How Kafka Resists Boxes

His themes almost always have more ambivalence than they first appear

Welcome to the Unsolicited Advice Reading Group! At the moment we are discussing Franz Kafka’s wonderful book The Castle, and our schedule is as follows:

Saturday 9th May: Up to chapter 5 - “At the Mayors”

Friday 15th May: Up to chapter 10 - “In the street”

Friday 22th May (sorry again!): Up to chapter 15 - “At Amalia’s”

Friday 29th May: Up to chapter 20 - “Olga’s Plans”

Friday 5th June: Up to the end of the book

Saturday 6th June: Live discussion call (for paid subscribers only)

The chapters we’ll look at today actually build quite nicely on the two themes we’ve examined in our previous two posts: namely the guilt of K., and to what level it stretches, and the ever-so-slightly bizarre psychosexual dynamics the character has with both Frieda and Klamm. And of course, since this is Kafka, these two ideas are not neatly separable, but feed into one another until it is hard to tell where guilt ends and where attraction begins.

Firstly, in these chapters we get confirmation of what we mentioned in the last post - that K,’s attraction to Frieda is at least partly mediated through her close connection to Klamm. When K. arrives at his new appointment we get the following description of Frieda:

“K. sat in one of the desks and watched her weary movements. Always before it had been vigour and resolution that made her insignificant body beautiful, now that beauty was gone. A few days of living with K. had sufficed to achieve that. Working in the bar had not been easy, but it had probably suited her better. Or was being away from Klamm the real cause of her decline? It was Klamm’s nearness that had made her so madly alluring, in that allurement she had snatched K. to her and now she was wilting in his arms.”

There are two important things to note here: the first is that K. partly blames himself for her conditions, and the second is that her attraction is intimately linked to her connection with Klamm. Though Kafka leaves the precise connection vague - is it that she is merely less attractive to K. because her connection to Klamm is weakened, or is it that, like a quasi-metaphysical power, Klamm’s influence makes the people around him more attractive or desirable. If so, we could read that metaphorically as a comment on the inseparability of mimesis and desire, in a quite Girardian way. Rene Girard argued that human desire is always (or almost always) linked to the way others are seen to desire things, and with a broader picture of who you want to be, rather than simply what you want. Thus, if what K. wants is to be the kind of person who would be let into the Castle without much trouble, then this will shape his desires in ways he is not even totally conscious of.

Incidentally, this taps into one of the major themes of both The Castle and Kafka’s wider work - the blurry line between someone being duplicitous, or even malicious, and them simply being unaware of their wider motivations. It can be tempting to ask whether K. is as manipulative as Frieda intimates he might be in this chapter, or whether he is being misinterpreted. But in many ways I think this is a false dichotomy, especially in the kind of stories created by Kafka. The characters rarely are aware of their full motivations, and this is part of what gives the books their particular feel. There is a sense that their actions arise out of the oblivion of their unconscious, as much as it occurs through their explicit decision making. Of course, if you were to believe someone like Nietzsche, or those inclined towards psychoanalysis, this is how many of our decisions work in any case, and Kafka’s characters are, if anything, more aware than we are, because unlike us they do not fool themselves into thinking that their decisions come about through rational process, but are a bit more conscious of the chaos that writhes underneath the surface.

This also emerges in the ambivalent feelings K. holds towards Frieda. Sometimes he places her at the centre of his priorities, and at other times he resents the fact he is doing this. He takes up the position as school caretaker, which he is not overly fond of, partly because he wants to ensure Frieda is safe and with him. However, at the same time, he begins to slowly resent this about their relationship. He comes across as torn between wanting to fulfil the responsibilities he thinks are appropriate to him as Frieda’s fiance, while also feeling uneasy with how this takes him away from his own personal plans. This is, like a lot of the book, autobiographical: if we look at Kafka’s letters to his twice-fiance Felice, we can see that he would quite often waver between wanting to hold her close, and then resenting the implied responsibilities he would have to her as soon as she did get close. We touched on this last time in relation to his father, but it applied just as much to Kafka’s lovers, who he often views as a mixture of threat and treasure.

Speaking of which, the theme of fatherhood, and of parenthood more generally, reappears in this section. First in K. being the subject of a number of parental reprimands, first from the schoolmistress, and second from the schoolmaster. In both cases K. is demeaned and condescended to in a manner reminiscent of how he describes his interactions with his father. In his letter, he details how his father would often make him feel completely insignificant, simply by his general attitude of disdain and disinterest towards Kafka. Similar to K., Kafka did not think that this disdain was totally unwarranted, and his letter is piled high with self-accusations just as much as accusations towards his father. Thus, we see the same dynamic between K. and various authority figures in The Castle that Kafka had with his father - a broad condemnation and condescension that, while not perceived as totally unwarranted, is still unwelcome and in some sense “goes too far”. The complex feelings Kafka has about his father cannot be encapsulated in a mere victim-oppressor dynamic. It is far more akin to an inner tension between Kafka’s judgement that an injustice of some kind has been done to him, and his sense that, even if this were the case, he would probably deserve it.

This ambivalence is evident in the exchanges between Frieda and K. towards the end of this section. If we were to read The Castle as simply apologia for K., then we would expect the confrontation between K. and Frieda to go something like this: Frieda accuses K. of being manipulative and self-interested with both her and the child Hans, and thus Frieda joins the ranks of people condemning K., despite K. being able to answer every one of her concerns. In fact, we see something far more complex. K. agrees with the general thrust of Frieda’s critique, and attempts to defend himself in its details. But as a reader, we are not given any indication from the omniscient narrator as to which of these two perspectives on K.’s character is right. Moreover, K. himself employs some dubious lines of argument in his response, such as repainting Frieda’s concerns as her being puppeteered by the Landlady. In my view, this marks a development in the way that Kafka treats his protagonists. In The Trial, Joseph K does sometimes behave unreasonably, but on the whole he is a far more sympathetic figure than K., and far less overtly dishonest and calculating. That is not to say that K. is a straightforward villain either. Instead, I think this reinforces both Kafka’s ambivalence about himself (since K. is undeniably part-autobiographical), and thus the further ambivalence of K. as a character.

We also see K. become more and more desperate during these chapters, as he seizes on the hope that helping Hans’ mother will somehow put him in connection with the Castle. There is in general a decreasing plausibility in each of K.’s numerous attempts to enter the Castle or to contact Klamm. At the beginning of the novel he just assumed that the Castle would be his destination, then he set about getting to Klamm in-person, and through Frieda, who undeniably has a personal connection there, but now he is reduced to fighting for whatever scraps of hope he can find. Not only that, but he has taken on more of the theological underpinnings with which the denizens of the village treat Klamm and the Castle. In his exchange with Barnabas, he attributes a kind of divine inscrutability to Klamm’s mind. The book itself often approaches Klamm in the extremes of reverence and disgust. When K. perceived him at the Count’s Arms earlier, he was described in quite unattractive terms (which is notable partly because Kafka is no stranger to describing his male characters as attractive), yet the narrative itself often ascribes to Klamm powers to foreknowledge (such as his ability to know that K. was waiting in his carriage, and so avoid exiting the inn at that moment). However, at other points Klamm’s knowledge is revealed as flawed or incomplete, such as when he writes to K. that he is very satisfied with K.’s progress in land surveying, even though K. has not done any land surveying yet, and indeed the Mayor said it was totally unnecessary. Such tension in the descriptions of Klamm should warn us against equating him with any mainstream interpretation of an Abrahamic deity. Instead, it will take careful unpacking over the rest of the book to see where Klamm could plausibly fit, theologically speaking. At the moment I lean towards viewing him through some strain of gnosticism, but that may be my own penchant for gnosticism more than anything else.

It may seem at the end of this post that I have raised far more questions than answers. That has been deliberate. I think that one of the most tempting things to do when we encounter a writer as mysterious and multifaceted as Kafka is to try to “neaten him up” by dispensing with as much of the inner tension as possible, and thus forcing him to make exact sense. But the evidence we have about Kafka himself does not indicate he was a didactic writer attempting to argue for a strict set of ideas, but rather that he was led by particular images that he found compelling, and aimed to articulate experience through those images. But an image and its interpretations are not required to fit within neat logical boundaries in quite the same way as a set of propositions might. I think it can be more helpful in the long-term to sit with the tensions in Kafka’s work while we are reading it, and then at the end to try to draw out its strands, seeing where they conflict and where they can be resolved. So if we have to pick between confusion and artificial purification, I think we should go with the former.

Until next time :)