Power and animality in Kafka’s The Castle

Abstract

Animality is a leitmotif in Kafka’s works. It has been studied from various points of view, but rarely in the context of power. Further, The Castle has been largely ignored in studies on animality in his oeuvre. This paper suggests that the novel, though animals as such are basically absent from it, is permeated with animality and that its focus on power interacts with animality in various ways. In particular, by the metaphor of animality, the three well-known dimensions of power can be illuminated; animals/humans used as pets reveal how the very human attitude of caring may be a fertile ground for a totalizing type of power; and finally, animality turns out to be deeply connected with divinity in terms of absolute or perfect power, knowledge and eternal happiness. Kafka’s last and unfinished novel can be read as a study about the theology of power, with the conclusion that to exist as a human being means to be doomed to will, to acquire knowledge by power, that, however, cannot bring us eternal bliss, only the animal perfection of the Hell that admires itself but is fundamentally unhappy.

Keywords:

• Kafka
• animality
• power
• caring
• knowledge
• happiness

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to my anonymous referees for commenting on and improving my arguments.

Notes

1. Studies cited above discuss animality in Kafka’s oeuvre mainly from perspectives that are related to concerns of existentialism, epistemology, natural sciences or interpret it in connection with Kafka’s personal development.

2. Boa describes the official Sortini as a ‘hybrid bureaucrat/god’ and she offers interesting parallels between the main characters of the novel and some Greek mythological figures (Gardena-Demeter, Amalia-Persephone, Sortini-Pan).

3. Robertson (2009) mentions similar analogies. Sebald (1972) refers to the zombie-like behaviour of the assistants, elsewhere (1976) he compares the officials to insects. Sheppard (1973) likens The Castle to a hive of bees.

4. Frieda lets K. watch Klamm through a hole on the door, like an object or animal whose behaviour is, again, mysteriously uninteresting. Klamm sits like an eagle in his cage and does not do anything. Corbella (2007) associates Bentham’s idea of the Panopticon with the ‘gaze’ of Klamm, the official who, without moving his eyes, sees everything. The Castle is replete with other instances of silent gazing, observing. But if I am right about the animal aspect of the officials, their silent gaze expresses something else. Eyes are not necessarily signs of being observed (by a god) but also of being incapable of speaking: many animals, and especially birds, can speak most with their eyes. There can be so much desperation in a silent gaze.

5. Sortini’s name is first a reference to sortieren, to make and maintain order, in a bureaucratic sense. But modern bureaucracies, fine-tuned in and by the First World War, have developed into man-sorting organizations. Sortini sorts out Amalia much as he, presumably, sorts out his files and as predators weigh and sort out their prey.

6. Robertson (2009) refers to the reports that Klamm changes his outlook frequently and notes that this name (klam), in Czech, means illusion.

7. Sebald (1976) makes some important observations on power and filth, parasytism, vampirism, purposelessness. Power is especially in the focus in Bennett (1991), Speirs and Sandberg (1997), Arneson (1988), Dodd (2002), Zilcosky (2002) and Corbella (2007).

8. Bennett (1991), for instance, cites Steven Lukes’ conception of power in support of a more structuralist, anti-pluralist understanding of how power operates, often, if not as a rule, without agents.

9. Arneson (1988) attributes K.’s failure to liberate the village both to his giving in to power temptations and to the lack of a community resistance to power. Not only power corrupts but powerlessness, too.

10. Sheppard (1973) and Robertson (2009). Speirs and Sandberg (1997) find that K. is both humiliated and humiliates others himself. Sebald (1976) considers K. a failed messiah whose failure consists in political restlessness that stands in sharp and unfavourable contrast to Amalia’s moral determination. E. Boa’s (2002) and Zilcosky’s (2002) views are similar. Boa argues that K. fails to find home (again) in the village for he is motivated by the lust for power; and Zilcosky thinks that K. wants to ‘see’ but cannot: invariably, it is always The Castle that observes, sees, supervises him, both by its officials and the village inhabitants. From Dood’s (2002) overview of the literature, it seems to emerge that the ambiguity of K.’s character is a reflection of Kafka’s own ambiguity about the use of power in achieving political and moral objectives.

11. Haugaard (2012) also concludes that each dimension (distinguished by Lukes, to which Foucault’s conception is added as a fourth one) compresses both a concept of ‘power over’ and a concept of ‘power to’ that can be linked, respectively, to a more negative, submissive and a more positive, creative understanding of power. Habermas’ criticism of Hannah Arendt makes a point on power having a positive, generative and a negative, domination aspect (Habermas 1986).

12. Except for Weber (1978) himself whose definition of power remains the origo for all power researches. Yet Weber declared the concept of power amorphous and practically useless in sociology.

13. Ortega y Gasset in his Meditations on Hunting (1995) recalls an anecdote about Malebranche by Fontanelle who, was visiting Malebranche, [when] a pregnant dog came into the room. So that the animal would not disturb anyone who was present, Malebranche (…) had the dog expelled with blows from a stick. The poor animal ran away howling piteously while Malebranche, a Cartesian, listened impassively. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘It’s a machine, it’s a machine!’ (p. 98). Well, machines may have feelings, and this may entitle them not to be treated in certain ways. Cartesians may admit that much but insist that dogs are machines, though different from inanimate ones.

14. On Kafka’s views about animals, not surprisingly, two opposing claims have been made: that they have their own inner life which is, in principle, not different from ours and therefore comprehensible (see Harel 2010) and that they are totally different, the border being impenetrable (see Sebald 1986, Norris 2010, Tyler 2010). Derrida (2009) does not reflect on Kafka but his note on Hobbes’ Leviathan as the being who like animals and gods do not really communicate with us, to not respond to us in human ways, is related to this point of otherness. See also de Ville (2012).

15. Bennett (1994) captures this by stressing the uncanniness of Kafka’s writings. She explicitly, though only briefly, refers to animality and humanity as a borderline from which this uncanniness originates (p. 654).

16. In Hegel’s philosophy, master and slave consciousnesses are radically different. It is very telling that in a climactic paragraph of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts Marx illustrates the master/slave dialectic exactly by referring to animality: ‘What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal. Certainly eating, drinking, procreating, etc., are also genuinely human functions. But taken abstractly, separated from the sphere of all other human activity and turned into sole and ultimate ends, they are animal functions’. The parallel consists in the perfect organization of work in both groups standing in contrast to the animality of their biological life.

17. Sebald (1972) interprets the bunch of these metaphors (night, sleep, bed, wardrobe, cellar, etc.) as references to death. Sheppard (1973) makes similar observations.

18. Gray (1988 [1973]) points this out, saying that words are not really taken seriously, their meanings are habitually shifted, modified, obfuscated, and there are no individual styles of speaking in the novel (it is particularly amusing to read a little boy’s elaborate account of his mother’s feelings and thoughts vis-a-vis K.).

19. K.’s becoming part of what he reports on is noted by Bernheimer (1977), too: ‘K.’s quest inscribes him more and more deeply into the very textual freeplay he seeks to ground and delimit. He becomes a kind of hermeneutic machine, having to interpret every aspect of what he sees, hears and reads’ (p. 373). He, too, stresses K.’s ‘duplicity’. The same point about the magic of speaking, of its impersonality and pointlessness is stressed by Kudszus (1977) who relates this specially to the figure of Pepi.

20. One may add, however, that politics has ever been one of the moving forces behind drama too, and both Sophocles and Shakespeare knew very well how satisfying and pleasing it is to the audience to see kings and rulers rise and fall. See Lyon (2006).

21. Sheppard (1973) argues that K.’s assistants parodize him (and Frieda, too). If they are indeed like animals as I claimed then Sheppard’s observation about the mutual mirroring of K. and his assistants is further, indirect argument for K.’s silent metamorphosis.

22. Vincent (1987) argues that right from the first sentence the novel offers three, equally valid interpretative perspectives that are untranslatable and frustrate one another constantly, although often they merge. K.’s perspective is sometimes very easy to reconcile with the one of the reader, yet sometimes it slips into a totally alien castle/village perspective. By this technique, we may now add, without having to turn K. literally into an animal of something else, and back again, Kafka managed to create perhaps the most fully elaborated specimen of his ‘fantastic beings’.

23. Thus Speirs and Sandberg (1997), for instance, conclude that ‘power exercised over the villagers from that higher place [The Castle] is a power built from the stuff of their own lives and maintained by their subordination to it’ (p. 122).

24. Boa (2002) considers matriarchy ‘as a subdominant system sustaining a dominant patriarchy’ (p. 69) but aren’t men, including officials who do appear mighty, dependent utterly on the services of women? Such a dependence challenges the hypothesis about the dominant patriarchy.

25. Gray (1988 [1973]) argues that the only conspicuous hierarchy within the village is among women.

26. A classic discussion of caring is Frankfurt (1999). His notion of caring is basically ‘to be concerned with’. After explaining this notion, he jumps to the topic of love and writes that ‘loving is a mode of caring’ (p. 165) and concludes that ‘loving’ is an intrinsic value. I think one should be more circumspect about the relation between caring and loving. Especially, if love is put into the context of caring, understood as a certain type of human activity, a kind of business, some potentially harmful aspects of it become conspicuous. The Castle, permeated with animality that makes caring an obvious subtopic of the novel, provides abundant evidence for that.

27. Kelly (2007) and Armstrong (2008) discuss the emergence of the habit of keeping pets in eighteenth century England through analysing literary texts.

28. It does not follow that pets would indeed agree. As one of my referees pointed out, cats would perhaps do so, on account that they perceive their relationship to the humans who care for them as one where cats are gods and humans their servants. Dogs, however, could have the opposite impression: humans care for them because they are gods, and dogs depend on them utterly. The remark is very apt and concise. Caring in itself cannot be equated with love.

29. Speirs and Sandberg (1997) write about Amalia’s ‘infinite patience in caring for her aged parents, particularly her helpless, childish father’ (p. 123) – but they fail to notice the striking similarity of this caring to that of other villagers, towards the sometimes no less helpless castle officials. Amalia has been generally praised by commentators, though Boa (2002) did compare her to Persephone, the goddess of the Netherworld. Robertson (2009), too, inclines to evaluate Amalia’s ‘frozen’ stature negatively but still thinks she is a victim. Sheppard (1973) is even more critical of her. As far as I can tell, no one really noted the desperation of her family in not being able to make sense of her act, a desperation K. shares with Olga in not being able to make sense of The Castle.

30. The unfinished novel Amerika begins with the narrator’s announcement that a housemaid seduced (in fact: raped) young Karl Roßmann. Although his family is said to be poor, they must have been a reputed family because his parents had to send him away to avoid scandal, and the girl was their employee. ‘Caring’ in this novel also implies sexual services, although unsought by the boy, yet we may easily imagine a more ‘normal’ trajectory of the story in which the seduced/raped becomes the later seducer/raper.

31. Derrida (2009) refers to H. Cixous and S. Freud in observing that fear and pleasure are often inseparably interconnected: the point often comes in a form or a tale of an animal that is both threatening and exciting.

32. Bernheimer (1977) thinks that the perverted, yet natural assertion that women ‘love’ officials, expresses Olga’s (and others’) desire to be connected to The Castle, but in a bureaucratic sense.

33. Robertson (2009) mentions but does not analyse the attitude of ‘superstitious reverence’ (xvii) of which K. is supposedly free.

34. This is, of course, not meant to be an anthropological statement, only a type of experience which is so funnily captured by H. Melville who describes Queequeg’s ritual exactly in this way: ‘All these strange antics were accompanied by still stranger guttural noises from the devotee, who seemed to be praying in a sing-song or else singing some pagan psalmody or other, during which his face twitched about in the most unnatural manner. At last extinguishing the fire, he took the idol up very unceremoniously, and bagged it again in his grego pocket as carelessly as if he were a sportsman bagging a dead woodcock’ (Moby Dick 1851, Ch. 3).

35. Hence the reason why the moral quality of The Castle has always sharply divided commentators. Sheppard’s view in which K. is invited to become a mature person (1973) is favourable. Heller (1974) strongly disagrees: The Castle is a demonic power. Interestingly, Sheppard himself summarizes the various possible interpretations and concludes that the right attitude towards The Castle is a kind of benevolent indifference, though this conclusion is at odds with his portrayal of K. and his failure to mature. If The Castle is in the first place a perfect world, then the moral evaluation of it becomes unnecessary. It is beyond morality.

36. Ortega y Gasset, The Self and the Other, cited by Reynaga (2010).

37. Size and power are naturally connected in our images of power. But does power also make the powerful beautiful? In aesthetics, the idea that the sublime and the powerful are related concepts, has been well-established. Yet beauty conveys the image of perfection understood as an essential identity of being with being in nature (which is what animality so forcefully expresses) better than sublimity. It may, therefore, be possible that if power also implies perfection in this sense, then it is able to lend aesthetic qualities related to beauty to the powerful. The Castle has, as K. first observes, a rather miserable, ramshackle outlook. Yet at the ‘end’ of the novel he finds the landlady’s clothes beautiful. We imagine them no less outdated than The Castle, lacking true aesthetic value. But she is in K.’s eyes now the most powerful person he is able to get in contact with.

38. The person to be executed must be naked. There are other features of the process that resembles a nightmarish, sadistic intercourse. As the last, self-imposed execution ends with the machine breaking up, the last sentence of the scene reads: ‘The tip of a large iron needle had gone through his forehead’ (Kafka 1914, p. 25). Sexual symbolism and, so to speak, epistemological symbolism can hardly be more succinctly integrated.

39. In an article on Heidegger’s analysis of power, M. de Beistegui concludes that in order to achieve the truth of being that is contrary to the truth of metaphysics, all power must be, in the end, negated. Yet power, in its most totalitarian form, is a necessary precondition of its own negation. This conclusion, if correct, may be regarded as flying in the face of the Nietzschean analysis that equates the will to power with the essence of being. On a deeper level, however, Nietzsche would not, perhaps, disagree with Heidegger: overcoming power may itself be the last instance of power. If this is right, Nietzsche would indeed look a Christian theologian of divine omnipotence. This may not sound very convincing yet, as I see it, not entirely implausible. See de Beistegui (2007).

40. This is perhaps the deepest reason why K. looks to many commentators so mad about power, ambition, fighting. It is, however, only Sheppard (1973) who makes an explicit reference to the Schopenhauerian philosophy of the will, to the figure of Faust, and he even suggests that an obsession with power and with the will to power conjures up the ghost of animality in human life.

41. Kohl (2006) argues that K. is capable only of a fake victory in his struggle for recognition. Politzer (1975), too, writes that ‘K.’ succumbing … to weakness and sleep is tantamount to a declaration by his ego of its own bankruptcy’ (p. 407). Critics have been mostly preoccupied with K.’s experience and precious little attention has been devoted to Bürgel and his revelations. Gray (1988 [1973]) is an exception but his conclusion is strange: acknowledging that The Castle seriously yearns for its own destruction, he maintains that in fact beyond this yearning is a desire for destruction, no matter which partner is destroyed. Although he does refer to the mystical experience where the soul’s destruction flows into utter happiness and he is rightly wary of such an utterly paradoxical end, yet the paradox may be given a more benevolent interpretation where destruction does not cause happiness. Rather, it is a metaphor of happiness being fundamentally different from the one we can imagine. More on this below.

42. Ullyot (2010). As he puts it: ‘Maintaining the principle of waiting is a success in itself’ (p. 438, original italics).