MYTH OF SISYPHUS
195
Here then I recognize a work absurd in its principles. With
regard to
The Trial,
for example, I can say that the success is total.
The flesh triumphs. Nothing is lacking to this, neither the unexpressed
revolt (it is that which writes), nor lucid and mute despair (it is that
which creates), nor the astonishing liberty of gesture which the
characters breathe up to their final death.
However, this world is not as closed as it appears to be. Into
this universe without progress, Kafka is going to introduce hope in
a peculiar form. In this respect,
The Trial
and
The Castle
do not
move in the same direction. They complete one another. The imper–
ceptible progression that can be disclosed from one to the other
represents an enormous conquest in the order of escape.
The Trial
poses a problem which
The Castle,
to a certain extent, solves. The
first describes, with a method almost scientific and without drawing
a conclusion. The second, to a certain extent, explains.
The Trial
diagnoses and
The Castle
imagines a treatment. But the remedy
proposed does not heal. It only makes the sickness re-enter normal
life. It helps us accept it. In a certain sense (let us think of Kierke–
gaard), it makes us cherish the sickness. The surveyor K. cannot
imagine another care than that which devours him. Those about him
fall in love with this void and this suffering that has no name, as if
suffering enclosed here a privileged fate. "How I need you,"
say~
Frieda to
K. ...
''How abandoned I feel, since I have known you,
when you are not beside me." This subtle remedy which makes us
love what crushes us, and gives birth to hope in a world without
issue, this brusque "leap" by which everything becomes changed–
this is the secret of the existential revolution and of
The Castle
itself.
Few works are more rigorous, in their pace, than
The Castle.
K.
is named surveyor of the castle and he arrives in the village. But
from village to castle, it is impossible to communicate. For hundreds
of pages
K.
will persist stubbornly at seeking his way, will try all
steps, ruses, shifts, will never get tired, and with a disconcerting faith,
will wish to recover the function that has been conferred upon him.
Each chapter is a checkmate. And also a new beginning. This is not
in the spirit of logic, but of mere continuation. The extent of this
persistence constitutes the tragic aspect of the work. When K. tele–
phones the castle, he hears confused and jumbled voices, vague laughs,
far-off appeals. These suffice to nourish his hope, like the occasional
signs that appear in the summer sky, or those promises of the evening
which give us reason for living. Here we find the secret of melancholy
