How to read "The Castle"

Depending on how we approach reading Kafka's Romanian Zamak, two perspectives open up to us. In the first, the Castle is what we find at Kanta, therefore - the Self-legislating Mind, a noumenal thing that is impossible to approach, since the question of freedom, immortality of the soul and the status of God cannot be determined exactly, on the other hand, the Village is truly a symbolically closed order from which it is impossible to escape, all the more so the structure itself is used by all figures in order to act through their once established functions. K. is a character who is constantly guided by the object of a little a, a cause-desire that first and foremost seeks confirmation, however, since he does not receive it, he is - non-existent, unrecognized by the Castle, and a person who is not verified, i.e., in the village he remains the one who is redundant, unplaceable, a constant threat that the Real will not break through from it, although, since he raises suspicion, something like that keeps the situation somewhat under control. - K. is and remains indivisible, the path to the Castle has no obstacles and therefore it is impossible to realize it, while the path from the village back to the world is open - that door of the Law has been waiting for you to open it all the time - but there is no other space waiting behind.

It is characteristic of every villager to carry out a task without asking himself what its ultimate or final purpose is. “You certainly know the Count? No!” replied the teacher and wanted to walk away, but K. did not give in, but asked once more: “How? You do not know the Count? How could I know him?” replied the teacher quietly and added loudly, in French: “Take care of the presence of innocent children.”

The novel is based on a sentence structure that repeatedly places each situation in a double dead end: one cannot approach the Castle, whose inner workings no one asks about (however, a somewhat experienced reader may sense that no one asks because they consider such a thing strictly forbidden, let's say immoral), and at the same time one cannot leave the village, even though one does nothing inside it. One thing is particularly interesting.

Namely, K. comes to the village at the invitation, as Zamka claims, but without geometric instruments, and guarantees that his assistants are on their way, they should arrive the next day, although they do not appear. As a geometer, he measures - space - therefore: his space is determined by movement without a goal, which is, in fact, movement in a circle, all the more so that every action undertaken is doomed to failure, which is why K.'s optimism is so deeply depressing in Kafka. However, if we do not lose sight of the fact that he is guided by the object of little a, which is what remains a disinterested pursuit, but at the same time cannot be translated into words, it becomes somewhat or somewhat clearer where his persistence comes from, in quite a number of situations he resorts to various tricks, simply, he does not agree to remain the one who constantly repeats himself as in a 'bad infinity', from one Chapter to the next always in the same place, with the same series of consecutive failures which, when viewed retrospectively, indicate that this is the only possible thing, because the action in The Castle is completed in the first sentence, so it is quite logical that it is interrupted in the last one, remains unfinished, open, but towards what?

In one conversation, the coachman will snap at K. that he is “nothing”; then he will quickly correct himself and add that he is “something”; then what is most important to us here follows, the point of his ontological status - K. is supernumerary. Okay, let's pause for a moment. So, being supernumerary in the symbolic order in which we act from a choice that, looking deeper, has chosen for us so that all we do is just take over actions, does this mean that K. is then an excess, a surplus, something that constantly points to itself, like an object that we have deprived of its function, for example, a chair whose leg we have broken? K. is only to the extent that it is not, or to use a phrase from a Slovenian philosopher here Mladen Dolar: “being is the failure of non-being”.

Having said that, once we return to the plot of the novel, we will notice that K. suddenly notices how the villagers are connected to each other in a way that is still invisible to him, since everyone he encounters (the plot takes place mostly at night, there is constant deep snow, which creates the image of a winding village that is inaccessible, cut off from the world, which is something like limbo - not the one we read about in theological texts, but seen here as a topos where everything is over and where those who can only imitate themselves as faithfully as possible, etc., live, know where they come from, who they have met before, and what they wanted to talk about. In that case, it may happen that while reading The Castle (Kafka does not position himself as an omniscient narrator - nor does he do so in To the process, where the absence of the Law is covered up by the existence of the process, so that the process is initiated even though the Law cannot support it in this by its non-existence, and in order for the Law itself to escape, in the end, Jozef Ka will be killed like a dog, without any prior judgment, and not a single word from his side), we feel uneasy that this is a symbol of the Panopticon, a lighthouse or a point that rises above the space that it controls most strictly in every part of it. However: there is no need for control, especially since the villagers control themselves by also exercising the same control over others because it has in the meantime become internalized, hence the disapproving looks at anyone who would stop with K on the road, even for a moment.

Is this then a novel that can be read and interpreted as dystopian, because for totalitarian regimes it is very important that those who fall under the power are those who are without privacy and always already exposed to a vast 'erased' space, where no trace can be left, and in which no message, not even an encrypted one, can be exchanged, let alone one in which two subjects, while doing something, think among themselves, which is otherwise a great omission, since - the reduction to work abolishes speech, treats the body as something that is directed solely and exclusively to production, while the external apparatus treats the subject as an initial. (In communist systems, this is why it was forbidden to say that it was forbidden to think, write, create that which refers to the question of death, sex, religion, everything that produces pleasure (enjoyment), which, although it causes pain, cannot stop us from constantly producing it, which is what the novel Process happens in the bureaucratic apparatus, while in Trap the case of K.'s persistence even though he is confronted with the fact that nothing can be changed for the simple reason that nothing as an ontological status can be reacted to.

In fact, from one moment on, the villagers begin to treat K. as if he simply did not exist. In a sense, he should be seen as someone whom Zamak, without announcing anything, excommunicated, although he did not expel him from the community or the village back to where he came from, although we will not find out, but he denied him any possible action in it. Thus, the village becomes completely open to him, but in this openness it is also closed, just as is the case with the freedom to which we constantly refer, although a) freedom is limited by natural laws and as such is possible at all, b) it is controlled and regulated by the state for the sake of the possibility of the functioning of the community, c) the freedom we have is like Zamak in its relationship to K. We can, in fact, only do that which in every act brings us back again to the awareness of the predetermination that is the condition for being. What? We leave that question open.