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message will be received from the Castle; the Court will not render
a plain decision; the defenses of the Burrow can always be pierced ...
-"Oh, how many business calls come to nothing, and yet one must
keep going."
Tied to this expressed mood is a meaning so close to the surface
of Kafka's created world as to be itself almost literally rather than
allegorically given. Let us, remembering that in Kafka's world the
conventional links of the standard world do not exist, consider
The
Trial
and
The Castle
together. The hero arrives in the following
condition: he feels that he has a purpose or goal; he does not know
what this may be; ho nevertheless must try to reach it, though, under
these circumstances, his efforts may obviously just as well negate as
further his unrevealed purpose (so far,
The Castle)
;
he also knows
that he must die, that he
is
condemned to death; presumably, there–
fore, he must be guilty from the point of view of whoever or whatever
is responsible for his being in this world; he feels he must try to dis–
cover what the basis of his guilt may be; but the guilt cannot be
traced to any specifiable or individual crime, other than the fact
that he does exist (thus,
The Trial).
Once we have abandoned the automatic acceptance of custom and
institutionalized behavior, and the stylized conscious beliefs of religious
or philosophical ideology, it is clear that the condition of Kafka's
hero is not in the least fantastic or peculiar. It is exactly and literally
the human condition. It is the spiritual situation in which every man
who has achieved self-awareness finds himself, and it sets the basic
problem for which religion, metaphysics, and myth must provide an
answer-must, because the situation is intolerable. Kafka, however,
neither accepts nor finds any answer. "Then the strangest questions
are asked, which no human being could answer: Why there is only
one such animal, why I rather than anybody else should own it,
whether there was ever an animal like it before and what would hap–
pen if it died, whether it feels lonely, why it has no children, what
it is called, etc. I never trouble to answer, but confine myself without
further explanation to exhibiting my possession."
It is not really that Kafka doesn't "trouble to answer"; he
troubles about little else. But he is unable to answer, as if from a
schizoid defect, or ambivalence, of will. This ambivalence, like the
anxiety, inseparable from the anxiety, pervades his work (as, it would
seem, his life). Together they mark how normal for our time are
Kafka's neuroses, how representative his singular writings, how near
this opaque glass is to being a mirror for souls.
