If God were the Count—strong, royal, and authoritative—then there could never exist a “power with,” only a “power over,” since “power with” exists only amongst (relative) equals.

After receiving the letter from Barnabas, K. is told to find Klamm, and after instructed by Klamm’s mistress Frieda, K. peeks at him through a peephole at the local bar.  While attempting to subtly extract information from Frieda, K. sees in her an ambition he does not see in many of the villagers.  She made her way from being a stable-girl to working at the bar, as well as being the mistress of an important castle official.  “Your eyes,” K. says to Frieda, “speak to me far more of conquests still to come than of conquests past.  But the opposition one meets in the world is great, and becomes greater the higher one aims.”[8] It is during these first few chapters that K. discovers he is not as important as he thought upon entering the village.  K.’s world is full of opposition, and all the more because he is trying to reach the top.  K.’s discovery of his place in this village is even more troubling when you add the fact that he is in somewhere strange and foreign.  So strange that his romantic affair with Frieda actually exacerbates, instead of relieves, his estrangement.  After lying with Frieda, K. “was haunted by the feeling that he was losing himself or wandering into a strange country, farther than ever man had wandered before, a country so strange that not even the air had anything in common with his native air, where one might die of strangeness.”[9]

This feeling of estrangement, often depicted by Jewish authors of various Diasporas, is central to the writings of Kafka.  The Psalmist of psalm 137 expresses this feeling when he famously wrote: “By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion” (Psalm 137 on Mad Men).  The difference here is that K. went to the village for work and a sense of meaning and not under the compulsory commands of a King.  K. is also so wrapped up in the affairs of the Castle that it seems he has forgotten much about his past.  If the Castle is a metaphor for a Heimat then it shows how out of reach Kafka thinks such a place is.  It exists only in the mind that imagines it, and somehow it forms a crucial place in the lives of the estranged.

The estrangement felt by Kafka can be thought of as more than existential.  It can also be a political and social estrangement.  In the village each member has their role to keep and it does not sound as if there is much, if any, upward social mobility.  It is a unique way of picturing a caste system using the imagery of an old, traditional village, with peasants and Inn’s on a snowy mountain.   The villagers keep to their customs and only the rare individual (like Frieda) desires anything more for her life.  Even though many of these customs are unspoken, when they come to being spoken it is as if they were written down in a long book of conduct.  Frieda’s landlady notes how K. is disrupting the social order when she said that K. is “a stranger, a man who isn’t wanted and is in everybody’s way, a man who’s always causing trouble.”[10] The social system is set up in such a manner that it runs in autonomic and autonomous ways, a kind of “self-regulating” social culture.  One can see its law-likeness by the fact that innumerable thoughts and acts are considered taboo.  K.’s story has much to do with finding one’s place in such a society, even at the cost of offending its culture.

The political estrangement in this novel is depicted by K.’s inability to create change in the system.  K. is constantly discovering his own helplessness to correct what he considers illegitimate rules, codes, and norms.  The distance between Count Westwest and K. is insurmountable as far as this culture is concerned.  It is a political distance justified by obscure and vague rules, most of which hinge on arbitrary and absurd reasons.  Kafka’s famous work The Trial covers more of this topic explicitly, but it is safe to say that The Castle depicts a world confident, if not presumptuously sure, of its assumptions about social norms, class differences, and the incredibly bureaucratic nature of its political machine.

The Castle is a great metaphor for the forces in the world that are beyond your control.  These forces—be they political, social, psychological, or emotional—often push us around and inhibit our growth.  This is why they must always be challenged.  There needs to be people who “push back” against these forces, discovering the cracks of their conventional nature.  The story of K. is the story of just such a person.  One who asks the impossible, challenges authority, and fights for freedom.  The pain and confusion K. feels resonates with those who, like Atlas, have felt the pressure of the world on their backs.

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[1] Walter Kaufman, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (New York: Meridian, 1956), 122

[2] Franz Kafka, The Castle (New York, Modern Library, 1969), 1

[3] Walter Kaufmann, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (New York: Meridian, 1956), 122

[4] Karl Jaspers, Tragedy Is Not Enough (New Haven: Archon, 1969), 30

[5] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 181

[6] Thomas J. J. Altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheism (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1966), 145

[7] Franz Kafka, The Castle (New York, Modern Library, 1969), 31

[8] Ibid, 50

[9] Ibid, 54

[10] Franz Kafka, The Castle (New York, Modern Library, 1969), 63-4