“It was simply out of calculation of the vilest kind that K. made up to Frieda, and that he stuck to her so long as he still had some hope that his plans would succeed. He believed, in fact, that in her he had won a sweetheart of the Herr Director, and so possessed a hostage which could only be redeemed at the highest figure. His one endeavour now is to treat with the Herr Director about his price. Seeing that Frieda matters nothing to him, the price everything, he is ready for any concession so far as Frieda is concerned, but as regards the price he is adamant. For the time being harmless, apart from the loathsome detail of his engagement and this proposition of his, when he recognises how completely he has deceived himself and betrayed himself he may become really vicious, to the limits of his small powers, of course.
“That was the end of the page. There was also on the margin a childishly scrawled drawing of a man holding a girl in his arms; the girl’s face was hidden in the man’s breast, but he, being much taller, was looking over her shoulder at a paper in his hand on which he was gleefully entering some figures.”
The connection between the “Castle”—that is Divine Guidance—and the women, this connection half-discovered and half-suspected by K., may appear obscure, and even inexplicable, in the Sortini episode where the official (Heaven) requires the girl to do something obviously immoral and obscene; and here a reference to Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling may be of value—a work which Kafka loved much, read often, and profoundly commented on in many letters. The Sortini episode is literally a parallel to Kierkegaard’s book, which starts from the fact that God required of Abraham what was really a crime, the sacrifice of his child; and which uses this paradox to establish triumphantly the conclusion that the categories of morality and religion are by no means identical. The incommensurability of earthly and religious aims; this takes one right into the heart of Kafka’s novel. It must be noted, however, that Kierkegaard, the Christian, starting from this conflict of incommensurabilities, progresses in his later works with growing clearness towards a complete renunciation of earthly aims, while Franz Kafka’s hero obstinately insists to the point of exhaustion on regulating his life on earth in accordance with instructions from “the Castle,” although he is forcibly and even brutally rebuffed by every Castle functionary. The fact that thus he is led into open expressions of disrespect for the “Castle,” while retaining the deepest reverence for it in his heart, is essentially what constitutes the poetic mood, the ironical atmosphere, of this incomparable novel. All K.’s vilifications merely show what a gulf there is between human reason and divine grace; a gulf seen from the wrong end of the perspective, of course, from the human end, so that the human beings (K. as well as the pariah family of Barnabas) are apparently completely in the right, and yet in some incomprehensible way always turn out to be in the wrong. This relationship between man and God, running as it were along a distorted plane, and the fact that reason cannot bridge the gulf, could not be better expressed (and that is why on closer inspection the apparently bizarre form of this novel proves to be the only possible), than by Kafka’s presentation of Heaven as seen by human reason, which he gives with magical humour, showing heavenly powers now as objects of the greatest love and reverence, such as Herr Klamm (Ananke?) enjoys, and now as subjects for scornful criticism, both of the clever and the silly kind, even at times as utterly incompetent (the filing of the village documents), or as disreputable, moody or impish (the assistants), or as pedantic and narrow-minded; but in every case as inexplicable. The nuances with which Kafka describes his heavenly powers are not all on one note, but show an endless and delicate gradation both in tragedy and in tragicomedy. And he has an equally rich range of expression for the obverse of heavenly guidance, earthly blundering.
“Whatever one does, it’s always wrong”—this theme could not be played on with more convincing and inventive variation than in K.’s many vain attempts to get himself into the right relationship with the village and the Castle. How help always turns up for him where it is least expected, and, on the other hand, how all his best-laid plans come to a miserable end—in cognac drinking, for instance—how the smallest temptation leads him into ruin (“The Country Doctor.” “Once answer a false ring at your night-bell, and you can never repair the mischief”), and how in his bewilderment he lends an attentive ear to the world, which gives either no answer at all or the most ambiguous answers, to his eternal question concerning good and evil, yet how in the depths of his soul persists the inexpugnable hope that he will find the one right way which is made for him as he for it (“Before the Law”): all this hotch-potch of values and intuitions, of all the limitations, vaguenesses, quixotisms, difficulties, and even sheer impossibilities of human existence, and with it all, faintly glimmering through the confusion, the dawning belief in a higher order of things: all this seems to me to have been completely expressed in Kafka’s novel The Castle, expressed both with intellectual and with adequate emotional force, two elements which are inextricably blended in the book. The thoroughness with which the detail is worked out—perhaps here and there a matter for surprise at first—is indispensable for the completeness of the expression; and this will be misunderstood only by those who have never tried to come to a conclusion about some given fact in life
