Kafka's labyrinths

Amerika: The Missing Person by Franz Kafka, translated by Mark Harman (Schocken Books, 2008)


Kafka's comic novels could hardly be called social realist ones, but I could detect a sympathetic attitude for subaltern-like characters. (And here I used the term "subaltern" loosely; Kafka's posthumous novels were hardly postcolonial). The novels operated within a psychological space of helplessness and entropy, hence they seemed to unravel in a nightmare landscape. Gregor Samsa awoke from a listless dream to find himself transformed into a monstrous insect. Here, Karl Rossmann arrived in America greeted by a transformed landmark, a signal that we were about to enter a weird reality.

As he entered New York Harbor on the now slow-moving ship, Karl Rossmann, a seventeen-year-old youth who had been sent to America by his poor parents because a servant girl had seduced him and borne a child by him, saw the Statue of Liberty, which he had been observing for some time, as if in a sudden burst of sunlight. The arm with the sword now reached aloft, and about her figure blew the free winds.

IMAGE: VANISHED EMPIRES

The scenes that followed were classic comedy from the master of indirection and misdirection. Karl was fetched by his uncle in the ship after running into misadventures with "the stoker" and another passenger to whom he foolishly entrusted his trunk. He was practically adopted by his uncle, a very wealthy businessman and politician. However, for flimsy reasons, his uncle disowned him and left him to his own devices. With this great misfortune and the succeeding hysterical scenes that followed, it was not farfetched to say that he was prejudged and found guilty of an unspecified crime, just like Josef K in The Trial, even before he set foot in America.

Now it was simply a matter of finding one's way back to the dining room, where in the initial confusion he had probably misplaced his hat. Of course, he intended to take along the candle, but even with a little light it was not easy to find one's way about. For instance, he could not tell whether this room was on the same floor as the dining room. On the way over Klara had dragged him, so that he hadn't been able to look around; Mr. Green and the servants carrying the candelabras had also kept him busy, and indeed he wasn't even able to say how many staircases they had passed, one, two, or perhaps even none. If the view from here was any indication, the room was fairly high up, and so he tried to imagine them taking the stairs, but even at the entrance they had had to go up several stairs, so why couldn't this side of the house be elevated also? If only there had been a glimmer of light from a door somewhere along the corridor or one could have heard a voice from afar, however faintly!

Confusion and disorientation reigned. Deadlines were missed. Unfortunate delays ensued. A chain of improbable digressions brought one to the brink of laughter. We were in Kafka territory alright. The claustrophobic and pathetic situations Karl found himself in was simultaneously funny and tragic. One had to consider it very funny. Otherwise the anxious reader, in all seriousness, would be frightfully affected by darkness and horror.

Karl, like K. in The Castle, was surrounded by characters who constantly demand for his attention or who sought him for some use. He was thrown in one absurd situation after another, one set piece of back luck after another, the kind of absurdity and lucklessness that induced one to side-splitting laughter, the only redemptive and bearable reaction, because, certainly, not to laugh and to take the writer seriously was more than tragic. Kazuo Ishiguro, in The Unconsoled, borrowed this almost unbearable absurdity and comedy to great effect.

While Kafka's three unfinished comic novels and fantastical stories like "The Metamorphosis" could be read literally, they most certainly opened up fertile grounds of inquiry for the reader. Translator Mark Harman, in addition to rewriting the German in an agile prose ("agile" being my token adjective for the quality of a translation from a language I do not speak), supplied a preface which provided an overview of Amerika's critical reception, some new background researches on Kafka, and some pathways with which to approach the ideas raised by the novelist. Harman noted how Max Brod's "once widely accepted portrayal of Kafka's works as religious allegories has not aged well". In fact, Jorge Luis Borges, who translated Kafka, considered Kafka's fiction as "a parable or a series of parables whose theme is the moral relation of the individual with God and with his incomprehensible universe". This might be true, but I think that a secular reading of the novelist offered a more robust reading.

Harman also underscored how, among Kafka's novels, Amerika constituted the most overt social criticism. That was obvious given how the major characters in the novel were all immigrants to America, with their countries of origin emphasized for good measure. It was also obvious how social hierarchies and inequalities (between the rich businessmen and the poor working class) were incorporated into the novel and how it eventually focused on Karl's adventures in soliciting menial work. It could even be argued that the novel's central topic was "work" in the same manner K. (a surveyor), Josef K (a banker), and Gregor Samsa (salesman) were partly prosecuted or haunted because of or on account of their work.

In her introduction to Walter Benjamin's Illuminations, Hannah Arendt—the German intellectual philosopher and previous editor of Schocken Books which championed the publication of Kafka's body of work—considered the Czech writer in light of the Jewish question.

No doubt, the Jewish question was of great importance for this generation of Jewish writers and explains much of the personal despair so prominent in nearly everything they wrote. But the most clear-sighted among them were led by their personal conflicts to a much more general and more radical problem, namely, to questioning the relevance of the Western tradition as a whole.

Certainly the Jewish question gave a rich context or background to any reading of Kafka. If one was to believe Arendt, the constricting atmosphere that pervaded European societies at the time, including Kafka's, was hard to ignore. When she wrote about the "most clear-sighted" Jewish writers, Arendt was referring to Kafka and Benjamin, among others. (It would be interesting to look into how Benjamin himself viewed Kafka in the two essays included in Illuminations.) (Extending to later non-Jewish European writers, I suppose this critique of the Western tradition was extended by Thomas Bernhard, W. G. Sebald, and László Krasznahorkai, each in his own revolutionary way)

When she wrote about "questioning the relevance of the Western tradition as a whole", one could recognize how this applies to Kafka's fiction which was a maze of digressions and collapse of meanings. The Western philosophical tradition I would say applied to the liberal capitalist machinery of society: power plays and power structures, labor inequities, economic inequalities, problematic family relations, societal arrangements, slavery and overwork, the deterioration of one's health and well-being. Like Gregor Samsa confined and wasting away in his small room, the sick Robinson (Karl's acquaintance) was visited by a grim self-realization.

Now I've ruined my health for the rest of my life, and what did I have other than my health? If I exert myself ever so slightly, I get a pain there and here. If I were healthy, do you think those boys in the hotel, those grass toads—what else would one call them?—could possibly have defeated me. But no matter what's wrong with me, I won't breathe a word to Delamarche and Brunelda; I'll work as long as possible, and until it's not possible anymore, then I'll lie down and die, and only then, when it's too late, will they see that, though I was sick, I was still working, always working, and that I actually worked myself to death in their service.

Of course the way with which this critique was explored in Kafka was almost invisible mainly because they were covered by comedy and a deceptively artless prose. One could only admit the critique if one interpreted the broad outline of the novels as tracing the plight of the disadvantaged, persecution of the vulnerable and marginalized, racism, the last gasps of a decent person in an inhospitable environment.

He knew that whatever he could say would end up seeming very different from the way it had been intended and that the way they assessed the matter was critical, since it alone would determine the final judgement of good or evil.

The impossibility of comprehension, the inability to fully understand one's state of nature, this was embedded in the work itself. There would always be a gulf between the word ("whatever he could say") and its supposed meaning ("the way it had been intended") which would make the novels seem impervious to criticism and evaluation. And the gatekeepers of power, with "the way they assessed the matter" would always find fault and would render harsh judgement.

Borges called Kafka a "nihilist" whose subject is "the unbearable, tragic solitude of the individual who lacks even the lowliest place in the order of the universe" and whose greatest strength as a writer is "the invention of intolerable situations".

"Well," said Karl, "it won't be that bad"; however, after everything he had heard, he no longer believed in a favorable outcome.

Unfavorable, yes. And we were still laughing.



Quotes from Borges were taken from pieces in Selected Non-Fictions, edited by Eliot Weinberger.

In the penal colony

"In the Penal Colony", from The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories by Franz Kafka, tr. Joachim Neugroschel (Scribner, 1993)

At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor of Auschwitz and Its Realities by Jean Améry, tr. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Indiana University Press, 1980)




In Kafka's "In the Penal Colony", a foreign diplomat visited the machine used for torturing and executing all criminals. There was no distinction among the crimes being punished. Whether the offense be petty or serious, the offenders would be uniformly subjected to the penal system and would have to suffer the precise mechanism and motions of the death machine, "the apparatus".  

Does the condemned man know his judgment? the diplomat asked of the executioner. No. He doesn't know his own judgment. The diplomat again asked, But he does know that he has been condemned? The reply was again a no. Then the man doesn't yet know how his defense was received? And again the reply: He had no opportunity to defend himself. The diplomat rises to his chair. He must have had an opportunity to defend himself.

"This is how things stand," said the officer. "I have been appointed judge here in the penal colony. Despite my youth. For I assisted the former commander in all criminal matters and I am also the person most familiar with the apparatus. The principle on which I base my decision is: guilt is always beyond doubt.

 
A man is guilty and he cannot be proven innocent. The observation was later made that "the injustice of the procedure and the inhumanity of the execution were beyond all doubt." The detailed description of the apparatus and the mechanical procedure of execution was some of Kafka's most graphic writing.

Both the bed and the draftsman have an electric battery each; the bed needs one for itself, the draftsman needs one for the harrow. Once the man is strapped tight, the bed is set in motion. It quivers in tiny, very rapid twitches, both sideways and up and down. You must have seen similar apparatuses in sanitariums; except that in our bed all the movements are precisely calculated. You see, they have to be meticulously geared to the motions of the harrow. But this harrow has the job of actually carrying out the judgment.

The harrow, the harrow. Among Kafka's corpus "In the Penal Colony" explicitly revealed one abiding subject of his fiction: systematic violation of human rights. If in his other novels and stories an invisible tormentor or aggressor, maybe an absentee landlord, circled around the protagonist, in this long story we were in direct contact with the torturer, explaining his wares and his violent procedures. The systematic reduction of a human being, physically and psychologically, was through the slow process of dying. It would take approximately 12 hours for the condemned to expire under the harrow. The harrowing harrow was the horrifying image of man's inhumanity to man.

* * *

I don't recall the word "dignity" being used in this story. But alongside human life, human dignity was the casualty of this inhumane penal system. Dignity was a slippery concept, but it was traditionally seen as the articulation of inalienable human rights. "To die with dignity" was a contradiction in state justice systems that execute its own kind.

In his encyclical of last year, Pope Francis talked at length about dignity in the context of climate change and inequality. The challenge for the disenfranchised and the poor was how to (in the pope's words) be "able to live in a way worthy of their human dignity." Disenfranchisement of access to basic resources lowers the quality of life and robs one of human dignity.

Jean Améry (1912-1978), the German writer imprisoned and tortured during the Nazi occupation, sought to personally define human dignity. What is dignity, really? he asked in At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor of Auschwitz and Its Realities. He came to equate it with life, or with the antithesis of destruction and degradation and death. "I believed to recognize that dignity is the right to live", he wrote. But it is a right "granted by society."

If I was correct that the deprivation of dignity was nothing other than the potential deprivation of life, then dignity would have to be the right to live. If it was also correct when I said that the granting and depriving of dignity are acts of social agreement, sentences against which there is no appeal on the grounds of one's "self-understanding," so that it would be senseless to argue against the social body that deprives us of our dignity with the claim that we do indeed "feel" worthy—if all of this were valid, then every effort to regain our dignity would have been of no value, and it would still be so today. Degradation, that is, living under the threat of death, would be an inescapable fate. But luckily, things are not entirely the way this logic claims. It is certainly true that dignity can be bestowed only by society, whether it be the dignity of some office, a professional or, very generally speaking, civil dignity; and the merely individual, subjective claim ("I am a human being and as such I have my dignity, no matter what you may do or say!") is an empty academic game, or madness. Still, the degraded person, threatened with death, is able—and here we break through the logic of the final sentencing—to convince society of his dignity by taking his fate upon himself and at the same time rising in revolt against it.

While being detained for posting anti-Nazi propaganda and receiving the first blow from the Gestapo, Améry had lost trust in the world. Disillusioned, he had come to renounce his citizenship and his German name. Born Hanns Chaim Mayer, he opted to use a pseudonym in his writing, choosing a French-sounding name that is an anagram of his last name. Améry was a post-national writer adrift in "memory and cruelty" of history.

In describing his harrowing experience of torture, the victim was limited by the capacity of words to describe his condition. It was both a limitation imposed by language and the mind. In reaching beyond the "mind's limits", one was constrained to go back to the sources of language. Torture, from Latin torquere, to twist. What visual instruction in etymology! he wrote after describing a painful twisting and dislocation of his arms and shoulders while being suspended on an "apparatus".

In the bunker there hung from the vaulted ceiling a chain that above ran into a roll. At its bottom end it bore a heavy, broadly curved iron hook. I was led to the instrument. The hook gripped into the shackle that held my hands together behind my back. Then I was raised with the chain until I hung about a meter over the floor. In such a position, or rather, when hanging this way, with your hands behind your back, for a short time you can hold at a half-oblique through muscular force.

To twist. There was no redeeming wordplay or pun but the original word. The writer's fallback was the gratuitous qualities of words in their original intent. (In describing a scene from Poison, Shadow and Farewell, the protagonist of Javier Marías had also to recognize a Latin root word to describe his helpless situation: "A poison was entering me, and when I use that word 'poison', I'm not doing so lightly or purely metaphorically, but because something entered my consciousness that had not been there before and provoked in me an immediate feeling of creeping sickness, of something alien to my body and to my sight and to my mind, like an inoculation, and that last term is spot on etymologically, for it contains at its root the Latin 'oculus', from which it comes, and it was through my eyes that this new and unexpected illness entered, through my eyes which were absorbing images and registering them and retaining them, and which could no longer erase them as one might erase a bloodstain on the floor, still less not have seen them.")

The reminiscences of Améry had affected W. G. Sebald to the extent that he had written about him in an essay in On the Natural History of Destruction and in the novel Austerlitz, both translated by Anthea Bell. In the novel, the narrator Austerlitz visited the same Breendonk fortress where Améry was imprisoned and tortured.

It was only a few years later that I read Jean Améry's description of the dreadful physical closeness between torturers and their victims, and of the tortures he suffered in Breendonk when he was hoisted aloft by his hands, tied behind his back, so that with a crack and a splintering sound which, as he says, he had not yet forgotten when he came to write this account [At the Mind's Limits], his arms dislocated from the sockets in his shoulder joints, and he was left dangling as they were wrenched up behind him and twisted together above his head.

The torture chambers in Kafka and in Améry were there to discredit the right to live, hence to dignity. Améry had to borrow Kafka's terms for his tortured condition: Those who had tortured me and turned me into a bug, as dark powers had once done to the protagonist of Kafka's The Metamorphosis, were themselves an abomination to the victorious camp. Améry was turned into a monstrous insect by the Gestapo, something non-human.

Josef K in The Trial was forever denied due process. K in The Castle and Gregor in The Metamorphosis were denied the right to work with dignity intact. Kafka had documented the various labyrinthine ways in which humans were marginalized, deprived of their rights and physically and mentally tortured by being kept in the dark about their condition and judgment. Torture was an offense against the body and mind, bringing one to immediate shame and indignity. For Améry, torture has an indelible character: "Whoever was tortured, stays tortured. Torture is ineradicably burned into him, even when no clinically objective traces can be detected. The permanence of torture gives the one who underwent it the right to speculative flights, which need not be lofty ones and still may claim a certain validity. [emphasis added]"

Whoever has succumbed to torture can no longer feel at home in the world. The shame of destruction cannot be erased. Trust in the world, which already collapsed in part at the first blow, but in the end, under torture, fully, will not be regained. That one's fellow man was experienced as the antiman remains in the tortured person as accumulated horror. It blocks the view into a world in which the principle of hope rules. One who was martyred is a defenseless prisoner of fear. It is fear that henceforth reigns over him. Fear—and also what is called resentments. They remain, and have scarcely a chance to concentrate into a seething, purifying thirst for revenge.

Because the tortured had learned of the human capacity to inflict pain and suffering, the tortured had also come to acquire the character of the torturer because he had the imagination to relive his torture and the acts of the torturer.

Kafka had inverted this sense in "In the Penal Colony". The torturer, who was arguably a madman, upon learning that his "justice system" might be abolished in case the travelling diplomat hand in a negative report, decided to become the tortured. He had come to accept the normalcy of his system. He would rather succumb to his harrow and be robbed of dignity than to face a life without the pleasure of seeing offenders suffer under his apparatus. The torturer and the tortured were one.

Favorite books 2015

My reading choices lately had been pretty much insular. For various reasons, I became interested in local (Philippine) literature in English and Tagalog. There's a very practical reason for this. The books were simply what's readily available and accessible to me in bookshops. Also, the postcolonial and postwar orientation of the books I've sampled was of great interest to me. I managed to make good headway on my two reading lists: the best Philippine novels of the last century and Filipino novels in English translation.

A subjective and flawed exercise, this singling out of books. Yet the obligatory post is quite enjoyable to write, if only to relive each specific reading experience, the beautiful flaws and obvious artifice of a well-made fiction. I selected eight novels as favorites this year. My only complaint about them is their ugly covers.

I probably have not read a finer Philippine novel in English in But for the Lovers by Wilfrido D. Nolledo. First published in 1970, it became extinct until miraculously resurrected in 1994 by Dalkey Archive Press. It is a fountainhead of creativity [not in any Ayn Rand sense, God forbid]. Surreal and savage scenes are interspersed with scenes of great hilarity and profundity. The large, multi-national cast of characters floats in a state of dreaming, half-waking, or in-between. The wartime set-pieces unravel in magical fashion. It's a powerful work of postcolonial perversity. Hyperbole does not give it justice.

After attending a party in a garden among socialites, the executive assistant of Imelda Marcos visited her estranged father. They argued about politics and the hot issues of the day. The father is a fervent critic of Marcos, the daughter does not care. In the end, both will be implicated in the New Society.

Linda Ty-Casper is perhaps the best living novelist from the Philippines, the one most deserving of winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. (F. Sionil José -- the supposedly best bet of this country -- simply does not cut it for me.) She had a rather cruel vision of failed history in A Small Party in a Garden (1988). In this short novel, the intersection of domestic personal conflicts with fractured official histories is narrated with uncompromising irony. In one unpleasant episode in the novel, historical forces, military and male, simply shatter and belittle any human effort for decency. A political novel that slaps the face of anyone who kept silent (i.e., almost everyone) during the Marcos regime.

The Hand of the Enemy (1962), the only novel written by Kerima Polotan, is a postwar novel of social corruption that anticipated the political stagnation during the years of dictatorship under Marcos. Herself a Marcos crony, Polotan is redeemed not by the probity of her characters but by their failings. There is an almost metaphysical representation of chance fate as the enemy, whose iron hand is a specter not to be trifled with. And yet the shadow of a false prophet leading his followers to perdition haunts these pages, like the would-be dictator. And like Linda Ty-Casper, the ardent anti-Marcos, Polotan the Marcos sympathizer makes palpable a very human, and evil, design in the institution of marriage and in the political structure of government.

The Cloak of God (1975) is the best of the three novels by Rosario de Guzman Lingat finally brought into English in recent years by her indefatigable translator and champion Soledad S. Reyes. Like The Hand of the Enemy, it analyzes corruption and degradation of spirit through its duplicitous main character, Felino Paras, a theater actor who accidentally became a religious leader. It has a parable-like quality in its treatment of religion as a source of salvation for the gullible masses, easily manipulated by the perfect performance of an actor who secretly lived in sinfulness and depravity. Maestro Felino perpetrated a massive fraud by brilliantly playing a double life, by naturally acting out the role of a religious leader. It is a role the artist is born to play. Wearing the cloak of God is the character's, as well as the novel's, performative act. And in the second act of the play, she will again subvert her own performance by switching roles and switching genres.

I couldn't readily decide which of the two novels by Tsushima Yūko I read this year to include in this list. Woman Running in the Mountains (1980) almost edged out Child of Fortune (1978) in terms of which mystified me the more. But the two are sister novels, both majestically translated by Geraldine Harcourt. There's a continuity in their themes and preoccupations. Both are portraits of an unwed, expecting woman in Japan, circa 1970s. The delicate progression of scenes in these novels reveals a portrait of an immediate family and a society almost unfit for bringing up children. Through challenges in their work stations and family relations, Tsushima's protagonists discovered small personal triumphs against personal doubts and insecurities. Her almost realist narratives are deepened by tensions arising from a wayward metaphor or a stray scene, a simple recollection or a brutal dream. Tsushima is a fixture in this blog and for good reasons.

All the Conspirators (1998) is Carlos Bulosan's posthumous detective novel, published 42 years after the author's death after being discovered among his papers. It exposes the deplorable actions of persons who collaborated with the Japanese enemy during the war and who betrayed their country and fellowmen in exchange for wealth and comfort during the Japanese occupation. This entertaining novel is accessible, full of action, and a fast read. But on the serious side, it provides a damning portrait of traitorous characters who sold out their souls by informing on freedom fighters. They are always waiting in the wings, these frigging collaborators.

And then there's this infamous 1915 Kafka story of magical transformation, Ang Metamorposis, in a recent Filipino translation. This is magical transformation in a cruel, terrifying way. The pathetic and noble struggle of Gregor Samsa against unjust power structures at work and in society is a reflection of the continuing class struggles of wage workers. A Marxist interpretation of the Kafkaesque may be inevitable, especially as it dramatizes how capitalism reduces the nuclear family to financial relations.


That's it for the year round up. Been a great year for badass reading.

Apat na Aklat ng Bayan

Ang Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino (KWF) ay nagpasinaya ngayong taonng bagong serye ng publikasyon na tinatawag nilang "Aklat ng Bayan" (Book of the Nation), isang malaking proyekto na bahagi umano ng "Aklat ng Karunungan" (Library of Knowledge) at magtatampok sa angking galing ng wikang Filipino. Kasama sa proyektong ito ang paglilimbag ng mga pag-aaral sa wika, panitikian, at kultura ng Pilipinas; salin sa Filipino ng mga akda mula sa katutubong wika; at pagsasalin ng mga obra maestra ng pangdaigdigang panitikan. Kudos sa KWF sa naisip nilang makabuluhang pakulo! Ito ay maaring ihanay sa iba pang pambansang proyekto (katulad ng Library of America, Library of Korean Literature, at Modern Library of Indonesian Literature) bagamat nakasentro sa wikang pambansa.

Ang apat na kababasa ko lang ay nakuha ko mula sa booth ng KWF sa katatapos na Manila International Book Festival.

1. Pitong Kuwento (Seven Stories) ni Anton Chekhov, salin ni Fidel Rillo
2. Ang Kuwintas at Iba Pang mga Kuwento (The Necklace and Other Stories) ni Guy de Maupassant, salin ni Allan N. Derain
3. Niyebe ng Kilimanjaro at Iba Pang Kuwento (The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories) ni Ernest Hemingway, salin ni Alvin C. Ursua
4. Ang Metamorposis ni Franz Kafka, salin ni Joselito D. Delos Reyes

(Ang mga ito ay pawang mga kuwento. May salin naman ng mga tula mula sa dalawang makatang nagtamo ng Gawad Nobel sa Literatura: ang Gitanjali ng makatang Bengali na si Rabindranath Tagore, salin ni Virgilio S. Almario, at Sa Prága: Mga Piling Tula ni Jaroslav Seifert (In Prága: Selected Poems of Jaroslav Seifert), koleksyon mula sa makatang Czech na isinalin ng isang grupo sa pamumuno nina Roberto T. Añonuevo at Gian Lauro Abrahan V.)

Tunay ngang nagpapakita ng galing ng mga lokal na manunulat na bigyan ng kapantay at kaakibat na salin ang mga klasikong akda nina Kafka, Chekhov, Hemingway, at Maupassant. Ang huling blog post ko ay nagbigay ng suri sa mahabang kwento ni Franz Kafka na "Ang Metamorposis" (link). Hindi ko gagamitin ang espasyo na ito para sa pagbibigay ng suri sa iba pang sinalin bagkus ay magbabahagi ng mga importanteng isyu patungkol sa pagsasalin.

Kung tutuusin marami pang dapat ayusin ang serye na ito. Pinapakita ang pagsunod sa modernong ortograpiya ng Filipino ngunit hindi naman pare-parehas ang aplikasyon sa lahat ng salita. Marami pa ring mga tipograpikal at gramatikal na kamalian na tyak na hindi naman makikita sa orihinal na akda. Para sa akin, mas dapat pag-igihan ang copyediting at proofreading ng pagsasalin dahil nakabatay ito sa isang akdang sinulat ng maayos at masinsin ng awtor nito. May responsibilidad ang tagapaglimbag na ayusin ang paglabas ng aklat na nakapangalan pa rin sa (dahil nakabalandra sa pabalat ng aklat ang pangalan ng) orihinal nitong awtor.

Ang salin ay dapat gawin nang makinis at dapat na masusi ang pag-edit dito. At hindi naman siguro ganun kaliit (maliit nga ba?) ang bayad sa mga tagasalin at mga editor ng KWF para tipirin ang kalidad ng pagpapalimbag? Isa pa, pamahalaan ang nagpapatakbo sa KWF at pati na rin sa Natinal Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) na syang nagbibigay ng grant sa pagsasalin, kung kaya pera ng taumbayan ang ginagamit para dito. Sana lang ay ayusin nila kasi talagang nakakadiskaril ang pagbabasa kung maya't maya ay may maling baybay na mapupuna.

Isa pa, hindi rin malinaw kung ang ilang salin ay talagang nagmula sa orihinal na wika o kaya ay adaptasyon ng salin sa Ingles. Si Fidel Rillo ba ay bihasa sa Ruso? Si Allan N. Derain ba ay ginamit ang orihinal na Pranses ni Maupassant at direktang nagsalin mula Pranses patungong Filipino? Si Joselito D. Delos Reyes ba ay nag-aral ng Aleman? Ligtas si Alvin C. Ursua sa Ingles ni Hemingway bagamat mas mainam kung dineklara kung anong edisyon ng aklat ni Hemingway ang pinagbatayan ng kanyang salin.

Tungkulin ng publisher at translator na banggitin mismo sa aklat kung anong bersyon ang ginamit sa pagsasalin - mula sa orihinal ba na lengguwahe o mula sa isa sa mga salin sa Ingles? Kung Ingles ang pinagbatayan ni Rillo, ito ba ay ang Ingles ni Constance Garnett o ang Ingles ng mag-asawang Richard Pevear at Larissa Volokhonsky o Ingles ng iba pang nagsalin kay Chekhov? May implikasyon ito sa pagiging transparent ng salin at sa intellectual copyright. Maari namang isulat sa copyright page na ang salin ay direktang ginawa mula sa orihinal na wika kung ganito talaga ang kaso.

Kung titingnan naman ang mga napiling manunulat, puro kalalakihan ang anim na naunang naisalin. Mas mainam kung magkakaroon ng representasyon ang mga kababaihan sa susunod pang isasalin para sa Aklat ng Bayan. Maganda rin kung magkakaroon ng sapat na representasyon ang mga manunulat mula sa iba't-ibang panig ng daigdig. Maganda kung talagang aayusin ang programang ito dahil totoo namang maganda ang layunin at kapaki-pakinabang sa mga mambabasang Pilipino.

Ang Metamorposis

Ang Metamorposis by Franz Kafka, tr. Joselito D. Delos Reyes (Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino, 2015)



It was well and good that I finished reading The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels right after Franz Kafka's story of an ordinary man's transformation into a monstrous insect. A specter of class antagonism haunted the story of Gregor Samsa's unfortunate situation. That specter was mostly in the background, but it was as palpable as the powerful, omnipotent, and omnipresent reach of an absentee landlord. The tension was there from the first page, when Gregor was without warning rendered into a terrifying living thing, impotent and marginalized and hideous. His struggle against irrelevancy and uselessness in a capitalist society began.

Nang magising isang umaga mula sa isang masamâng panaginip, natuklasan ni Gregor Samsa sa kama ang sariling isa nang kahindik-hindik na insekto. Nakatihaya siya sa matigas at tíla baluting likod, at sa bahagyang pag-angat ng ulo ay natatanaw nya ang malakupula't kayumangging tiyan na nahahati sa matitigas na arkong tumutumbok sa magkabilâng gilid ng katawan; ang katawang iyon ay hindi halos matakluban ng kubrekama na sa anumang sandali, maaaring dumausdos at tuluyang malaglag. Ang kaniyang binti, na kahambal-hambal at lubhang maninipis kung ihahambing sa kabuuan ng kaniyang katawan, ay sumisikad-sikad nang walang kalaban-laban hábang pinagmamasdan niya.

[One morning, upon awakening from agitated dreams, Gregor Samsa found himself, in his bed, transformed into a monstrous vermin. He lay on his hard, armorlike back, and when lifting his head slightly, he could view his brown, vaulted belly partitioned by arching ridges, while on top of it, the blanket, about to slide off altogether, could barely hold. His many legs, wretchedly thin compared with his overall girth, danced helplessly before his eyes.]*

I was reading the recent translation of the story into Filipino by Joselito D. Delos Reyes, part of the new Aklat ng Bayan (Book of the Nation)** series of Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino. The choice and arrangement of the translated words in this paragraph alone (kahindik-hindik; malakupula; kahambal-hambal) was so chilling it was as if from the outset Gregor had no chance at all to survive this struggle. The choice of the word malakupula (like a cupola) in "malakupula't kayumangging tiyan" for "brown, vaulted belly" was a particularly grisly description.

He never heard the alarm clock. (A missed appointment to attend work, just like K. and Josef K. missed theirs every step of the way.) Let us just say that the Kafkaesque adhered to Murphy's law. Gregor emphasized that it was not a dream (Hindi iyon panaginip.). Proof of which was the presence of a magazine cutout he recently made. It was a nightmarish reality every person never dreamed of.

We never did encounter Gregor's big boss in the story, the absentee landlord, the owner of the company where he worked as a travelling salesman of textiles. But after only an hour of being late for work, he was immediately visited by the officer manager, the chief overseer of the company, to specifically remind him of the temporary nature of his tenure in the company ("tandaan mong hindi ganoong katatag ang posisyon mo sa kompanya"). That he was at the mercy of being fired with just one day of being absent without official leave. The company was bent on exploiting the labor force from the likes of Gregor to earn its profits and more capital.

Because he was sick, he was no longer (viewed as) human. Hindi iyon boses ng tao, observed the chief upon hearing Gregor who barricaded himself in the room. Even his cough was described as inhuman: maging tunog ng ubong ito ay maaaring hindi tulad ng sa tao.

Kafka's exaggerated realism was on point. As in his full-length novels, Ang Metamorposis deals with the struggle of ordinary workers ("paid wage-labourers" in The Communist Manifesto***) against the mental and physical exploitation by their insensitive and inhuman society.

At alam ninyo rin, ser, na ang ahente, na halos buong taóng hindi makikita sa opisina, ay madaling nabibiktima ng mga tsismis, kamalasan, at daing at sumbong na walang kamalay-malay. Malaláman lang niya ito kung nakabalik na siya mula sa isang nakapapagod na paglalakbay at doo'y tuwirang maghihirap mula sa nga parusa na hindi man lang niya natutukoy kung ano ang orihinal na dahilan.

[You also know very well that a traveling salesman, being away from the office most of the year, can so easily fall victim to gossip, coincidences, and unwarranted complaints, and he cannot possibly defend himself since he almost never finds out about them, except perhaps when he returns from a trip, exhausted, and personally suffers their awful consequences at home without fathoming their inscrutable causes.]

This almost revealed the mystery surrounding Gregor's metamorphosis, his disintegration into something hardly human after being over-exploited by the labor machine. The basic framework of Kafka's 'critique' of modern society was this disintegration of social and societal meaning. In Marx and Engels, "[the bourgeoisie] has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal rites that bound man to his 'natural superiors', and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked, self-interest, than callous 'cash payment'." Gregor's entreaties fell on deaf ears.

Gregor was the model employee; for many years never had he been absent in work for a single day. The powers that be would not take that into consideration. Gregor's life force must be squeezed out of him to feed the market economy. The common worker became an insect in the colony of capitalist economy. The queen bee needed to be served. The individual was reduced into the form of something like an animal if only to satisfy the appetite of the system.

Nang mga panahong iyon, ang tanging kagustuhan ni Gregor ay gawin ang lahat ng makakaya para matulungan ang pamilya na makalimutan, sa lalo at madaling panahon, ang kasawiang dinanas ng negosyo at maisalba silá mula sa pagkakasadlak sa kawalang pag-asa. Mula noon ay pinaigting na ni Gregor ang pagtratrabaho; mula sa pagiging isang simpleng klerk, halos gabi-gabi na siyang naging isang ahente kung saan tiyak na mas malaki ang kita. Ang mga pagpupursigi at pagsusumikap na iyon ay kagyat nasuklian ng malaking salaping kaniyang naiuuwi sa manghang-mangha at tuwang-tuwang pamilya.

[Gregor's sole concern at that time had been to do whatever he could to make the family forget as quickly as possible the business catastrophe that had plunged them all into utter despair. And so he had thrown himself into his job with tremendous fervor, working his way up, almost overnight, from minor clerk to traveling salesman, who, naturally, had an altogether different earning potential and whose professional triumphs were instantly translated, by way of commissions, into cash, which could be placed on the table at home for the astonished and delighted family.]

Gregor's family was in debt to the very manager he was slaving for. His parents were now in advance age. As a man in his prime, he took the cudgels to be the breadwinner and fend off for the family.

"In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed," Marx and Engels wrote, "in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed – a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market."

"Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State," Marx and Engels added. "They are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is."

For Marx and Engels, the bourgeoisie is unfit to rule society because "it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state [e.g., the insect-like existence of the transformed Gregor], that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him." Gregor was allowed to live only as long as the ruling class requires it, as long as he increases the capital. By being destitute, weak, and unproductive, he became an outcast in the eyes of the bourgeois society where (Marx and Engels again) "the living person is dependent and has no individuality". Gregor must die because he was no longer a worker who earns (an article of commerce and instrument of labour) but a burden to society. Gregor was no longer marketable.

The family (mother, father, daughter) was forced to work as their financial status became more dire. They let go of the household help and accepted tenants to the house to augment their much reduced income due to Gregor's condition. "The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation", wrote Marx and Engels. This reduction of the family relation to money matters was inevitable.

Sa labis na trabaho at pagod na pamilyang ito, sino pa ang magkakaroon ng panahon na bigyang-pansin si Gregor maliban na lang kung lubusang kailangan? Patuloy na lumiliit ang badyet ng bahay; pinaalis na ang serbidora [...] Ginampanan na nila sa abot ng makakaya ang lahat ng utos ng mundo sa mahihirap na tao; ikinukuha ng ama ng almusal ang mga maliliit na kawani ng bángko, iniuukol ng ina ang lakas sa pananahi ng mga damit panloob ng mga estranghero, at pabalik-balik sa kaha ang kapatid para sa mga utos ng mga mámimíli. Kung higit pa doon ang kailangan ay wala na siláng lakas na gumawa pa.

[Who in this overworked and exhausted family had time to look after Gregor any more than was absolutely necessary? The household was reduced further; the maid was now dismissed after all {...} Whatever the world demands of poor people, they carried out to an extreme: the father fetched breakfast for the minor bank tellers, the mother sacrificed herself to [sewing] underwear for strangers, the sister, ordered around by customers, ran back and forth behind the counter. But those were the limits of the family's strength.]

Slowly and gradually, Gregor's family suffered the same working system that reduced the son to a thing of monstrosity. His sister, Greta, who at first religiously cared for him and fed him began to change her attitudes toward him. In the end, Greta passionately and vehemently rejected her brother (Hindi ko tatawaging kapatid ang nilalang na ito, at ang masasabi ko lang: kailangan na nating alisin iyan. ["I will not pronounce my brother's name in front of this monstrosity, and so all I will say is: We must try to get rid of it."]).

After Gregor's demise the family collectively heaved a sigh of relief. They no longer had to care for a useless invalid, an inutile member of the family. They were ready to move on, with hope in their hearts because they were at present fortunate to be "employed".

Hábang maginhawang nakasandal sa kanilang upuan, pinag-usapan nila ang kanilang plano para sa hinaharap, at lumabas, sa málapitáng pagsisiyasat, na hindi na rin iyon masamâ, dahil sa trabahong mayroon silá na bagama't ngayon ay hindi pa nila napag-uusapan, tiyak namang magdadala ng magandang búkas para sa pamilya.

[Leaning back comfortably in their seats, they discussed their future prospects and concluded that, upon closer perusal, these were anything but bad; for while they had never actually asked one another for any details, their jobs were all exceedingly advantageous and also promising.]

This reinforced the mentality of a colonized family within the bourgeois society, by viewing future happiness in terms of the fruits of labor employment. This ironic resolution was heightened in the end when the parents looked at Greta, now in her physical prime, as an article of commerce and instrument of labor, i.e., in terms of her potential contribution to the family coffers through marriage to a good prospective husband and by being paid as wage laborer, in complete opposition to her brother's damaged body.

At, bilang animo'y isang pagpapatibay sa kanila bagong pangarap at matalinong balakin, nang marating ang destinasyon, tumayo ang anak at ipinakita ang magandang hubog ng batang katawan.

[And it was like a confirmation of their new dreams and good intentions that at the end of their ride the daughter was the first to get up, stretching her young body.]

Gregor was bound to fail in this class struggle. As Marx and Engels pointed out: "The first direct attempts of the proletariat to attain its own end, made in times of universal excitement, when feudal society was being overthrown, these attempts necessarily failed, owing to the then undeveloped state of the proletariat, as well as to the absence of the economic conditions for its emancipation."

At Kafka's bidding, in his juncture of history when the proletariat has not yet organized itself and acquired political supremacy and constituted itself as the nation, Gregor was a casualty because of the as yet undeveloped state of the struggle, if he even made any attempt to fight back. If he even could be considered heroic in any sense of that word. The Gregor Samsas of the world had yet to reach their saturation points and fight back. But the economic conditions for the emancipation of slaves are now turning. The frameworks for radical and progressive movements have now been tested. The time is now ripe. GREGOR SAMSAS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!


Read in anticipation of German Literature Month V.


* The English passages quoted are by Joachim Neugroschel, from The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories (Scribner), first published in 1993.

**The Aklat ng Bayan series aims to publish works in Filipino or translations into Filipino of noteworthy texts, including translations of great foreign works of literature.

*** The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, translated by Samuel Moore (Penguin Classics, 2015). Translation first published in 1888.

The castle

Angkor Wat, Cambodia (image source)

Sometimes he would tell her the story of the guard who protected the imaginary castle.

There was a castle. No. It wasn't necessarily a castle, it could be anything: a factory, a bank, a gambling house. So the guard could be either a watchman or a bodyguard. Now the guard, always prepared for the enemy attack, never failed in his vigilance. One day the long-expected enemy finally came. This was the moment, and he rang the alarm signal. Strangely enough, however, there was no response from the troops. Needless to say, the enemy easily overpowered the guard in one fell swoop. In his fading consciousness he saw the enemy sweeping like the wind through the gates, over the walls, and into the buildings unhindered by anyone. No, it was the castle, not the enemy, that was really like the wind. The single guard, like a withered tree in the wilderness, had stood guarding an illusion.

– from The Woman in the Dunes by Abé Kobo and E. Dale Saunders

See also "A Message from the Emperor" by Franz Kafka and Mark Harman, a sort of streamlined version of Das Schloß.

The castle of metaphoric destinies

The Castle by Franz Kafka, translated and with a preface by Mark Harman (Schocken Books, 1998)

KAFKAS TEKEL STORE AT THE FOOT OF THE KARS CASTLE (PHOTO: ELIF BATUMAN)

   The Castle, whose contours were already beginning to dissolve, lay still as ever, K. had never seen the slightest sign of life up there, perhaps it wasn't even possible to distinguish anything from this distance, and yet his eyes demanded it and refused to tolerate the stillness. When K. looked at the Castle, it was at times as if he were watching someone who sat there calmly, gazing into space, not lost in thought and therefore cut off from everything, but free and untroubled; as if he were alone, unobserved; and yet it could not have escaped him that someone was observing him, but this didn't disturb his composure and indeed—one could not tell whether through cause or effect—the observer's gaze could not remain fixed there, and slid off. Today this impression was further reinforced by the early darkness, the longer he looked, the less he could make out, and the deeper everything sank into the twilight. (98-99)

The obvious mystery of Franz Kafka's unfinished novel was whether the Castle is a symbol for something and whether the novel is a kind of allegory. Many interpretations were put forward. Max Brod and the Muirs (its first translators), according to Mark Harman (the translator in my edition), favored a theological/spiritual interpretation of the Castle as a source of "salvation" or "divine grace" that K. desperately seeks. Harman tended to dismiss or at least downplay this interpretation, calling it "simplistic." I tended to agree with him. A theological interpretation can only get you so far. I think that an atheistic interpretation of the Castle can say more about the whimsical and inconsistent attitudes of the characters, the unpredictable plot, and the dense "bureaucratic" prose stye.

If anything, the Castle, perched high up on a hill, at least represents the seat of political power. At the basic level, K. wanted to practice his profession of surveying and earn his worth, but people get in the way of his desire to work. The governmental system in place wouldn't let him be a productive individual. Thus, The Castle is basically a story about unemployment. But the prose of Kafka, which is closely tied to his politics, and which is also his poetics, obscures some things through a potent combination of hysteria and boredom. In the process of reading the novel, it gains excessive meaning through various interpretations and eidetic associations.

*

   He speaks to Klamm, but is it Klamm? Isn’t it rather someone who merely resembles Klamm? Perhaps at the very most a secretary who is a little like Klamm and goes to great lengths to be even more like him and tries to seem important by affecting Klamm’s drowsy, dreamlike manner. That part of his being is easiest to imitate, many try to do so; as for the rest of his being, though, they wisely steer clear of it. And a man such as Klamm, who is so often the object of yearning and yet so rarely attained, easily takes on a variety of shapes in the imagination of people. For instance, Klamm has a village secretary here called Momus. Really? You know him? He too keeps to himself but I have seen him a couple of times. A powerful young gentleman, isn’t he? And so he probably doesn’t look at all like Klamm? And yet you can find people in the village who would swear that Momus is Klamm and none other than he. That’s how people create confusion for themselves. And why should it be any different at the Castle? (181)

The deliberate objective of the people around K. seems to be to confuse him, to speak to him in circumlocutions. Why shouldn't it be any different from what the Castle stands for? Why shouldn't the entire novel be a novel about duplicity, misunderstanding, miscommunication, and fraud? What's interesting is that K. himself seems to be aware that he is being had from the beginning. He's playing the game even if he's acting naïve about it the whole time. At some point K. admitted, "It amuses me ... only because it gives me some insight into the ridiculous tangle that may under certain circumstances determine a person's life" (63).

Of course to think of The Castle as the odyssey of the unemployed is also a simplistic reading. The scenes are just too rich with meanings and innuendos. Nothing is as it seems. The man called Klamm may not be Klamm at all. Klamm's name has to be mentioned nine times above to drive home the feeling of suspicion and uncertainty. The surface appearance of things is deceitful. Anything uncalled for can happen and it does happen. Time collapses. And snow, bad weather, will fall on a beautiful day.

“How much longer is it till spring?” asked K. “Till spring?” repeated Pepi, “the winter here is long, a very long winter, and monotonous. But we don’t complain about that down there, 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 memory spring and summer seem so short, as if they didn’t last much longer than the two days, and sometimes even on these days, throughout the most beautiful day, snow falls.” (311-312)

*

In reality Hans was looking for K.'s help against his father, it was as if he had deceived himself, for he had thought that he wanted to help K. whereas what he had truly wanted, since nobody in their old circle could help them, was to determine whether this stranger, whose sudden appearance even Mother had noted, might perhaps be able to help them. (147)

Yet another interpretation of K's struggles around the Castle was messianism, the belief in a savior or redeemer. K. was ostracized by some Castle villagers and not given a chance to practice as a surveyor, but he was also embraced by others as someone who could be the answer to their problems. The Landlady, the Chairman, and the Teacher were the ones who wanted to drive K. out. Hans, Barnabas, Frieda, and Olga, all seemed to need something from him.

With his unannounced arrival, the deep rifts among the villagers, their insecurities and tragic histories were brought back to the surface. He was seen as a kind of mediator in their behalf, one who could patch up their personal and family difficulties or who could straighten their falling out with the Castle employees. Consulting with K., the characters appeared to carry the very burden of their existence. In the the same way K. wanted to establish himself in the village, they desperately wanted something from him. While speaking to him, they were either solicitous and extremely cautious of the Castle's power over them, or they were prone to badmouthing and backstabbing others. K.'s presence seemed to embolden them.

This K.-type messianism was exaggerated and used more overtly in Kazuo Ishiguro's novel The Unconsoled, wherein a pianist named Ryder was assaulted by requests from different personages left and right prior to his performance. A similarity with Ishiguro's novel is the inclination of the two protagonists, K. and the pianist Ryder, to be generally apathetic with people around them.

*

“Surveyor, in your thoughts you may be reproaching Sordini for not having been prompted by my claim to make inquiries about the matter in other departments. But that would have been wrong, and I want this man cleared of all blame in your thoughts. One of the operating principles of authorities is that the possibility of error is simply not taken into account. This principle is justified by the excellence of the entire organization and is also necessary if matters are to be discharged with the utmost rapidity. So Sordini couldn’t inquire in other departments, besides those departments wouldn’t have answered, since they would have noticed right away that he was investigating the possibility of an error.”
   “Chairman, allow me to interrupt you with a question,” said K., “didn’t you mention a control agency? As you describe it, the organization is such that the very thought that the control agency might fail to materialize is enough to make one ill.”
   “You’re very severe,” said the chairman, “but multiply your severity by a thousand and it will still be as nothing compared with the severity that the authorities show toward themselves. Only a total stranger could ask such a question. Are there control agencies? There are only control agencies. Of course they aren’t meant to find errors, in the vulgar sense of that term, since no errors occur, and even if an error does occur, as in your case, who can finally say that it is an error.” (64-65)

K. is a "total stranger". His arrival at the Castle has upset some kind of balance in the Castle's domain. He is like a brand new idea that is stubbornly rejected by tradition, an outsider who dares to ask questions and so must be put in his proper place. His very presence is attributed to a clerical error. He is reproached for questioning about control agencies when such agencies seem to function under a totalitarian organization.

The Castle is necessarily an unattainable goal. Based on the characters' description of its internal workings, even if K. is granted audience by the Castle authorities, the layers of bureaucracy and the red tape will not take him further afield. His dealings with officials and their emissaries are presented as Sisyphean. Hence, his desired destination (the Castle), as well as his starting point, does not matter; only his journey is important. This worldview is one shared by Javier Marías who said in an interview, "Conclusions and final explanations are often the most irrelevant—and disappointing—parts of a novel. What counts the most—and what we remember the most—is the atmosphere, the style, the path, the journey, and the world in which we have immersed ourselves ... What matters, then, is the journey along the horizon—in other words, the journey that never ends." Another modernist, the Brazilian novelist par excellence João Guimarães Rosa, put it another way: The truth is not in the setting out nor in the arriving: it comes to us in the middle of the journey. The novel being an unfinished novel already implies that Kafka didn't care in the least how the story proceeds. He has already written the meat of his vision through K.'s eternal struggle to settle down in the village despite being prevented from doing so. The officials could just as easily pay K. for the trouble of journeying into the village. But then we wouldn't have a story.

*

  From the mouthpiece came a humming, the likes of which K. had never heard on the telephone before. It was as though the humming of countless childlike voices—but it wasn’t humming either, it was singing, the singing of the most distant, of the most utterly distant, voices—as though a single, high-pitched yet strong voice had emerged out of this humming in some quite impossible way and now drummed against one’s ears as if demanding to penetrate more deeply into something other than one’s wretched hearing. K. listened without telephoning, with his left arm propped on the telephone stand he listened thus.
   He had no idea how long, not until the landlord tugged at his coat, saying that a messenger had come for him. “Go,” shouted K., beside himself, perhaps into the telephone, for now someone answered. (20, emphases added)

Someone answered the phone even though K. did not dial a number in the first place. What principle was operating here? Dream logic? The unconscious? Magical realism? Science fiction? Or was it simply a well calculated joke? From a never-heard-before humming to singing, from children’s voices to distant singing, from listening to waiting, from static to a definite reply: there’s an apparent breach of the fundamental laws of nature. Or was the error confined only in the observable dimensions? A warping of spacetime, “in some quite impossible way”? As suggested in one of the previous quoted passages, no errors ever occur; if one does occur, who can say that it is an error?

The Castle is a palpable example of spontaneous realism, a tendency in fiction writing characterized by shifts in narrative direction. The shifts may be dreamlike or not, they may be logical or not, and magical or not. Whatever the case, a spontaneous realist novel is a record of transformations: of characters, scenes, and details. The changes in the appearance and attitudes of the characters may be gradual or sudden—without due warning, without being prefigured—and irrevocable.

Frieda’s disposition changes from a resolute lover to a wronged woman. Jeremias, one of the assistants, suddenly changes appearance from a youthful person to an old, infirm man “whose flesh sometimes gave one the impression that it wasn’t quite alive” (237). Some major changes are explained in flashback stories of the villagers, where a family’s economic standing suddenly plummets, their vigor turning into wretchedness, and their health deteriorating to a most pitiful state. The witness to all these instabilities is our tenacious K., the surveyor whose search for work and recognition is rebuffed by the Count’s authorities. For someone who was meant to validate the location and measure the size of plots of land (i.e., someone who ascertains that things are right in their proper place), his failure to initiate the first step tells on a really confused state of affairs.

*

“We are not your guardian angels and don’t have to follow you every single byway. Well, all right. The chairman thinks differently. Of course the actual decision, which is handled by the Count’s authorities, is not something he can speed up. But within his sphere of influence he seems to want to arrive at a truly generous temporary settlement, which you are free to accept or to reject, he is offering you temporarily the post of school janitor.” (90-91) 

To be more precise, K. was faced with underemployment, a temporary reprieve from unemployment. He was offered a job as a school janitor. For someone trained in a technical job as a land surveyor, this was an absurd proposition. K. refused the offer. But consistent with the novel’s spontaneous absurdity, he was later made to accept the job. By the end of the book, the landlady fancied another job for him, a plausible job but utterly incompatible to his skills as surveyor. Given the serious comedy of what came before, his new job offer adds laughter to injury.

*

For all the ludicrous tangles K. found himself in, his uncompleted journey to the Castle can be read as a heroic effort. He elected to go through the motions even if there’s a stronger and stronger indication that all his efforts are doomed.

Certainly, I am ignorant, that at least is true, sadly enough for me, but the advantage here is that those who are ignorant take greater risks, and so I’ll gladly put up with my deficient knowledge and its undoubtedly serious consequences for a little while, for as long as my energy holds out. (55)

The irony is that K.’s journey also represents a missed opportunity. At the moment when he stumbled on an influential man from the Castle, someone who could assist him in his troubles, he was not able (Kafka will not let him) to seize the day. At the precise moment when a light is proferred K., he collapsed in exhaustion. Whatever K. (a person, a cog in the wheel) does is answerable to the built (fictional) system in place. And the system has decided that K. must fail, in a magnanimous and spontaneous and riveting way.

The means justify the means. As a work of spontaneous realism, The Castle is destined to be an open metaphor, concerned as it is with the perpetual collapse of meaning and representation. The cathartic encounters and transformations only emphasize the tragic comedy of existence. It can be a deeply religious text in a hermeneutic sense as it takes for its object a naked individual facing machinations by an inscrutable power structure (read: shit happens). Fulfilling destiny is facing the manipulations of a capricious god/s (the Count, the Count's men, the author, randomness, evolution, intelligent design, someone, something). But considered as a secular text, the novel is more open to inquiry, more robust in its possibilities. The Castle as a metaphor for metaphors, as a projection of man's yearnings and desires. As metaphors are worth pursuing, interpreting (or head-scratching) then becomes an exercise of freedom. Which is to say: an exercise of happiness, in spite of the dark and the fog enclosing the hulking metaphoric structure. "How suicidal happiness can be!" (269), exclaimed one Castle employee, in a tone that was perhaps half-serious, half-mocking.

“It isn’t easy to understand exactly what she is saying, for one doesn’t know whether she is speaking ironically or seriously, it’s mostly serious, but sounds ironic.” “Stop interpreting everything!” said K. (205)

I hear you, K.



(Note: First posted in Project Dog-eared. This post is benefited by an online group discussion.)