Additional Note
At this point, which indicates an important, probably a decisive defeat for the hero, Franz Kafka’s posthumous novel does not end, but goes on still for a good stretch further. Next comes a new defeat. For the first time a Castle secretary speaks kindly to K.—even his kindness, however, gives cause for certain doubts; but all the same it is the first time that a functionary of the Castle shows good will and actually declares himself ready to intervene in the affair—which is not really in his province, however (here lies the catch)—and so help K. But K. is too tired and sleepy to be able even to put this offer to the test. At the decisive moment his bodily powers fail him. There follow scenes in which K. strays farther and farther from his goal. All these episodes are only outlined in their preliminary and tentative stages. As they are unfinished I am reserving them for a supplementary volume (as I did with the unfinished chapters of The Trial).
Kafka never wrote his concluding chapter. But he told me about it once when I asked him how the novel was to end. The ostensible Land Surveyor was to find partial satisfaction at least. He was not to relax in his struggle, but was to die worn out by it. Round his deathbed the villagers were to assemble, and from the Castle itself the word was to come that though K.’s legal claim to live in the village was not valid, yet, taking certain auxiliary circumstances into account, he was to be permitted to live and work there.
With this echo of Goethe’s “Wer immer strebend sich bemüht, den dürfen wir erlösen” (certainly a very remote echo, and ironically reduced to a minimum), this work, which may truly be called Franz Kafka’s Faust, was to end. Certainly K. is a Faust in deliberately modest, even needy trappings, and with the essential modification that he is driven on not by a longing for the final goals of humanity, but by a need for the most primitive requisites of life, the need to be rooted in a home and a calling, and to become a member of a community. At the first glance this difference seems very great, but becomes considerably less so when one recognises that for Kafka those primitive goals have religious significance, and are simply the right life, the right way (Tao).
When Kafka’s novel, The Trial, was published, I intentionally omitted to add in my note at the end any comment on the content of the book; an interpretation or anything of that nature. When later, in the reviews, I read the crassest misinterpretations, such as, for instance, that in The Trial Kafka was occupied in scourging the abuses of justice, I regretted my discretion, but would no doubt have been still more disappointed had I given some sort of interpretation, and in spite of it the unavoidable misconstructions of careless or less gifted readers had remained. The case is different this time. The Castle is obviously not so near its finished state as The Trial, although (just as in The Trial) internally determined all through, in spite of its lack of external completeness, by the complex of feeling which the author was resolved to traverse. This is one of the mysteries and part of the absolute uniqueness of Kafka’s art, that for the chosen reader of those great unfinished novels the conclusion loses in importance from the point at which the main assumptions are more or less completely given. Nevertheless, at the stage at which it was left, The Trial could more easily dispense with concluding chapters than the present book can. When a drawing is approaching its completion it no longer needs guiding lines. Then one uses guiding lines at one’s discretion, and any other data to hand, notes, etc., so as to carry on the drawing to its conjectured end. Of course, in no circumstances will one confuse or mix up the drawing itself with the scaffolding.
One of those guiding lines which I think can be dispensed with less easily in The Castle than in The Trial, leads us back to The Trial again. The resemblance between the two books is striking. It is not merely the likeness between the names of the heroes (Josef K. in The Trial and K. in The Castle), that points to this. (Here I may mention that The Castle seems to have been begun as a story in the first person, the earlier chapters being altered by the author, “K.” being inserted everywhere in place of “I,” and the later chapters written straight out in the third person.) The essential thing to be noted is that the hero in The Trial is persecuted by an invisible and mysterious authority and summoned to stand his trial, and that in The Castle he is prevented from doing exactly the same thing. “Josef K.” conceals himself and flees—“K.” advances to the attack. But in spite of the reversal of the action the underlying feeling is the same. For what is the meaning of this Castle with its strange documents, its impenetrable hierarchy of officials, its moods and trickeries, its demand (and its absolutely justified demand) for unconditional respect, unconditional obedience? Without excluding more specific interpretations, which may be completely valid, but which are subsumed within this very comprehensive one as the inner compartments of a Chinese puzzle are enclosed within the outer—this “Castle” to which K. never gains admission, to which for some incomprehensible reason he can never even get near, is much the same thing as what the theologians call “grace,” the divine guidance of human destiny (the village), the effectual cause of all chances, mysterious dispensations, favours and punishments, the unmerited and the unattainable, the “Non liquet” written over the life of everybody. In The Trial and The Castle, then, are represented the two manifested forms of the Godhead (in the sense of The Cabbala), justice and grace.
K. sought a connection with the grace of the Godhead when he sought to root himself in the village at the foot of the Castle; he fought for an occupation, a post in a certain sphere of life; by his choice of a calling and by marriage he wanted to gain inner stability, wanted as a “stranger”—that is from an isolated position and as one different from everybody else—to wrest for himself the thing which fell into the ordinary man’s lap as if of itself, without his striving for it particularly or thinking about it. Decisive for this interpretation of mine is the deep emotion with which Franz Kafka once referred me to the anecdote which Flaubert’s niece mentions in her introduction to his correspondence. The passage runs: “May not Flaubert have regretted even in his last years that he had not chosen an ordinary vocation? I could almost credit it when I think of the touching words which once burst from his lips when we were returning home along the Seine; we had been visiting one of my friends, and had found her in the midst of her brood of lovely children. ‘They’re in the right of it’ (Ils sont dans le vrai), he said, meaning the honest family life of those people.”
Like the hero of The Trial, K. puts his faith in women who are destined to show him the right way, the right vocation; but yet he rejects every half-truth and falsehood and insincerity; for on no other terms will he accept this vocation, and it is precisely this incorruptibility that makes his struggle for love and integration in the community a religious struggle. At one point in the story, where he certainly overestimates his successes, he himself defines the goal of his struggle: “It may not be much, but I have a home, a position and real work to do, I have a promised wife who takes her share of my professional duties when I have other business, I’m going to marry her and become a member of the community.” The women have (in the language of this novel) “a connection with the Castle”—and in this connection lies their importance, though from it result many things that lead both men and woman astray, also much injustice, real and illusory, for both. A deleted passage in the manuscript (this, too, shows the uniqueness of Kafka as a writer, that the deleted passages in his manuscripts are just as beautiful and important as the rest—one does not need to be a prophet to foresee that a later generation will insist on having those passages printed as well)—the deleted passage, then, concerning the chambermaid Pepi, runs: “He had to admit to himself that if he had encountered Pepi here instead of Frieda and had suspected that she had some connection with the Castle, he would have sought to get possession of the mystery by means of the same embrace which he had had to employ in Frieda’s case.”
A complete statement of the theme, seen, it is true, entirely through an enemy’s eyes, can be found in a fragment (afterwards deleted) from the protocol of the Village Secretary Momus. It is set down here as a good, though very one-sided, survey of the plan of the whole:
“The Land Surveyor had first to try to establish himself in the village. That was not easy, seeing that nobody needed his services, nobody, apart from the Bridge Inn landlord, whom he had taken unawares, wanted to take him in; nobody, apart from the officials who had played a few pranks on him, troubled about him. So he ran about apparently without any aim, and did nothing but disturb the peace of the place. But in reality he was very much occupied; he was lying in wait for his opportunity, and it was soon found. Frieda, the young barmaid in the Herrenhof, believed in his promises and let herself be carried away by him.
“To prove the Land Surveyor K.’s guilt is not an easy matter. One can only get on his track, indeed, when one gives oneself up to his train of thought, painful as this may be. In doing so one must not allow oneself to be turned aside if one comes across a piece of wickedness incredible when seen with our eyes; on the contrary when one reaches that point it is certain that one has not gone astray, then only does one know one is on the right track. Let us take Frieda’s case, for example. It is clear that the Land Surveyor did not love Frieda, and that it was not for love of her that he wanted to marry her; he knew quite well that she was an insignificant hectoring girl, a girl, besides, with a past; he actually treated her accordingly, and went about his affairs without troubling about her. That is the gist of the matter. Now it could be interpreted in several ways, so that K. might appear a weak, or a stupid, or a magnanimous, or a despicable fellow. But all these interpretations would miss the mark. One only attains the truth when one continues full on his tracks, which we have exposed here, from his arrival until his connection with Frieda. If one comes then on the hair-raising truth, one must just accustom oneself to believe it, there is no other course open.
“It was simply out of calculation of the vilest kind that K. made up to Frieda, and that he stuck to her so long as he still had some hope that his plans would succeed. He believed, in fact, that in her he had won a sweetheart of the Herr Director, and so possessed a hostage which could only be redeemed at the highest figure. His one endeavour now is to treat with the Herr Director about his price. Seeing that Frieda matters nothing to him, the price everything, he is ready for any concession so far as Frieda is concerned, but as regards the price he is adamant. For the time being harmless, apart from the loathsome detail of his engagement and this proposition of his, when he recognises how completely he has deceived himself and betrayed himself he may become really vicious, to the limits of his small powers, of course.
“That was the end of the page. There was also on the margin a childishly scrawled drawing of a man holding a girl in his arms; the girl’s face was hidden in the man’s breast, but he, being much taller, was looking over her shoulder at a paper in his hand on which he was gleefully entering some figures.”
The connection between the “Castle”—that is Divine Guidance—and the women, this connection half-discovered and half-suspected by K., may appear obscure, and even inexplicable, in the Sortini episode where the official (Heaven) requires the girl to do something obviously immoral and obscene; and here a reference to Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling may be of value—a work which Kafka loved much, read often, and profoundly commented on in many letters. The Sortini episode is literally a parallel to Kierkegaard’s book, which starts from the fact that God required of Abraham what was really a crime, the sacrifice of his child; and which uses this paradox to establish triumphantly the conclusion that the categories of morality and religion are by no means identical. The incommensurability of earthly and religious aims; this takes one right into the heart of Kafka’s novel. It must be noted, however, that Kierkegaard, the Christian, starting from this conflict of incommensurabilities, progresses in his later works with growing clearness towards a complete renunciation of earthly aims, while Franz Kafka’s hero obstinately insists to the point of exhaustion on regulating his life on earth in accordance with instructions from “the Castle,” although he is forcibly and even brutally rebuffed by every Castle functionary. The fact that thus he is led into open expressions of disrespect for the “Castle,” while retaining the deepest reverence for it in his heart, is essentially what constitutes the poetic mood, the ironical atmosphere, of this incomparable novel. All K.’s vilifications merely show what a gulf there is between human reason and divine grace; a gulf seen from the wrong end of the perspective, of course, from the human end, so that the human beings (K. as well as the pariah family of Barnabas) are apparently completely in the right, and yet in some incomprehensible way always turn out to be in the wrong. This relationship between man and God, running as it were along a distorted plane, and the fact that reason cannot bridge the gulf, could not be better expressed (and that is why on closer inspection the apparently bizarre form of this novel proves to be the only possible), than by Kafka’s presentation of Heaven as seen by human reason, which he gives with magical humour, showing heavenly powers now as objects of the greatest love and reverence, such as Herr Klamm (Ananke?) enjoys, and now as subjects for scornful criticism, both of the clever and the silly kind, even at times as utterly incompetent (the filing of the village documents), or as disreputable, moody or impish (the assistants), or as pedantic and narrow-minded; but in every case as inexplicable. The nuances with which Kafka describes his heavenly powers are not all on one note, but show an endless and delicate gradation both in tragedy and in tragicomedy. And he has an equally rich range of expression for the obverse of heavenly guidance, earthly blundering.
“Whatever one does, it’s always wrong”—this theme could not be played on with more convincing and inventive variation than in K.’s many vain attempts to get himself into the right relationship with the village and the Castle. How help always turns up for him where it is least expected, and, on the other hand, how all his best-laid plans come to a miserable end—in cognac drinking, for instance—how the smallest temptation leads him into ruin (“The Country Doctor.” “Once answer a false ring at your night-bell, and you can never repair the mischief”), and how in his bewilderment he lends an attentive ear to the world, which gives either no answer at all or the most ambiguous answers, to his eternal question concerning good and evil, yet how in the depths of his soul persists the inexpugnable hope that he will find the one right way which is made for him as he for it (“Before the Law”): all this hotch-potch of values and intuitions, of all the limitations, vaguenesses, quixotisms, difficulties, and even sheer impossibilities of human existence, and with it all, faintly glimmering through the confusion, the dawning belief in a higher order of things: all this seems to me to have been completely expressed in Kafka’s novel The Castle, expressed both with intellectual and with adequate emotional force, two elements which are inextricably blended in the book. The thoroughness with which the detail is worked out—perhaps here and there a matter for surprise at first—is indispensable for the completeness of the expression; and this will be misunderstood only by those who have never tried to come to a conclusion about some given fact in life (Napoleon, for example) and to fit it into a conception of “the right way” (whether right for one man or for all men). What Olga says about Barnabas’s letters is true of all the things in life that one examines seriously: “The reflections they give rise to are endless.” Or as is said in a deleted part of the story: “If you have the strength to look at things steadily, without, as it were, blinking your eyes, you can see much; but if you relax only once and shut your eyes, everything fades immediately into obscurity.”
As one who possessed both the strength and the capacity to keep his eyes open with unusual energy, animated by the deepest love (a love often full of bitterness and yet how tender!) Kafka, to use his own sober language, “saw much,” much that was never previously divined.
In editing this posthumous work of his I have again followed the lines indicated in my note appended to The Trial, as regards both the material and the manner of presenting it. Nothing, of course, has been altered. Only obvious slips have been corrected. I have further introduced chapter divisions at some few places. The other chapter divisions were indicated in the manuscript by the author himself, and the subheadings in the Olga episode are also his work. The manuscript as a whole was given no title, but in conversation Kafka always referred to it as “The Castle.” For the reasons already given I have omitted the last pages; I have also omitted two passages of about a page in length, one from the scene between K. and Hans, and one from the Gisa-Schwarzer episode; passages of no importance for the succeeding narrative, and which would only have taken on a recognisable significance in the further development of the whole.
Max Brod.