Robin:

Hello, Agnes.

Agnes:

Hi, Robin.

Robin:

We just read Kafka.

Agnes:

Yes, I don't know why he's saying that voice, but yes, we just read, we both read Kafka's The Castle, and I'd never read it before. I've actually never read a Kafka novel before. I've read a lot of his short stories. And so I suggested that we both read this and now, since we just read it, we're going to talk about it. And I was just remarking, I'm just remarking to you, but I'll say it for our listeners, that whenever I read a book, I always have a pen in my hand and I'm always ready to underline and some books I do like tons of underlining and it struck me that I underlined almost nothing in my copy of Kafka. Somehow, everything was at the same level, the same register, so that if I was going to underline anything, I would have had to underline everything.

Robin:

Although I felt that about that other book we read about Musel.

Agnes:

The Man Without Qualities? Are you kidding me?

Robin:

You underlined a lot, but I still thought I was all at a pretty similar level.

Agnes:

No way. It's full of these little lines, these little remarks. I've created an entire sticker page of quotes from The Man Without Bars. The Man Without Bars is just the opposite. It's full of bon mots and things you can pull out of context and then hand them to somebody else and say, isn't this witty? Isn't this insightful?

Robin:

But that's not because they aren't at the same level. That's a different thing.

Agnes:

I think it is, but they're not the same level. But we should tell, in case people haven't read it, what it's about. Do you want to give a summary?

Robin:

Well, my summary is basically a horror story.

Agnes:

That's a take, that's not a summary.

Robin:

Okay, but so basically a man shows up in a town, He's supposed to be a land surveyor. There's a castle on a hill above the town where most of the big decisions get made. And he's been supposedly summoned to the town by the castle. But then it takes him a while, and he's got assistants right from the beginning who have been assigned to him, but he doesn't know people.

Agnes:

Not immediately, but close to the beginning.

Robin:

And then he's struggling to find anybody to talk to about what he's supposed to do. He finds out they don't actually want him to be a land surveyor. And then various things go wrong, and then he is trying to, and many other people are trying to, like, apply to the castle, or persuade the castle, or manipulate the castle in their various personas, in various ways to get better treatment, or to get heard about something, or to undo some problem. And almost the entire book is, almost no work happens. Our person K, who doesn't even have a whole name, he's just K-dot. Everybody else has names, but our main character is K-dot. And K-dot seems to be reasonable, then at various points he makes some pretty random decisions that seem, to me, kind of questionable. But he's in this sort of reasonable voice of, in his own head, how reasonable he is. And then... We just see all of these, you know, the strange opaque bureaucracy and it's random actions and they're a pact on him and other people and various people's complicated, time-consuming strategizing about how they're going to influence various people in the castle and their, you know, perceptions and things like that. And it's a whole world of, you know, in the end things go badly for him and they get worse. And it's, in that sense, a horror story of It's exaggerated, I think, relative to our world, of just how dysfunctional this castle bureaucracy is, and how opaque it is, and how people are so obsessed with... The castle is prestigious, and people there are high, and people put up with a lot of shit from them, basically, because they're so high, and yet, and then they're always, like, whenever they have a problem, instead of just dealing with the problem directly, they want to somehow lobby the prestigious people. to come help solve their problem. And even just having an audience with them seems to be like a high point of their life somehow, just to be in their presence and to get them to listen to them.

Agnes:

Yeah, but I think it's a little more than that. It's somehow that they understand everything in their lives as sort of somehow symbolically related to the castle. So it's not like, oh, I have a problem and I'm gonna get the castle people to figure it out. It's that the nature of the problem is that somehow the problem is my not getting recognized by the castle, like that I'm turned down by this woman or that I don't have this job or whatever. The reason it's a problem is because it indicates disfavor with the castle. To the point where like, yes, you could read it as a comment on bureaucracy or you could read it as a comment on religion. There's something that is the source of the meaning of all of these people's lives, and it is the thing that's supposed to render intelligible everything they do, but since they have no access to it, the stuff that they do doesn't make a lot of sense. and at first it feels like K is this voice of reason and reasonableness in this kind of slightly crazy world where he shows up at this inn and nobody who knows who he is and people are kind of rude to him and he's supposed to be this land surveyor and like why don't people just let him do his job and then you sort of start at you you you you you start to hear like the backstories of the characters and while you're starting to learn the backstories of the characters you see K getting more and more pulled into the symbolic thinking of the castle. And by the end, he's just like everybody else. He's fully like symbolically entrenched in this castle. Yeah, I don't know, ideology or something.

Robin:

It seems like it happened relatively early that I mean, I was sort of puzzled early that is so early on somehow he has this sexual relationship with the barmaid. And then they decide to be, you know. freedom, and then they're going to be engaged to be married. And then he gets it into his head that because of this, he should have an audience with her former lover for no other reason than that he wants to talk about that. And he gets really obsessed with that. And I'm just like, what? Why does he want to do that? But it seems very early that he gets into this whole idea that the purpose of his life should be somehow to have an audience with High Castle people and to, you know, to emphasize their connection to him through other things in the world.

Agnes:

Right, well, I think that the book presents two ambiguous readings of that. So the first reading is the only reason why Kay gets involved with Frieda in the first place is that her association with Klom. That Klom is his best possible connection to the castle. It's the closest he can get to the castle. And so he picks, he attaches himself to someone who has some connection. The other is that once he takes up with Frieda, he is worried that he will fall into disfavor with the castle if Clam is offended, and so he wants to make sure to clear the air between them so that Yeah, so those are the two possibilities that I think the novel puts both of those forward completely ambiguously. They might both be true. That is, it might be that he first got together with her because he thought that would be a connection and then he also wants to clear the air and he wants to do both those things at the same time.

Robin:

But they both present quite an obsession with the castle pretty early in the story. That is.

Agnes:

Oh, yeah. I mean, like, well, so the crucial thing that happens even earlier than that in the story is, like, he tries to go to the castle. Remember when he's, like, caught in the snow and it's really cold? And everyone's like, no, you can't go. You're never going to go. You're not, like, there's this impossibility of going there that.

Robin:

In the very beginning, he just wants to call them on the phone. And people say, no, you can't even do that.

Agnes:

Right. So the obsession with the castle, I think, is fueled by the inaccessibility of the castle. but also all these other narratives that pop up along the way about everybody else also being obsessed with the castle. That is, everyone in the town is obsessed with the castle, right? So if you're going to hang out in this town, if you're going to speak the language of the town, you're also going to become obsessed with the castle.

Robin:

So this book is presented as a modernist book with a modernist author. And it's therefore presented as in something of a contrast to sort of books from centuries ago, scenarios from centuries ago. It doesn't feel that much, certainly nothing like Musel in terms of having such modern characters. These characters do seem more peasant, old worldish. But there is a sense in which this Castle isn't the sort of story people would have told centuries ago because there would have just been a world where people just knew their place in it more and accepted things. And this world just seems just more dysfunctional and opaque and at play than I think a centuries ago story would tell. So there is something modern about it.

Agnes:

Yeah, you know what it reminds me of? Let me find the title of it. Kim Ji-young, born 1982. It's a novel, it's a Korean novel that I read while I was just in Korea, and it's a novel about like this young woman growing up in the 80s and 90s, but also like her mother and grandmother and all the sexism that she's faced. But the striking thing about the novel is that there's a kind of commentary about the sexism that seems too aware for its time. Like the stuff that's being singled out and remembered is the stuff you would remember if you were looking at that from the point of view of, I don't know, 2020 or when was this novel written? I don't know what it was written. It was translated. All right. And there's something like that in Kafka where it seems to be about this like peasant world, this sort of feudal world, but the people in it seem to be sort of aware of feudalism or too aware. It's somehow not comfortable in the time that it's in. And so it does feel like a modern take on a feudal story.

Robin:

Right, so one way to think about it is, I remember talking about this recently to some other people, in more ancient worlds, most people sort of mainly socialized and interacted within their class. And they didn't actually have that much relationship with people in other classes in terms of spending a lot of time or having a lot of interactions with her or depending on it much. And then the modern world is more a world where everybody is all mixed up together in a sense where now if you're poor, you're supposed to feel bad that you aren't rich because you could have been rich. Whereas in an old world, you would have just known you couldn't possibly be in the upper class because you just weren't born in the right sort of place to even make that possible. And so I think that we read Peasants into Frenchmen. And I think what we read about the peasants is they had very little awareness of any councils nearby or much interactions with them. They were just in their own little peasant world. And then there might be towns or castles or cities where just whole different peoples were interacting. And then the Peasants into Frenchmen was about how this world became more integrated. And then there were more interactions of more sorts across class lines. And then there was more maybe awareness of lower class people being resentful of the upper-class people that they interacted with, and maybe leading the French Revolution, etc. But like in the ancient world, there was so little interaction that there was less jealousy even, or awareness of how the other classes lived. And so we see Kafka here presenting the castle and the village, which from peasants into Frenchmen, they just wouldn't interact much at all. But Kafka presents them as in intense interaction,

Agnes:

Well, I mean, both interacting and not, right? Right. That is, what's marked is the desire for an interaction that never happens.

Robin:

But there's still lots of, apparently, rulings from the castle that matter for people in the village, which is why they're all sort of lobbying for it. So it sits between, you see, the ancient world and the modern world in this weird sense, where we have them being villagers in the village, and the castle's on the hill. But now we've changed it to have a much more modern bureaucracy and degree of interaction between the classes, mediated by complicated rules and structures.

Agnes:

There's, I mean, I think it's one thing that makes it feel modern is that it feels quite sort of allegorical or something, right? So maybe bureaucracy, that's one reading that's been given, maybe theological. It feels like this is a story that's sort of about something other than the characters and the things that are in it. And, but like Kafka stories are like that too. In fact, I think they're even more like that. That is, they feel like little sort of almost morality tales or something. Borges was apparently a big admirer of Kafka, and I feel like the other person who writes a little bit like this is Borges, and as far as I know, Borges never wrote anything really long. And I found that it was very interesting to be in effect in a Kafka story that goes on and on and on and on. That's what this novel feels like. It doesn't feel to me like, I guess he died before he finished it, but it doesn't feel like it needed an ending. It felt like,

Robin:

I also feel like it doesn't get that much deeper. I mean, we see a more elaborate detail as if half a dozen of these short stories were all crammed next to each other and overlapping, but there's no deeper plot or structure that elaborates than you would get in the short story.

Agnes:

So it's true, but I find it to be quite a different experience as a reader. So when I'm reading one of Kafka's short stories, I read it from a big distance and I'm like, oh, here's an odd world. I wonder what the things in it stand for or something. And that's different from how I read a novel when I'm invested in the characters. And what I found was that I found the castle really boring at first. Like, it was a struggle to get through the first 50 pages. And then it kind of pulled me in, and I found myself, like, really invested in these stupid things that the characters wanted. Like, when he's waiting outside for Kalam with the coachman, And he's waiting to meet him, and I'm like, no, no, stay there, stay there. He's going to come out eventually. You're going to catch him. And it was like being pulled into this absurd world. you know, the effect of the novel was to make me forget a little bit that this was supposed to be a parable of some kind. And that was much more effective in kind of turning it into something like a depiction of the absurdity of life itself. Like, maybe my life is like this. My life is like a thing where there's stuff I just, like, really care about, and it's super important to me. And if you ask me, but, like, talk me through, why does this matter to you so much? I would kind of fall short at a certain point.

Robin:

So we once watched a movie together called Ridicule about French court antics. And in that world, people were making a similar degree of subtle, strategic calculations about who to talk to and who to approach how. But that made more sense in a court situation. And in some sense, what Kafka is doing is describing that same sort of degree of court intrigue and complication, but putting it in a village where it has very little point, there's very little at stake, but you still put all of that political complexity and ambiguity and strategy in Kafka in the village.

Agnes:

It's true though, there are these scenes like Barnabas, you know, trying to get him, like, oh no it's not Barnabas, it's one of the other guys who's like, waits outside and, or like, goes to these meetings at the castle and there's like a bunch of people and they're moving files around or whatever. And he never knows, like, he never even knows when he's being given a message. So there are these scenes- I think that is Barnabas. That is Barnabas, okay. He doesn't even have an official job there.

Robin:

He hangs out there long enough so somebody just gives him something to do at some points and finally, oh, now I have a job. He doesn't even get paid.

Agnes:

Right, right. Well, there's kind of a puzzle about how anyone in this story makes money. It's very much not a story where economics comes to the fore at all. And that's an interesting thing about it. Though there are these moments where some character is really tired, that tiredness comes up. Not hunger so much, but tiredness.

Robin:

Weariness, even.

Agnes:

Weariness, like really wanting to go to sleep, or being too cold. So certain bodily conditions come up. But the idea that life is a struggle for existence, where you have to make money in order to buy food, in order to feed your family, or whatever, that's not. It's like that's backgrounded in Kafka. Right. Even though he's talking about peasants, who presumably that was their central concern. It's not the central concern in Kafka. The central concern in Kafka is the quest for meaning.

Robin:

And the thought- It's an odd way to describe it because in some sense, they don't look like anybody who's seeking meaning. They are in a world of vague, complicated meaning. They are navigating, but they don't look like they're looking for meaning exactly.

Agnes:

I think they are. I think that Kay's desperate desire to be affiliated with Klum. is a quest for meaning. That is, he's like, well, here's an important person or Barnabas trying to have an appointment at the castle. This is what it would be to be a significant or meaningful person.

Robin:

How would it be different if we said they had a quest for status or prestige?

Agnes:

So I think that in a way what Kafka is doing is giving you a story that is sort of a story about status, but where it's very, very clear that status is an end in itself and is not gonna then be deployed to give you more money or anything. So yeah, like the thought is that if you have this connection to this high slave, then you're of value.

Robin:

So I initially told you, basically, this is a book about status. And these are characters who are unusually not only obsessed with status, but self-cautiously so, and also kind of selfish. That is, in this world- They are very selfish. Right. There is not much of a social sort of niceness in trying to appear to be nice and kind and love and care about each other. They are all very, very self-centered and selfish in their striving for status.

Agnes:

They're very sincere in their striving for status, which is the difference with ridicule. So with ridicule, yes, everyone's striving for status, but everyone also has a kind of ironic attitude towards it. And everyone also sees status as instrumental to gaining something or other. We're not sure what. It kind of often turns out to be more status. Though our main character's like, no, no, I want to use it to clear the swamps. But there's this thought of status as a tool. And Akavka's characters are just like deeply sincere and naive about just wanting to have some castle value in their souls. and not to use it for anything, but just because then they would be someone. That's sort of why I'm calling it meaning. It's the uncynical pursuit of status.

Robin:

But I'm going to still call it a horror story in some sense. There's two key elements of the horror. One is that people are just nakedly looking for status that seems to have no meaning and being very selfish about it. And the other horror is just this is a completely dysfunctional organization. And they are all just accepting that and going along with it. Those are the two horror elements.

Agnes:

I think it's quite insightful to say that it's a horror story. I think it really is that. And I think it's, in a way, it's a surprising fact about it. Like when you said that to me, I was like, oh, that's right, but I hadn't noticed it. Like here I was happily reading along, not horrified, right? And I think that's an interesting thing about literature by contrast with movies. If there's like a horror movie, you don't have to inform me that it's a horror movie, right? I figured that out from watching it.

Robin:

In fact- When somebody gets their head bit off, that's a big clue.

Agnes:

Exactly. But I think that it's just the difference of literature where the horror element can in some sense be disguised from you. And I think that that's sort of what's going on in Kafka.

Robin:

I was just thinking of the movie Brazil. I don't know if you've seen basically, it has this dysfunctional bureaucracy, which is part of the story, but it's very clearly also like it tortures people and kills people like it. You can tell why it's a bad bureaucracy because of just obvious dysfunctions like that. Whereas Kafka, the castle is taking away all those torturing and bad outcomes and just having the horror of this dysfunctional bureaucracy that people are obsessed with.

Agnes:

Right, OK, good. But I think there's a third thing that makes it a horror novel. To me, the thing that's ultimately more horrifying about it is that the story is pretty much exclusively a set of interactions. Like Kafka focuses on conversations between people. And it'll be like Kay and Frieda, Kay and Barnabas, Kay and Barnabas's two sisters, right? Just a series of conversations. And in none of these conversations do you ever feel like people understood each other. That is, there's this kind of persistent- Or even much care about each other. Well, definitely not care about each other, but presumably those things are separate, right? Yeah. At least separate. Especially the ones where he's talking to the first guy in the bed, and then finally the other guy, Errol Langen, something like that. There's a guy who gives him the command and the previous guy where he's sitting in the guy's bed and keeps dozing in and out. Anyway, uh, those scenes of just, like, incomprehensible, like someone's talking, but you can tell that K isn't really understanding what he's saying and isn't going to be able to take it the way that he wants it. And so it seems to me that what Kafka, like, wants to draw our attention to is not just that the village is dysfunctional or the bureaucracy is dysfunctional or the people are selfish, But that in this kind of a world, nobody can connect to anybody else. And like Kay's attempt to connect to Frida, and they're differing demands and wants and feelings of betrayal. I mean, that's the core relationship in the book is Kay's relationship to Frida. And each of them just feels sure that the other is going to betray them. And thus, they preemptively sort of do so.

Robin:

I often go through long explanations of their strategies. all the possibilities and why they're gonna do this so that doesn't happen, et cetera. And so for example, near the end of the book, there's two long monologues by two women explaining to Kay, like Olga and then Pippin, I guess. And after each of them gives this long description of their life and their life strategy, none of which he knew before, immediately he tells them how they're wrong about their lives. Arrogant enough to just say, oh no, you didn't understand that about yourself. You know, so he's apparently listening enough to think he heard them and they're all wrong. And he's just.

Agnes:

What's interesting about that is just how sincere everybody is. Everybody in this book is sincere all the time. That is, to me, it's a very striking thing. It's the thing that makes it allegorical as much as anything else is just how directly everybody talks all the time. That is, there's no irony. There's no, there even doesn't seem to be any, like, What's the right word? Failure to disclose or something. People like tell things to other people that they have incentives to not want that person to learn. And it's almost as though in order to not tell someone all the things you don't want them to know, you have to not meet them, which is why Clam keeps running away from Kay. or the castle people don't let you show up there because they would just tell you stuff. So it's like a world that's open in a weird way, but the openness doesn't go anywhere. Because even though everybody's being sincere, nobody quite hears anybody else the way that they want to be heard.

Robin:

So I guess it's a horror from the sort of therapist point of view of, if only you could get people to talk and say what they felt, then we could all, you know, understand each other and feel better. This is a horror story where they do say what they feel, and they are open, and it all goes very badly.

Agnes:

Right. And I feel like everyone's selfishness is a secondary phenomenon. That is, the reason everybody is selfish is nobody understands anybody else. How are you going to help people if you don't get them at all? The selfishness seems to be a product of the scenario that they're in. So I guess I feel like the first fact, the primal fact, is the castle and the bureaucracy and this kind of structure of power or structure of status or however you want to put it. And then that trickles down to selfishness and to the impossibility of communication where those two are connected.

Robin:

So they're all, you know, obviously they don't understand the castle very well and how it works, but then not understanding each other can't be explained so much in terms of the opacity of the castle. They are just failing. And they're failing understanding each other when they each give long monologues explaining their reasoning and their state of mind.

Agnes:

Yeah. But I think it is the thing about the castle. So I think that like, um, you know, Let's say Kay is going to try to explain to the, like, the landlady does not want him to meet Clem, but she's also had an affair with Clem. And he's trying to explain to her why he has to meet Clem, and she's trying to explain to him why he can't do it, and she tells him the story of the affair, right? I think it's that each person has internalized the symbolic nexus of the castle in slightly different ways. So that for Barnabas's dad, it's going to involve waiting at that post. For Barnabas, it's going to be like, I'm going to get recognized as a messenger. For Kay, it ends up being that I have to talk to Klom. And none of these things really make sense. And that's why they don't make sense to each other. So it's everybody sort of has this like somewhat incoherent way of connecting the castle with their own lives. Like they draw some lines, but the line, like they have to draw the line somehow, but it's sort of arbitrary. And so it's that it doesn't make sense. And so they can't make it make sense to the people around them.

Robin:

Well, I guess a key story here is that they have to find a narrative that connects them to the castle and makes sense of their actions. And then they are so desperate to find one and grab onto it that they grab onto something that isn't that coherent, that isn't shared with other people, but they can't let go of it. It's so important to them.

Agnes:

Right, because they don't have anything else.

Robin:

Well, they could grab to somebody else's narrative. They've got all these other narratives around them, but they can't do that.

Agnes:

I mean, I think briefly, Kay and Frida do try to like construct a shared narrative. And there are these, this period where they're in the schoolhouse, right? Where they sort of be cooperating a bit, but yeah, it's very easy for them to get pulled apart. Like they're differing reactions to that kid. They each react in slightly different ways. And then it's like, there's maybe overlap between the symbolic projects, but the overlap is only partial. And so all cooperative endeavors eventually get pulled apart. Nobody cooperates with anybody else for very long.

Robin:

Because they see various things other people do so symbolically in terms of the term. I thought the story that most sort of pulled at my heart would be the story of Olga, because it's the story of the villagers rejecting Olga and her family on the basis of fearing that the castle might not dislike them, but, and then Olga and her family go to appeal to the castle to undo this, but the castle says, we didn't do anything, do you? It was all these, but somehow Olga can't see that she should go to the rest of the village and say, you know, the castle's fine with this, why can't you be here or something? She has to, they have to appeal to the castle. So somehow, it's a way in which basically, maybe a metaphor for how we often, I don't know, blame capitalism or other sorts of large structures in our world for things that we are doing to each other. And somehow we can't just go to each other and complain about it and negotiate because somehow we have to solve capitalism or some larger problem instead.

Agnes:

Yeah, though. I guess I think there's this worry about was, they might be worried that the thing that she did would make them look bad or would make her look bad such that then they wouldn't want to affiliate with her. The problem is more specific than we're blaming capitalism.

Robin:

It's something like- Well, basically, she tore up a note. And everybody's afraid the castle will be offended by her tearing up this note, which apparently hardly anybody knows or cares about, but... She's trying to appeal to the castle, please don't punish me for tearing up this note, and they are not punishing her. They have no knowledge of it, or they don't care about it, but everybody else is shunning her for doing so, for fear that the castle would punish them if they didn't shun her.

Agnes:

Right, exactly. So it's that they think that the castle is watching them more than it is. They think they're being watched all the time.

Robin:

And acting on lots of things they do. Like, yeah, they think many things they do will be of interest to the capital castle, and the castle will react to them.

Agnes:

Right. Right. And that might be, like, insofar as their lives have meaning through that, like, through the thought that It's the castle cares what we're doing. That might be a hard thing to drop.

Robin:

You keep saying the word meaning and it just, it doesn't sit with me very well that I see these people obsessed with the status they get from the castle, but I just not seeing they're getting meaning from it. That's part of the horror here is they are just stuck in a world where they are so obsessed with something that they must have that is not giving them meaning.

Agnes:

I mean, maybe meaning is not a great word. The reason I don't like status is that that word is so easily used in a kind of ironic and distancing way. And that's generally how it shows up, like in ridicule. And what's so marked about this is the absence of that. That is, if we wanted to say honor. Like, that might be okay. The point is that this is what makes them important or worthy.

Robin:

This is how they mark themselves. They measure themselves against the status of the castle.

Agnes:

They think their lives are nothing, are worth nothing. They might as well die if they're not going to be anything to the castle, because that's what it is to be something.

Robin:

And we hardly ever, we basically get almost no view of people from the castle.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

I mean, I guess near the end, there's this assistant to somebody else who goes on to a long discussion. At least we get his perspective on something, but he's a very low level person. They don't seem to be especially enjoying their lives. They have the things everybody else wants, which is to actually be in the castle and be involved in things. And he doesn't seem to be getting that much out of it.

Agnes:

Right, well, one of the descriptions of the castle was something like, whenever you're inside, there's always a further inside early on. Right. There's a further door, and you're always behind some door. And so you never really, like, you can't enter the castle in so many senses. It's not penetrable. So that there's some kind of, like, that's the question for me about this novel, is like, what is it supposed to be? What's the message supposed to be? And, you know, the idea that like bureaucracies are often frustrating. I mean, I think that's the message that's associated with Kafka, but it seems like you could tell that story with like, you could tone that story way down.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

This is not just like a somewhat frustrating bureaucracy. It's like completely totalizing in the degree to which it rules these people's lives. And it does so because of what they're doing, not what it's doing.

Robin:

I'm imagining a similar story in an ancient world where people were just obsessed in rising in status and they want to be lord or something like that. But I imagine that world is a much simpler, understandable world. So the interesting interaction here is to have a bunch of people obsessed with rising in status, seeing that as meaning. In the alternative story, you could have all these people obsessed with rising in status and discovering that when they got it, it wasn't really worth that much. We could have the, gee, I wonder why can't people realize that they should just be happy with what they have or find meaning in their relationships or something. That would be a different story than this. It's interesting that, in fact, the opacity and dysfunction of the castle makes the story very different. That makes the most interesting thing here. How is it such a different horror story to be throwing your lives away for meaningless status in an opaque world that's dysfunctional rather than a simple transparent world?

Agnes:

I think that it's not within the bounds of possibility in this story to get some status and then realize it wasn't worth everything I thought it was. Rather, the way you would describe that, the way that the messenger would describe it is, well, I didn't really get into the castle. I didn't go through the next door.

Robin:

Right. But you could do that in an ancient world. You could have, you know, seven hierarchy levels and our character goes from one to two to three to four and that's where they end up. And they say, well, but I didn't get to five. So, you know, if only I'd gotten to five or six, then, then might've been meaningful. I mean, you could have told that story in a transparent, understandable world that was functional.

Agnes:

But I think that, I think that in those worlds, it's at least like on the table for the person to say, ah, status isn't all that it's cracked up to be. I got it and then I learned that there are other things in life, other important things in life. This is a novel about the other important things in life have been just removed. They're not in the story. There's nothing else that could matter to anyone. And then it's like, then go, that's your premise, go. And so in that sense, the point is not that it's, whether it's ancient or modern, the point is, that there's no distance. There's no, when I was in Korea, one of the things that some people said to me, I don't know if this is true, was that in Korea, there's no irony. They said Koreans are not ironic. They don't understand irony. There's no word for irony in Korean. They're just confused by this thing that we're all doing. And they're all like very, people are just very, they're very straightforward and direct about like pursuing the things that they want. And now, I don't think that means that there's no symbolic pursuit, right? But of course, there's plenty of symbolic pursuit in Kafka without irony. It's not that the lack of irony means that you don't do symbolic pursuit. It's just that the lack of irony means when you do symbolic pursuit, you don't have any distance from that. You don't have any sense of the absurdity of it. I wonder if Koreans like Kafka or not. I wish I could ask.

Robin:

All of a sudden, I'm remembering Waiting for Godot, which is another story of everybody's obsessed with the thing that isn't in their world that they are focused on. But that's, it feels very different. That is, it doesn't.

Agnes:

So it's been a very long time since I saw it once. I've never actually read it. But my feeling about it was that it was filled with irony. That's my memory of it. It's kind of arch.

Robin:

But the characters weren't supposed to be aware of the irony, but we as the observers were more supposed to see it. But there's someone sitting on the edge.

Agnes:

It's almost funny. There's nothing funny about the castle. It's just such an unfunny work. There's not an amusing moment in the whole thing, even where there's almost like certain things that could have been slapstick, like Kafka, sorry, Kafka, K, beating up one of the messengers, right? But then it's like, he gets really sick and then he runs off with Frida and she has to take care of him because he's so sick. There's nothing, there's no space for comedy at all. It's deadly serious.

Robin:

A lot of it takes place at night.

Agnes:

Yeah, that's true.

Robin:

And in cold and dark places.

Agnes:

Or very early morning. Cramped places. Hours when people shouldn't be awake.

Robin:

Right. I think it might feel different if it took place in a sunny garden or something.

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

So that's part of what pulls the mood, right? There's these people who are, they're tired and weary, but obsessed. And they have that momentum of a tired, weary, obsessed person who can't see many things, but they're just going to stick with their obsession. And it's a dark, dreary place.

Agnes:

And like many people in it are sick, like they have a cold or they're, you know, the person in the bed who can't sleep, the woman in the corner, the one that I'm obsessed with and she seems like emaciated or something. So there's a lot of like sickness. It's interesting because there isn't any of like hustle to survive, but there is, sick and exhaustion and being cold, physically cold. Like when K is trapped in the snow and the other guy pulls him on the sled, but the guy doesn't even get on the sled. Only K is on the sled, even though he's like old and sick.

Robin:

So these add to a horror sort of element to it. I mean, you know, most horror stories take place at night, you know, in a dark castle with fog and weird sounds. I mean, those are classic horror story elements.

Agnes:

Right. And you almost sort of, once you adopt the horror framing, you think, oh, this is gonna be a horror story about a haunted castle. And it kind of is a horror story about a haunted castle, except in the horror story about the haunted castle on top of the hill, the scary part happens when you go into the castle and all the terrible things happen to you. And this is the scary part is you never go into the castle and all the terrible things still happen to you because the haunting of the castle happens outside the castle.

Robin:

In the minds of the people in there, stance toward the castle.

Agnes:

Right. So do you feel like you learned anything from this book?

Robin:

I'm not sure. That's, I guess, what I was hoping we might do in this conversation.

Agnes:

Well, now that we did the conversation, do you feel like you learned anything?

Robin:

So he successfully, I mean, we have to admit he's a good writer and successfully created a distinctive horror story. And I'm almost willing to call it a new genre. That is, you might be able to make money more. There are different horror genres, and this is kind of unique as a horror genre. And you can imagine writing more things in this genre, although people just might not have much tolerance for it. And I guess the insight is to see another thing we're horrified by that's maybe more interesting than some monster eating your head off. Interesting horror stories are about what we're actually afraid of. To help us realize that we do actually see some things as horrifying here.

Agnes:

So one of the things that I think is really interesting about the idea of this as a horror story is that And just about any other horror story, the characters in the story would be scared, right? So when they meet up with the ghost or whatever, they'd be like, ah! But the kind of horror that's at play in this story is one where the characters get pulled in like k is not initially embedded in this world and he's not initially he's not thinking about the castle the way they all do like initially he's thinking about the castle my naive way i'll just go there and i'll straighten this all out right and like one you know a third of the way into the into the book and it dawns on him, oh no, that's not how this works. I don't go up to the castle. I just let it rule my life completely without ever going there and just making a bunch of assumptions about what's going on there. And so that's him being drawn into. It's almost like he shows up in this world and it kind of horrifies him. K is kind of horrified by what he sees and it's at night and he's at this barn and these people are being mean to him. Everything's confusion. And then slowly, it's like the frog boiling in the water. Slowly, he just gets used to it and gets pulled into it. And the thought is maybe that there's another thing that we should be horrified by besides having limbs chopped off. Namely, it's a thing where we are inclined to get so used to it that we don't know that we're supposed to be afraid of it.

Robin:

So I certainly had the puzzle at the beginning of the book. Why doesn't Kay leave?

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

I mean, surely at the beginning, right? Or he's like, at the beginning is very touch and go. This is before even the messenger show up. He it just seems like he's here to do a job and he's, you know, that's it. He seems normal at the very beginning.

Robin:

Right. You might think, oh, they didn't have a job for me. They didn't do what they promised. I guess that happens sometimes. I'll just go back home and, you know, try for another thing. But he doesn't. He doesn't even consider that. and I guess part of the sucking in. So maybe the affair with Frida is part of what sucks him in to being in this world, because now he wants to marry her or something, which seemed like quite a big.

Agnes:

Yeah, there was things, guys, at the end, like if only we could have just run away at the very beginning, everything would have been OK, i.e. if only we could have run away before our relationship itself got entangled in the castle. Because by that point, once it has been, by the end of the novel, when they're broken up, everything about their relationship has to be understood in terms of these other people who are themselves interested in the relationship because of what it means about the castle. I think it's naive of her to think there was any point at which it was really free. But the point is, this is after he's gotten together with Frida. Frida wishes they would have just run away. The reason they didn't run away is that Kay thought he has to talk to Klump.

Robin:

Right. Why would he need to if they run away? What's the point of that?

Agnes:

Exactly. So that's just to say they're already, from the beginning, they are stuck.

Robin:

So I can see how I will like this story as a moral lesson, if you will, which is just if, you know, I've been thinking about cultural drift for many months now. And if I think of the idea that you can be in a world with a bunch of status markers that you really internalize, and you don't realize just how arbitrary your world status markers are. And what I'm trying to do maybe with discussing cultural drift is get people to realize the status markers of your world are kind of arbitrary and they might've decayed from some prior world. and you shouldn't be so just accepting of them. And then this story is a warning story of that sort, of a world of people who just accept some opaque, somewhat arbitrary status markers, and are so invested in it that they twist their lives and actions, even when it's not actually being very functional for them. Then I can use that, you see, as a warning story of that sort of thing.

Agnes:

So it has a pedagogical function for you. I think there's something else, though, that's important about it, which is that if you take today's status markers and you take the people who pursue them, everybody pursues every status marker, ironically, at least to some degree. That is, there's no one who would just be like, being a professor, that makes me important. Or wearing a suit, that makes me important. Everyone has this idea that they're actually ironically distanced from all the status markers that they pursue, and they're not actually judging their worth by that. And so it's like a little move we learned to make, like, I don't know when we learned to make this move because I don't actually see it in texts going back, you know, if I'm talking about like, right. Yeah, I don't know that it goes back as far as our literature goes back, but it's very, very common now. I can't imagine anyone now just sincerely avowing that some status marker makes them important. Wealth, position, doesn't matter. Fame, it doesn't matter what it is. Everybody's in our own distance, right? And I think we think that's doing us a lot of work. We're like, no, no, no. I don't take being a professor that seriously. I'm not very important. People are very ready to be humble, to disavow it, but they're pursuing it. And so it's really hard to get into view yourself as a pursuer of status. What is it that that looks like? And Kafka is showing us what that looks like. Pure, what the pure version of that, when you haven't inserted all this little confusions of irony that distract the person from the fact that they're doing it.

Robin:

I mean, it highlights for me that even if we are pursuing sadness to a substantial degree, we are often distracted from it by simple, you know, pleasant food, you know, joking with people, you know, petting a cat. In our world, we have all these nice pleasantries, which if you filled a novel with it, would make the character seem lively and to be enjoying themselves to some degree. And we would just strip all that out.

Agnes:

Exactly. And so it's like, basically, our world might be mostly driven by status, but we managed to distract ourselves from it in enough ways that we all think it's fine and we don't think we're in a horror story, right? And Kafka just shows us what it looks like if you take that out, if you take out the element of the person distracting themselves from the fact that they're pursuing status, and you're just like, whoa, that's horrible. And so the point there might not just be, oh, well, we need to liven up life with a few pleasures. It's that the element of distraction is crucial, right? It's that these people, it's like they can't help but be faced all the time with the thought like, oh, well, I meet them. Will I be recognized as Barnabas? Will I be given a message to give someone? Is this the real message or not the real message? It's all they think about. And you're just like, what a horrible life.

Robin:

It makes me think about movies I've seen about like ridicule, about court intrigue, or maybe spy novels with people strategizing, and to see how in some sense unrealistic they are because you present people as overwhelmingly focused on their intrigue or strategizing, etc., or social timing even, when most ordinary people, even though they do that, they also just are distracted in many other ways.

Agnes:

But I think ridicule is realistic in that way, in that the way to do social climbing is to constantly, at every moment, be pretending you're not doing it. That's why it's ridicule. That's why you have to be funny. You have to be all the time. You have to be cool, blase, not trying too hard. All of that stuff, the cool, blase, not trying too hard, joking, whatever, all of that is the distraction. The ridicule's filled with the distraction. And then there are these moments when the bare nakedness of status pops out, like where somebody makes a joke and nobody laughs or whatever. All of a sudden, you're briefly in the Kafka world for a second.

Robin:

Right. So in some sense, it says, well, there is this view of humans as being very selfish and very status-oriented and very strategic and even mean. And then, OK, people are somewhat like that. And then there's the way in which they're not. Not because they're strategic in some other sense, but we just, we laugh and we eat and we sleep and we laze about sometimes and enjoy a song. And like, in some sense, the celebration of life is in all those other little things.

Agnes:

This is exactly the opposite of the moral that Kafka wanted us to draw. Good thing that we can distract ourselves from the fact that we pursue status all the time by having little pleasures. I don't think that's his point. His point is this is what human life is like. And the little pleasures that we add do not transform it fundamentally from this. They just appear to us to transform it. We are living in a horror story. Otherwise he wouldn't write this story, he wouldn't tell this story to make you feel complacent about the fact that you got to add the little pleasures to your pursuit of status.

Robin:

I mean, he might be okay with our not attending to this all the time. I mean, he wants to show us a thing, and the way to show us is to take away the other things that distract us from seeing this thing in the story. It's not clear. I mean, he doesn't moralize. Certainly the book does not at all moralize about how these people should fix their problem. It doesn't give us any hint whatsoever on what direction they should go.

Agnes:

These problems are not fixable. These people, there's nothing that could fix their problems. For me, that's an interesting fact about the world Kafka has created. At the beginning and in the middle, you're still like, oh, I hope Olga gets to explain herself, or I hope that Barnabas gets to deliver a real message. For a little while, you enter into that thing. You get the crazy and habits your own mind. And by the end, you're just like, no, there's nothing that could happen.

Robin:

I think we can infer that K came from somewhere where this wasn't happening. Otherwise, he would have recognized it too quickly and easily. He would say, oh, this is just like the castle at home, except I have to do things a little different this way here. But he is not at all aware of the whole castle dynamics as he shows up in this town. So we have to presume that where he came from isn't like this.

Agnes:

So, right, a solution to the problem would be that you were somewhere else. Yes, that's the solution to the problem. But leaving, like, it looks like there's just reasons why you can't leave once you've shown, right? There's almost a sense of, well, if he came from somewhere else, why isn't it harder for him to understand what's going on here? It's really easy for them to incorporate him into their crazy. And that's like, I feel like if I showed up, if I were Kay and I showed up in this town, I would spend a little longer being like, you guys are all nuts. And I'm leaving. I'm just going to go. Or like, you know, or like just trying hard to get into the castle. Like I would break in or something. Like I wouldn't just accept that I was now part of this bizarre order. But maybe Kafka's point is, yes, you would, and you've done it many times in your life. You wouldn't notice that you're doing it. What's weird about these people is that, in effect, they're not being destructive in the fact that they're doing it, but we're all doing this all the time.

Robin:

Not only are they not very distracted by their other aspects of the personal lives from pursuing affiliations with the castle, they'd also don't have much in the way of excuses about why the castle is great. So in our world, we often, if we're a professor and we rise and says, we tell about why professors are good for the world and why it's great that there are professors, or we're a business person, we'll tell about the value of business, we're a general, we'll say how there needs to be soldiers, but none of these people are ever telling a rationale about why it's so great they have a castle, these castle people doing stuff. They don't care for that, they're not interested.

Agnes:

It's true. Like, I guess it's just, so in order to think that you need to justify your status markers, you need to have like a little bit of distance from them. You're like, I could have not cared about having a professor in front of my name. So let me explain why I do care about it. But in this world, there's no, that's just not a possibility. It's not a possibility that you could have not cared about what the castle is thinking about you. And because of that, you don't have to justify why it's important.

Robin:

And they don't even think, well, maybe, is my castle better than the castle down the street? Should I go to a different town? And then none of them even try to say why our castle is better than other castles.

Agnes:

Their idea of another castle is not in this. Like, this story is not a world where there is this other castle. Clearly, there has to be another place, because Kahn came from another place. But that somehow recedes. It's almost like, I feel like it's almost like K is born into this world, but he just, it wouldn't have made sense for him to be a baby. So he just kind of shows up as an adult from nowhere. You have no sense of his past. The weird thing about how the messengers are his messengers, but he's never met them before. It's not like they came with him from whatever place he went to. He kind of has no past. This is how Kafka could construct that. Somebody showing up somewhere and having no past. Right.

Robin:

But these are also some of the ways that frame our status markers in our status contests. Not only do we have things that distract us from them, but we have ways we frame them compared to other competing status markers or other competing contests, and that we try to justify them or distance ourselves by imagining we could associate with a different one instead, and they have none of that.

Agnes:

Right, exactly, exactly. So that, and that's part of what led me to say meaning instead of status. There's something absolute about, like, this is the only possibility. It's not like I'm choosing this among other alternatives. It's like, this is given to me as, and that's what makes it feel to me like I can equally well interpret as religious, being as religious as bureaucratic. Like, this is God. And what are you going to go do? Find another God? Like, you think there's only one God. You think there only could be one God. The idea of God is the idea that there is one God. Your idea of God, right? Not every idea of God. And so, like, of course, if God disapproves of me, that's going to be a huge problem.

Robin:

So I think it's worth noticing what exactly people want from the castle. That is, they get meaning from the castle via association with it. But it's only particular associations that count exactly. Right? Merely talking about it and praising it isn't this kind of association they want.

Agnes:

Getting a letter from the castle, that's a big deal.

Robin:

A letter or a meeting with someone from the castle. Yes. Or maybe an affair with someone from the castle.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

So it's personal associations that seem to be the key mediation between them and the castle. So that is interestingly, an interesting comment on status that you might think many kinds of status in a world aren't so mediated by personal interactions. But here, the status that they get and the meaning they get is mediated by personal connections to the people associated with the castle. Even being in the building doesn't seem to be the thing. It's talking to people, having them know about you, having met with them, having them acknowledge you in correspondence. Those are the things that give meaning in this world. So it's about connection with people who have status. That's an important comment of Kafka. And it's insightful because it's actually, I think, true about much kinds of status is that it's mediated by personal connections.

Agnes:

Yeah. Like when I meet someone, I often find that two of us end up like figuring out who it is that we both know or maybe they know someone that like I recently when I was in Korea I met this like old German guy who was who like had uh like hung out with Bukow a bunch of times and like you know, he said that, and he like told us about it, and I'm like, wow, you know, you, like, I'm so impressed. I'm just impressed by the fact that you hung out with Foucault. Like, why would that be impressive? Well, it's like he's got a letter from, and he had a letter, too. Actually, he had a letter from Foucault that he said he sent me a thing that quoted the letter. So, it's like that. So. Right.

Robin:

So, and some says the word is the castle, but it's, it's kind of misleading about what it is that's, in fact, the thing that anchors their meaning. It is not the castle itself. It is the people who are associated with the castle that are the key anchor of meaning for these people.

Agnes:

Yeah, that's true. And that, I mean, that could cut against its being religious, although maybe not if you think, well, God's gotta somehow be a person.

Robin:

I mean, that makes the horror story all the more dramatic. If, say, what they were, you can imagine a horror, I mean, there are horror stories, I guess, about people with strange status things they're obsessed with, like maybe, you know, I don't know how many times they've cut their skin or something, right, or tattoos or something, right, that people could just be obsessed with a physical thing as, and then you could have a horror story, oh, look how terrible, they're so obsessed with this physical thing, not people. And here Kafka is giving you a horror story where they're obsessed with people and it's still horrible, but they're not like killing each other, eating each other, other sorts of things from a horror story. This is authentic human interactions with people that are the thing they are craving.

Agnes:

Yeah, it's true. So there's like a pathological kind of human interaction that is, you know, The interactions in the castle are not good interactions. People aren't really understanding each other. And then the kind of interaction that they're craving is also a pathological kind. It's not that the people from the castle are going to understand them or they're going to understand those people. That's not what's going to happen. Something else is going to happen in the interaction, like a transfer of meaning.

Robin:

Right, but it's striking how other sorts of stereotypical horrifying interactions like, you know, slavery or rape or I mean, you know, we have a world of horror stories where we have horrible interactions between people and this doesn't use any of those and still makes it horrible. That's quite an achievement here. He's granting us a lot of things we might say we needed to have a good world, and he's gonna give us those things and still make it horrible. That's the achievement.

Agnes:

Right, that's the challenge. That's true. That's the challenge of a... You could see that as a challenge of a horror story. allow people to specify all the things they want in life and then give it things and then still make it horrible.

Robin:

Well, that's like we discussed utopia a long time ago, right? About how it's so hard to describe a utopia that isn't.

Agnes:

Every utopia sounds like a dystopia. And so in a way, Kafka's The Castle is an illustration of that.

Robin:

In the abstract, it might sound pretty utopian.

Agnes:

Yeah. Right. Like, nobody dies. Everybody, like, nobody's like crazy overworked. Everybody seems to have food.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

You know.

Robin:

They have something that gives them meaning and it's anchored in personal interactions with people they find impressive and admirable. And these interactions are relatively aren't like domination interactions or, you know, shameful interactions or anything like that.

Agnes:

We should stop.

Robin:

All right. Good talking.

Agnes:

Yeah. Bye.