The Castle, by Franz Kafka
unk. hardcover edition, probably Schocken 1999, trans Harmann

Somerville, MA
December 1999

As with so many authors I began Kafka out of order and by some result of my early engagement with G.K. Chesterton. Chesterton leads me to Wolfe, Wolfe to Borges, Borges to Joyce, and so on. Chesterton to Eliot, Eliot to Frazier, Frazier to Robert Graves, and so on. The links are often tenous.

Wolfe to Kafka, via a short, throwoff (but inexpressibly sincere) story I wrote earlier in the fall, an involved discussion of estrangement, and one of my failed attempts to make someone else fall in love with Wolfe.

The piece in question was titled “85 Cent Widescreen: A Review”, and was a two-page description of a subway ride in Boston, made as one describes a movie: for a subway ride has twice the mystery and six times the immanence, and yet remains in so many ways as entirely out of reach as a movie.

These were the arguments of a man who refused (still refuses) to accept the pre-packaged version of life proffered by the media-industrial complex, who wanted nothing to come between him and the raw and bloodied hands of the world, of reality, to see nothing through the window of a car. Who wrote an article for Adbusters demanding that we be allowed to live our own lives, claiming that the pre-digested emotions of the movies had rendered us all Walking Men in a Giacometti city.

And who discovered that as the world becomes infinitely complex and stripped of its Platonic costumery, it becomes no easier to touch. You cannot stop the car everywhere, you cannot speak to everyone in Boston who steps onto a subway, you cannot follow every woman to the ends of the earth.

Anyone familiar with Kafka will find similarities between my story and “On the Tram”, and a friend and former professor of mine whom I had unsuccessfully tried to convert to Gene Wolfe with a gift of Nightside the Long Sun pointed me to The Castle, both as a response to the Wolfe book (which she disliked for its Catholicism and echos of Augustine – only parly unfairly) and to what she saw as a dangerous tendency to reduce my life to some impossible struggle up a hill, to “touch people”, at the expense of the real people already around me.

Kafka may in fact have been as dangerous as anything to read then: unemployed and friendless in an alien city, in the dead of winter. But that is the way of philosophy professors. Reading Kafka then was what solidified forever this tension in my mind, and is probably what enabled me to understand Kundera when I read him years later. But the ability to live at peace with the world has only, I think, begun to develop.