Outside the Castle / Inside the Unconscious

Outside the Castle / Inside the Unconscious 

1. 

The surest way to avoid engaging with Kafka’s The Castle is to read the novel as a narration that will eventually solve a mystery. Approached in this way a reader will soon be confronted with waiting passively for a knowledge that, by privileging the denouement and the outcome over the process, could only serve an elitist and self-defeating use: it can explain-away and dismiss. This may well imply that arrogance and self-enclosure are as much an effect of the narrative-form as is its supposed realist transparency for what it can induce in a reader is a lack of attention to detail: the obscuring of micro-perception and points of emphatic connection that strengthen the links between author and reader. Giving everything or promising to give everything, the narrative-form can create a stimulus-shield that protects us from the trauma of being affected by the detritus of a slipstream that, in The Castle, presents a series of enigmas and potentialities that only seem confusing and nonsensical if the narrative-form is held onto. In order to maintain a low stimulus that hampers imagination and stills desire, the narrative-form promises us explanations, outcomes and resolution, a whole welter of rationalisms, that absolve us from the traumas of self-criticism, participation and action. It makes our mind up for us and creates the impression that there are perceivable limits to the social; that “knowledge is a matter of reinforcing the custom.”¹

2. 

With The Castle we are given an object, an ostensible destination, that can ward off all trauma and all wandering. The castle, at the outset of reading, becomes the central signifier around which all else tends and if we too, like K, want to get inside the castle then we might as well turn our attention away from it. The very title of this novel is a decoy that ostensibly offers a direction for our attention without us having to think or engage with the novel. When such a signifier is allied to the narrative-form then what we would expect is the untroubled exposition of K.’s journey. Yet this is one journey that is over before it has begun: “the castle hill was hidden, veiled in mist and darkness, nor was there even a glimmer of light to show that a castle was there.” By immediately establishing the fact that the castle will not be reached, Kafka offers us not so much the trauma of delusion but the trauma of seeing customary purposefulness undermined and replaced with endless conjecture and labyrinthine dialogues. Instead of gaining access to the castle from where all questions could be answered and from where a view of society could become transparent and personified, Kafka sets the novel entirely within its servicing village and gradually fills in a picture of social relations upon which the power of the castle is based. 

Yet, any potential opposition between the castle and the village is also jettisoned as early as the first page: “This village belongs to the castle and whoever lives here or passes the night does so in a manner of speaking in the castle itself.” K., refusing to consider the implications of this advice and scorning the assistants who have come to him directly from the castle, seeks access to the castle anywhere except where it is potentially possible. As a character in a novel K. comes to embody the illusory clarity of a monologic narrative-form that seeks a “clearer meaning than the muddle of everyday life” and which consequently remains insulated from that which could effect a change of direction: caught in the mystifying structures of rank he cannot perceive the social as anything other than hierarchical technique and, thus enthralled, the political is absented by the existence of over-riding executive powers. The most crucial advice – because it remains uninterpreted by K., because its meaning is, for him, disconnected from a confidence in his own social-experiences – comes to take on the guise of an absurd mysticism: “You mustn’t imagine that these barriers are a definite dividing line,” says Olga, and with this advice we learn that the obedient villagers see rules and barriers everywhere… between rooms and between people. Barriers create the impression of definitive dividing lines and are erected to maintain a minimum of interaction and a minimal sense of possibility. And so, K.’s quest, seen as a yearning for ‘absolute knowledge’ comes to be more about the way such a quest is a means of inducing servility and passivity.

3. 

Though we are engaged with K.’s pursuit of entry into the castle we soon become aware that it is more a question of asking why is it that K. wants admittance to the castle. At first this is about him seeking instruction as to his work as a Land Surveyor, but this is initially transformed into his working to find out what his work is: “the task of proving that you are taken on is laid on you.” Narrative direction is undermined and K.’s job, as such, becomes the work of accessing the castle and not land surveying and this leads him to temporarily suspend his investment in his ‘career’ and accept a post as the school janitor. This ‘demotion’ may infer that K.’s need to access the castle is an indication of his willingness to conform, but this is contradicted by his unexpected defiance towards officials in various meetings; a defiance that works against him. This defiance is in part related to K.’s sense of his own professional self-esteem. He is as deserving of access as anyone else and his being equal, his not seeing a definitive dividing line, is a sure-fire way that his admittance will not be sanctioned. But if K. is no longer a Land Surveyor and the castle has no need of him in this capacity then his purpose for access has similarly shifted and it becomes instead a purpose that is hidden and obscured.

Is it that K. needs legitimation from the castle? Is it that he aspires to a post within the castle? Is it that he needs to set-right the quizzical breaches of protocol that he has effected? Is it that access to the castle has itself become the sole purpose; a purpose that is correlative to the very aimlessness of the bureaucratic machinations of the castle? This latter point perhaps builds a connective and mutually influencing bridge between the castle as an ‘institution’ and K. as a ‘subject’ for, as philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis has written, “once an institution is established it seems to become autonomous… it possesses its own inertia and its own logic… in its continuance and in its effects, it outstrips its function, its ‘ends’ and its ‘reasons for existing.’”²

Just as this serves as a description of the activity of the castle, where tasks prepare preparations for other tasks that are only preparatory, can it also be read as a description of a K. who has become institutionalised and who, in pursuing a single-minded access to the castle, has lost sight of the reason why he wants access? The trauma of The Castle could lie in this direction: that K., in seeking a customary legitimation, has lost all sense of autonomy and has thus, without knowing it, become overdetermined by the castle to the extent that his interaction with the other characters of the book is never quite clear of a self-interest whereby, in attempting to help other characters, K. proceeds to interrogate and use them to get where he wants.

4. 

Such interactions between K. and the various villagers form the substance of The Castle and it is just this meandering that saves The Castle from occupying the deadening terrain of the narrative-form. Instead of establishing the shared assumptions and expectations of such a form, what Kafka depicts through these interactions are the pitfalls of misunderstanding and the very real possibilities that actions and motives can neither be transparent nor fully conscious. Being a novel mainly composed of dialogue and lacking descriptive passages and a sense of authorial intention (confirmed by the fact that this is an unfinished work,) so too the reader is confronted with an interaction between characters that is quirky and ambiguous. There are gaps in The Castle that could be filled to explain these often darkly comic effects, but all the reader can ascribe to these gaps is a mystery of motive that, lacking authorial explanation, has often been misconstrued as having a mystical or religious intent. However, such intents are explicitly referred to by Kafka when he has Frieda say to K: “I noticed that you were talking to him with a hidden intention,” or when Gardenia says to K., “you misconstrue everything even a person’s silence.” It is such seemingly harmless statements as these that constitute the power of The Castle as a novel, for it is by means of them that Kafka drifts away from the castle as the object of a narrative towards the mesh of inter-relationships that are the novel’s real substance.

Ambiguity and mystery arise in that K., rather than discovering ‘facts’ about the castle (‘facts’ that the narrative form is usually charged with supplying), meets instead with the villagers’ interpretations of what the castle means for them. By means of such stories, such attempts at meaning-making, The Castle presents the reader with the unfurling of a social fabric that is neither transparent nor concretely renderable, and which includes many enigmatic elements that cannot be immediately known: hidden intentions and misconstruals, misunderstandings and manipulations, are just as much a socially-productive factor as are the edicts, protocols, and petitions that are issued under the guidance of the castle officials. To ascribe these hidden intentions and ambiguities to Kafka as the author or religious parables is to evacuate the psycho-social terrain that, unbeknownst to himself, the Land Surveyor is marking out.

Castoriadis again: “No society will ever be totally transparent, first because the individuals that make it up will never be transparent to themselves, since there can be no question of eliminating the unconscious.”³ The Castle, then, presents us with inter-subjective relationships that go towards forming the social, but the social cannot be apprehended once and for all as the sum of these relationships. There is always something more, a wider setting than that of the conscious individual; and, crucially, a factor in this surrounding and influencing breadth relates to the fact that not everything there is expressed in language. What K. discovers through his social interactions is not articulated as some finalising knowledge because there is much that (as readers ‘ahead’ of K.) we know he is aware of, but which he cannot put into words: “K. tried to think of the exact word, but could not find it immediately, and so contented himself with a makeshift.” 

In The Castle, there is a pronounced slipstream of non-verbal communication and enigmatic encryptions that foreground the unconscious as having a social effect. This is a relational situation that K. shares with other villagers and which Kafka shares with his readers: the unconscious dimension of hidden intention, misconstrual, and makeshifts implies that behind inter-subjective interaction there lie forces that are not immediately registered by consciousness but which are acting upon and influencing behaviour and response: “now of course all these differences aren’t the result of magic but can be easily explained; they depend on the mood of the observer, on the degree of his excitement, on the countless gradations of hope and despair.”  

Like the unconscious, the social is, for Castoriadis, as much a force as the gradations of hope and despair, one which contains an “ungraspable productive element,” and if K. seems always to be floundering, error-driven, one step behind the game, then this is because he is a participant in something that surpasses him on every side: “the admirable autonomy of service, which one divined to be peculiarly effective precisely where it was not visible.” This unconscious social dynamic is borne out elsewhere by Voloshinov: “Class interest and presumption constitute an objective sociological category of which the individual psyche is by no means always aware.”⁴

The Castle thus works as a text that cannot provide the knowledge we expect from the narrative-form: it does not reinforce the feeling that the individual is central, nor does it offer to the reader a ‘keynote’ theme that is supported by the empirical observations of its author. The traumatic effect that The Castle induces is one which depicts the social as unpredictable and teetering on the edge, as always already replete with misunderstandings, social inequalities, and unconscious motivations, and in place of palliatives for these Kafka posits an ignorance that, once recognised, becomes a dynamic motor of communication: “one cannot have control over that of which one is part… one can only participate more deeply in it.”⁵

5. 

If Kafka had completed this work, if he had rounded it off within the strictures of the narrative-form, then this traumatic effect may have been assuaged. As it stands, a traumatic effect seeps through by which we encounter K.’s being dwarfed by a social of which he can have no overall knowledge and a ‘self’ which to a certain extent remains similarly unknown to him. The Castle, lacking as it does a sense of history, could be expressive of an existential angst (a present without hope) and of an inability to transform the social (neither precedents nor continuity), but rather than see The Castle as a scenario of fated hopelessness and social atomisation, it should be remembered that K. is hardly ever on his own. If one of the villagers or Castellans had been able to tell him exactly what he wanted to know, then there would be no novel, no attempt at communication.

What we have instead is Kafka’s offering up to us not the social as an ‘objective sociological category,’ but the social as an enigma: the castle itself as an opaque institution (“inextricable complications of a great authority”) and social interaction as an encounter with encrypted desire (“the letter… may have been the thought of a moment, thrown on paper in complete disregard for the meaning to be taken out of it.”) In the words of Jean Laplanche, an enigma “is not just to ask a question of which you don’t have the answer; it is a question for which even you are not to have an answer.”

In such a light, the trauma of reading The Castle is not in the degree of some originary experience to be recoiled from and repressed; a trauma that society over-protectively wards off by all manner of ‘security measures’ and explanation, but, as The Castle reveals, it is instead a series of layered, small-scale traumas that create psychical energy by their attempt to respond to enigmas. Instead of encountering a narrative that reveals its intention and encourages our identification with it as a place of knowledge, The Castle institutes a process of questioning, that, like K.’s quest, can never be fulfilled, but which produces other effects and partial knowledges, desires, that cluster around possible meanings and the sharing of these in an endless quizzical protest.

Every interaction of K.’s is his being faced with “the enigma posed by the other,” and this, for Laplanche, is one means of recognising the unconscious as “the residue of the movement of questioning.” The unconscious becomes the depository of what of the enigmas still needs to be recalled and worked-over. This remainder is what provokes a drive for understanding and so if the social cannot be understood in its entirety, it can still be apprehended as that which is productive of desire. And so, K.’s quest without aim, object or outcome becomes indicative of the “very constitution of human subjectivity” as that which constantly plays itself out as a putting-into-relation of desire, the other, and the social⁶.

Howard Slater

NOTES

All quotes from Franz Kafka, The Castle, Penguin 1972.

Otherwise:

1. J.F. Lyotard: The Postmodern Condition, Manchester University Press, 1991, p.19.  ↩︎
2. Cornelius Castoriadis: The Imaginary Institution of Society, Polity, 1987, p.110.  ↩︎
3. Ibid, p111.  ↩︎
4. V.N. Voloshinov: Freudianism, Indiana University Press, 1987, p.25. ↩︎
5. Ronald Sukenick: In Form, Southern Illinois University Press, 1985, p.4. ↩︎
6. Jean Laplanche: Seduction, Translation, Drives, ICA Documents 11, 1992. ↩︎

Links

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