MARK HARMAN
575
Beckett's astuteness about
The Castle
is all the more remarkable given
that he was reading the original in the edition of Kafka's friend and first
editor Max Brod. Brod normalized Kafka's punctuation and made other
significant changes-roughly two per page. Malcolm Pasley's 1982 German
cri tical edition, on which my 1998 translation is based, restores the loosely
punctuated sentences and the breathless effect of Kafka's seemingly never–
ending paragraphs, which do not separate out the dialogue from the
narrative and thus create a rush of language.
There is no doubt that Beckett's reading of
The Castle
left discernible
traces in his last English-language novel
VUltt,
as the Beckett scholar Ruby
Cohn has convincingly shown. Klamm, a remote Castle official, inspired
Beckett's portrayal of the equally elusive Knott-forefather of the vaguely
God-like Youdi in Beckett's
Molloy
and, ultimately, of Godot himself. By
a piquant coincidence, one of Kafka's original chapter headings, not
included by Max Brod in his editions but restored in my translation, was
"Das Warten auf Klamm," or "Waiting for Klamm."
Kafka began writing
The Castle
in the first person-a mode more char–
acteristic of Beckett than of Kafka. In the beginning there was no
K.,
only
an 1. In the course of penning the third chapter Kafka went back and
replaced all the
Is
with K.s. The traces left by these first-person origins
accentuate the sensation that we are stuck inside K.'s head, eavesdropping
on his obsessive thoughts.
In the final, unfinished chapter a barmaid called Pepi invites
K.
to
come live with her and two other girls. The ensuing exchange suggests a
climactic as well as temporal stasis that points forward, beyond Kafka's
nameless village and Castle, to Beckett's even more abstract landscapes:
"So will you come?" "How much longer is it till spring?" asked
K.
"Till spring?" repeated Pepi, "the winter here is long, a very long win–
ter, and monotonous. But we don't complain about that down here,
we're safe from the winter. Of course at some point spring does come
and summer too, and they certainly have their day, but in one's mem–
ory spring and summer seem short, as if they didn't last much longer
than two days, and sometimes even on those days, throughout the
most beautiful day, snow falls."
Sex appears to offer
K.
some relief by gIvmg him access-if only
metaphorically-to a strange country where the air is fresh. However, this
new air is not so much replenishing as suffocating:
