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Saturday, October 16, 2010

The Castle: Easy to read, impossible to (fully) comprehend

The weirdness of Kafka only enhance by late-night insomniac reading - like stepping into the dream that you're not really having. Kafka's "The Castle" a big step toward darkness compared with the better-known The Trial, in that The Castle is much more explicitly sexual - K arrives in the village and is immediately smitten/beset upon by Freida, in days, maybe moments, she becomes his beloved and his fiancee - they fall on each other like animals, described somewhat vividly - people think of Kafka as deeply repressed, but not really so. However: he is a writer of obstacles and frustrations, and much The Castle is about the unreachability of goals - sex, power, security - everything just beyond the vale of perception and comprehension. K proceeds from one strange encounter to another, of course as in a dream, but there is almost a theological aspect to his journey, a contemporary pilgrim's progress (or lack of progress - precursor to Beckett and other postwar European absurdists). Summary: K arrives in village supposedly hired by the Castle (Klamm?) as a surveyor, cannot gain admittance to the castle, at last arranges meeting with the mayor, who tells him surveyor not needed, learns later from landlady (Frieda's mother) in odd sexual scene, long interview alone in her bedroom, that mayor is not powerful, then gets told he will be school janitor - all the while his assistants laugh and romp and mock him and do nothing, always showing up outside the door or window. Is this in some way about trying to find a god, a spiritual center, in a secular, capitalist, postfeudal modern world? The Castle is easy to read and almost impossible to fully comprehend.

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