It’s not easy for post-millennials and digital natives to recapture the dimensionality of pre-internet communications. Where once a single movie commanded the simultaneous attention of hundreds of viewers, now each of us commands, Alladin-like, a hundred thousand genies to be summoned by the stroke of a fingertip. Has this vastly augmented power instilled confidence and wisdom in the public? It has more likely split a mass once susceptible to consolidation into a million errant souls. Once upon a time, authors lent guidance to those eager for enlightenment. Authors could speak for their generation. They could orient readers in history and inspire movements.
One of the last great political-literary debates was centered on the literary worldview of Franz Kafka (Prague 1883-1924). In the postwar era, Kafka stood for avant-garde culture in New York, Paris, or West Germany. But the Marxist critics of the communist countries denounced him as decadent. They condemned his work as tainted with the worldview of Existentialist alienation. Instead of marching resolutely toward communism, the human being falls prey to the despair and hopelessness of an irrational universe. Despair and hopelessness were of course characteristics of capitalism. To ascribe despair to socialist society was heresy.
After the war, Prague was the capital of socialist Czechoslovakia. His “decadent” visions of nightmarish bureaucracy were too relatable for comfort. In 1963, a Czech scholarly conference at Liblice rehabilitated Kafka’s work. His rehabilitation is thought to have set the stage for the Czech experiment of “socialism with a human face,” the “Prague Spring.”
So is he decadent, an antifascist or an anti-Stalinist prophet? The best criterion for literary realism is, “If the shoe fits, wear it.” The socialist bureaucrats certainly deserved to squirm.
Unfortunately, Soviet tanks put an end to the Prague Spring in August 1968; and the debate over realism became moot. But questions that are silenced are still in need of answers. I was in Prague with a student group during Easter Week of 1968. It was a mysterious city that recalled the uncanny ambiance of Kafka’s writings. In the shadow of the towering, massive Prague Castle, warrens of medieval, 19th-century, and modern streets bewildered and swallowed up the naïve stranger—me. Place and people were caught in a time warp between worlds. Older Czechs still spoke the language of Kafka, Prager Deutsch.
The relationship of the literary imagination to historical reality stayed with me when I wrote my dissertation and began searching for a job. I found my first one in a private testing company and then teaching German and administering academic programs abroad. Searching for my place in life, I felt the afterglow of fiction, historical fact, and existential alienation.
In deepest winter, a man claiming to have been summoned as a surveyor trudges through deep snow to seek night lodging in a forlorn community dominated by a massive high castle—the kind commonly encountered in rural Central Europe. Bedded down in an inn, he is awakened in the middle of the night by a castle agent who challenges his right of residence or passage.
This is a situation more common in Europe—doubly so for the undocumented aliens who are now seeking work in the unfamiliar lands beyond the Mediterranean.
The surveyor K. in Kafka’s novel The Castle claims to be obeying an official summons. The surly agent phones the castle authorities and receives ambiguous and confusing responses that seem to recognize K.’s summons and accept his temporary sojourn. As if expecting worse, K. feels that he has won a preliminary round in his “struggle” with his prospective bosses in the castle. He also senses a latent peril of being reduced to the status of a mere “worker,” held at arm’s length by the agents of official power.
He has embarked on an ill-defined but mortal class struggle.
We are left in the dark about where and why this is happening and we know nothing of the surveyor K. beyond the unfolding events and dialogue. Yet everything seems familiar, everything from the cold and snow to the rudeness and unintelligibility of officials in a remote place. We have a premonition of frustration and circularity.
We anticipate the treadmill on which every apparent advance turns into an equal or greater setback.
We are not surprised that the empty snow-filled street that seems to lead into the castle actually leads away from it.
We aren’t astonished that the emissaries of the castle turn out to be figures of vague authority, themselves aspiring to regularize their own status.
We sense fatefulness when K.’s assignment as a janitor of a two-room schoolhouse, which is coupled with a fixed workplace, turns out to be even more elusive. The surveyor-janitor is recompensed with residence in whichever room isn’t in use.
The Chaplinesque forward-backward of K.’s quest is overshadowed by the overwhelming vastness of a bureaucracy which is perhaps only a projection of the obsequiousness of the villagers and castle underlings and those who covet its favor. K. reveals himself in the role of the ambivalent radical who marches against an establishment in which he wants to find a secure position. We know K.
In the course of K.’s sallies, which seem to extend over a lifetime, though they take place in less than a week, the would-be surveyor stumbles into an inn where the various grades of castle secretaries perform nocturnal overtime, dozing between encounters with petitioners, while messengers dart furiously through the hallways bearing documents. The exhausted K. is invited into the working space of the friendly “liaison secretary” Bürgel.
In a flight of loquaciousness, Bürgel explains to the barely conscious petitioner the rules governing certain petitions—petitions, it seems, that coincide with the very circumstances of K.‘s own case. It seems that while there is indeed a division of labor in the castle hierarchy, the shifting needs of such a “great living organization” require that each official competency encompass the whole of affairs. The whole is contained in each organic part, rather as with the DNA of living organisms. In consequence, if a respondent shows up fortuitously, just as K. is doing now, the ever-zealous secretary will be tempted beyond all resisting to enter into and resolve his affair. Unfortunately, just as it is becoming evident that Bürgel‘s disquisition is precisely about K.’s own case, K. drifts off into a strange dream of ludicrous combat. Having arrived at last, all is lost for the sleeping surveyor. The world must totter on between good and evil.
German scholars of Kafka are so dogmatically convinced that everything in Kafka’s writing has its key in his personal life, optimally in his love life, that they have neglected his professional experience. During Kafka’s career, the subaltern officials and employees of the Hapsburg Empire were represented by a militant union movement of functionaries (Beamtenbewegung) which demanded a governmental codification of their precarious position (Dienstpragmatik).
Among the officials were surveyors called upon to survey the empire which would disintegrate in 1918.
Almost all the motifs of employment in Kafka’s novels and stories are paralleled by conflicts and stipulations in labor laws which fell within his sphere of professional competence as a lawyer and insurance official.
Kafka was familiar with the theory and practice of bureaucracy. Even the exception addressed in Bürgel‘s disquisition has its counterpart in the sociological literature. (See “Kafka’s Das Schloß: The Bureaucratic Everyman and the Enigma of Modernity,” pp. 35-39.) So much for the issue of realism.
But of course, Kafka was not writing as a sociologist. The surveyor K. is a literary type, the type of radical whose revolutionary initiative has the unspoken purpose of securing a fixed position within the establishment he so vehemently attacks. The potential comrade and helper Bürgel appears as an opponent. Bürgel’s procedural “secret”—namely, that the part contains the whole—is tantamount to the injunction to Know thyself. We know the surveyor K. We knew him in the aftermath of the 1960s. Do we know ourselves?
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 