JONATHAN ULLYOT

University of Chicago

Kafkas Grail Castle

Gewiss, sagte K., noch besser aber verstehe ich, dass hier ein entsetzlicher Missbrauch mit mir, vielleicht sogar mit den Gesetzen getrieben wird. Ich werde mich fr meine Person dagegen zu wehren wissen. Wie wollen Sie das tun? fragte der Vorsteher. Das kann ich nich verraten, sagte K. (Das Schloss 88)

Marthe Robert, in her book, The Old and the New: From Don Quixote to Kafka, argues that the Kafka hero is an inversion of the traditional quest hero: Unique to Kafka is the fact that the prized object or goal has itself no fixed value. [] Kafkas hero is the inverse of the traditional quest hero who may be overwhelmed by the trials he must undergo but knows at least the value of the Golden Fleece or the Grail or any other symbolic object worthy of his efforts. K. the Land-Surveyor knows nothing at all about the Castle save that it exists and that apart from himself no one seems much concerned with it (194). Roberts comparison of the fixed value of the grail or Golden Fleece to the unfixed value of the Castle begs a more important question for a critic approaching Das Schloss: is K.s goal the Castle, and, if so, what does that mean? Certainly, K. wants to penetrate the Castle and meet with every official he can. But another important shift has occurred from the traditional quest narrative to Kafkas that Robert does not mention: not only does K. know nothing at all about the Castle, but the symbolic object worthy of his efforts has become a place rather than a thinga place where, in the traditional grail romance, the grail is kept. A comparison of the medieval grail romance with Das Schloss reveals many important similarities that have not yet been examined. In Perceval (1181), the first extant version by Chrtien de Troyes, the nave (nice) young Welshman enters a wasted land (terre gaste) where no crops can grow. He meets a wounded fisherman (the Roi Pescheoir) who offers him hospitality at his castle and gives him directions. Perceval follows them, but he cannot find the castle, and assumes he has been tricked. Then a castle tower seems to emerge as if from nowhere. Inside, Perceval sees a procession of mysterious objects, includThe German Quarterly 83.4 (Fall 2010)

431

2010, American Association of Teachers of German

432

THE GERMAN QUARTERLY

Fall 2010

ing a lance that bleeds and a brilliant grail (graal) carried by a beautiful maiden. He defers his questions as to why the lance bleeds and whom the grail serves because he was warned earlier that day that a knight should never be too inquisitive. After he leaves the castle the next day, he learns that asking about the lance and the grail would have healed the wounded Fisher King and lifted the curse from the land. Perceval sets out to find the castle again, beginning what Juliette Wood calls the wanderings and adventures stage common to most grail narratives, in which the hero repents for his sins before earning a second chance (170). In Das Schloss, K. arrives in a seemingly deserted village trapped in an endless winter, which, as Levi-Strauss points out, is the origin of the waste land theme (23). The barmaid Pepi remembers spring and summer lasting only a few days, and even on those days the snow was falling (488). K. is looking for a castle, though it is not at all clear why. K.s first words upon waking up at the Gentlemens Inn in the village are, In welches Dorf habe ich mich verirrt? Ist denn hier ein Schloss? (8). When he tries to walk toward the Castle,1 no road leads to it. As he nears it, in fact, it doesnt even look like a castle anymore: es war doch nur ein recht elendes Stdtchen, aus Dorfhusern zusammengetragen (17). The Castle, it turns out, has no defined physical place; it is anywhere that official business takes place. At the Gentlemens Inn, K. sees the official Klamm through a peephole sitting at a table, sleeping. K. seduces the barmaid Frieda, who is Klamms mistress and serves him his beer. The next day, K. decides that he must talk to Klamm, and struggles to do so for the rest of the book without so much as gaining another glimpse of him. Kafka borrows many themes from the grail narrativethe wasted land, the castle that appears/disappears as the knight approaches it, a seated and exhausted/wounded man served by a beautiful maiden, and the heros initial failure to speak to him and his quest to find him again. Kafka also seems to borrow structural elements from Chrtiens Perceval, a text that he most likely knew.2 Chrtien uncharacteristically introduces an entirely new quest halfway through his romance: Gauvains quest for the Bleeding Lance. Halfway through Das Schloss, K. visits Olga, who recounts sixty pages of Schlossgeschichten, or Castle stories, which include the story of how Amalias father tried in vain to gain an interview with the official Sortini. Perceval is much longer than any other romance Chrtien wrote, and it cuts off in mid-sentence long before Perceval (or Gauvain) ever finds the Castle of the Fisher King again, presumably because of the authors death. Das Schloss is Kafkas last book, his longest book, and it also ends mid-sentence. Das Schloss, in other words, borrows structural and thematic elements from the medieval grail quest, and has a strange affinity to Chrtiens original failure. The crucial difference, however, is that the symbolic object worthy of [the questers] efforts is absent in Kafka. The only grail in Das Schloss, as Helen Adolf points out, is Klamms beer glass, which Frieda (as grail maiden)

ULLYOT: Kafkas Castle

433

carries to him (160). But there is no mystery behind Klamms enjoyment of beer and K. already knows whom this glass serves. The real interpretive mystery of Das Schloss is why K. persists in looking for Klamm and trying to reach the Castle.3 K. does not wake up one morning to find himself arrested like Josef K. and his exasperation with the stupidity of the villagers and the disorder of official business hardly motivates such a compulsive quest. This is one of the most cryptic things about the book, and demands the readers own interpretive quest to unlock what the Castle means to K. (Schloss means both castle and lock.) Although the novel is told in free indirect discourse from K.s perspective, Kafka deliberately keeps K.s motivations mysterious, suggesting at times that K. has a secret (even messianic) strategy that the reader is meant to decipher. As the landlady puts it, K. is einer dessen Absichten unbekannt sind (80). Roberts suggestion that Das Schloss is a grail narrative without a grail, and that K.s quest object is the Castle itself (that is, getting to the Castle without knowing whats in the Castle, or even how to get there), is what this paper will explore. Almost no scholarship has illuminated the way Kafka borrows motifs from the grail narrative, especially Chrtiens version, in Das Schloss.4 By looking at how Das Schloss is a kind of stalled or failed version of Perceval, I will illustrate how Kafkas last novel tells the story of K.s successful resistance to the oppressive force of authority. K.s quest to get to the Castle represents not just his lack of a definitive goal but his refusal to be satisfied by any object or have any end point to his quest.5

Absence as Authority In his essay, The Law of Ignominy: Authority, Messianism and Exile in The Castle, W. G. Sebald describes Castle authority as parasitic rather than powerful (43). Literally, this means that the official relies on the villager to satisfy himself. Sortini, as Sebald puts it, embodies the vampiric lasciviousness of the official who demands virginal sacrifice and public prostitution. When Amalia refuses Sortinis lewd invitation for her to become his mistress, she is ostracized by the villagers as though she had defied an official decree. More important, Castle authority is parasitic in essence. This means that officials make themselves appear inaccessible; they have the air of being absent because this is what constitutes their authority. When Gardena wanted a gift from Klamm, she explains, she had to ask for it, and Klamm signaled his agreement by doing nothing (127). One wonders if he ever spoke to her. At the firemans party, some villagers recognize Sortini: er aber blieb bei der Spritze und jeden der sich ihm mit irgendeiner Bitte oder Schmeichelei zu nhern suchte, vertrieb er durch sein Schweigen (300). Sortinis silence, unlike Klamms, is

434

THE GERMAN QUARTERLY

Fall 2010

not a gesture of consent, but a refusal to enter into discourse entirely. After K. glimpses Klamm through the peephole in the Gentlemens Inn, it proves impossible to even lay eyes on him again. When K. tries to surprise him in the courtyard, Klamm takes another carriage. In this case, Klamm not only refuses to enter into discourse, he refuses even to be visible to K., as if radically trying to preserve his reputation as one whom, as the landlady puts it, no one can talk to (81). It could be the case that Castle officials are just profoundly disorganized, or too harried by their duties to notice the villagers. But Das Schloss is written from the perspective of K., who receives his information from the villagers. And to a villager, the official is tantamount to a god. Like a parody of religious exegesis, K. learns from the chairman that officials never make mistakes:
Ob es Kontrollbehrden gibt? Es gibt nur Kontrollbehrden. Freilich, sie sind nicht dazu bestimmt, Fehler im groben Wortsinn herauszufinden, denn Fehler kommen ja nicht vor und selbst wenn einmal ein Fehler vorkommt, wie in Ihrem Fall, wer darf denn endgltig sagen, dass es ein Fehler ist. (104)

The fact that there are only control agencies (that check for errors) means that the concept of error disappears, and everything that comes from the Castle is good and just. The passage is funny, partly because the chairman finds no humor in it. Even naming the official seems blasphemous to the villager, as if the naming itself were to make the official too present. When K. first meets the schoolteacher, and asks him if he knows the Count, Wie sollte ich ihn kennen? sagte der Lehrer leise und fgte laut auf franzsisch hinzu: Nehmen Sie Rcksicht auf die Anwesenheit unschuldiger Kinder (20). Momus swears Im Namen Klamms (176), and Gardena requests that K. only refer to Klamm as he: Gebrauchen Sie nicht Klamms Namen. Nennen Sie ihn er oder sonstwie, aber nicht beim Namen (137). K. begins to learn the danger of thinking like a villagerto accept that something can have authority through absence alone, or that a bureaucracy can borrow theological models to secure its authority. In the aptly titled chapter Kampf gegen das Verhr, the landlady explains to K. that there is no point in trying to surprise Klamm in the street because he will not respond to K. The only way to reach Klamm is through the protocol, because Klamm has approved the protocol as the only way of reaching him. Und wie kann etwas Klamms Zustimmung haben, was nicht von seinem Geiste erfllt ist (183). To the landlady, reaching Klamm means reaching Klamm the way he wants to be reached: through a means in which he does not have to be present. Officially contacting Klamm, therefore, is to not contact him at allor, at least, it is to live in the hope that a meeting will someday occur. But the landlady goes even further than that: Klamms spirit is in the protocolmeaning that one reaches Klamm by consenting to his form of authority as one who is un-

ULLYOT: Kafkas Castle

435

reachable. To reach Klamm, according to her, is never to reach Klamm. This is why the refusal to sign the protocol represents a Kampf to K.: a struggle not to accept an idea of authority that is constituted by its inaccessibility. The enemy is always slipping away from the battle, or trying to convince K. that there is no battle. If K.s struggle appears paranoid or even delusional, that is because the strength of his enemy is constituted by how indifferent he seems to him. As he complains to Gardena, Nicht einmal die Erbitterung des Herrn kann ich erregen, wie sollte ich seine Anerkennung verdienen! (189). In order to challenge the nature of such an authority, K. must insist that a battle is always being fought; he must continue to battle without a (visible) enemy.

Klamm as Fisher King After glancing at Klamm through the peephole at the Gentlemens Inn, K. gives no indication that he thinks of Klamm as a formidable power, or that seeing him was especially significant. Likewise, when Chrtiens Perceval stumbles across the Fisher King on his way to his mothers house, he doesnt comprehend the significance of this opportunity. It is not until he learns the full extent of his failure at the court of King Arthur that he resolves to find him again. K.s quest to find Klamm, on the contrary, is not motivated by the realization of any great missed opportunity, but by the fact that he is told he cannot meet with Klamm face to face. When K. tells the landlady that he wants to marry Frieda, he mentions almost in passing that he would also like to speak to Klamm before the wedding (78). Both the landlady and Frieda tell K. that this is impossible, and immediately K.s image of Klamm radically changes:
So haben Sie [...] gewiss Recht, wenn Sie sagen, dass ich vor Klamm ein Nichts bin und wenn ich jetzt auch verlange mit Klamm zu sprechen und nicht einmal durch Ihre Erklrungen davon abgebracht bin, so ist damit noch nicht gesagt, dass ich imstande bin, den Anblick Klamms ohne dazwischenstehende Tr auch nur zu ertragen und ob ich nicht schon bei seinem Erscheinen aus dem Zimmer renne. Aber eine solche wenn auch berechtigte Befrchtung, ist fr mich noch kein Grund, die Sache nicht doch zu wagen. Gelingt es mir aber ihm standzuhalten, dann ist es gar nicht ntig, dass er mit mir spricht, es gengt mir wenn ich den Eindruck sehe, den meine Worte auf ihn machen und machen sie keinen oder hrt er sie gar nicht, habe ich doch den Gewinn frei vor einem Mchtigen gesprochen zu haben. (8182)

K. expressed no fear of Klamm before this chapter, and has no reason to build up this formidable picture of him here, or imagine that there is some effect his words will have on him. Klamm is a harmless looking official who sleeps with his eyes open. But Klamm is described here as something too pow-

436

THE GERMAN QUARTERLY

Fall 2010

erful to behold with the naked eyea technique often used by medieval authors to describe the grail. The idea of a connecting door and K.s own fear that he would run out of the room the moment Klamm appears recall Malorys description of Lancelots failure to behold the Sangreal. In Le Morte dArthur (1469), Lancelot tries to open the chamber door into the room where the Sangreal is kept, but the vision is so powerful it burns him and he is magically transported out of the room.6 Klamm, however, has only become an awesome figure because of the landlady and Friedas ban. If it is impossible to speak to Klamm, then K. must speak to KlammKlamm becomes K.s Sangreal. If the nature of Castle authority is that it is inaccessible, then K. will insist on meeting the official in order to defy (or negate) that conception of authority. This is why K.s speech equates Klamm with a person with power. Having the chance to gaze at any official, he says, will be a Gewinn (gain, but also prize or winnings) even if the official does not hear a word he says. Practically, this makes no sense. If K. has the honorable intention of telling Klamm that he loves Frieda and hopes there are no hard feelings, this would certainly require Klamm to at least hear him, and so silently acknowledge that K. spoke to him. But K. wants only the chance to stand before the official, the freedom to pursue his quest. Exposing the official as present and struggling to expose the official as present are almost synonymous in his formulation, which means that K. is not just explaining to the landlady and Frieda what he wants, he is explaining to them what he is already doingnamely, to insist on speaking to Klamm and refuse to let your explanations deter me [], to risk going ahead [] for the chance to speak frankly to a person in power (4950, emphasis added). Faced with the protocol, K. reformulates his quest in even more abstract terms. He decides that even if he were to see Klamm (achieve his goal), he would not be satisfied:
Und doch hatte K. nicht den richtigen Sinn dafr; er, der sich mit allen Krften um einen Blick Klamms bemhte, schtzte z.B. die Stellung eines Momus, der unter Klamms Augen leben durfte, nicht hoch ein, fern war ihm Bewunderung oder gar Neid, denn nicht Klamms Nhe an sich war ihm das erstrebenswerte, sondern dass er, K., nur er, kein anderer mit seinen, mit keines andern Wnschen an Klamm herankam und an ihn herankam, nicht um bei ihm zu ruhen sondern um an ihm vorbeizukommen, weiter, ins Schloss. (17576)

By reducing Klamm to one step in his quest, K. implies a clear distinction between his goal and what would be a success. Seeing Klamm would not be a success, for Klamm is only a stepping stone to the next official, and the one after him, and so on to the Castle. And yet the Castle, K. knows, has no definite location. It is an authoritative structure that operates under the name of various officials and can only be reached by contacting those persons in power. As K. puts it, more important than actually contacting Klamm (or any official) is that he alone approaches him, in his own way, without help

ULLYOT: Kafka

437

from anyone. The Castle, therefore, has become K.s own placeholder for an infinite line of authority (Klamm, Sordini, Count Westwest) which guarantees that his quest cannot be exhausted. The ultimate object of K.s quest is a refusal to allow any object (either real or symbolic) to satisfy him. There is always another official behind the official, because the very nature of the official is to defer to some official above and beyond him. The Castle is simply the name for this state of affairs, this always another which constitutes authority. In this respect, Marthe Roberts suggestion that the object of K.s quest is the Castle itself makes sense. The Castle is that abstract place that K. is always trying to get to, a long line of Fisher Kings, or persons in power who must be located. One can also understand the object of K.s quest in Lacanian terms: he is maintaining the satisfaction of the partial drive. For Lacan, the goal of the oral drive, for example, is not to reach a destination, but to follow its aim, which is the circulation around the lost object (objet petit a) in a closed circuit.7 The source of enjoyment (or jouissance) is the repetitive movement of this closed circuit. While desire seeks to satisfy itself in an object, the (partial) drive is constituted by the fact that no object will satisfy it. Although K. desires to (actually) get a glimpse of Klamm, his drive is satisfied by going towards Klamm, or always aiming in the direction of Klamm. And even if K. should (by chance) actually get a glimpse of Klamm, Klamm would quickly be replaced by the official behind Klamm, and the struggle would continue. K.s greatest danger, as he puts it earlier walking home from the chairmans house, lies in the satisfaction of his apparent goals (9293). In Lacanian terms, this would mean the release of sexual tension, or an end of jouissance. The Struggle as Possession In the eighth chapter, Das Warten auf Klamm, what seems like yet another failure in fact narrates K.s own acknowledgement of the possession of his struggle. When Pepi tells K. that Klamms carriage is in the courtyard, K. runs outside, hoping to surprise Klamm before he leaves. K. waits by the carriage, but Klamm never arrives. A gentleman then appears, orders the coachman to stable the horses, and tells K. that Klamm has already left. K., however, insists on waiting: Ich warte hier auf jemanden, sagte K., nicht mehr in Hoffnung auf irgendeinen Erfolg, sondern nur grundstzlich (166). K. is waiting on principle, which can be read as the refusal to accept any form of authority. However, while K. acknowledges that success (Erfolg) is no longer possible, he goes on to identify an achievement or possession (Besitz) gained from the waiting itself:
Trotzallem was geschehen war hatte er das Gefhl, dass das was er bisher erreicht hatte eine Art Besitz war, den er zwar nur noch scheinbar festhielt aber

438

THE GERMAN QUARTERLY

Fall 2010

doch nicht auf einen beliebigen Befehl hin ausliefern musste. Sie verfehlen ihn auf jeden Fall ob Sie warten oder gehn, sagte der Herr zwar schroff in seiner Meinung aber auffallend nachgiebig fr K.s Gedankengang. Dann will ich ihn lieber beim Warten verfehlen, sagte K. trotzig, durch blosse Worte dieses jungen Herrn wrde er sich gewiss nicht von hier vertreiben lassen. (167)

K.s idea of a Besitz (possession) that is only apparently retained and yet belongs to him insofar as it can be surrendered invites a comparison with the grail. The grail is not an object to be won. Finding the grail means finding the Castle of the Fisher King and learning the right interpretation of the grail. Chrtien introduces Gauvains quest for the Bleeding Lance as a trophy to bring back to the king of Escavalon in order to differentiate these two models of the quest object. As Todorov put it, the grail narrative tells the story of a quest; what is sought, however, is not an object, but a meaning: that of the word Grail (40). Eschenbachs Parzival doesnt win the grail and gulp down immortal life; he becomes the protector of its secret. For Eschenbach, this is the lesson of the grail: it is unattainable, and yet those who are chaste enough to understand why are rewarded with its proximity.8 K.s acknowledgement of a possession here suggests that he has grasped the way in which his refusal to be satisfied is an achievement in itself. As the gentleman puts it, youll miss him whether you wait or gomeaning that there is no point in waiting for nothing. But if waiting has become the object of the quest itself, then the having-waited, and the opportunity to wait longer, is the possession itself. K. is the protector of his own struggle, which is not really an object (which he only apparently retained) but can still be surrendered (but that neednt be surrendered simply upon some arbitrary command) by giving up and going home. Maintaining the principle of waiting is a success in itself.

K.s Victory Most critics regard the section in which K. falls asleep at the secretary Brgels feet to be his most paradoxical failure. As Anne Hoffman puts it, K. falls asleep in a bed in the Herrenhof just as Brgel, a Castle official, is telling him what he most desires to know (298). Ronald Gray calls this the profoundest irony of all, the ironical situation of man, successful only when he stops trying to succeed (61). This scene, however, does not recount a failure at all. It is a deliberate red herring that makes us rethink what a victory in such a narrative might look like. While looking for the door of Erlanger, Klamms secretary, at the Gentlemens Inn, K. inadvertently wakes up a man named Brgel, who presents himself as a connecting secretary between Friedrichs village and Castle secretaries (405).9 Brgel invites K. to sit on his bed and talk to him, in the hopes

ULLYOT: Kafka

439

that a conversation will put him to sleep (407). As Brgel begins to expound monotonously on the process of night interrogations, K. starts to drift off. As he does, K., the reader is told, can hear Brgel
vielleicht besser als whrend des frhern totmden Wachens, Wort fr Wort schlug an sein Ohr, aber das lstige Bewusstsein war geschwunden, er fhlte sich frei, nicht Brgel hielt ihn mehr, nur er tastete noch manchmal nach Brgel hin, er war noch nicht in der Tiefe des Schlafs, aber eingetaucht in ihn war er, niemand sollte ihm das mehr rauben. Und es war ihm, als sei ihm damit ein grosser Sieg gelungen und schon war auch eine Gesellschaft da es zu feiern und er oder auch jemand anderer hob das Champagnerglas zu Ehren des Sieges. (415)

K. not only thinks of his ability to fall asleep as a possession (no one was going to steal this from him) but also as a victory (Sieg). This is because he successfully reverses the roles between himself and Brgel. Instead of being kept or held (halten) by Brgel, who can only fall asleep if he is in conversation, K. now gropes or feels about (tastete) to hear Brgel, turning his words into a lullaby. Sleep, in this context, represents a successful negotiation of Castle discoursethat is, a nullifying it of its content, a reversal of its signifying role. This seems to be the passage Benjamin was thinking of in his letter to Gershom Scholem: Ich habe versucht zu zeigen, wie Kafka auf der Kehrseite dieses Nichts, in seinem Futter, wenn ich so sagen darf, die Erlsung zu ertasten gesucht hat (460). Ertasten, to grope or feel about with ones hands, echoes Kafkas tasten hin or feeling about. Instead of irritating words which accost K.s ears and demand that he try to decipher a meaning, K. hears them as pleasant noise, what K. in his dream calls ein Piepsen (416) or, later, as mere chatter:
An die leise, selbstzufriedene, fr das eigene Einschlafen offenbar vergeblich arbeitende Stimme Brgels hatte er sich nun so gewhnt, dass sie seinen Schlaf mehr befrdern als stren wrde. Klappere Mhle klappere, dachte er, Du klapperst nur fr mich. (419)

K.s victory is this moment of shifting, or feeling sudden liberation through the Castles one-sided (monologic) discourse. Instead of trying to interpret that discourse (which K. attempts with Klamms first letter, and fails) or blocking it out (which K. attempts by refusing to sign this protocol, and refusing to give Momus a reason for why he refuses), K. transforms it into pleasant noise, which represents both a negotiation of it as well as an acceptance of it as pure meaninglessness. Brgels words are no longer there to be deciphered, but to sing K. to sleep.10 This moment of reversal recalls an earlier moment in Das Schloss, when, in the second chapter, K. picks up the telephone receiver and hears the sound of what he thinks of as children singing: Es war wie wenn sich aus dem Summen zahlloser kindlicher Stimmenaber auch dieses Summen war keines, son-

440

THE GERMAN QUARTERLY

Fall 2010

dern war Gesang fernster, allerfernster Stimmen (36). This also has the effect of a soporific; K. listens to the noise dreamily with his left arm propped against the telephone until the landlord tugs at his coat. The chairman later explains to K. that what he heard was the sound of all the officials and secretaries speaking at once on the open Castle telephone line. In the village, he explains, the telephone is less a communication device than an automated phonograph [Musikautomat]: Dieses ununterbrochene Telephonieren hren wir in den hiesigen Telephonen als Rauschen und Gesang (116). Martin Seel, in Aesthetics of Appearing (2005), identifies Rauschen as a borderline aesthetic experience. Rauschen, he says, is an occurrence perceivable through the sense of hearing or seeing without something occurring that has form (or can be followed and determined unequivocally); in short, it is an occurrence without something occurring (143). Rdiger Campe, in his paper, The Rauschen of the Waves: On the Margins of Literature, identifies the telephones Rauschen in Das Schloss as a reversed intercourse [verkehrten Verkehr], given that K. picks up the receiver to talk, but ends up listening (33). Campe links this moment to Kafkas own description of a dream in a letter to Felice on January 22, 1913, in which Kafka describes picking up a telephone in anticipation of hearing news, aber aus dem Telephon nichts und nichts zu hren bekam, als einen traurigen mchtigen wortlosen Gesang und das Rauschen des Meeres (Briefe 1913 Mrz 1914 55). He suggests that while Kafkas dream seems to represent a pure frustration of hearing, it is a deferred pleasure to feminize oneself through the application of the telephone receiver, and that this moment of Rauschen is already the whole pleasure (Campe 33). Though Campe never makes the connection explicitly, his conception of reversed intercourse through the pleasurable experience of Rauschen recalls Lacans definition of satisfaction of the partial drive, or the satisfaction in the movement of the circuit itself.11 The Rauschen of the telephone is the humming of that circuit of meaningless discourse, the moment of reversal in which the meaninglessness becomes purely (pleasant) noise, and anticipation (Kafka waiting for news from Felice, K. waiting to be connected with the Castle) becomes jouissance. Campe does not connect the telephone sequence with the Brgel sequence (nor does Wolf Kittler, who also explores the notion of Rauschen in his Schreibmaschinen, Sprechmaschinen: Effekte technischer Medien im Werk Franz Kafkas), but once again a discourse is inverted into a kind of Rauschen.12 This time, however, no apparatus is involved. More dramatically, K. identifies this reversal or becoming-noise of Brgels speech as a victory itself. K. exposes Brgels words as meaningless, he cancels out their signifying role, and hence the authority of all Castle discourse. The Rauschen is more than just aesthetic pleasure in this case; it is the exterior manifestation of K.s own drive to be forever unsatisfied. Ronald Gray claims that this is the moment in which K. finally abandons his struggle (6163). If Gray is right, then K.s feeling of victory is either delu-

ULLYOT: Kafkas Castle

441

sional or marks a realization that the only way to succeed is to give up the quest. But the text suggests the opposite of this. K.s victory immediately becomes a hypnopompic dream, in which he sees himself repeatedly winning a battle with a secretary who is trying to pose as a god, while a crowd celebrates that victory. Falling asleep is not an escape from the problems of waking life, but a new interpretation of them. The notion of groping or feeling about (tasten) for Brgels words becomes K. advancing (vorrcken) at the figure of the secretary-God in the dream:
Ein Sekretr, nackt, sehr hnlich der Statue eines griechischen Gottes, wurde von K. im Kampf bedrngt. Es war sehr komisch und K. lchelte darber sanft im Schlaf, wie der Sekretr aus seiner stolzen Haltung durch K.s Vorstsse immer aufgeschreckt wurde und etwa den hochgestreckten Arm und die geballte Faust schnell dazu verwenden musste um seine Blssen zu decken und doch damit noch immer zu langsam war. Der Kampf dauerte nicht lange, Schritt fr Schritt und es waren sehr grosse Schritte rckte K. vor. War es berhaupt ein Kampf? Es gab kein ernstliches Hindernis, nur hie und da ein Piepsen des Sekretrs. Dieser griechische Gott piepste wie ein Mdchen, das gekitzelt wird. (41516)

This dream condenses all the elements of K.s quest: a constant struggle in the attempt to approach the distant, absent, or posed figure, and a victory that results from the very maintaining of that struggle or forward march before the eyes of others, who witness the decline of authoritys posturing. The secretary posed as a Greek god is the official, seen only by K. in photographs (Count Westwest on the wall of the Gentlemens Inn) or as a kind of tableau vivant (Klamm as he is sleeping with his eyes open). The irony of this dream, and perhaps the reason why K. is smiling, is that it seems to solve one of the great enigmas of Das Schloss: why the official is never seen in person. If the nature of authority is absence, meaning that officials are reached only through secretaries and messengers, then the official necessarily becomes secretary the moment anyone tries to advance toward him. This means that either there are no real officials (only secretaries posing as them), or that all secretaries are secret officials. Either way, it suggests that K.s inability to physically locate the official is in fact a mark of his success. Whenever K. tries to approach Klamm, he runs into another bumbling secretaryJeremias, Artur, Momus, the gentleman in the courtyard, Brgel, Erlangerall of whom act as stand-ins for Klamm. Like the Castle itself, which became a mere aggregation of stone houses when K. approached it, the official became a secretary or clerk when K. tried to approach him. The act of advancing, in other words, disrupts the empty pose of authority, immediately demoting or exposing that figure as a mere secretary. Failure (of the battle ever to begin) is in fact a success; it is a victory so easy to win that it doesnt seem like a battle at all. All that is important is that it continues. K.s dream unlocks the enigma of Das Schloss only insofar as it makes the enigma disappear. It is at once K.s playful (and perhaps subconscious) solu-

442

THE GERMAN QUARTERLY

Fall 2010

tion to the dilemma of absent Castle authority, and at the same time marks the closest K. will ever come (or the closest Kafka will ever allow us to come) to acknowledging that the success of his quest occurs in the struggle itself, in the very refusal to be satisfied by any (real or symbolic) object or goal. Understanding this reversal is to understand the event in Kafkas text, which Benjamin likens to redemption, the Umkehr of what seems to be deadlock. James Conant calls this the climax: the moment of climax [in Kafka] comes not when something happens in the story but when something happens in the reader: when we suddenly realize that we no longer understand what it would be for that which we are waiting to happen in the story actually to happen (687). In this case, it is the realization that the goal is always already being reached; the secret of the grail is already known.13

Brgel as Fisher King The Brgel scene is the most elaborate allusion to the grail narrative in Das Schloss. This may be why K.s act of falling asleep seems like a failureit echoes Percevals failure to present his request to the Fisher King. A comparison will help to illuminate the similarities: Chrtiens Perceval is in search of his mothers house, but succumbs to exhaustion. He chances upon a fisherman who offers him hospitality in his castle. Perceval follows the strangers directions, but cannot find the castle. He gives up hope, at which point the tower suddenly emerges as if by magic (lines 29743048). K. is summoned to the Gentlemens Inn to meet with Erlanger, one of Klamms secretaries. He goes in search of Erlangers door, fighting his exhaustion, but all the doors look the same. He gives up his search, and instead opens a random door hoping to find an empty bed, and stumbles into Brgels room (403). In the castle, Perceval is received by the kind Fisher King, seated upon a bed in the middle of the room. The Fisher King apologizes that he cannot get up because he is wounded. Perceval sits by his feet (lines 308891). Brgel is confined to his bed out of exhaustion. He invites K. to sit down by his feet and chat with him, because there are no chairs in the room (40506). After the grail procession and the banquet, Perceval has still failed to present his request. (Chrtien reminds us of this three times.) The attendants carry the Fisher King out of the room and Perceval falls asleep on the same bed (lines 332036). K. falls asleep on Brgels bed, just as Brgel cryptically alludes to an opportunity to present his request:
Man muss zeigen, wie die Partei zwar in diese Gelegenheit in aller Hilflosigkeit, wie sie deren kein anderes Wesen als eben nur eine Partei fhig sein kann, hineingetappt ist, wie sie aber jetzt, wenn sie will, Herr Landvermesser, alles beherrschen kann und dafr nichts anderes zu tun hat, als ihre Bitte irgendwie vorzubringen. (424)

ULLYOT: Kafkas Castle

443

The next morning Perceval awakes, hurriedly leaves the castle and then learns from his cousin of his missed opportunity (lines 3632781). K. is awoken by knocking, and a voice tells him that it is morning and that Erlanger has been waiting for him. K. meets Erlanger in the front hall, who delivers the much-awaited message from Klamm: Frieda must return to her job at the Gentlemens Inn, because Klamm prefers it when she serves him his beer (42728). Once again, the absence of any real mystery in Kafkas version means that the allusions themselves fail to be anything other than ironic. K. has no request to make to Brgel, a liaison secretary between two secretaries of an official he has never even heard of, nor is there any grail in Brgels room. Erlangers message only reminds the reader of this fact by calling attention to the empty grail-like ritual of Frieda serving Klamm his beer, which K. has, if anything, disrupted. The scene in which Perceval learns of his great failure the next morning becomes comic in Kafkas version. Erlangers message from Klamm is outdated: Frieda has already returned to the Gentlemens Inn; K. has already succeeded in carrying out Klamms request. More important, by repeating the scene of Perceval before the Fisher King a second time, Kafka borrows the structure that would have resulted in the completion of Chrtiens textPercevals return to the castle to present his request. Das Schloss can therefore be read as a modernist continuation of Perceval, one that both completes the story but also fails better than Chrtiens, creating a new kind of grail knight in a world without a grail, where success is marked by an inversion of the traditional scene of failure. Kafka offers hope not by presenting a new model of hope, but by turning the traditional idea of failure into nonsense. The First Continuation of Chrtiens Perceval written in 1249 contains another striking similarity with Das Schloss, one which suggests Kafka was at least familiar with the story. As I mentioned, Chrtien introduces Gawain on a parallel quest for the bleeding lance, but Gawain never makes it to the castle in Chrtiens version. In the First Continuation, however, he does. He sees the grail and the bleeding lance, and, unlike Perceval, succeeds in presenting his request, asking why the lance bleeds and whom the grail serves. The Fisher King obliges him: the lance was the same lance that Longinus held and wounded Christ, while the grail but Gawain cannot keep his eyes open any longer, and succumbs to sleep (lines 13003602).14 The next morning, he wakes outside the castle walls, and, like Perceval, realizes his failure: Oh God! he cried, the noble, worthy, wise and courteous king was telling me so graciously the secrets of all the great wonders, and I fell asleepit grieves me (lines 1354246, Bryant 132). Gawain, however, doesnt really fail; water has been restored to the terre gaste and, miraculously, giant trees have grown and are flourishing all around him. This is a technique the author of the First Continuation uses to reserve the knowledge of the grail for Perceval. (Learning about the lance restores the terre gaste; learning about the grail heals the Fisher

444

THE GERMAN QUARTERLY

Fall 2010

Kings wound.) By conflating Percevals failure with Gawains failure/success in the First Continuation, Kafka again undermines the traditional scene of failure. Kafkas grail narrative contains no great wonders, and hence no secrets that would reveal them. Percevals sin, remaining silent, has become Rauschenthe moment of inversion that is Kafkas redemption. Gawains sin, falling asleep, is the necessary means of revelation. This is why K. dreams, but Gawain does not. This is another crucial difference, for the dream in the medieval romance serves as a prognostication of a future event or an immediate threat. A happy dream means that something good is coming; a bad dream means the reverse. Lancelot in Perlesvaus (c. 1205) falls asleep and dreams that five bears are attacking him, which wakes him up in time to defend himself as five brigands are about to attack him (Branch 8, 547). If Gawain were to have dreamed of a victory, as K. does, it would be another way of saying that a victory was about to take placeor was already taking place.

Conclusion This paper has challenged the common conception that Kafkas last work is one centered around a tragic or satiric depiction of failure, an idea that comes from a reading of K. as a bumbling and stubborn hero who misses his opportunities on his meaningless and even compulsive quest. Das Schloss is not a humorless (and perhaps terrifying) version of Don Quixote, as Marthe Robert argues. Kafka takes the medieval grail story absolutely seriously, and offers a reading of what the grail might be, and what redemption can look like in a world where there is no grail. K. stays in the village because, like the loftiest Arthurian knight, he seeks out challenges that are seemingly impossiblea land trapped in endless winter, a castle impossible to locate, a feeble king impossible to question. In a letter to Max Brod in 1918, Kafka describes his idea of redemption through the image of the striving man [strebende Mensch] who must oppose this world, um das Gttliche in sich zu retten, oder, was das gleiche ist, das Gttliche stellt ihn gegen die Welt, um sich zu retten (Briefe 19021924, 239). Kafkas description of the man whose only goal is to strive in opposition to this world in order to save the divine element within himself recalls the grail knight, whose quest is about solving a mystery through repentance and reflection on his fate. It also recalls K.s quest to retain the possession of his struggle. As Kafka goes on, one recognizes the seeds of what would become a novel project four years later:
Sobald ein Mensch kommt, der etwas Primitives mit sich bringt, so dass er also nicht sagt: Man muss die Welt nehmen wie sie ist [], sondern der sagt: Wie die Welt auch ist, ich bleibe bei einer Ursprnglichkeit, die ich nicht nach dem Gutbefinden der Welt zu verndern gedenke: im selben Augenblick, als dieses Wort

ULLYOT: Kafkas Castle

445

gehrt wird, geht im ganzen Dasein eine Verwandlung vor sich. Wie im Mrchen, wenn das Wort gesagt wird, sich das seit hundert Jahren verzauberte Schloss ffnet und alles Leben wird: so wird das Dasein lauter Aufmerksamkeit. (239)

This is Kafkas description of the only redemption possible for his knight. To remove the enchantment of the Castle, the hero does not need to say a magic phrase or ask the right question, but simply declare his refusal to adhere to the world, and commit to his original nature. Although K.s struggle in Das Schloss is much more complicated with respect to the world around him than is suggested in this letter, the victory as Kafka imagines it is the same: unlocking a castle/lock [Schloss] by a refusal to submit to what the world regards as good (Klamms spirit in the protocol, humans posing as gods). This creates a metamorphosis (Verwandlung, but one can also read reversal) in existence, and the world comes to lifethe frozen official becomes a squeaking secretary. Redemption, for Kafka, does not involve discovering the key to the meaninglessness or blocking it out, but struggling attentively for the moment in which ones defiance forces the words which signify nothing to point back on themselves and become the Rauschen of the sea. Notes
1 Mark Harman capitalizes the c of castle whenever Kafka writes das Schloss (as opposed to ein Schloss). I have preserved this choice here. 2 Kafka would have been familiar with more than just Wolfram von Eschenbachs Parsifal, itself a continuation of Chrtiens text which brings the story to completion. Kafka was not only well-read in French, but texts of Chrtiens Perceval, the continuations, and other grail narratives were widely available in his day; most editions were published in Germany and were bilingual. There was also an explosion of scholarship around Perceval and the grail myth beginning in the early 1900s, scholarship focusing on the incomplete nature of the original grail text, and speculations on its origins. (Chrtiens graal is not explicitly the Holy Grail nor the Irish hero Brans horn of plenty.) For a complete history of this scholarship, see Williams. 3 Kafka saw only an ironic conclusion to his book, if one can believe Max Brods account: The ostensible land surveyor was to find partial satisfaction at least. He was not to relax his struggle, but was to die worn out by it. Round his deathbed the villagers were to assemble, and from the Castle itself word was to come that though K.s legal claim to live in the village was not valid, yet, taking certain auxiliary circumstances into account, he was to be permitted to live and work there (quoted in Howe, xxviii). 4 Patrick Bridgewater, in Kafkas Novels, makes a series of passing comments about Kafkas allusions to the grail quest. Taking his cue from Josef K.s own reflections on the picture of the knight he sees in the cathedral in Der Process, Bridgewater suggests that Josef is Joseph of Arimathea, who was imprisoned in a pillar for twelve years and sustained himself by the Holy Grail (113). He compares Josefs mediation on the snow outside the courts to Perceval looking at three drops of blood outside King Arthurs

446

THE GERMAN QUARTERLY

Fall 2010

court (158). He also suggests that Artur, one of K.s servants in Das Schloss, may be an allusion to Arthur (234). 5 This paper is indebted to an indirect source: Samuel Becketts Molloy, which alludes heavily to both Chrtiens Perceval and Das Schloss, and first alerted me to the affinity between Kafka and Chrtiens romance (Ullyot). 6 So came he to the chamber door, and would have entered. And anon a voice said to him: Flee, Launcelot, and enter not, for thou oughtest not to do it; and if thou enter thou shalt for-think it. [] Right so entered he into the chamber, and came toward the table of silver, and when he came nigh he felt a breath, that him thought it was intermeddled with fire, which smote him so sore in the visage that him thought it brent his visage; and therewith he fell to the earth, and had no power to arise, as he that was so araged, that he had lost the power of his body, and his hearting, and his seeing. Then felt he many hands about him, which took him up and bare him out of the chamber door, without any amending of his swoon, and left him there, seeming dead to all people (Malory 17:15). 7 The object petit a is not the origin of the oral drive. It is not introduced as the original food, it is introduced from the fact that no food will ever satisfy the oral drive, except by circumventing the eternally lacking object (Lacan 179). Lacans theory is meant to be an elucidation of the mystery of the zielgehemmt [literally, goal-hampered/blocked] which is the term Freud uses to describe the satisfaction of the oral drive (Freud 1526). 8 Earlier in this chapter K. sneaks into Klamms carriage and takes a drink of his cognac, imagining it to be some kind of magical potion, and is quickly disappointed. K. insists on reading Klamm like a Fisher King who possesses a sacred chalice, but these efforts prove to be disappointing: the beer glass is just a beer glass and the cognac is a drink fit for a coachman (164). This chapter, like many in Das Schloss, dramatizes the way K. shifts his model of thinking about his quest. It is never clear, however, whether K. actually shifts models here or whether this is done in order that the reader will shift her understanding of K.s quest. At best, one could say that K. vacillates between two models of his quest, because the second can only come about through the failure of the first. 9Friedrich is a name that has not yet been mentioned in the text. As Das Schloss progresses, it propagates names of officials and levels of authority as though it were following the logic of K.s quest. 10 See Joel Morriss recent paper, Josef K.s (A + x) Problem, for a full account of how Kafka dramatizes the cognitive shift in hypnopompic and hypnagogic states. Waking is the riskiest moment of the day for Kafka because it demands sudden orientation to ones surroundings, which the Kafka hero often fails to do. The moment of falling asleep, by contrast, is a blissful experience in which one can remain cognitively aware of ones surroundings (or, in this case, of Brgels words) without feeling compelled to understand them. 11 Seels own definition of Rauschen as an occurrence without something occurring also suggests Lacanian jouissance. 12 The word Rauschen does not appear in the Brgel section, but some elements of pleasant soporific noise, which becomes mere chatter and squeaks, suggest a clear correlation. I suspect the reason that neither Kittler nor Campe makes note of this is because they limit their analyses to technical apparatuses in Kafka.

ULLYOT: Kafkas Castle

447

13 My argument bears similarities with Agambens reading of Kafkas Before the Law (see The Messiah and the Sovereign and section 4 of Homo Sacer). Agamben argues that the insatiable persistence of the man from the country results in a successful inversion of the authoritative structure of the lawnamely, he gets the door of the law to close and ends the force of the law. Agambens reading seems like evidence of the kind of interpretive reversal that can be applied to many of Kafkas parables, rather than a definitive interpretation. If anything, what is dramatized here in Das Schloss is this very shift in understanding. Agambens reading of Before the Law, in other words, might have been K.s dream. 14 Unless otherwise noted, all citations of the First Continuation refer to the Roach edition.

Works Cited
Adolf, Helen. Visio Pacis, Holy City and Grail. State College: Pennsylvania State UP, 1960. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998. . The Messiah and the Sovereign: The Problem of Law in Walter Benjamin. Potentialities. Ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999. 16074. Beckett, Samuel. Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. New York: Knopf, 1997. Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Briefe. Vol. 4: 19311934. Ed. Christoph Gdde and Henri Lonitz. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995. Bridgewater, Patrick. Kafkas Novels: An Interpretation. New York: Rodopi, 2003. Bryant, Nigel, trans. The First Continuation. Perceval: the Story of the Grail. Suffolk: St. Edmundsbury, 1982: 98135. , trans. The High Book of the Grail: A Translation of the Thirteenth Century Romance of Perlesvaus. Ipswitch: Rowman and Littlefield, 1978. Campe, Rudiger. The Rauschen of the Waves: On the Margins of Literature. Trans. Simon Richter. SubStance 19.1 (1990): 2138. Chrtien de Troyes. Perceval. Ed. Daniel Poiron. Oeuvres compltes. Paris: Gallimard, 1994: 685911. Conant, James. In the Electoral Colony: Kafka in Florida. Critical Inquiry 27.4 (2001): 662702. Eschenbach, Wolfram von. Parzival. Trans. A. T. Hatto. New York: Penguin, 2004. Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Gray, Ronald. Kafkas Castle. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1956. Hoffman, Anne Golumb. Plotting the Landscape: Stories and Storytellers in the Castle. Twentieth Century Literature 27. 3 (1981): 289307. Howe, Irving. Introduction. The Castle. By Franz Kafka. Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. New York: Schocken, 1992: ixxxix. Kafka, Franz. Briefe 19021924. Ed. Max Brod. New York: Schocken, 1958. . Briefe 1913Mrz 1914. Ed. Hans-Gerd Koch. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1999. . Das Schloss. Ed. Malcolm Pasley. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1982. . The Castle. Trans. Mark Harman. New York: Schocken, 1998. Kittler, Wolf. Schreibmaschinen, Sprechmaschinen. Franz Kafka: Schriftverkehr. Freiburg: Rombach, 1990. 15063.

448

THE GERMAN QUARTERLY

Fall 2010

Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1978. Lvi-Strauss, Claude. Structural Anthropology. Vol. 2. Trans. Monique Layton. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976. Malory, Sir Thomas. Le Morte dArthur. Trans. William Caxton. Ware: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1996. Morris, Joel. Josef K.s (A + x) Problem: Kafka on the Moment of Awakening. The German Quarterly 82.4 (2009): 46982. Roach, William, ed. The First Continuation. The Continuations of the Old French Perceval of Chrtien de Troyes. Vol. 1. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1949. Robert, Marthe. The Old and the New: from Don Quixote to Kafka. Trans. Carol Cosman. Berkeley: U of California P, 1977. Sebald, W . G. The Law of Ignominy: Authority, Messianism and Exile in The Castle. On Kafka: Semi-Centenary Perspectives. Ed. Franz Kuna. London: Harper & Row, 1976. 4258. Seel, Martin. Aesthetics of Appearing. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005. Todorov, Tzvetan. The 2 Principles of Narrative. Diacritics 1.1 (1971): 3744. Ullyot, Jonathan. Molloy or Le Conte du Graal. Forthcoming in Modern Philology 108.4 (2011). Williams, Harry F. Interpretations of the Conte del graal and their Critical Reactions. The Sower and his Seed: Essays on Chrtien de Troyes. Ed. Rupert T. Pickens. Lexington: French Forum, 1983. 14654. Wood, Juliette. The Holy Grail: From Romance Motif to Modern Genre. Folklore 111.2 (2000): 16990.