Guided tour of Kafka’s Castle

Since his death from tuberculosis at 40 in 1924, Franz Kafka has become a human Rorschach blot. Critics have read him as everything from the exemplar of an array of neuroses to the precursor of millions of victims of modern totalitarianism. Likewise, writers of fiction have found Kafka irresistible. An anthology’s worth of novelists, including Philip Roth, Nadine Gordimer, Guy Davenport and Jonathan Lethem, have used the sage of Prague as a jumping-off point for stories. Oddly, these stories tend toward the opposite of the somber critic’s perspective, often taking a playful attitude in portraying the jug-eared insurance man as a nebbish rather than a genius. Now comes “K.,” by Italian writer and publisher Roberto Calasso, which maintains a deft balance between genres, mixing an elegant discussion of Kafka’s work with a novelist’s eye for detail.

Essentially, Calasso retells various episodes from the novels, primarily “The Castle,” but also “The Trial” and “The Missing Person” (more commonly known in this country as “Amerika”), while interposing excerpts from the writer’s diaries and adding his own commentary. He is a generous guide who defers to the subject of his discourse, and yet the relationship between them is so intrinsic that it’s hard to tell them apart. Think of the form as a connect-the-dots drawing, linking hundreds of quotations by observation, extrapolation and analysis, creating a seamless blend.

Calasso’s interpretation of Kafka is intellectual rather than academic, with nary an “h” word (hermeneutic, hegemonic, heuristic) to be found, but the book is also a narrative. Calasso’s technique -- though full of references to Western thought and Indian lore as well as to modern writers such as Elias Canetti, Vladimir Nabokov, Robert Musil and, with blissful incongruity, the French farceur Georges Feydeau -- is philosophy made dramatic, which is sort of what Kafka did. Calasso’s relentlessly inquisitive mind is the perfect counterpart to the mind he investigates. By approaching Kafka’s work this way, he is able to reanimate the author and attribute unique individual qualities to figures that originally were emblematic. For example, he calls K., the protagonist of “The Castle,” “cheeky,” an endearing and unexpected adjective for so enigmatic a character.

Calasso is a supremely close reader who focuses on details. When discussing Josef K.’s initial apprehension in “The Trial,” he dwells on the early-morning hour of the event. Never mind that this event may lead to his doom, “[b]ehind all this lies Josef K.’s memory of the guards who devoured his breakfast.” This places us squarely inside the accused man’s mind, where the (il)logic of his concern is simultaneously ludicrous and understandable. Had he woken a few minutes earlier, had he eaten a bit more swiftly and left the house sooner, might he have avoided the fate awaiting him in the court? Maybe the guards would have knocked next door and eaten someone else’s breakfast. For Calasso, watching Josef K. struggle with the nightmare that is about to devour him is an act of empathic imagination instead of exegesis.

Of course, Calasso is capable of a more structural analysis, noting, as many have before him, that the main difference between “The Castle” and “The Trial” is that K. desperately wants to get into the former, whereas Josef K. desperately wants to get out of the latter. Dead opposites, the systems are also effectively identical because their common nature is to prohibit their victims from either success or the certainty of failure. Both rely on their impenetrability. Sure, “[t]he court has the power to punish, the Castle, to elect.” But then again, “election and condemnation are almost indistinguishable.” As Calasso brilliantly points out, one could simply eliminate the word “Castle” and substitute the word “Law.”

Since neither characters nor readers ever gain access to these sanctums, most of “The Trial’s” and “The Castle’s” actions are set in the limbo of a judicial waiting room or a local inn. Calasso is fascinated by these places and especially so by the female secretaries of the court and the loose women in the inn. For all their humanity, they are no more autonomous than the petitioners they tend and sometimes sleep with. “What goes on there,” Calasso says, is “no easier to unravel or understand” than the Castle itself.

The unique contribution Calasso makes is to apply this perspective beyond the visible functionaries on the institutions’ perimeter to the invisible authorities within. Indeed, if Kafka’s various characters all suffer from mystification, the officials who degrade and ultimately destroy them must similarly suffer from an inability to demystify themselves. In fact, demystification may be their deepest yearning, but if one weakens and accepts the “invitation [to show mercy] in the dead of night ... in that moment one ceases to be an official.”

Almost tenderly, Calasso leads us to understand that as K. and Josef K. need to believe in the possibility of being seen by the unseen authorities, those same authorities also need to believe in the possibility of being seen. Calasso imparts humanity where Kafka presented none. But by refusing to allow that to occur, they, like their supplicants, become a part of the self-eradicating process: “Everything is made of concentric circles” that “produce ... chronic vertigo.”

Nor do the circles end with the self-torture of the torturers. Beyond all human ken, the Castle and the Court are “conscious, acutely conscious, perennially conscious.”All that is real in this vortex is time spent waiting for “[t]he simple passing of ... judgment,” and that judgment is always the same. “Peculiarity and guilt converge.” By “peculiarity,” Calasso means individuality or selfhood. Life is a condition of terminal -- or rather, natal -- guilt.

Yet perhaps the only thing to do to break this evil cycle is exactly what Kafka did, what Calasso did, what I’m doing right now: writing about it. On the page, in a “higher type of observation,” Kafka said, lies the “joyous.” What else can suffice in a universe where, back to Calasso, “[t]he goal is punishment for its own sake, a self-sufficient activity, like art”? In “K.,” C. is not really suggesting that the “The Trial” be read as an allegory for artistic creation, but try that one on for size. *