Dying Inside

FOUR.

Paul F. Bruno

Comp Lit 18, Prof. Schmitz

October 15, 1976

In the nightmare world of The Trial and The Castle, only one thing is certain: that the central figure, significantly known by the initial K, is doomed to frustration. All else is dreamlike and unsure; courtrooms spring up in tenements, mysterious warders devour one’s breakfast, a man thought to be Sordini is actually Sortini. The central fact is certain, though: K will fail in his attempt to attain grace.

The two novels have the same theme and approximately the same basic structure. In both, K seeks for grace and is led to the final realization that it is to be withheld from him. (The Castle is unfinished, but its conclusion seems plain.) Kafka brings his heroes into involvement with their situations in opposite ways: in The Trial, Joseph K. is passive until he is jolted into the action of the book by the unexpected arrival of the two warders; in The Castle, K is first shown as an active character making efforts on his own behalf to reach the mysterious Castle. To be sure, though, he has originally been summoned by the Castle; the action did not originate in himself, and thus he began as as passive a character as Joseph K. The distinction is that The Trial opens at a point earlier in the time-stream of the action—at the earliest possible point, in fact. The Castle follows more closely the ancient rule of beginning in medias res, with K already summoned and trying to reach the Castle.

Both books get off to rapid starts. Joseph K. is arrested in the very first sentence of The Trial, and his counterpart K arrives at what he thinks is going to be the last stop before the Castle on the first page of that novel. From there, both K’s struggle futilely toward their goals (in The Castle, simply to get to the top of the hill; in The Trial, first to understand the nature of his guilt, and then, despairing of this, to achieve acquittal without understanding). Both actually get farther from their goals with each succeeding action. The Trial reaches its peak in the wonderful Cathedral scene, quite likely the most terrifying single sequence in any of Kafka’s work, in which K is given to realize that he is guilty and can never be acquitted; the chapter that follows, describing K’s execution, is little more than an anticlimactic appendage. The Castle, less complete than The Trial, lacks the counterpart of the Cathedral scene (perhaps Kafka was unable to devise one?) and thus is artistically less satisfying than the shorter, more intense, more tightly constructed Trial.

Despite their surface artlessness, both novels appear to be built on the fundamental threepart structure of the tragic rhythm, labeled by the critic Kenneth Burke as “purpose, passion, perception.” The Trial follows this scheme with greater success than does the incomplete Castle; the purpose, to achieve acquittal, is demonstrated through as harrowing a passion as any fictional hero has undergone. Finally, when Joseph K. has been reduced from his original defiant, self-confident attitude to a fearful, timid state of mind, and he is obviously ready to capitulate to the forces of the Court, the time is at hand for the final moment of perception.

The agent used to bring him to the scene of the climax is a classically Kafkaesque figure—the mysterious “Italian colleague who was on his first visit to the town and had influential connexions that made him important to the Bank.” The theme that runs through all of Kafka’s work, the impossibility of human communication, is repeated here: though Joseph has spent half the night studying Italian in preparation for the visit, and is half asleep in consequence, the stranger speaks an unknown southern dialect which Joseph cannot understand. Then—a crowning comic touch—the stranger shifts to French, but his French is just as difficult to follow, and his bushy mustache foils Joseph’s attempts at lip-reading.

Once he reaches the Cathedral, which he has been asked to show to the Italian (who, as we are not surprised to find, never keeps the date), the tension mounts. Joseph wanders through the building, which is empty, dark, cold, lit only by candles flickering far in the distance, while night inexplicably begins fast to fall outside. Then the priest calls to him, and relates the allegory of the Doorkeeper. It is only when the story is ended that we realize we did not at all understand it; far from being the simple tale it had originally seemed to be, it reveals itself as complex and difficult. Joseph and the priest discuss the story at great length, in the manner of a pair of rabbinical scholars disputing a point in the Talmud. Slowly its implications sink in, and we and Joseph see that the light streaming from the door to the Law will not be visible for him until it is too late.

Structurally the novel is over right here. Joseph has received the final perception that acquittal is impossible; his guilt is established, and he is not yet to receive grace. His quest is ended. The final element of the tragic rhythm, the perception that ends the passion, has been reached.

We know that Kafka planned further chapters showing the progress of Joseph’s trial through various later stages, ending in his execution. Kafka’s biographer Max Brod says the book could have been prolonged infinitely. This is true, of course; it is inherent in the nature of Joseph K.’s guilt that he could never get to the highest Court, just as the other K could wander for all time without ever reaching the Castle. But structurally the novel ends in the Cathedral; the rest of what Kafka intended would not have added anything essential to Joseph’s self-knowledge. The Cathedral scene shows us what we have known since page one: that there is no acquittal. The action concludes with that perception.

The Castle, a much longer and more loosely constructed book, lacks the power of The Trial. It rambles. The passion of K is much less clearly defined, and K is a less consistent character, not as interesting psychologically as he is in The Trial. Whereas in the earlier book he takes active charge of his case as soon as he realizes his danger, in The Castle he quickly becomes the victim of the bureaucracy. The transit of character in The Trial is from early passivity to activity back to passive resignation after the epiphany in the Cathedral. In The Castle K undergoes no such clearcut changes; he is an active character as the novel opens, but soon is lost in the nightmare maze of the village below the Castle, and sinks deeper and deeper into degradation. Joseph K. is almost an heroic character, while K of The Castle is merely a pathetic one.

The two books represent varying attempts at telling the same story, that of the existentially disengaged man who is suddenly involved in a situation from which there is no escape, and who, after making attempts to achieve the grace that will release him from his predicament, succumbs. As they exist today, The Trial is unquestionably the greater artistic success, firmly constructed and at all times under the author’s technical control. The Castle, or rather the fragment of it we have, is potentially the greater novel, however. Everything that was in The Trial would have been in The Castle, and a great deal more. But, one feels, Kafka abandoned work on The Castle because he saw he lacked the resources to carry it through. He could not handle the world of the Castle, with its sweeping background of Brueghelesque country life, with the same assurance as he did the urban world of The Trial. And there is a lack of urgency in The Castle; we are never too concerned over K’s doom because it is inevitable; Joseph K., though, is fighting more tangible forces, and until the end we have the illusion that victory is possible for him. The Castle, also, is too ponderous. Like a Mahler symphony, it collapses of its own weight. One wonders if Kafka had in mind some structure enabling him to end The Castle. Perhaps he never intended to close the novel at all, but meant to have K wander in ever-widening circles, never arriving at the tragic perception that he can never reach the Castle. Perhaps this is the reason for the comparative formlessness of the later work: Kafka’s discovery that the true tragedy of K, his archetypical hero-as-victim figure, lies not in his final perception of the impossibility of attaining grace, but in the fact that he will never reach even as much as that final perception. Here we have the tragic rhythm, a structure found throughout literature, truncated to depict more pointedly the contemporary human condition—a condition so abhorrent to Kafka. Joseph K., who actually reaches a form of grace, thereby attains true tragic stature; K, who simply sinks lower and lower, might symbolize for Kafka the contemporary individual, so crushed by the general tragedy of the times that he is incapable of any tragedy on an individual level. K is a pathetic figure, Joseph K. a tragic one. Joseph K. is a more interesting character, but perhaps it was K whom Kafka understood more deeply. And for K’s story no ending is possible, perhaps, save the pointless one of death.

That’s not so bad. Six double-spaced typed pages. At $3.50 per, it earns me a cool $21 for less than two hours’ work, and it’ll earn the brawny halfback, Mr. Paul F. Bruno, a sure B+ from Prof. Schmitz. I’m confident of that because the very same paper, differing only in a few minor stylistic flourishes, got me a B from the very demanding Prof. Dupee in May, 1955. Standards are lower today, after two decades of academic inflation. Bruno may even rack up an A—for the Kafka job. It’s got just the right quality of earnest intelligence, with the proper undergraduate mixture of sophisticated insight and naive dogmatism, and Dupee found the writing “clear and forceful” in ‘55, according to his note in the margin. All right, now. Time out for a little chow mein, with maybe a side order of eggroll. Then I’ll tackle Odysseus as a Symbol of Society or perhaps Aeschylus and the Aristotelian Tragedy. I can’t work from my own old term papers for those, but they shouldn’t be too tough to do. Old typewriter, old humbugger, stand me now and ever in good stead.