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

KAFKA, KIERKEGAARD AND THE K.'S: THEOLOGY, PSYCHOLOGY AND FICTION 1

Richard Sheppard
I. EVER SINCE Max KAFKA'S HECEPTION OF KIERKEGAARD 2

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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 elements. Where some critics see Kafka's attraction to Kierkegaard in terms of parallels, others draw attention to the contrastive nature of the relationship. 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 19171918; systematized

August-October 1920; H3954), 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 commentators 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
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from his 'tyrannical' father (p 31) and the shadow which his own father had cast across his life (c.f. pp. 2628). And with his feelings reinforced by Brod's comments of 3 March 1918 (BKB237), Kafka also recognized a physical 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 failed engagement to Felice Bauer and Kierkegaard's broken engagement to Regine Olsen.5 Thus, in August 1913, precisely when Kafka was feeling ever more intensely that he ought to sever his engagement, he made his first written reference to Kierkegaard, noting in his diary: As I suspected, his [SK's] case, despite essential differences, is very similar to mine, at least he is on the same side of the world. He bears me out like a friend (T578) And four years later, the second phase of Kafka's dialectical engagement with Kierkegaard straddled his second and final break with Felice, a connection 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 spoke of 'essential differences', and the reason why Kafka should have been attracted to Kierkegaard as a contrastive as well as a parallel 'case' is made very 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] case a perpetual succession of calculation, a monstrous four years' toing and froing (T803). Where, in Kafka's view, Kierkegaard had made his decision to break off his engagement from positive motivesthe desire to serve God better he felt, despite Brod's asseverations to the contrary (BKB237), that he himself had simply drifted into a decision behind which lay a less worthy, more negative motivation. These biographical considerations also explain why Kafka should have been particularly drawn to Fear and Trembling and Either-Or, and why his comments on both works should have been such a mixture of fascination and repulsion (c.f. especially Br236 and BKB240). Both books concern the ineluctible necessity of making existential decisions in situations where there are no clear guide-lines, and the former centres on a situation where the decision required of Abraham is, in the short term, morally wrong and humanly dreadful. As his letters, especially those to Felice, repeatedly demonstrate, Kafka was both extremely bad at taking decisions and acutely aware of the mixed motives behind his every action.
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Hence, the slightest problem, when scrutinized by his hyper-sensitive mind, could very easily turn into something massive, complicated and acutely painful, thus making it even more difficult for him to come to any clear decision. Consequently, Kierkegaard's two books must have touched Kafka on a very raw nerve, confronting him with what he knew he had had to do even while reminding him of the difficulty he had experienced in doing it. That is one reason why he could return to those texts so frequently even while, in his letter to Brod of 20 January 1918, he could describe Either-Or as 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 refer to Kierkegaard's Abraham as 'monstrous' (Br236; BKB240). A comparable ambiguity marks the second level of Kafka's relationship with Kierkegaardthe authorial level. First of all, Kafka was both attracted to and repelled by the sheer authority of Kierkegaard's writing, by its ability to grasp the reader through 'the power of its terminology' (Br238; BKB246). Second, and more importantly still, Kafka was also fascinated by and deeply cntical of the use which he believed Kierkegaard to have made of that authority. As is well-known, the work of both men is marked by an ironic stance towards conventional religious, scientific and political discourses, by a kind of bi-focalism ('Doppelreflexion') which enables them to use and simultaneously to subvert established modes of thought and speech,6 thus unsettling their readers and forang them to stand back from those modes and reflect upon their (m)adequacy. From his reading of Monrad, Kafka would have known how central an ironic stance was to Kierkegaard's entire work (pp. 4653) and how entangled its origins were with his broken engagement (p. 47) and struggle with his father (p. 51). But for Kafka, the most reluctant of sceptics, that common ironic dexterity involved an illegitimate use of authorial power, a literary seduction of the reader of which the sexual seduction described in Either-Or was just a more blatant version. Finally, while Kafka admired Kierkegaard's ability to challenge, he felt that he was hiding behind his various pseudonyms and personae in order to evade taking responsibility for any damage or pain he might cause his readers. As he wrote to Brod in late March 1918: [SK's books] are not straightforward, and even if he later developed towards a kind of straightforwardness ['Eindeutigkeit'], this too is simply part of his chaos of spirit, mourning and belief. His contemporaries may well have sensed that more clearly than we do. Moreover, his compromising books are pseudonymous and that almost to their very core; despite the amount which they explicitly admit, they can, in their totality, be very properly regarded as letters by the seducer, written behind clouds (Br238; BKB247). But these statements are far from simply contrastive: they also apply to Kafka himself as well. Like no other modern writer, Kafka has the ability

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to invade his readers' imaginations, confuse, unsettle and even obsess them, only then to leave them adrift amid a sea of ambiguities, bereft of the consolation of a named, reliable, omniscient or interventionist narrator. Just as Kierkegaard is and is not Johannes de Silentio and Victor Eremita, so Kafka is and is not Josef K. and K.whose minds monopolize the foregrounds of his two major novels. Even in early 1918, when apparently distancing himself from Kierkegaard (to whom, incidentally, Brod several times referred in his letter of 19 March 1918 as K. (BKB243-5)), Kafka must have sensed how close their situations as narrators were. Thus, when he characterized Kierkegaard's method as 'shouting so as not to be heard, and shouting out things which are wrong just in case somebody does hear you' (Br238; BKJB247), he was simultaneously speaking about himself. And when he wrote to Brod that one should read Kierkegaard's work only if one has 'a modicum of superiority' over them, he was simultaneously descnbing the narratorial doubts of an author who would, at great personal cost, continue writing prose fiction only then to decree that his major works should be destroyed lest they lead the weak, those without that 'modicum' (Br225; BKB228), astray. The third level of Kafka's attraction to Kierkegaard concerns metaphysics and, as in the case of the first two levels, the relationship is deeply ambiguous. However, where, at the biographical and authorial levels, critics have stressed the parallels and played down the contrastive aspects of Kafka's relationship with Kierkegaard, at the metaphysical level the reverse has been the case.7 That contrast is, however, only one aspect of a more complex situation since, as Claude David himself recognized, Kafka's suspicion of Kierkegaard's theology was also 'to some extent a commentary on himself and a condemnation or suspicion of his own rehgious contemplations' (p. 86). I wish to take the argument one stage further and suggest that at the metaphysical level, Kafka saw, at one point in his life at least, more in Kierkegaard's theology than a straightforward contrast with his own position. The nature of that 'more' is, I suggest, already visible in the third, seventh and eighth paragraphs of H1246. Here, Kafka recognizes the possibility of 'Ruhe' ('rest', 'peace', 'repose'); sees that someone like Kierkegaard's Abraham can acknowledge his pride as a delusion and use that realization as a 'springboard into the world'; and arrives at the concept of a 'constructive destruction of the world'. Far from being a straightforward critique of Kierkegaard's Abraham, the nine paragraphs of H1246 transcribe Kafka's dawning, and never very confident awareness that someone whose life is heading up a metaphysical or existential cul-de-sac can, by colliding with its end wall, undergo a dialectical reversal which may enable him or her to discover the nght way and issue in a sense of peace. Or, to use the metaphor

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from the fifth paragraph of H124-6, Abraham's attempt to flee the world may be misguided, but if his 'furniture van' gets stuck in the 'entrance gate', the resultant pain ('Qual') may bring about that change of consciousness which Abraham needs if he is to see that it is he, and not the world, which is at fault (paragraph 7) and learn to listen to what the world has to say to him (paragraph 1). What Kafka hinted at privately and cryptically in the above jottings in February 1918 became more public and more explicit in his two long letters to Brod of the following month. In the first of these, he twice states that despite his reservations about the 'monstrous' Abraham, one 'certainly' cannot describe Kierkegaard as a negative thinker. And the second letter not only contains an important discussion of Kierkegaard's theology, it also includes 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 developed a 'straightforwardness' ('Eindeutigkeit'a German word which connotes singleness of meaning or interpretation) (Br238; BKB247). This third passage is particularly important because it takes us beyond the view that there is a simple, contrastive relationship between Kafka the metaphysical pessimist and 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 him back to a man with whom he had sought to contrast himself but with whom he had simultaneously sensed so much in common. And second, we see Kafka trying, by means of the indirect process of paraphrase, commentary and citation, to put that 'something' into words without necessarily committing himself to it: Kierkegaard's religious situation refuses to reveal itself to me with the extraordinary, 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 word seems to disprove you. For in the first place, for Kierkegaard, the relationship to the divine perhaps eludes any external judgment to such an extent that even Jesus might not be permitted to judge how far that person has advanced who is his disciple. For Kierkegaard, it seems, to a certain extent, to be a question of the Last Judgment, and thus answerableto the extent that an answer is still necessaryafter this world has come to an end. Which is why our present external image of the religious relationship has no meaning. However, the religious relationship wants to reveal itself but cannot do so in this world, and that is why the striving human being must set himself against the world in order to save 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.

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KAFKA, K I E R K E G A A R D A N D T H E K 'S Thus, the world must be assaulted by you as it is by Kierkegaardmore by you here, more by him therethose are distinctions merely from the point of view of the world which is being assaulted. And the following passage doesn't come from the Talmud: 'As soon as a person comes along who has some primitive quality ["etwas Primitives" in the German text; "Pnmitivitet" in the original Danish] about him, and who therefore says not " O n e must accept the world as it is" ... b u r " N o matter how the world is, I shall remain true 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 to how the world sees fit"in the same instant that this word is heard, a transformation 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 a hundred years is opened and everything comes alive again, so, similarly, the whole of existence becomes sheer attentiveness The angels have work to do and watch with curiosity to see what will happenfor this is a matter which concerns them. O n the other side, dark, sinister demons, who have sat there idly for a long time chewing their finger-nails, j u m p up and stretch their limbsfor, they say, there is something here for us, something which they have been waiting for for a long time e t c ' (Br239; BKB248).

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The passage overall is not easy to understand, but it sets out from a critique of Kierkegaard's understanding of the relationship between man and God which to some extent echoes the remarks in H, but whose tone is markedly less condemnatory than that of the letter of 20 January 1918 (Br224-5; BKB228). And at its heart there lies the highly paradoxical (and very Kierkegaardian) insight that the person who decides to struggle with and even do violence to the world in order to preserve 'the divine element within himself', his 'originality', is, in fact, being impelled to do that precisely 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 of the 'teleological suspension of the ethical' according to which the individual may have to risk getting into a convoluted moral or existential situation in the short term if he or she is to get things right in the longer term; and may, in order to reach that longer-term goal, have to take into him- or herself the kind of rending sense of guilt which Kafka had experienced as a 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 being particularly drawn to Kierkegaard's concepts of 'the dialectical', 'the knight of infinity' and 'the knight of faith'. With Kierkegaard's Abraham in the forefront of his mind, Kafka is working his way towards the idea that the decision to struggle and go against the world in order to preserve a sense of selfhood ('Urspriinglichkeit') is better than being passively conventional

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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 his or her sense of selfhood thereby invites one of two outcomes: either salvation by heavenly powers or destruction by hellish ones. Which is why, one may surmise, Kafka broke off his discussion with the inconclusive 'etc.': he felt that he could not say how, in any given case, the existential venture would end. From the preceding discussion it emerges that Lange's assertion of an 'elective affinity' between Kafka and Kierkegaard is entirely justified and that the relationship is even more complex than has been generally assumed. It not only involved a series of parallels and contrasts at several levels, it ultimately, in the second letter to Brod of March 1918, generated the obhque affirmation that there is an essential and dynamic power in human nature which can, at least in some instances, enable the individual to live authentically while remaining, paradoxically, in a state of tension with and acceptance of the world. It was that sense which generated the first of the nine paragraphs in Hwith which Kafka was to conclude the Meditations when he systematized them in Autumn 1920: It isn't necessary for you to leave the house Stay sitting at the table and listen Don'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 do anything else, enraptured it will writhe before you (H54 and 124). And it was also, I suggest, from the same sense that Aphorism 50 of the Meditations arose as well: Man cannot live without a lasting faith in something indestructible in himself though at the same time both that indestructible something and the faith may remain hidden from him. One of the ways in which this state of hiddenness may manifest itself is the belief in a personal God (H44). But, characteristically, Kafka crossed through both of these aphorisms in pencil in the final draft of the Meditations (H348) when preparing them for publication 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 obhque discussion of Kierkegaard, so Kafka, having arrived, with Kierkegaard's help, at a statement of faith which was at once psychological, philosophical and theological, could neither hold onto it with any certainty nor deny it totally. Nevertheless, as David points out (p. 80), the period which culminated in Kafka's extended reflections on Kierkegaard marked the end of a

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long period of creativity and the beginning of a gap in Kafka's productive life which lasted until Autumn 1920 and which, as far as we know, was interrupted only by the composition of the letter to his father in November 1919. So, given that Kafka's long quotation from Kierkegaard involves at least some degree of displaced afHrmativeness and that his (tentative) deletion of the two aphonsms from the Meditations involves ambiguous interpretative possibilities, it is perhaps not too fanciful to claim two things. First, that Kafka's dialectical engagement with Kierkegaard at least contributed to that more positive view of human nature and the ordering of the world in general which, in my view at least, marks the work of his last four years;9 and second, that it also helped weaken the hold over his imagination of the aggressively phallic father-figure who had featured so prominently in his early works.
II. KIERKEGAAHDIAN PSYCHOLOGY A N D THE K . ' S

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Given the affinities described above, it is unfortunate from the point of view of this article that Kafka never read Kierkegaard's The Sickness unto Deatha text which had appeared in German in 1881 but which had long been out of print by 1913. I say that, for had Kafka read The Sickness unto Death, he would, I suggest, have been disturbed by it but also responded very positively to it smce it grapples with precisely those problemsAngst, guilt, despair and the emergence of a sense of meaning out of radically negative experiencewhich were occupying him so painfully in 1913 and 19171918 and which, by general agreement, are central to his two major novels.10 As though anticipating Kafka's strictures (Br238; BKB247), AntiClimacus, the pseudonymous author of The Sickness unto Death, seems to want to discourage the potential reader from reading any further by opening his treatise with the following, lnfuriatingly difficult proposition: Man is spirit. But what is spirit' Spint is the self. But what is the self? The self 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 is not the relation but [consists in the fact] that the relation relates itself to its own self. Man is a synthesis of the infinite and thefinite,of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short it is a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two factors So regarded, man is not yet a self.11 By this, Kierkegaard means that the human personality has two sidesan unconditional side (which is spiritual and, ultimately, grounded in God) and a conditional side (which has been determined by heredity, environment, culture and education)and that authentic selfhood is attained when these two sides are fused. However, Kierkegaard then goes on to argue that

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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' is despair. Moreover, because, in Kierkegaard's view, despair is not a feeling but 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 away from it into what Pascal had termed 'diversions' ('divertissements')games, pastimes, amours, the quest for public honours, work etc.12 But because despair is, according to Kierkegaard, structurala state of being in which the two sides of the personality grate against one another like the two jagged halves of a broken bonethe person m despair will always be pursued 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 to remind 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 which is its symptom has to be confronted and its roots and implications understood. And if this is allowed to happen, then, Kierkegaard concludes, it becomes possible for the unconditional side of the personality to pervade and reshape the conditional side and, at a further stage of personal development, to reveal its origins as divine: This then is the formula which describes the condition of the self when despair is completely eradicated: by relating itself to its own self and by willing to be itself, the self is grounded transparently in the Power which posited it (p. 147). From the subjective point of view, however, Kierkegaard maintains that the feeling of despair has to get worse before the state of despair can be overcome, and, even more audaciously, that the subjective feeling that the despair is worsening actually means that objectively, the subject is on the mend. Thus he wrote: So then it is an infinite advantage to be able to despair; and yet it is not only the 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 symptoms are dialectical, and for this reason the superficial view is so readily deceived in determining whether despair is present or not. For not to be in despair may mean to be in despair, and it may also mean to be delivered from being in despair. 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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KAFKA, K I E R K E G A A R D A N D T H E K 'S one has overcome despair and gained peace. In this respect despair is unlike bodily sickness; for not to be sick cannot possibly mean to be sick; but not to be despairing may mean preasely to be despairing. It is not true of despair, as it is of bodily sickness, that the feeling of indisposition is the sickness (p. 157)

In a r g u i n g w h i c h , I suggest, K i e r k e g a a r d was saying in extenso w h a t Kafka was to say m o r e elhptically w h e n , o n 13 M a r c h 1915, he w r o t e in his diary: Sometimes the feeling of being unhappy which almost tears me to pieces and simultaneously the conviction of its necessity and of a goal towards which one works ones way through the power of attraction of unhappiness (T732)
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Against this general analytical b a c k g r o u n d , Kierkegaard, in t h e first half o f The Sickness unto Death, distinguishes b e t w e e n various types o f d e s p a i r of w h i c h I wish t o consider t w o in relation t o Kafka's t w o major novels. T h e first o f these Kierkegaard designates ' T h e Despair o f Finititude w h i c h is d u e t o t h e Lack o f Finitude' and describes as follows: Despairing narrowness consists in the lack of primitiveness [Danish 'Pnmitivitet'], or of the fact one has deprived oneself of one's primitiveness; it consists in having emasculated oneself, in a spiritual sense. For every man is primitively planned to be a self, appointed to become oneself; and while it is true that every self as such is angular, the logical consequence of this merely is that it has to be polished, not that it has to be ground smooth, not that for fear of men it has to give up entirely being itself, nor even that for fear of men it dare not be itself in its essential accidentality (which preasely is what should not be ground away), by which in fine it is itself. But while one sort of despair plunges wildly into the infinite and loses itself, a second sort permits itself as it were to be defrauded by 'the others.' By seeing the multitude of men about it, by getting engaged in all sorts of worldly affairs, by becoming wise about how things go in this world, such a man forgets himself, forgets what his name 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 like the 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 of Kafka's The Trial (1914). 13 Most obviously, Josef K.'s very name suggests that he has become 'a number, a cipher in the crowd'. Indeed, as the narrator very clearly implies at the beginning of the second chapter, Josef K., 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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o'clockhe would take a short walk on his own or together with acquaintances and then go on to a pub where he usually sat until eleven o'clock with the other regulars, mainly older men, at their special table. But there were exceptions 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 a ride in his car or to supper Besides that, once a week K. visited a girl called Elsa who served every night as a waitress in a wine bar until the small hours of 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 his journal entry of Autumn 1854 and in The Sickness unto Death, called 'Primitivitet' ('primitiveness' in the sense of being in touch with what is primal in one's nature) and, in his journal entry, 'Oprindehghed' ('originality' 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 men with 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, children and subordinates can be viewed as the external correlatives of an interior disrelationshipof his lack of contact with the 'female', 'childlike' and 'lower' parts of himself. Josef K. either ignores the women in his life (his mother and cousin) or sees them as sexual objects to be exploited (Erna, Fraulein Biirstner, the wife of the law court attendant and Leni). And when Frau Grubach, a woman who is also Josef K.'s social inferior, fails to conform to the submissive behaviour which he expects from her by saying something about Fraulein Biirstner which casts indirect hght on his own exploitative relationships with women, he becomes violent and vindictive (P36-7). Thus, when Josef K. is shocked by the obscene picture and the rapine behaviour of the student during his second visit to the courtroom (P76-7 and 86-7), he is actually reacting negatively to mirror images of his own behaviour and state of being. It is the same with children. Unlike the men in shirt-sleeves whom Josef K. notices holding children 'carefully and tenderly' (P53) at open windows when he is trying to find the courtroom for the first time, he is incapable of having a non-threatening relationship with children. For Josef K., children exist as objects to be manipulated or controlled by force, and so, when confronted with crowds of them on his way to the court, he thinks to himself: 'If ever I should come here again ... I must either bring sweets to get round them with or my stick to beat them with' (P55). Similarly, he is so careless of his subordinates that when three are present at his arrest, he fails to recognize them (P27) and regrets that 'humanity' prevents him from making a joke about 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 painter Titorelli. The lascivious little girls from the poorer classes who stream up the stairs and hammer on Titorelh's door, demanding to be let into the stuffy attic, are the objective correlatives of those forgotten, 'primitive' aspects of Josef K.'s mechanized personality which are demanding access to his over-developed, but closed-off consciousness. Similarly, the plethora of paintings of a dead tree amidst a bleak landscape which Titorelli shows Josef K. are the mirror images of Josef K.'s own personality from which the sap of life, Kierkegaard's 'Primitivitet', has vanished. Josef K. is like the knight in the painting in the cathedral scene: a faceless being encased in the hard shell of his own ego, standing in an arid landscape and watching the burial of the life-giving principle (P281). Josef K. almost entirely lacks what Kierkegaard had, in his Concluding Scientific Postscript (1846), termed 'inwardness'. Early on in the novel, the narrator tells us parenthetically that Josef K. was not in the habit of learning from his experiences (Pi2) and that he tended always to take things for granted, to believe in the worst only when it happened and not to think about the future (Pn). Moreover, the senior pohce official in the first chapter (P22), Leni (Pi423) and the chaplain in the cathedral chapter (P28990) all, in various ways, advise Josef K. to think more about his inner life and less about matters and persons external to himself. Josef K. is simply not used to analyzing himself, his experiences, his thoughts and his feelingsor, to use Kierkegaard's metaphor, he has never tried to polish himself. Consequently, for most of the novel, he fails to heed Frau Grubach's insight that his arrest is not of the run-of-the-mill kind (P33) and refuses to accept the idea that there could be something wrong with his whole way of hfe. Instead, Josef K. tries to evade the creeping sense of Angst which his arrest has engendered either by continuing to barricade himself psychologically within his work, i.e. by 'getting engaged in all sorts of worldly affairs', or by displacing the blame onto others and hence repressing the message which the watchmen had tried, albeit obliquely, to communicate to him in the first chapter. And it is precisely this complex of defensive reactions which is encapsulated in the scene with the 'whipper' in the fifth chapter: Josef K. is forcibly repressing his deeper conscience by relegating it to a cubby-hole in his apparently secure, work-dominated mind. But because Josef K.'s personality is deeply at odds with itself, the objectless Angst described by Kierkegaard slowly eats into him (c.f. P149), so that by the beginning of the cathedral chapter, the narrator tells us that it is eroding his most potent defence mechanism: his absorption in his work: K. got the job of showing a very important Italian client who was staying in the city for the first time round some of its cultural sites. It was a task which

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he would, at another time, have certainly considered an honour but which he now took on reluctantly given that he was able to maintain his status in the bank only with great effort Every hour that he was removed from his office caused him worry. True, he was not nearly so capable of making use of the time he spent in his office as he used to be; he spent many hours giving the flimsiest impression of doing real work, but that made his worries all the greater when he wasn't in his office. During those times he imagined the assistant manager, who had always lain in wait, coming from time to time into his office, sitting down at his desk, going through his papers, receiving clients with whom K. had been on friendly terms for years, and turning them against him, yes, perhaps even discovering those mistakes by which K. felt menaced from a thousand directions while he was working and which he could no longer avoid making. Consequently, if he were asked to go out on a job or make a short journeyit so happened that such jobs had been piling up recentlythen, no matter how prestigeous the job might be, the suspicion was never far off that they wanted to get him out of the office for a little while and check his work, or at least, that they considered him readily dispensable as far as the office was concerned. Most of these jobs he could have refused without difficulty, but he didn't dare to do so since, if his fears had the slightest basis, the refusal of a job would have been tantamount to an admission of his anxiety ['Angst'] (P270-1) However, the process (German 'Process'/'Prozess' means trial or process) described by Kierkegaard continues, and by the beginning of the novel's final chapter, Josef K.'s psychological defence mechanisms have all but ceased to function so that, even in this dark novel, we can observe the beginnings of the healing synthesis envisaged by Kierkegaard. To begin with, Josef K. has started to acquire inwardness, to stand back from himself and reflect: 'The only thing that I can do now', he said to himself, and the fact that he was walking evenly, in step with the three others, confirmed his thoughts, 'the only thing that I can do now is to keep my dispassionately analytical intelligence going right to the end. I always wanted to grab hold of the world with twenty hands and that, moreover, for a purpose which wasn't very laudable. That was wrong, so shall I now show that my trial, which has been going on for a year now, could teach me nothing? Shall I leave this world as a man who is incapable of learning? Are people to say of me subsequently that I wanted to end 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 have been 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 place in 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 narrator immediately provides us with an image of renewal and light:
The water, glittering and trembling in the moonlight, parted around a small island on which, as though jammed together in a bunch, the foliage of masses of trees and shrubs piled up. Beneath it, invisible now, ran gravel paths with comfortable benches on which K. had lain and stretched himself out in many a summer (P309).

Images of organic growth are rare in Kafka's work and apart from the few sparse blades of grass in the picture in the cathedral scene (P281), there are no others in The Trial. Moreover, this passage is, as far as I can tell, the first instance in the novel where we hear of direct, natural hght. Upto this point, either the narrator has made no mention of hght in one of those rare outdoor scenes where one might expect him to do so, or the hght has been indirect, 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). So here, for the first time in The Trial, we are given a hint that something is beginning 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.'s egoistical cerebrahsm is capable of being softened. The hint is not a strong one and many critics have overlooked itfor when Kafka began writing The Trial in August 1914, he was, given his own experience and temperament and the dark historical context, more aware of the negative than the positive sides of human experience and far from convinced that any rejuvenating potential'Primitivitet', 'Opnndehghed', 'Urspriinghchkeit'was at work in the human personahty let alone capable of being harnessed by the powers which governed the world. But by the time he wrote The Castle seven to eight years later, there is evidence to suggest that Kafka's view of human nature, human relationships and the world in general had become significantly less bleak. Consequently, while The Castle deals with much more complex and problematic subjectmatter than does The Trial, it works it through to a conclusion which is markedly less negative. Here again The Sickness unto Death provides us with a way of understanding what happens to K., the novel's protagonist, by means of the concept of 'Despair of Possibility which is due to the Lack of Necessity'. This Kierkegaard analyzes as follows: Just asfinitudeis the limiting factor in relation to infinitude, so in relation to possibility it is necessity which serves as a check. .. Now if possibility outruns necessity, the self runs away from itself, so that it has no necessity whereto it is bound to returnthen this is the despair of possibility. The self becomes an abstract possibility which tries itself out with floundering in the possible, but

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does not budge from the spot, nor get to any spot, for precisely the necessary is the spot; to become oneself is precisely a movement at the spot. To become is a movement from the spot, but to become oneself is a movement at the spot Possibility then appears to the self ever greater and greater, more and more things become possible, because nothing becomes actual. At last it is as if everything were possiblebut this is precisely when the abyss has swallowed up the self ... What really is lacking is the power to obey, to submit to the necessity in oneself, to what may be called one's limit (pp. 1689). That is a very accurate characterization of K., whose unwillingness to accept necessity, to 'submit ... to what may be called [his] limit', is most patent in his claim to be a land-surveyor. As several critics have argued in detail, this claim is clearly false 14 and directly related to K.'s continual desire for the impossible. As I have argued at length, two of K.'s most sahent charactenstics are his repeated refusal of what is offered him as a feasible possibility in order to strive for the impossible, and his neglect of what is close at hand because his gaze is focussed on what lies in the far distance. 15 Because, with K., 'possibility outruns necessity', he is completely unable to define his aims in any concrete way. He never says with any precision what it is that he wants; and whenever anyone asks him what he wants, he either evades the question, runs away, or gives an answer which, on closer examination, falls to piecesleaving his questioner in a state of incomprehension. 1 6 The incident which encapsulates K.'s refusal to submit to the necessary is the wall-climbing episode of his youth (S49-50). There was no need for K. to chmb the wall since it was possible for him to gain access to the graveyard by a gate; and anyway, what lay on the wall's far side was no secret to him. Rather, K. climbs the wall partly because it is known to be impossibly difficult and partly because the attempt to 'conquer'/'subdue' ('bezwingen') it involves violent struggle, almost certain failure and the consequent necessity of beginning the struggle all over again. K. is, in other words, a Faustian personality 17 in flight from the limitations of mortality, and in the second chapter, his Faustian urge to achieve the impossiblepenetration of the forbidden Castle by forceinvolves him in a nightmare journey with Barnabas (S48-51) which pictonahzes Kierkegaard's analysis of Faustian despair with uncanny accuracy. In this incident, the nature of K.'s despair causes 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 going not to the Castle but his family's house, a location which, for all the journey's apparent duration, cannot be all that far from K.'s and Barnabas's starting-point. Because K. is a much more active personality than Josef K., he does not need 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 happens which Kierkegaard, in his journal entry of late Autumn 1854, said would happen: the angels and demons sit up and take notice. Indeed, it is particularly apposite that at this precise point in his reflections Kierkegaard should have introduced the notion of 'the castle which has lain under a spell for a hundred years' since in Kafka's novel, the angels and/or demons are played by 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' the Castle to K. by granting him any request that he cares to make (S422). Precisely because K. is prepared to be active, he produces reactions from the world18 which are both positive and negative. And gradually, from this interaction, K. becomes increasingly aware of the futility and desperation of his quest for the boundless and the impossible, and, if he is to find inner peace, the importance of accepting the limitations of necessity. This realization pushes its way into K.'s consciousness in a particularly staking way at the very end of the eighth chapter when K., having forced his way into a forbidden place and compelled everyone to bow to his will, comes to the following conclusion: .. then it seemed to K as though they had broken off all connections with him and as though he was indeed freer than ever before and could wait as long as he wanted in this place which was otherwise prohibited to him and had struggled to achieve this freedom as scarcely anyone else could do and noone 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 the same 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 become less 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 he wakes up a very different person.19 A comparison of K.'s behaviour before and after the Biirgel interview reveals, in my view at least,20 that K.'s relationship with himself, with others and with the Castle authorities has undergone a marked change. K., the hitherto egomaniac striver, has become more composed, more self-aware, more tolerant, more respectful and better able to empathize with othersand, concomitantly, less aggressively Faustian, less insensitive, less suspicious, less judgmental and less eager to dominate In Kierkegaardian terms, K. has begun to acquire 'inwardness', and this process is nowhere more evident than in his conversation with Pepi (who is 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 guilt is by no means clear to me, only when I compare myself with you, something along the following lines occurs to me; it's as though we had both striven too much, too noisily, too childishly and with too little experience in order, by crying, by scratching, by tugging to get something which could have been gained easily and unobtrusively by Frieda's matter-of-factness for example; it's just 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 and makes 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 to himself in the final chapter of The Trial, but there is also one crucial difference. Precisely because K. was prepared to enter into an actively dialectical relationship with the world which has both positive and negative effects, there is a much greater possibility that the synthesis between the conditional and the unconditional aspects of his personality will come about along the lines envisaged by Kierkegaard in the opening pages of The Sickness unto Death. And although Kafka is never tnumphalist about this possibility, the (non-)ending of The Castle having as ambiguous a status as the quotations from Das Buch des Richters and the two deleted aphonsms from the Meditations cited above, it is my contention that when he wrote The Castle, Kafka could entertain it more confidently than he had been able to do when writing The Trial. Moreover, in The Castle, the above synthesis comes about as a result of what Kierkegaard had termed 'the teleological suspension of the ethical'. Precisely because K. is prepared to go drastically wrong, to take a leap into the void with his mendacious claim to be a landsurveyor,22 he comes up against salutory resistances in a way that the more passive Josef K. does not. As a result, the enchanted castle of K.'s personality begins 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 they had at first seemed malevolent, remote, infallible, omnipotent and cruel to K.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 accessiblemore akin to the New Commandant in the same story. It is going too far to equate, as Brod did, the Castle officials allegorically with God, for they are, as Heller forcibly reminded us, all-too-human in most respects.23 Nevertheless, as the narrative unfolds, it becomes increasingly possible to see them dealing with K. as the agents or mediators of a more than human power which is far more benevolent and proximate than the remote, nameless authorities in The Trial; and they are associated with an imagery of light

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and whiteness in a far clearer way than their earlier counterparts had ever been. Thus although, as several commentators have argued, it may not be possible 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 read The Castle as a vindication of the claim, made by Kafka under the direct influence of Kierkegaard in his letter to Brod of late March 1918, that: .. the striving human being must set himself against the world in order to save 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<p; BKB248).
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Over the past decade, post-structuralist thinkers, writing largely under the influence of Lacan and Dernda, have firmly rejected the idea that human nature involves any unifying principleany self, spirit or soul. Quite apart from anything else, the oblique, tentative nature of Kafka's reading of Kierkegaard and a Kierkegaardian reading of Kafka's two major novels suggest how it is possible to go beyond the ontological vacuum which hes at the heart of post-structurahsm without having recourse to the centred categories and confident correspondences of classical criticism. With Kafka, as with Kierkegaard, the self is not a hard, static, atomic core, but a fluid state of being which emerges, dialectically, once that core is broken open by conflict with the total environment. But that total environment is, for both men, shot through with a secret power which is simultaneously psychological and theological, and which, if namable at all, is so only with the utmost cautionironically, via pseudonyms and the narratorial invisibility involved in the 'monopolized perspective' ('Einsinrugkeit') of Kafka's major fictional work. 24 REFERENCES
1

The following abbreviations have been used throughout FK = Franz Kafka, SK = Seren Kierkegaard; Br = Franz Kafka, Brtefe 19021924 (Lizenzausgabe), edited by Max Brod (New York, Schocken Books, 1958), BKB = Max Brod and Franz Kafka, Eine Freundschafi: Briefwechsel, edited by Malcolm Pasley (Frankfurt/Main, Fischer, 1989); H = Franz Kafka, Hochzatsvorbercitungen auf dem Lande (Lizenzausgabe), edited by Max Brod (New York, Schocken, 1953), P = Franz Kafka, Der Process (In der Fassung der Handschnft), edited by Malcolm Pas-

ley (Frankfort/Main, Fischer, 1990), S = Franz Kafka, Das Schloss (In der Fassung der Handschnft), edited by Malcolm Pasley (Frankfort/Main, Fischer, 1982); T = Franz Kafka, Tagcbucher (In der Fassung der Handschnft), edited by Hans-Gerd Koch, Michael Muller and Malcolm Pasley (Frankfurt/Main, Fischer, 1990) 2 For detailed chronological information on Kafka's recepaon of SK, see Kajka-Handbuck in zwei Banden, edited by Hartmut Binder (Stuttgart, Kroner, 1979) I, pp. 5238. 3 T h e major secondary texts dealing with

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this problem are Jean Wahl, 'Kafka et Kierkegaard Commentaires', in Petite Histoire de 'L'Extstcntialisme' (Pans, Editions Club Maintenant, 1947) pp 95-131, Brian F M Edwards, 'Kafka and Kierkegaard: A Reassessment', German Life and Letters, 20(196667) 218-25; Reed Merrill, '"Infinite Absolute Negativity": Irony in Socrates, Kierkegaard and Kafka', Comparative Literature Studies, 16(1979) 222-36; Claude David, 'Die Geschichte Abrahams: Zu Kafkas Auseinandersetzung mit Kierkegaard', in Bild und Cedanke (Munich, Fink, 1980) pp. 79-90; Wolfgang Lange, 'Ober Kafkas Kierkegaard-Lekture und eimge damit zusammenhangende Gegenstande', DVjs, 60(1986) 286-308, Hideo Nakazawa, 'Zu Kafkas und Brods Kierkegaard-Deutung', Doitsu Bungaku, 79(1987) 128-35 Lange, p 287; Edwards, pp 221-2 and Klaus Wagenbach, Franz Kafka in Selbstzeugmsstn und Btlddokumcntcn (Reinbek bei Hamburg, Rowohlt, 1964), p 44 5 For possible sources from which Kafka derived his biographical information (including Monrad, pp. 44-70), see BKB492 n 51 and Binder, I, pp 523-8 6 Lange, p 302 7 See Wahl, p 119, David (commenting on H124-6) p 87, Merrill, pp 231-3. 8 Das Buck des Richters was a selection (translated into German) from SK's journals which had been published in 1905 and which Kafka read in August 1913 (T578), when his relationship with Felice Bauer was becoming increasingly problematic As far as we know, Das Buck des Richters was the first text by SK to be read by FK Edwards and Merrill ignore the three quotations completely; and David and Lange a t e only eight and two lines respectively from the longest quotation without indicating that it was sufficiently important to Kafka for him to quote it verbatim and at length five years after coming across it for die first time C f . Richard W. Sheppard, 'The Trial/ The Castle' Towards an Analytical C o m parison', in The Kafka Debate, edited by Angel Flores (New York, Gordian Press, 1977) PP 396-417
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See, for example, Wagenbach, pp 768 ' S^ren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death, translated by Walter Lowne (Princeton U.P., 1974) Interestingly enough, Monrad (pp 804) briefly summarizes the argument of The Sickness unto Death and in so doing, echoes precisely this opening passage (p. 80). He then goes on to describe precisely the two types of (unconscious) despair which I use in my reading below, calling them respectively 'Verzweiflung der Notwendigkeit' and 'Verzweiflung der Moghchkeit' (p. 81) One cannot, of course, draw any firm conclusions from that fortuitous fact, indeed, one might ask why, if that analysis did recommend itself to Kafka, he apparently made no attempt to get hold of and read the book as a whole.

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See Pascal's Penste no 136 (139) entitled 'Divertissement' 13 Until recently, most studies of The Trial saw Josef K as a guiltless victim The most extensive study to date which takes the opposing view is Eric Marson, The Case against Josef K (St Lucia, Queensland U P., 1975)14 For bibliographical information relating to 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 and 127-88. 18 As I argued in my 1977 article, the differing syntax of the two novels reflects differing relationships between the K.'s and their surroundings. Where the syntax of The Trial emphasizes the gap between self and world, that of The Castle implies the possibility of a dialectical relationship between self and world. 19 This assertion has always been and remains extremely contentious. Most Kafka-cntics deny that such a change in K. takes place For bibliographical information relating to this point, see Binder, II, p 463. 20 See Sheppard, 1973, pp. 177-88 21 See Sheppard, 1973, pp. 41, 78-9, 171-2. 22 As has often been pointed out, the German word for 'land-surveyor' ('Landver-

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KAFKA, K I E R K E G A A R D A N D T H E K 'S worth, Penguin Books, 1961) pp. 175-202 2 * The concept of 'Einsinnigkeit' goes back to a lecture by Fnednch Beissner of 1952 For a discussion of its nature and hrrutadons, see Binder, II, p 449 and 455-9.

messer') is closely associated with a verb ('sich vermessen') which means either 'to be presumptuous'/'to get above oneself or 'to make an error of reckoning'. "Erich Heller, "The World of Franz Kafka', m The Disinherited Mind (Harmonds-

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