Lamron Lit Corner: The Trial, The Castle, and true liminality

“From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.”

~Franz Kafka, The Trial

“You misinterpret everything, even the silence.”

~Franz Kafka, The Castle

What happens to a book when it is never completed? Does it simply end in the last chapter written? Are the readers meant to make their own conclusions about the world and the plot? When the story so centrally revolves around one single idea that is never fully revealed, are we meant to accept it as truth?

Or, perhaps instead, does a story that has no ending simply never end? Is there a space where a story can live forever?

Franz Kafka, despite going on to be named one of the most influential 20th century authors and even having a genre coined after him (“Kafkaesque”), didn’t publish a single novel during his lifetime. The Metamorphosis, a novella talked about in the Lit Corner previously, was his longest and most famous published work while he was still alive, but Kafka frequently discussed his own distaste with it in letters to editors and friends. Kafka, as well as being known as a very ill man both mentally and physically, was also incredibly self-critical.

After battling tuberculosis for a number of years, Kafka died at the age of 40, leaving one of the most infamous last letters in all of literary history behind, demanding that his editor and close friend Max Brod burn all of his unpublished work. In two separate letters, undated and scribbled and possibly never meant to be found, Kafka wrote, “My last request: Everything I leave behind me . . .  in the way of notebooks, manuscripts, letters, my own and other people’s, sketches and so on, is to be burned unread and to the last page, as well as all writings of mine or notes which either you may have or other people, from whom you are to beg them in my name. Letters which are not handed over to you should at least be faithfully burned by those who have them. [...] all these things without exception are to be burned, and I beg you to do this as soon as possible.” 

Obviously, and perhaps miraculously, Brod did not follow these instructions, and not only were Kafka’s three unfinished novels eventually published, but a massive amount of his journals, letters to friends and family, and short stories were as well. It’s not too much of a surprise to those who know the relationship between Kafka and Brod well, as Brod frequently wrote to those who knew Kafka praising his almost prophetic writing, saying to Kafka’s fiance in a letter, “an exceptional man like Franz needs exceptional conditions to prevent his spirit from withering. [...] If his parents love him so much, why don't they give him 30,000 gulden [...] so that he can leave the office [...] to create those works of God. His whole disposition cries out for a peaceful, trouble-free existence dedicated to writing.”

So what made, and continues to make, Kafka’s writings so inexplicably drawing? In the end, Brod was correct in his assumption that Kafka’s works deserved—needed—to be shared with the world. Where does the lasting impact come from?

Let’s start with Kafka’s third and final novel, The Castle. The Castle follows a man simply known as K. as he attempts and ultimately fails at assimilating himself into an undisclosed mountain-village in Europe. The village, based on an actual location in present-day Czech, is under the rule of ‘The Castle;’ a governmental power that blurs the lines between monarchy, aristocracy, and bureaucracy. Despite K. being solely focused on infiltrating The Castle and finding out why he was requested to come to the village in the first place, he can find no concrete way of getting closer. Even when K. is literally meters away from those that represent The Castle, it all falls away and becomes an illusion, just as the truth often does in Kafka’s works.

This relationship with power also rears its head in The Trial, Kafka’s second novel and the only one that seems to have been somewhat accepted by Kafka himself. In The Trial, a man named Josef K. (note the half-identical names) wakes up one morning to find himself under arrest for a crime that is never named. The Trial, despite the name, has little to do with law and order at all, as the city K. inhabits, once again never named, has no clear laws in place, no clear punishments, and no real sets of rules for citizens to live by. Once again, this K. (who is almost definitely not the same K. as appears in The Castle, instead being a placeholder name) is fighting against an unknown force that is forever out of reach. The Trial evolves as a story of self-discovery, or rather self-undiscovery, as K. finds himself losing everything that makes him unique as he searches for the truth that will clear his name.

While it may seem on the surface that these two novels are similar, to the point of philosophizing on the same idea, they differ in incredibly significant ways. To start things off, the protagonist. K. in The Castle and Josef K. in The Trial, as said before, are not the same person despite sharing the same distinguishing initial. Castle K. is mean-spirited, harsh, brutish, and his search for the truth comes above those he’s promised to protect. He’s obsessive, in a word, and this closely relates to the time Kafka was writing his final novel. Being written in early 1922, only two years before his death, the almost tangible nihilism is incredibly present in The Castle, to the point where many readers are likely to find themselves rooting against K. despite him acting as the only non-hypnotized character in the whole book. 

As Kafka was approaching his own mortality, it’s obvious that there were many things he still wanted answers for, things he was bitter he would never understand. This is one of the main reasons he was so critical of his own works, too, as he once wrote, “I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable.” There’s an overarching tone of pessimism that fuels the writing, and this idea that Kafka was writing what could never be written only reinforces it. The Castle in the novel is the incommunicable, and so is everything it stands for.

The Trial is far more…well, indescribable. Written nearly a decade before The Castle, Kafka was in a far different part of his life when composing what would become, by far, the most famous of his novels. Josef K., in contrast to K., is weak, fearful, and even perhaps spineless in some instances. It’s important to note that the stakes are far different, which can explain this difference. Right from the beginning of the novel both the reader and K. understand only one thing about this world: there is a punishment for committing a crime, a punishment that, like Kafka himself, K. wasn’t willing to pay the price for. 

As Kafka wrote to Brod, speaking about himself in the third person, “He has a terrible fear of dying because he has not yet lived.” The Trial is my personal favorite of Kafka’s. The name led me to think that the world of the novel would revolve around legality and argument; the typical courtroom drama that we think of. The fact that only one instance near the beginning of the novel actually takes place in a courtroom drives home the more horrifying reality that Kafka encapsulates: there is not arguing. There is no debating. K.’s fate was sealed before he woke up that morning, and there was nothing he could do about it despite all his effort.

This rings true in Kafka’s personal life as well. Kafka had an incredibly fraught relationship with his father, so much so that Kafka went on to say, “My writing was all about [my father].” Kafka went into a life as an insurance worker—the epitome, in Kafka’s opinion, of bureaucracy—recognizing how pointless the rules we set up for our society really are, how little they matter in the end. Kafka’s father demanded he find a ‘real job,’ or something other than writing. Part of this seems to have been because Kafka was the only male son, another part because Kafka’s parents didn’t seem to think his writing would be able to make him a living, but that’s all to say Kafka was told what he could and could not do, he was, like K., sentenced without having done anything wrong. Kafka himself said in a letter to his fiancé, “Shouldn’t I stake all I have on the one thing I can do? What a hopeless fool I should be if I didn’t! My writing may be worthless; in which case, I am definitely and without doubt utterly worthless. If I spare myself in this respect, I am not really sparing myself, I am committing suicide.” 

In other words, to not write was a death sentence; one handed down from a source of power Kafka could never fully comprehend, could never figure out, and had an indescribable amount of power over him whether he understood it or not. Is it really just a coincidence that K. is the letter Kafka used as a placeholder for his characters?

This connection between Kafka’s fiction and his life is what has drawn me to his work so irrevocably. It’s a rather obvious idea that all fiction comes in some way from reality, no matter how much the work itself may stray from ‘truth,’ but Kafka is able to place his work not on one side or the other—not either fiction or nonfiction—but both at the same time. This is what, to me, embodies the Kafkaesque. There are so few stories that can do what Kafka could only do: set a story in a world that is so clearly fictional, so clearly absurd, yet also so realistic. So unrealistic, yet so close to reality, all at the same time. 

The term “liminal,” most commonly used in the phrase “liminal space,” has become exceedingly popular in the last few years as a way to describe what many have been trying to describe for their whole lives, but liminal itself isn’t just a term that indicates something between reality, but something that exists on both sides as well: Google’s second definition for the term is, “occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold.” Kafka and the Kafkaesque are so commonly referred to as ‘liminal’ not because the works often use liminality and liminal spaces to evoke emotion, but because the works in their entirety are liminal. They exist on both sides of reality, as honest as Kafka’s relationship with his father and as absurd as Alice in Wonderland all at once.

I always recommend that new Kafka readers start with The Metamorphosis as their introduction to what Kafka has to offer, but for those of you who have read this far, it seems you’re more than a little interested in something more. The Trial and The Castle, despite revolving around nearly identical themes, are radically different in execution. Looking to dive into the existential? Into the realm between, or on either side, of realms? Perhaps it’s presumptuous to say, but I can’t imagine there’s anyone who does it better than Kafka. Who could do the Kafkaesque better than Kafka himself?