Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
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| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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Monday, September 15, 2003 The Pitch: It's like The Castle meets Light Sleeper! Monday morning. Work. A bowl of cereal and Kafka's The Castle which I began about a week ago, and am slowly shuddering my way through.When I started it last week, I was pissed about a situation at work and trying to calm myself down, worried my supervisor wouldn't back me and that my trying to do something about being treated badly (by outside co-counsel) would somehow boomerang back on me. That copy of The Castle, that I read then, seemed the hopeless, absurdist struggle of K. against the machinations of the Castle--a grimly amusing battle between a dismissive bureaucrat and a dismissive bureaucracy. This week, now that everything got resolved at work amicably and with all apparent support behind me, I feel like I'm reading a different copy of The Castle, aided in part by the bit of Thomas Mann's introduction I had initially ignored. This feels more like a religious parable, about a man trying to see, essentially, God and the Kingdom of Heaven, and everything that prevents him from doing so: the people around him, himself, and the nature of the very universe. At 151 pages in (after K. has refused to submit to a protocol to the secretary of Klamm, his hunted contact, despite everyone's protestations), it seems like a slightly different book from the one I was reading last week. Kinda makes me wonder what I'll be making of it by this time next week. Part of this may also stem from being able to peruse the deleted sections of The Castle. In fact, I'm midway through a very long section around pg. 148 that was cut in which K. is still struggling over the protocol with his nemesis, the landlady. Gotta say, I'm really kinda envious of Kafka for being able to have his novel possess all these clip-on attachments. He's able to lay it on as thick as he wants in these sections and then have them neatly dismissed by not being part of the official text. Of course, Kafka doesn't really have much to do with it, I think, since the book was published posthumously by his friend Max Brod. Brod dutifully retains all the scraps of The Castle (which is an unfinished novel, I just discovered poking through yet another note and introduction I had previously ignored) and presents them for us to examine--a good thing since The Castle is a mystery, and the bits and pieces of deleted text, alternate text, gossip about the ending (which I turned my eyes from as soon as I started to read it), are all clues--tatters of a mysterious note, maybe--which could be used to decipher that mystery. I imagine this is my third context of The Castle (and probably the most easily exhausted one); as being one of the world's best metanovels. Just as K. frustratedly chases his way through the village to get to The Castle, so too do we battle our way through the book's pages to "get" The Castle, to redeem the experience of reading it by understanding it. As he maneuvers through blind alleys, pulling himself along on the arm of stoic messengers, barges into courtyards and knocks things about in coaches, similarly, the reader chases deleted passages, pulls himself along on the introductions of stoic editors, barges through paragraphs without grasping their meaning, attributes importance to tossed-off asides by infrequently appearing characters... and all of this, to get at the idea of Kafka's intentions, to meet a character who, like Klamm, we might only glimpse once, alone in a room at a writing desk, and the rest of the time must find ourselves at his mercy--every page we turn, every character we encounter, a seeming messenger of his will. posted by Jeff Lester | 9:39 AM | |
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