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PARTISAN RiEVIEW
away. We are always walking at the edge of a cliff.
III
At the allegorical level, it seems to me an error to try to reach
a single, consistent, and final interpretation of Kafka's meaning.
Metaphysical, sociological, theological, Freudian interpretations do
not exclude each other. On the contrary, a special quality of the
writing, I feel, is to prevent any single consistent interpretation at
the same time that it compels us to seek interpretation. Just as we
become convinced that the problem is, say, theological, a shifted
phrase makes that suddenly ridiculous: we are pulled back to the
literal, or pushed into the social or psychoanalytic.
If
the Castle means, or can be felt at times to mean, the incom–
municable God of Abraham and Kierkegaard, it can mean also the
bureaucratized State- or simply human society, or the projected
father image, or the unknowable real of a Kantian sort of metaphysics.
For that matter, can it not mean also reality as presented by Science,
Science thought of as a church with its ritualistic priests, and its
formulas intoned as the incomprehensible explanation of all that is?
We wrong Kafka by turning him into a philosopher or theologian
or social scientist. The explicit "aphorisms" included in
The Great
Wall of Ckina
are not distinguished in rational content. His writings,
undoubtedly, are much concerned with philosophical and related
problems, but about these he felt complexly and deeply rather than
thought adequately. Indeed, Kafka's stories and novels are, perhaps
primarily, in the manner of poems, an expression of mood and feel–
ing. The suggested ideational structures-never more than suggested,
never completed-are not sovereign, but serve to develop the feeling.
The dominant feeling, or cluster of feelings, we can roughly
identify as
anxiety,
a universal, all-sided anxiety. Everything, or nearly
everything, meets in this engulfing anxiety: the anxious insecurity of
the neurotic psyche; the homelessness of the Jew; the emptiness of
the metaphysical desert decreed by the attendant ideologies of mod–
ern science; the cosmic anxiety or "care" of Kierkegaard and Ex–
istence philosophy; the isolation of the individual in the bureaucratized
social mechanism; the care of the traveler unsure of where he is
traveling, the reasoner who has lost his axioms. Every effort to over–
come the anxiety only renews it: the Great Wall can never be com–
pleted; the truth about the Giant Mole cannot be established; the
investigating dog will never have his question answered; no clear
