Kafka Enters The Public Domain
The author is uniquely suited to our times
Franz Kafka’s incomplete novel, The Castle just entered the public domain. It’s fitting, since it was a project Kafka had abandoned before his death that was heavily edited by Max Brod, who preserved Kafka’s literary legacy. The work has long been beyond the control of its initial creator, much like David Foster Wallace’s incomplete and posthumously published The Pale King.
The Pale King and The Castle even share some themes. Wallace’s deathbed project was a long novel about Internal Revenue Service employees and the edited result is a meditation about the uses and purpose of taxation, bureaucracy and boredom. Wallace doesn’t exactly galmorize the IRS but he takes the original path of presenting it as a vital and necessary part of society rather than demonizing it.
In The Castle, a man named K arrives in a village to work as land surveyor. The village is ruled by a caste of people in a nearby castle. The Castle cannot be visited. The rulers cannot be reached or spoken to by the common people. The village has no need for a land surveyor and K is reassigned to janitorial work. K spends the rest of his life in the village, trying to figure out why he was summoned. He receives an answer after his death, but the response (he is not authorized to live and work in the village but is given provisional permission to do so anyway) would not have satisfied him had he lived to hear it. The rulers in the castle admit that they control the villagers through voluminous and confusing paperwork, but they also insist their system is “flawless.” People believe in the efficacy of these procedures, even as K witnesses castle servants destroying underliverable documents.
The Castle shares themes with The Trial, a completed story about a man named Josef K. who is accused of a crime but is never told what law he has broken. He must navigate a Byzantine justice system without clear rules and no accountability. He is ultimately sentenced to death without ever learning why, executed in the street “like a dog.”
Kafka’s critique of the condition of society — there are always authorities with power who, at a certain point, will not only refuse to explain themselves but will refuse to acknowledge anybody’s standing to question — is also a critique of human life. While government agencies and large corporations may well act with indifference to our struggles, nature is the ultimate detached arbiter of our fates. Weather, viruses, predators and earthquakes cannot be reasoned with, appealed to or argued with. Throughout history we have attempted to anthropomorphize nature by imagining them as gods with human bodies and language, but the old tales of ordinary people trying to interact with those gods tend to end badly. A human couldn’t even look on most of the gods without being driven mad, vaporized or turned to salt. Think you struck a bargain with Poseidon? The ocean keeps no promises.
It’s odd that we would embue our own structures of power and governance with nature’s cruel neutrality. But this is also, in a way, how we enforce fairness among us. In The Castle, a rigid class system defines who is in and out of power. But the villagers think highly of the ruling class and accept that they cannot appeal to their government.
The right to petition the government is essential in American democracy but we struggle daily with the results: the owner of a large business gets a louder voice than the owner of a small business, a person with a professional lobbyist is more effective than one without one. Heck, the childhood friend of a police officer might get better treatment than a stranger. In a sense, the “faceless bureaucracy” enforces equal treatment by eliminating or limiting the ability of individuals to influence processes through financial, political or social leverage.
This all plays into the age-old problem of social life where we try to organize ourselves to create optimal collective outcomes but experience our lives as individuals. There’s no way to opt out as extreme libertarianism will eventually build feudal cultures, which is why the idea is so popular with tech billionaires who think they have the resources to get to and remain on top. But all our attempts to create fairer structures will, to som extent, impose depersonalized authority of the type we’d find in nature, which is the reason, beyond pure genetic impulse, we banded together in the first place.
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Ever wonder how stars like Jay-Z build and keep their wealth? Zack O'Malley Greenburg spent a decade researching such fortunes for Forbes (while authoring books like Empire State of Mind and A-List Angels). Now he's writing the Zogblog—a weekly newsletter on the intersection of music, media and money—and serializing his next book, We Are All Musicians Now, via Substack. Click here to get both for free.
A university-level, creative writing/reading class, taught by master writer George Saunders. I’m reading the free version, very worthwhile.