A labyrinth that Kafka could not escape : The Castle

Even the most ardent fan of Franz Kafka's "The Castle" would have to concede that the novel drags through its last 50 or so pages - interminable monologues by two characters (Olga, Breugel?) discussing the arcana of the mysterious bureaucracy and heirarchy that imbues life in the village beneath the castle. The inventiveness of the earlier chapters is gone, as we're frozen in place with K., stuck as he listens to others - in fact in one instance K. is so painfully tired that he can barely listen and neither can we. It seems as if, like the castle itself, this novel became a labyrinth that Kafka could not find his way out of, and though he apparently sketched out a concluding chapter (in which K. dies), he could not get himself to that point. No wonder he abandoned it - it's one of those strange (few) works whose very incompletion is a testament to the grand vision - like St. John's Cathedral in NYC. One striking thing about the Shocken edition is the preface, pretentiously called an "Homage," by Thomas Mann. One heavy-hitter going to bat for another! Imagine someone of that stature writing an "homage" for a book today. As a matter of fact, there is nobody of that stature. Mann of course has some wise insight into Kafka and the castle, yet he does seem to miss or gloss over one point, the sexual and in particular the homoerotic content of the novel. For example, in scene mentioned above, K. is sitting on a man's bed, and soon finds himself lying on the bed, dozing off, and clutching the other man's feet. Not sure what to make of this but there seems to be a hint that K.'s attraction to the various barmaids, including his fiancee, Frieda, may be a screen for a deeper attraction that he feels toward men: the secretaries, his goofy assistants, the powerful and rarely seen Klamm. Yes, there is a strong religious element, which Mann describes, but also a confusing and tortured erotic element to the novel that's not so obvious and not so easy to grasp.