SubStance

Many shades of the departed are occupied solely in licking at the waves of the river of death because it flows from our direction and still has the salty taste of our seas. Then the river rears back in disgust, the current flows the opposite way and brings the dead drifting back into life. But they are happy, sing songs of thanksgiving, and stroke the indignant waters.

(Kafka, Blue Octavo Notebooks, 87)

It requires only a little leap of the imagination and no extensive academic investment in the textual drama concerned to note parallels between the critical industry dedicated to the study of Kafka's authorship and the bureaucratic systems at work in The Trial and The Castle. Knowing the critical industry in question, these parallels cannot have escaped notice, but being a serious student of Kafka helps to fully personalize and develop the analogy.

Thus Kafka scholarship is situated in a comparable relation to the reader of Kafka's works as is the Castle bureaucracy to K. Concomitantly there always remains the possibility of an appointment in the industry around Kafka, but it entails, one suspects, menial duties not unlike those of a janitor in a village school. The more seriously the reader seeks to get to the bottom of The Castle, the more he unearths a vast information network endlessly turning his attention to further required reading, delaying and diverting him, as he must increasingly see it, from his original objective; the more seriously the reader takes this business, the more he threatens to be weaned off his erstwhile assumption that he has a unique calling with regard to The Castle. All evidence to the contrary, he very possibly leaps to his own conclusions about The Castle. Yet there is no way around it: to arrive at a conclusion about The Castle is, more or less unwittingly, to settle for a position in the village, for the village is nothing less than the constantly evolving conclusion K. never ceases to arrive at. The village is, in a sense, K.'s work-in-progress.

There is, however, another course of action for anyone who intends to stay the course, and this is, like K., to take up no appointment, at least [End Page 3] to contrive to disappoint every expectation and lose every ostensible advantage placed in one's way. K. boasts an infinite appetite for conversation: "persuaded that in this village everybody meant something to him" (36), K. forms acquaintance after acquaintance. Admittedly, he finds that "each new acquaintance only seemed to increase his weariness" (17). All he wants are directions to the Castle, but these figures divert him into tiresome narratives that serve above all to develop his impression of the village. Thus for instance when K., new to the village, hopeful of penetrating directly to the Castle on Barnabas's arm, arrives at Barnabas's family house, he is disappointed, but not really surprised, to find himself diverted into a domestic scene with a further batch of acquaintances requiring physical description and family backgrounds--adaptation, in short, to the village as it already lies developed in the backwash of K.'s actions. And yet, notwithstanding repeated disappointment and growing weariness, K.'s appetite always bounces back with the next promise of assistance. In K.'s eyes, people remain interesting so long as they promise assistance, hence the apparent ubiquity of information in the village regarding the Castle means that he, for one, will never run entirely dry of ambition.

If the reader of Kafka is to take his cue from K., one could say that K. maintains the exuberance of reading before it resigns itself to a particular interpretation. Assured there are no insurmountable obstacles, every further obstacle--every attempt at diverting, misleading, deceiving, seducing him--persuades him he is on his way. This is K.'s "appalling ignorance," deplored by the innkeeper's wife, "which can't be enlightened at one sitting, and perhaps never can be" (58).

Such appalling ignorance in the lay reader with regard to The Castle will be interpreted, at the outset, as an only slightly...