sheppard kafka

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Journal of Literature & Theology, Vol j , No _j, November iggi KAFKA, KIERKEGAARD AND THE K.'S: THEOLOGY, PSYCHOLOGY AND FICTION 1 Richard Sheppard I. KAFKA'S HECEPTION OF KIERKEGAARD 2 EVER SINCE Max Brod used Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling in the afterword of the first edition of The Castle (1926) as a means of interpreting the Amaha episode allegorically, the relationship between Kafka and Kierkegaard has been a minor battle-ground for Kafka-critics. 3 Where some critics claim that Kafka's attraction to Kierkegaard was primarily biographical, others lay greater stress on formal-stylistic and/or philosophico-theological ele- ments. Where some critics see Kafka's attraction to Kierkegaard in terms of parallels, others draw attention to the contrastive nature of the relation- ship. Where some critics assign greater weight to the semi-public statements which Kafka made in letters, others assume that the private statements which he made in his diaries and the Third and Fourth Octavo Notebooks are more representative of his true opinions on Kierkegaard. Where some critics follow Brod in claiming that Kierkegaard's thought had a marked effect on Kafka's fiction and religious beliefs as those are set out in the Betrachtungen uber Sunde, Leid, Hoffnung und den wahren Weg {Meditations on Sin, Suffering, Hope and the True Way (written 1917—1918; systematized August-October 1920; H39—54), others deny this connection more or less emphatically. 4 Against this background, I wish to do two things. First, I aim to describe Kafka's relationship to Kierkegaard in a way which does more justice to its multi-levelled, ambiguous nature than previous comment- ators have succeeded in doing. Second, acknowledging the justice of Lange's assertion that there is a 'secret elective affinity' (p. 287) between the two men, I wish to show how Kierkegaard's The Sickness unto Death (1849) provides us with a set of conceptual tools by means of which we can better understand the psychology of the protagonists of The Trial and The Castle. Kafka's attraction to Kierkegaard, although very clearly focussed on Fear and Trembling, involved three levels, of which the biographical is the most obvious. When Kafka read Monrad's Soren Kierkegaard (1909) in late 1917, he must have been struck by the parallel between its author's claim that Kierkegaard's 'massive melancholy' ('ungeheure[r] Schwermut') derived Oxford University Presi 1991 at TULB Jena on May 2, 2013 http://litthe.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from

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  • Journal of Literature & Theology, Vol j , No _j, November iggi

    KAFKA, KIERKEGAARD ANDTHE K.'S: THEOLOGY,

    PSYCHOLOGY AND FICTION1Richard Sheppard

    I. KAFKA'S HECEPTION OF KIERKEGAARD2

    EVER SINCE Max Brod used Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling in the afterwordof the first edition of The Castle (1926) as a means of interpreting the Amahaepisode allegorically, the relationship between Kafka and Kierkegaard hasbeen a minor battle-ground for Kafka-critics.3 Where some critics claimthat Kafka's attraction to Kierkegaard was primarily biographical, otherslay greater stress on formal-stylistic and/or philosophico-theological ele-ments. Where some critics see Kafka's attraction to Kierkegaard in termsof parallels, others draw attention to the contrastive nature of the relation-ship. Where some critics assign greater weight to the semi-public statementswhich Kafka made in letters, others assume that the private statementswhich he made in his diaries and the Third and Fourth Octavo Notebooksare more representative of his true opinions on Kierkegaard. Where somecritics follow Brod in claiming that Kierkegaard's thought had a markedeffect on Kafka's fiction and religious beliefs as those are set out in theBetrachtungen uber Sunde, Leid, Hoffnung und den wahren Weg {Meditations onSin, Suffering, Hope and the True Way (written 19171918; systematizedAugust-October 1920; H3954), others deny this connection more or lessemphatically.4 Against this background, I wish to do two things. First, Iaim to describe Kafka's relationship to Kierkegaard in a way which doesmore justice to its multi-levelled, ambiguous nature than previous comment-ators have succeeded in doing. Second, acknowledging the justice of Lange'sassertion that there is a 'secret elective affinity' (p. 287) between the twomen, I wish to show how Kierkegaard's The Sickness unto Death (1849)provides us with a set of conceptual tools by means of which we can betterunderstand the psychology of the protagonists of The Trial and The Castle.

    Kafka's attraction to Kierkegaard, although very clearly focussed on Fearand Trembling, involved three levels, of which the biographical is the mostobvious. When Kafka read Monrad's Soren Kierkegaard (1909) in late 1917,he must have been struck by the parallel between its author's claim thatKierkegaard's 'massive melancholy' ('ungeheure[r] Schwermut') derivedOxford University Presi 1991

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  • 278 KAFKA, KIERKEGAARD A N D THE K.'S

    from his 'tyrannical' father (p 31) and the shadow which his own fatherhad cast across his life (c.f. pp. 2628). And with his feelings reinforced byBrod's comments of 3 March 1918 (BKB237), Kafka also recognized aphysical resemblance between himself and Kierkegaard (Br236; BKB240);agreed that they were both prone to melancholy ('Schwermut') (Br236;BKB240) and, most importantly, saw a clear parallel between his own failedengagement to Felice Bauer and Kierkegaard's broken engagement toRegine Olsen.5 Thus, in August 1913, precisely when Kafka was feelingever more intensely that he ought to sever his engagement, he made hisfirst written reference to Kierkegaard, noting in his diary:

    As I suspected, his [SK's] case, despite essential differences, is very similar tomine, at least he is on the same side of the world. He bears me out like afriend (T578)

    And four years later, the second phase of Kafka's dialectical engagementwith Kierkegaard straddled his second and final break with Felice, a connec-tion which his letter to Brod of c. 5 March 1918 makes quite explicit (Br235;BKB239-40).

    At the same time, however, Kafka's earliest note on Kierkegaard spokeof 'essential differences', and the reason why Kafka should have beenattracted to Kierkegaard as a contrastive as well as a parallel 'case' is madevery plain in his diary entry of 27 August 1916:

    Flaubert and Kierkegaard knew very clearly how matters stood with them,were men of decision, did not calculate but acted. But in your [FK's] casea perpetual succession of calculation, a monstrous four years' toing and froing(T803).

    Where, in Kafka's view, Kierkegaard had made his decision to break offhis engagement from positive motivesthe desire to serve God betterhe felt, despite Brod's asseverations to the contrary (BKB237), that hehimself had simply drifted into a decision behind which lay a less worthy,more negative motivation. These biographical considerations also explainwhy Kafka should have been particularly drawn to Fear and Trembling andEither-Or, and why his comments on both works should have been such amixture of fascination and repulsion (c.f. especially Br236 and BKB240).Both books concern the ineluctible necessity of making existential decisionsin situations where there are no clear guide-lines, and the former centreson a situation where the decision required of Abraham is, in the short term,morally wrong and humanly dreadful. As his letters, especially those toFelice, repeatedly demonstrate, Kafka was both extremely bad at takingdecisions and acutely aware of the mixed motives behind his every action.

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  • RICHARD SHEPPARD 279

    Hence, the slightest problem, when scrutinized by his hyper-sensitive mind,could very easily turn into something massive, complicated and acutelypainful, thus making it even more difficult for him to come to any cleardecision. Consequently, Kierkegaard's two books must have touched Kafkaon a very raw nerve, confronting him with what he knew he had had todo even while reminding him of the difficulty he had experienced in doingit. That is one reason why he could return to those texts so frequently evenwhile, in his letter to Brod of 20 January 1918, he could describe Either-Oras a 'frightful, repulsive' book which makes one 'want to despair' (Br2245;BKB228), and why, in his letter to Brod of c. 5 March 1918, he could referto Kierkegaard's Abraham as 'monstrous' (Br236; BKB240).

    A comparable ambiguity marks the second level of Kafka's relationshipwith Kierkegaardthe authorial level. First of all, Kafka was both attractedto and repelled by the sheer authority of Kierkegaard's writing, by its abilityto grasp the reader through 'the power of its terminology' (Br238; BKB246).Second, and more importantly still, Kafka was also fascinated by and deeplycntical of the use which he believed Kierkegaard to have made of thatauthority. As is well-known, the work of both men is marked by an ironicstance towards conventional religious, scientific and political discourses, bya kind of bi-focalism ('Doppelreflexion') which enables them to use andsimultaneously to subvert established modes of thought and speech,6 thusunsettling their readers and forang them to stand back from those modesand reflect upon their (m)adequacy. From his reading of Monrad, Kafkawould have known how central an ironic stance was to Kierkegaard's entirework (pp. 4653) and how entangled its origins were with his brokenengagement (p. 47) and struggle with his father (p. 51). But for Kafka, themost reluctant of sceptics, that common ironic dexterity involved an illegit-imate use of authorial power, a literary seduction of the reader of whichthe sexual seduction described in Either-Or was just a more blatant version.Finally, while Kafka admired Kierkegaard's ability to challenge, he felt thathe was hiding behind his various pseudonyms and personae in order to evadetaking responsibility for any damage or pain he might cause his readers. Ashe wrote to Brod in late March 1918:

    [SK's books] are not straightforward, and even if he later developed towardsa kind of straightforwardness ['Eindeutigkeit'], this too is simply part of hischaos of spirit, mourning and belief. His contemporaries may well have sensedthat more clearly than we do. Moreover, his compromising books are pseud-onymous and that almost to their very core; despite the amount which theyexplicitly admit, they can, in their totality, be very properly regarded as lettersby the seducer, written behind clouds (Br238; BKB247).

    But these statements are far from simply contrastive: they also apply toKafka himself as well. Like no other modern writer, Kafka has the ability

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  • 280 KAFKA, KIERKEGAARD AND THE K 'S

    to invade his readers' imaginations, confuse, unsettle and even obsess them,only then to leave them adrift amid a sea of ambiguities, bereft of theconsolation of a named, reliable, omniscient or interventionist narrator. Justas Kierkegaard is and is not Johannes de Silentio and Victor Eremita, soKafka is and is not Josef K. and K.whose minds monopolize the fore-grounds of his two major novels. Even in early 1918, when apparentlydistancing himself from Kierkegaard (to whom, incidentally, Brod severaltimes referred in his letter of 19 March 1918 as K. (BKB243-5)), Kafkamust have sensed how close their situations as narrators were. Thus, whenhe characterized Kierkegaard's method as 'shouting so as not to be heard,and shouting out things which are wrong just in case somebody does hearyou' (Br238; BKJB247), he was simultaneously speaking about himself. Andwhen he wrote to Brod that one should read Kierkegaard's work only ifone has 'a modicum of superiority' over them, he was simultaneouslydescnbing the narratorial doubts of an author who would, at great personalcost, continue writing prose fiction only then to decree that his major worksshould be destroyed lest they lead the weak, those without that 'modicum'(Br225; BKB228), astray.

    The third level of Kafka's attraction to Kierkegaard concerns metaphysicsand, as in the case of the first two levels, the relationship is deeply ambiguous.However, where, at the biographical and authorial levels, critics havestressed the parallels and played down the contrastive aspects of Kafka'srelationship with Kierkegaard, at the metaphysical level the reverse has beenthe case.7 That contrast is, however, only one aspect of a more complexsituation since, as Claude David himself recognized, Kafka's suspicion ofKierkegaard's theology was also 'to some extent a commentary on himselfand a condemnation or suspicion of his own rehgious contemplations'(p. 86). I wish to take the argument one stage further and suggest that atthe metaphysical level, Kafka saw, at one point in his life at least, more inKierkegaard's theology than a straightforward contrast with his ownposition.

    The nature of that 'more' is, I suggest, already visible in the third, seventhand eighth paragraphs of H1246. Here, Kafka recognizes the possibility of'Ruhe' ('rest', 'peace', 'repose'); sees that someone like Kierkegaard's Abra-ham can acknowledge his pride as a delusion and use that realization as a'springboard into the world'; and arrives at the concept of a 'constructivedestruction of the world'. Far from being a straightforward critique ofKierkegaard's Abraham, the nine paragraphs of H1246 transcribe Kafka'sdawning, and never very confident awareness that someone whose life isheading up a metaphysical or existential cul-de-sac can, by colliding withits end wall, undergo a dialectical reversal which may enable him or her todiscover the nght way and issue in a sense of peace. Or, to use the metaphor

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  • RICHARD SHEPPARD 281

    from the fifth paragraph of H124-6, Abraham's attempt to flee the worldmay be misguided, but if his 'furniture van' gets stuck in the 'entrancegate', the resultant pain ('Qual') may bring about that change of con-sciousness which Abraham needs if he is to see that it is he, and not theworld, which is at fault (paragraph 7) and learn to listen to what the worldhas to say to him (paragraph 1).

    What Kafka hinted at privately and cryptically in the above jottings inFebruary 1918 became more public and more explicit in his two long lettersto Brod of the following month. In the first of these, he twice states thatdespite his reservations about the 'monstrous' Abraham, one 'certainly'cannot describe Kierkegaard as a negative thinker. And the second letternot only contains an important discussion of Kierkegaard's theology, it alsoincludes two short and one long quotations from Das Buck des Richters(pp. 112, 114 and 160),8 the longest of which comes, significantly enough,from Kierkegaard's journals of late Autumn 1854i.e. from precisely that(late) period of Kierkegaard's life when, in Kafka's view, he had developeda 'straightforwardness' ('Eindeutigkeit'a German word which connotessingleness of meaning or interpretation) (Br238; BKB247). This third passageis particularly important because it takes us beyond the view that there isa simple, contrastive relationship between Kafka the metaphysical pessimistand Kierkegaard the metaphysical optimist and shows us Kafka trying,obliquely, to do two things. First, we see Kafka trying to discover whether,perhaps, something essentially positive had played a part in drawing himback to a man with whom he had sought to contrast himself but withwhom he had simultaneously sensed so much in common. And second, wesee Kafka trying, by means of the indirect process of paraphrase, comment-ary and citation, to put that 'something' into words without necessarilycommitting himself to it:

    Kierkegaard's religious situation refuses to reveal itself to me with the extraord-inary, and from my point of view highly seductive clarity that it does to you.But Kierkegaard's very positionhe doesn't have to have uttered a wordseems to disprove you. For in the first place, for Kierkegaard, the relationshipto the divine perhaps eludes any external judgment to such an extent that evenJesus might not be permitted to judge how far that person has advanced whois his disciple. For Kierkegaard, it seems, to a certain extent, to be a questionof the Last Judgment, and thus answerableto the extent that an answer isstill necessaryafter this world has come to an end. Which is why our presentexternal image of the religious relationship has no meaning. However, thereligious relationship wants to reveal itself but cannot do so in this world, andthat is why the striving human being must set himself against the world inorder to save the divine element within himself, or, what amounts to the samething, the divine element sets him against the world in order to save itself.

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  • 282 KAFKA, KIERKEGAARD AND THE K 'S

    Thus, the world must be assaulted by you as it is by Kierkegaardmore byyou here, more by him therethose are distinctions merely from the pointof view of the world which is being assaulted. And the following passagedoesn't come from the Talmud: 'As soon as a person comes along who hassome primitive quality ["etwas Primitives" in the German text; "Pnmitivitet"in the original Danish] about him, and who therefore says not "One mustaccept the world as it is" ... bu r " N o matter how the world is, I shall remaintrue to an originality ["Ursprunghchkeit" in the German text; " O p n n d e -hghed" in the original Danish] which I do not intend to alter according tohow the world sees fit"in the same instant that this word is heard, atransformation comes about in the whole of existence. As in the fairy-tale,when the word is spoken and the castle which has lain under a spell for ahundred years is opened and everything comes alive again, so, similarly, thewhole of existence becomes sheer attentiveness The angels have work to doand watch with curiosity to see what will happenfor this is a matter whichconcerns them. On the other side, dark, sinister demons, who have sat thereidly for a long time chewing their finger-nails, j ump up and stretch theirlimbsfor, they say, there is something here for us, something which theyhave been waiting for for a long time e t c ' (Br239; BKB248).

    The passage overall is not easy to understand, but it sets out from acritique of Kierkegaard's understanding of the relationship between manand God which to some extent echoes the remarks in H, but whose toneis markedly less condemnatory than that of the letter of 20 January 1918(Br224-5; BKB228). And at its heart there lies the highly paradoxical (andvery Kierkegaardian) insight that the person who decides to struggle withand even do violence to the world in order to preserve 'the divine elementwithin himself', his 'originality', is, in fact, being impelled to do thatprecisely because he is already in the grip of a divine power ('das Gottliche')which is seeking its own salvation. Or, to put it another way, in this passage,Kafka seems to have internalized the classically Kierkegaardian concept ofthe 'teleological suspension of the ethical' according to which the individualmay have to risk getting into a convoluted moral or existential situation inthe short term if he or she is to get things right in the longer term; andmay, in order to reach that longer-term goal, have to take into him- orherself the kind of rending sense of guilt which Kafka had experienced asa result of his twice failed engagement to Felice. Once this is understood,it becomes clear why, earlier in the same letter, Kafka had owned to beingparticularly drawn to Kierkegaard's concepts of 'the dialectical', 'the knightof infinity' and 'the knight of faith'. With Kierkegaard's Abraham in theforefront of his mind, Kafka is working his way towards the idea that thedecision to struggle and go against the world in order to preserve a senseof selfhood ('Urspriinglichkeit') is better than being passively conventional

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  • RICHARD SHEPPARD 283

    even if that decision involves risk and suffering. Though having said that,it has to be stressed that Kafka, like Kierkegaard, was no naive triumphalist.The person who decides to go against the world in order to preserve hisor her sense of selfhood thereby invites one of two outcomes: either salvationby heavenly powers or destruction by hellish ones. Which is why, one maysurmise, Kafka broke off his discussion with the inconclusive 'etc.': he feltthat he could not say how, in any given case, the existential venture wouldend.

    From the preceding discussion it emerges that Lange's assertion of an'elective affinity' between Kafka and Kierkegaard is entirely justified andthat the relationship is even more complex than has been generally assumed.It not only involved a series of parallels and contrasts at several levels, itultimately, in the second letter to Brod of March 1918, generated theobhque affirmation that there is an essential and dynamic power in humannature which can, at least in some instances, enable the individual to liveauthentically while remaining, paradoxically, in a state of tension with andacceptance of the world. It was that sense which generated the first of thenine paragraphs in Hwith which Kafka was to conclude the Meditationswhen he systematized them in Autumn 1920:

    It isn't necessary for you to leave the house Stay sitting at the table and listenDon't even listen, simply wait Don't even wait, be completely still and solitary.The world will offer itself to you so that you can unmask it, it can't doanything else, enraptured it will writhe before you (H54 and 124).

    And it was also, I suggest, from the same sense that Aphorism 50 of theMeditations arose as well:

    Man cannot live without a lasting faith in something indestructible in himselfthough at the same time both that indestructible something and the faith mayremain hidden from him. One of the ways in which this state of hiddennessmay manifest itself is the belief in a personal God (H44).

    But, characteristically, Kafka crossed through both of these aphorisms inpencil in the final draft of the Meditations (H348) when preparing them forpublication as a book (which, characteristically again, never materialized).Just as Brod, when answering Kafka's letter of late March 1918 (BKB249),could recognize nothing personal, nothing about Kafka himself in its obhquediscussion of Kierkegaard, so Kafka, having arrived, with Kierkegaard'shelp, at a statement of faith which was at once psychological, philosophicaland theological, could neither hold onto it with any certainty nor deny ittotally. Nevertheless, as David points out (p. 80), the period which culmin-ated in Kafka's extended reflections on Kierkegaard marked the end of a

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  • 284 KAFKA, KIERKEGAARD A N D THE K.'S

    long period of creativity and the beginning of a gap in Kafka's productivelife which lasted until Autumn 1920 and which, as far as we know, wasinterrupted only by the composition of the letter to his father in November1919. So, given that Kafka's long quotation from Kierkegaard involves atleast some degree of displaced afHrmativeness and that his (tentative) deletionof the two aphonsms from the Meditations involves ambiguous interpretativepossibilities, it is perhaps not too fanciful to claim two things. First, thatKafka's dialectical engagement with Kierkegaard at least contributed to thatmore positive view of human nature and the ordering of the world ingeneral which, in my view at least, marks the work of his last four years;9and second, that it also helped weaken the hold over his imagination of theaggressively phallic father-figure who had featured so prominently in hisearly works.

    I I . K I E R K E G A A H D I A N P S Y C H O L O G Y A N D T H E K . ' S

    Given the affinities described above, it is unfortunate from the point ofview of this article that Kafka never read Kierkegaard's The Sickness untoDeatha text which had appeared in German in 1881 but which had longbeen out of print by 1913. I say that, for had Kafka read The Sickness untoDeath, he would, I suggest, have been disturbed by it but also respondedvery positively to it smce it grapples with precisely those problemsAngst,guilt, despair and the emergence of a sense of meaning out of radicallynegative experiencewhich were occupying him so painfully in 1913 and19171918 and which, by general agreement, are central to his two majornovels.10

    As though anticipating Kafka's strictures (Br238; BKB247), Anti-Climacus, the pseudonymous author of The Sickness unto Death, seems towant to discourage the potential reader from reading any further by openinghis treatise with the following, lnfuriatingly difficult proposition:

    Man is spirit. But what is spirit' Spint is the self. But what is the self? Theself is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation[which accounts for it] that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self isnot the relation but [consists in the fact] that the relation relates itself to itsown self. Man is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal andthe eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short it is a synthesis. A synthesis is arelation between two factors So regarded, man is not yet a self.11

    By this, Kierkegaard means that the human personality has two sidesanunconditional side (which is spiritual and, ultimately, grounded in God)and a conditional side (which has been determined by heredity, environ-ment, culture and education)and that authentic selfhood is attained whenthese two sides are fused. However, Kierkegaard then goes on to argue that

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  • RICHARD SHEPPARD 285

    with most people, these two sides are dislocated to a greater or lesser extent;that this state of being sundered is the essence of sin (Danish 'Synd'; German'Siinde'); and that the secular name for this condition of 'disrelationship' isdespair. Moreover, because, in Kierkegaard's view, despair is not a feelingbut a state of being, it is possible either to be unaware of being in that state(pp. 1557) o r . even if an awareness exists, to spend one's life running awayfrom it into what Pascal had termed 'diversions' ('divertissements')games,pastimes, amours, the quest for public honours, work etc.12 But becausedespair is, according to Kierkegaard, structurala state of being in whichthe two sides of the personality grate against one another like the twojagged halves of a broken bonethe person m despair will always bepursued by the psychological equivalent of physical pain: Angst.

    In Kierkegaard's use of that term, Angst is not fear of anything specific,but a generalized, objectless, pervasive sense of unease whose purpose is toremind the subject that he or she is living in a state of deep disrelationship.Accordingly, if the state of despair is to be overcome, then the Angst whichis its symptom has to be confronted and its roots and implications under-stood. And if this is allowed to happen, then, Kierkegaard concludes, itbecomes possible for the unconditional side of the personality to pervadeand reshape the conditional side and, at a further stage of personal develop-ment, to reveal its origins as divine:

    This then is the formula which describes the condition of the self when despairis completely eradicated: by relating itself to its own self and by willing to beitself, the self is grounded transparently in the Power which posited it (p. 147).

    From the subjective point of view, however, Kierkegaard maintains thatthe feeling of despair has to get worse before the state of despair can beovercome, and, even more audaciously, that the subjective feeling that thedespair is worsening actually means that objectively, the subject is on themend. Thus he wrote:

    So then it is an infinite advantage to be able to despair; and yet it is not onlythe greatest misfortune and misery to be in despair; no, it is perdition (p. 148).

    and:

    Not only is despair far more dialectical than an illness, but all its symptomsare dialectical, and for this reason the superficial view is so readily deceived indetermining whether despair is present or not. For not to be in despair maymean to be in despair, and it may also mean to be delivered from being indespair. A sense of security and tranquillity may mean that one is in despair,precisely this security, this tranquillity, may be despair; and it may mean that

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  • 286 KAFKA, KIERKEGAARD A N D THE K 'S

    one has overcome despair and gained peace. In this respect despair is unlikebodily sickness; for not to be sick cannot possibly mean to be sick; but not tobe despairing may mean preasely to be despairing. It is not true of despair, asit is of bodily sickness, that the feeling of indisposition is the sickness (p. 157)

    In a rgu ing which, I suggest, Kierkegaard was saying in extenso wha t Kafkawas to say m o r e elhptically w h e n , on 13 March 1915, he wro t e in his diary:

    Sometimes the feeling of being unhappy which almost tears me to pieces andsimultaneously the conviction of its necessity and of a goal towards which oneworks ones way through the power of attraction of unhappiness (T732)

    Against this general analytical background , Kierkegaard, in the first half ofThe Sickness unto Death, distinguishes be tween various types of despa i rof which I wish to consider t w o in relation to Kafka's t w o major novels.The first of these Kierkegaard designates ' T h e Despair of Finiti tude whichis due to the Lack of Fini tude ' and describes as follows:

    Despairing narrowness consists in the lack of primitiveness [Danish 'Pnmitivi-tet'], or of the fact one has deprived oneself of one's primitiveness; it consistsin having emasculated oneself, in a spiritual sense. For every man is primitivelyplanned to be a self, appointed to become oneself; and while it is true thatevery self as such is angular, the logical consequence of this merely is that ithas to be polished, not that it has to be ground smooth, not that for fear ofmen it has to give up entirely being itself, nor even that for fear of men itdare not be itself in its essential accidentality (which preasely is what shouldnot be ground away), by which in fine it is itself. But while one sort of despairplunges wildly into the infinite and loses itself, a second sort permits itself asit were to be defrauded by 'the others.' By seeing the multitude of men aboutit, by getting engaged in all sorts of worldly affairs, by becoming wise abouthow things go in this world, such a man forgets himself, forgets what hisname is (in the divine understanding of it), does not dare to believe in himself,finds it too venturesome a thing to be himself, far easier and safer to be likethe others, to become an imitation, a number, a cipher in the crowd(pp. 166-7).

    That is a completely accurate picture of Josef K., the central figure ofKafka's The Trial (1914).13 Most obviously, Josef K.'s very name suggeststhat he has become 'a number, a cipher in the crowd'. Indeed, as thenarrator very clearly implies at the beginning of the second chapter, JosefK., a yuppie auant la lettre, has lost himself in the routine of'worldly affairs':

    This spring K was accustomed to spend his evenings as follows: after work,whenever this was still possiblehe normally stayed in his office until rune

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  • RICHARD SHEPPARD 287o'clockhe would take a short walk on his own or together with acquaintancesand then go on to a pub where he usually sat until eleven o'clock with theother regulars, mainly older men, at their special table. But there were excep-tions to this routinewhen, for example, K. was invited by the Bank Manager,who valued his capacity for work and reliability very highly, to come for aride in his car or to supper Besides that, once a week K. visited a girl calledElsa who served every night as a waitress in a wine bar until the small hoursof the morning and during the day-time only received visitors from her bed(P3O).

    Moreover, it is also true that Josef K. lacks what Kierkegaard, both in hisjournal entry of Autumn 1854 and in The Sickness unto Death, called'Primitivitet' ('primitiveness' in the sense of being in touch with what isprimal in one's nature) and, in his journal entry, 'Oprindehghed' ('original-ity' in the sense of being in touch with one's origins). On several occasions,but most massively in the court scene (P71), Josef K. is confronted by menwith beards and moustaches, as though to remind him of the primitive,'hairy' sides of his personality which have got lost through routinization.Analogously, Josef K.'s consistently bad relationships with women, childrenand subordinates can be viewed as the external correlatives of an interiordisrelationshipof his lack of contact with the 'female', 'childlike' and'lower' parts of himself. Josef K. either ignores the women in his life (hismother and cousin) or sees them as sexual objects to be exploited (Erna,Fraulein Biirstner, the wife of the law court attendant and Leni). And whenFrau Grubach, a woman who is also Josef K.'s social inferior, fails toconform to the submissive behaviour which he expects from her by sayingsomething about Fraulein Biirstner which casts indirect hght on his ownexploitative relationships with women, he becomes violent and vindictive(P36-7). Thus, when Josef K. is shocked by the obscene picture and therapine behaviour of the student during his second visit to the courtroom(P76-7 and 86-7), he is actually reacting negatively to mirror images ofhis own behaviour and state of being. It is the same with children. Unlikethe men in shirt-sleeves whom Josef K. notices holding children 'carefullyand tenderly' (P53) at open windows when he is trying to find thecourtroom for the first time, he is incapable of having a non-threateningrelationship with children. For Josef K., children exist as objects to bemanipulated or controlled by force, and so, when confronted with crowdsof them on his way to the court, he thinks to himself: 'If ever I shouldcome here again ... I must either bring sweets to get round them with ormy stick to beat them with' (P55). Similarly, he is so careless of hissubordinates that when three are present at his arrest, he fails to recognizethem (P27) and regrets that 'humanity' prevents him from making a jokeabout one of their number's facial peculiarity (P29).

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    The subjective implications of Josef K.'s disrelationship with women,children and subordinates become very plain during his visit to the painterTitorelli. The lascivious little girls from the poorer classes who stream upthe stairs and hammer on Titorelh's door, demanding to be let into thestuffy attic, are the objective correlatives of those forgotten, 'primitive'aspects of Josef K.'s mechanized personality which are demanding access tohis over-developed, but closed-off consciousness. Similarly, the plethora ofpaintings of a dead tree amidst a bleak landscape which Titorelli showsJosef K. are the mirror images of Josef K.'s own personality from whichthe sap of life, Kierkegaard's 'Primitivitet', has vanished. Josef K. is like theknight in the painting in the cathedral scene: a faceless being encased in thehard shell of his own ego, standing in an arid landscape and watching theburial of the life-giving principle (P281).

    Josef K. almost entirely lacks what Kierkegaard had, in his ConcludingScientific Postscript (1846), termed 'inwardness'. Early on in the novel, thenarrator tells us parenthetically that Josef K. was not in the habit of learningfrom his experiences (Pi2) and that he tended always to take things forgranted, to believe in the worst only when it happened and not to thinkabout the future (Pn). Moreover, the senior pohce official in the firstchapter (P22), Leni (Pi423) and the chaplain in the cathedral chapter(P28990) all, in various ways, advise Josef K. to think more about hisinner life and less about matters and persons external to himself. Josef K. issimply not used to analyzing himself, his experiences, his thoughts and hisfeelingsor, to use Kierkegaard's metaphor, he has never tried to polishhimself. Consequently, for most of the novel, he fails to heed Frau Grubach'sinsight that his arrest is not of the run-of-the-mill kind (P33) and refusesto accept the idea that there could be something wrong with his wholeway of hfe. Instead, Josef K. tries to evade the creeping sense of Angst whichhis arrest has engendered either by continuing to barricade himself psycholo-gically within his work, i.e. by 'getting engaged in all sorts of worldlyaffairs', or by displacing the blame onto others and hence repressing themessage which the watchmen had tried, albeit obliquely, to communicateto him in the first chapter. And it is precisely this complex of defensivereactions which is encapsulated in the scene with the 'whipper' in the fifthchapter: Josef K. is forcibly repressing his deeper conscience by relegatingit to a cubby-hole in his apparently secure, work-dominated mind. Butbecause Josef K.'s personality is deeply at odds with itself, the objectlessAngst described by Kierkegaard slowly eats into him (c.f. P149), so that bythe beginning of the cathedral chapter, the narrator tells us that it is erodinghis most potent defence mechanism: his absorption in his work:

    K. got the job of showing a very important Italian client who was staying inthe city for the first time round some of its cultural sites. It was a task which

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  • RICHARD SHEPPARD 289he would, at another time, have certainly considered an honour but which henow took on reluctantly given that he was able to maintain his status in thebank only with great effort Every hour that he was removed from his officecaused him worry. True, he was not nearly so capable of making use of thetime he spent in his office as he used to be; he spent many hours giving theflimsiest impression of doing real work, but that made his worries all thegreater when he wasn't in his office. During those times he imagined theassistant manager, who had always lain in wait, coming from time to timeinto his office, sitting down at his desk, going through his papers, receivingclients with whom K. had been on friendly terms for years, and turning themagainst him, yes, perhaps even discovering those mistakes by which K. feltmenaced from a thousand directions while he was working and which he couldno longer avoid making. Consequently, if he were asked to go out on a jobor make a short journeyit so happened that such jobs had been piling uprecentlythen, no matter how prestigeous the job might be, the suspicionwas never far off that they wanted to get him out of the office for a little whileand check his work, or at least, that they considered him readily dispensableas far as the office was concerned. Most of these jobs he could have refusedwithout difficulty, but he didn't dare to do so since, if his fears had the slightestbasis, the refusal of a job would have been tantamount to an admission of hisanxiety ['Angst'] (P270-1)

    However, the process (German 'Process'/'Prozess' means trial or process)described by Kierkegaard continues, and by the beginning of the novel'sfinal chapter, Josef K.'s psychological defence mechanisms have all butceased to function so that, even in this dark novel, we can observe thebeginnings of the healing synthesis envisaged by Kierkegaard. To beginwith, Josef K. has started to acquire inwardness, to stand back from himselfand reflect:

    'The only thing that I can do now', he said to himself, and the fact that hewas walking evenly, in step with the three others, confirmed his thoughts, 'theonly thing that I can do now is to keep my dispassionately analytical intelligencegoing right to the end. I always wanted to grab hold of the world with twentyhands and that, moreover, for a purpose which wasn't very laudable. That waswrong, so shall I now show that my trial, which has been going on for a yearnow, could teach me nothing? Shall I leave this world as a man who isincapable of learning? Are people to say of me subsequently that I wanted toend my trial at its beginning and now, at its end, to begin it all over again' I .don't want them to say that. I'm grateful that I've been given these half-dumb,uncomprehending gentlemen to accompany me on my way and that I havebeen left to say to myself everything that is needful (P308-9).

    And as if to emphasize the fact that new growth has begun to take placein the bleak landscape ofjosef K.'s personality, that he has begun to acquire

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    Kierkegaard's quahty of 'Pnmitivitet' or 'Oprindelighed', the narratorimmediately provides us with an image of renewal and light:

    The water, glittering and trembling in the moonlight, parted around a smallisland on which, as though jammed together in a bunch, the foliage of massesof trees and shrubs piled up. Beneath it, invisible now, ran gravel paths withcomfortable benches on which K. had lain and stretched himself out in manya summer (P309).

    Images of organic growth are rare in Kafka's work and apart from the fewsparse blades of grass in the picture in the cathedral scene (P281), there areno others in The Trial. Moreover, this passage is, as far as I can tell, thefirst instance in the novel where we hear of direct, natural hght. Upto thispoint, either the narrator has made no mention of hght in one of those rareoutdoor scenes where one might expect him to do so, or the hght has beenindirect, artificial and/or minimal. And if anyone has opened a window,that action has allowed not hght, but dirt and soot to come in (Pioo). Sohere, for the first time in The Trial, we are given a hint that something isbeginning to fill the emptiness at the heart of Josef K.'s personality hitherto;that Josef K.'s sterile personality is beginning to be enlivened; that Josef K.'segoistical cerebrahsm is capable of being softened. The hint is not a strongone and many critics have overlooked itfor when Kafka began writingThe Trial in August 1914, he was, given his own experience and tempera-ment and the dark historical context, more aware of the negative than thepositive sides of human experience and far from convinced that any rejuven-ating potential'Primitivitet', 'Opnndehghed', 'Urspriinghchkeit'wasat work in the human personahty let alone capable of being harnessed bythe powers which governed the world.

    But by the time he wrote The Castle seven to eight years later, there isevidence to suggest that Kafka's view of human nature, human relationshipsand the world in general had become significantly less bleak. Consequently,while The Castle deals with much more complex and problematic subject-matter than does The Trial, it works it through to a conclusion which ismarkedly less negative. Here again The Sickness unto Death provides us witha way of understanding what happens to K., the novel's protagonist, bymeans of the concept of 'Despair of Possibility which is due to the Lack ofNecessity'. This Kierkegaard analyzes as follows:

    Just as finitude is the limiting factor in relation to infinitude, so in relation topossibility it is necessity which serves as a check. .. Now if possibility outrunsnecessity, the self runs away from itself, so that it has no necessity whereto itis bound to returnthen this is the despair of possibility. The self becomes anabstract possibility which tries itself out with floundering in the possible, but

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  • RICHARD SHEPPARD 291does not budge from the spot, nor get to any spot, for precisely the necessaryis the spot; to become oneself is precisely a movement at the spot. To becomeis a movement from the spot, but to become oneself is a movement at thespot Possibility then appears to the self ever greater and greater, more andmore things become possible, because nothing becomes actual. At last it is asif everything were possiblebut this is precisely when the abyss has swallowedup the self ... What really is lacking is the power to obey, to submit to thenecessity in oneself, to what may be called one's limit (pp. 1689).

    That is a very accurate characterization of K., whose unwillingness to acceptnecessity, to 'submit ... to what may be called [his] limit', is most patent inhis claim to be a land-surveyor. As several critics have argued in detail, thisclaim is clearly false14 and directly related to K.'s continual desire for theimpossible. As I have argued at length, two of K.'s most sahent charactensticsare his repeated refusal of what is offered him as a feasible possibility inorder to strive for the impossible, and his neglect of what is close at handbecause his gaze is focussed on what lies in the far distance.15 Because, withK., 'possibility outruns necessity', he is completely unable to define his aimsin any concrete way. He never says with any precision what it is that hewants; and whenever anyone asks him what he wants, he either evades thequestion, runs away, or gives an answer which, on closer examination, fallsto piecesleaving his questioner in a state of incomprehension.16 Theincident which encapsulates K.'s refusal to submit to the necessary is thewall-climbing episode of his youth (S49-50). There was no need for K. tochmb the wall since it was possible for him to gain access to the graveyardby a gate; and anyway, what lay on the wall's far side was no secret tohim. Rather, K. climbs the wall partly because it is known to be impossiblydifficult and partly because the attempt to 'conquer'/ 'subdue' ('bezwingen')it involves violent struggle, almost certain failure and the consequent neces-sity of beginning the struggle all over again. K. is, in other words, a Faustianpersonality17 in flight from the limitations of mortality, and in the secondchapter, his Faustian urge to achieve the impossiblepenetration of theforbidden Castle by forceinvolves him in a nightmare journey withBarnabas (S48-51) which pictonahzes Kierkegaard's analysis of Faustiandespair with uncanny accuracy. In this incident, the nature of K.'s despaircauses him literally to 'flounder' in the possible (in this case the snow-drifts)and barely to 'budge from the spot' since, as it transpires, Barnabas is goingnot to the Castle but his family's house, a location which, for all thejourney's apparent duration, cannot be all that far from K.'s and Barnabas'sstarting-point.

    Because K. is a much more active personality than Josef K., he does notneed to be arrested but, instead, actively challenges the powers that be by

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    his false claim to be a land-surveyor. And as a result, precisely that happenswhich Kierkegaard, in his journal entry of late Autumn 1854, said wouldhappen: the angels and demons sit up and take notice. Indeed, it is particu-larly apposite that at this precise point in his reflections Kierkegaard shouldhave introduced the notion of 'the castle which has lain under a spell for ahundred years' since in Kafka's novel, the angels and/or demons are playedby the Castle officials, one of whom, Biirgel, will, towards the novel's end,respond to K.'s strivings by implicitly telling him that he can 'open up' theCastle to K. by granting him any request that he cares to make (S422).

    Precisely because K. is prepared to be active, he produces reactions fromthe world18 which are both positive and negative. And gradually, fromthis interaction, K. becomes increasingly aware of the futility and despera-tion of his quest for the boundless and the impossible, and, if he is to findinner peace, the importance of accepting the limitations of necessity. Thisrealization pushes its way into K.'s consciousness in a particularly stakingway at the very end of the eighth chapter when K., having forced his wayinto a forbidden place and compelled everyone to bow to his will, comesto the following conclusion:

    .. then it seemed to K as though they had broken off all connections withhim and as though he was indeed freer than ever before and could wait aslong as he wanted in this place which was otherwise prohibited to him andhad struggled to achieve this freedom as scarcely anyone else could do andnoone might touch him or drive him away, yes, scarcely speak to him even,butand this conviction was at least as strongas though there was at thesame time nothing more senseless, nothing more despairing than this freedom,this waiting, this invulnerability (S169).

    Accordingly, after this juncture, K.'s claims to be a land-surveyor becomeless and less strident and he himself becomes more and more weary until,during the above-mentioned interview with Biirgel, he falls into a deep,dreamless sleep which is a kind of metaphoncal death and from which hewakes up a very different person.19 A comparison of K.'s behaviour beforeand after the Biirgel interview reveals, in my view at least,20 that K.'srelationship with himself, with others and with the Castle authorities hasundergone a marked change. K., the hitherto egomaniac striver, has becomemore composed, more self-aware, more tolerant, more respectful and betterable to empathize with othersand, concomitantly, less aggressively Faus-tian, less insensitive, less suspicious, less judgmental and less eager to domin-ate In Kierkegaardian terms, K. has begun to acquire 'inwardness', and thisprocess is nowhere more evident than in his conversation with Pepi (whois in many respects a mirror-image of himself):21

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    "... I don't know whether it is so [K. says to Pepi], and the nature of my guiltis by no means clear to me, only when I compare myself with you, somethingalong the following lines occurs to me; it's as though we had both striven toomuch, too noisily, too childishly and with too little experience in order, bycrying, by scratching, by tugging to get something which could have beengained easily and unobtrusively by Frieda's matter-of-factness for example; it'sjust like when a child tugs at the table-cloth, but gains nothing by doing so,and instead brings down all the splendid things which are standing on it andmakes them unobtainable for everI don't know whether it really is like that,but I certainly do know that it's more like that than the way you put it(S484-5)

    There is a close parallel between this admission and Josef K.'s remarks tohimself in the final chapter of The Trial, but there is also one crucialdifference. Precisely because K. was prepared to enter into an activelydialectical relationship with the world which has both positive and negativeeffects, there is a much greater possibility that the synthesis between theconditional and the unconditional aspects of his personality will come aboutalong the lines envisaged by Kierkegaard in the opening pages of TheSickness unto Death. And although Kafka is never tnumphalist about thispossibility, the (non-)ending of The Castle having as ambiguous a status asthe quotations from Das Buch des Richters and the two deleted aphonsmsfrom the Meditations cited above, it is my contention that when he wroteThe Castle, Kafka could entertain it more confidently than he had been ableto do when writing The Trial. Moreover, in The Castle, the above synthesiscomes about as a result of what Kierkegaard had termed 'the teleologicalsuspension of the ethical'. Precisely because K. is prepared to go drasticallywrong, to take a leap into the void with his mendacious claim to be a land-surveyor,22 he comes up against salutory resistances in a way that the morepassive Josef K. does not. As a result, the enchanted castle of K.'s personalitybegins to open up; K.'s despair begins to be overcome; and, concomitantly,the Castle authorities begin to change their shape in K.'s mind. Where theyhad at first seemed malevolent, remote, infallible, omnipotent and cruel toK.like the Old Commandant in Kafka's short story In the Penal Colony(written October 1914)they begin, during and after the Biirgel episode,to seem kindlier, more vulnerable, more flawed and more accessiblemoreakin to the New Commandant in the same story. It is going too far toequate, as Brod did, the Castle officials allegorically with God, for they are,as Heller forcibly reminded us, all-too-human in most respects.23 Neverthe-less, as the narrative unfolds, it becomes increasingly possible to see themdealing with K. as the agents or mediators of a more than human powerwhich is far more benevolent and proximate than the remote, namelessauthorities in The Trial; and they are associated with an imagery of light

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  • 294 KAFKA, KIERKEGAARD A N D THE K. 'S

    and whiteness in a far clearer way than their earlier counterparts had everbeen. Thus although, as several commentators have argued, it may not bepossible to chart a direct influence of Kierkegaard on Kafka's fictional work,the 'elective affinity' between the two men does at least permit us to readThe Castle as a vindication of the claim, made by Kafka under the directinfluence of Kierkegaard in his letter to Brod of late March 1918, that:

    .. the striving human being must set himself against the world in order tosave the divine element within himself, or, what amounts to the same thing,the divine element sets him against the world in order to save itself (Br23

  • RICHARD SHEPPARD 295this problem are Jean Wahl, 'Kafka etKierkegaard Commentaires', in PetiteHistoire de 'L'Extstcntialisme' (Pans, Edi-tions Club Maintenant, 1947) pp 95-131,Brian F M Edwards, 'Kafka and Kierke-gaard: A Reassessment', German Life andLetters, 20(196667) 218-25; Reed Merrill,'"Infinite Absolute Negativity": Irony inSocrates, Kierkegaard and Kafka', Com-parative Literature Studies, 16(1979) 222-36;Claude David, 'Die Geschichte Abrahams:Zu Kafkas Auseinandersetzung mitKierkegaard', in Bild und Cedanke (Mun-ich, Fink, 1980) pp. 79-90; WolfgangLange, 'Ober Kafkas Kierkegaard-Lektureund eimge damit zusammenhangendeGegenstande', DVjs, 60(1986) 286-308,Hideo Nakazawa, 'Zu Kafkas und BrodsKierkegaard-Deutung', Doitsu Bungaku,79(1987) 128-35

    4 Lange, p 287; Edwards, pp 221-2 andKlaus Wagenbach, Franz Kafka inSelbstzeugmsstn und Btlddokumcntcn (Rein-bek bei Hamburg, Rowohlt, 1964), p 44

    5 For possible sources from which Kafkaderived his biographical information(including Monrad, pp. 44-70), seeBKB492 n 51 and Binder, I, pp 523-8

    6 Lange, p 302

    7 See Wahl, p 119, David (commenting onH124-6) p 87, Merrill, pp 231-3.

    8 Das Buck des Richters was a selection (trans-lated into German) from SK's journalswhich had been published in 1905 andwhich Kafka read in August 1913 (T578),when his relationship with Felice Bauerwas becoming increasingly problematicAs far as we know, Das Buck des Richterswas the first text by SK to be read by FKEdwards and Merrill ignore the three quo-tations completely; and David and Langea te only eight and two lines respectivelyfrom the longest quotation without indic-ating that it was sufficiently important toKafka for him to quote it verbatim and atlength five years after coming across it fordie first time

    Cf . Richard W. Sheppard, 'The Trial/The Castle' Towards an Analytical Com-parison', in The Kafka Debate, edited byAngel Flores (New York, Gordian Press,1977) PP 396-417

    10 See, for example, Wagenbach, pp 768

    1' S^ren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and

    The Sickness unto Death, translated byWalter Lowne (Princeton U.P., 1974)Interestingly enough, Monrad (pp 804)briefly summarizes the argument of TheSickness unto Death and in so doing, echoesprecisely this opening passage (p. 80). Hethen goes on to describe precisely the twotypes of (unconscious) despair which I usein my reading below, calling themrespectively 'Verzweiflung der Notwen-digkeit' and 'Verzweiflung der Moghch-keit' (p. 81) One cannot, of course, drawany firm conclusions from that fortuitousfact, indeed, one might ask why, if thatanalysis did recommend itself to Kafka, heapparently made no attempt to get holdof and read the book as a whole.

    12 See Pascal's Penste no 136 (139) entitled'Divertissement'

    13 Until recently, most studies of The Trialsaw Josef K as a guiltless victim The mostextensive study to date which takes theopposing view is Eric Marson, The Caseagainst Josef K (St Lucia, QueenslandU P., 1975)-

    14 For bibliographical information relatingto this point, see Binder, II, pp 4601

    " S e e Richard Sheppard, On Kafka's Castle(London, Croom Helm, 1973) pp 568,67-9, 132-7 and 154-5

    16 See Sheppard, 1973, pp 1406.

    17 See Sheppard, 1973, pp. 84-92 and127-88.

    18 As I argued in my 1977 article, thediffering syntax of the two novels reflectsdiffering relationships between the K.'sand their surroundings. Where the syntaxof The Trial emphasizes the gap betweenself and world, that of The Castle impliesthe possibility of a dialectical relationshipbetween self and world.

    19 This assertion has always been and remainsextremely contentious. Most Kafka-cnticsdeny that such a change in K. takes placeFor bibliographical information relatingto this point, see Binder, II, p 463.

    2 0 See Sheppard, 1973, pp. 177-88

    21 See Sheppard, 1973, pp. 41, 78-9, 171-2.

    2 2 As has often been pointed out, the Germanword for 'land-surveyor' ('Landver-

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    messer') is closely associated with a verb worth, Penguin Books, 1961)('sich vermessen') which means either 'to pp. 175-202be presumptuous'/'to get above oneself 2* The concept of 'Einsinnigkeit' goes backor 'to make an error of reckoning'. to a lecture by Fnednch Beissner of 1952

    "Erich Heller, "The World of Franz Kafka', For a discussion of its nature and hrruta-m The Disinherited Mind (Harmonds- dons, see Binder, II, p 449 and 455-9.

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