Kafka is an ethical, not an aesthetic, writer. There is no conclusion to his books. The Castle was actually unfinished, but what ending could there be to it? And there is some doubt about the proper order of the chapters in The Trial—it does not really seem to matter very much in which order you read them, since the book as a whole does not get you anywhere. (An uncharitable reader might disagree, and say that it throws fresh light on the Judiciary .) In this it is faithful to life as we actually experience it. There is no ‘happy ending’ or ‘tragic ending’ or ‘comic ending’ to life, only a ‘dead ending’—and then we start again.
We suffer, because we refuse to be reconciled with this lamentable fact; and even though we may say that life is meaningless we continue to think and act as if it had a meaning. Kafka’s heroes (or hero, ‘K.’—himself and not himself) obstinately persist in making efforts that they understand perfectly well are quite pointless—and this with the most natural air in the world. And, after all, what else can one do?
Notice, in The Trial, how the notion of guilt is taken for granted. K. does not question the fact that he is guilty, even though he does not know of what he is guilty—he makes no attempt to discover the charge against him, but only to arrange for his defence. For both Kierkegaard and Heidegger, guilt is fundamental in human existence. (And it is only the Buddha who tells us the charge against us—avijjā.) I should be glad to re-read The Castle when you have finished it (that is, if ‘finished’ is a word that can be used in connexion with Kafka).
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(...) indeed, it seems likely that he [Camus] actually had in his youth some emotional experience, some ‘spiritual revelation’, on these lines, and that this made a lasting impression on him. But he is too intelligent to be deceived.
His theme in Le Mythe de Sisyphe (quite his best book) is that there is no solution. Man’s invincible nostalgia for clarity and reason is opposed by an irrational, unreasonable, world; and from the conjunc-tion of these two the Absurd is born. The Absurd, of course, is simply another name for the essential ambiguity of man’s situation in the world; and this ambiguity, this hopeless situation, is lucidly portrayed by Camus in the extract I have made in Nibbāna¹. But in view of the fact that there is no solution (I am not speaking of the Buddha-dhamma, of course) what is one to do? ‘Face the situation’ says Camus ‘and do not try to deceive yourself by inventing God—even an evil God’. You will see at once why Camus is interested in Kafka.
In The Castle, K. is engaged in the hopeless task of getting himself recognized as Land Surveyor by the Authorities in the Castle—that is, by God. K. is a stranger in the village (an exile), and he is seeking permission to live permanently in the village (which is, of course, the kingdom—of heaven, if you like). But so long as he is engaged in this hopeless task, he has hope; and Camus maintains (quite rightly, of course) that he is in contradiction with himself. If the situation is hopeless, one has no business to have hope. Camus points out that Amalia, the girl who indignantly rejected God’s immoral proposal (the deceitful promise of eternal bliss in heaven, if you like to take it that way—but God, since he made man in his own image, is presumably capable of being immoral in as many ways as man), is the only character in The Castle who is entirely without hope (she has made herself eternally unworthy of God’s grace by refusing to lose her honour—her intellectual integrity, if you like—for his sake); and that it is she that K. opposes with the greatest vehemence.
Camus accuses Kafka of deifying The Absurd (which, naturally, produces an Absurd God—but still God, for all that [or rather, because of that; for if God is comprehensible one can no longer believe in him, one understands him and that is an end of the matter]). The Trial, however, commends itself to Camus as a completely successful portrayal of The Absurd (with which, perhaps, to judge from your recent letters, you might agree). In The Trial, K. is not concerned with hope (he is not seeking anything): he lets his hopeful uncle (who is seeking to preserve the family honour) do the talking with the advocate while he himself goes off to amuse himself with the advocate’s girls. In The Castle, on the other hand, K. makes love to the barmaid precisely because she is the mistress of one of the Castle officials and offers the hope of a channel of communication with the Castle. It is the Castle that K. wants, not the girl. In The Trial, K. is simply defending himself against the importunities of an irrational and capricious God, whereas in The Castle he is seeking them. In The Trial K. is defending himself against the charge of existing by disclaiming responsibility (but this is not enough to acquit him): in The Castle, K. is trying to convince the Authorities that he is justified in existing (but the Authorities are hard to convince). In the first, K. denies God; in the second, he affirms God. But in both, K. exists; and his existence is Absurd.
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About Kafka’s Trial, as I remarked on an earlier occasion, it seems to me that the crime with which K. is charged is that of existing, and that this is why the charge is never made explicit. Everybody exists, and it would be ridiculous to charge one man with this crime and not the next man as well. But not everybody feels guilty of existing; and even those who do are not always clear about what it is precisely that they feel guilty of, since they see that the rest of mankind, who also exist, go through life in a state of blissful innocence. The criminal charge of existing cannot be brought home to those who are satisfied of their innocence (since judicial censure is worse than futile unless the accused recognizes his guilt), and also it cannot be brought home to those who recognize their guilt but who are not satisfied that it is of existing that they are guilty (since judicial censure fails of its intended effect if the accused, though aware of guilt, believes that the charge against him has been wrongly framed). To secure a conviction, then, the charge must be one simply of guilt; and so, in fact, it is in The Trial.
‘“Yes”, said the Law-Court Attendant, “these are the accused men, all of them are accused of guilt.” “Indeed!” said K. “Then they’re colleagues of mine.”’ (pp. 73-4) And this charge of guilt, clearly enough, can only be brought against those who are guilty of guilt, and not against those who do not feel the guilt of existing. But who is it that feels the guilt of existing? Only he who, in an act of reflexion, begins to be aware of his existence and to see that it is inherently unjustifiable.
He understands (obscurely, no doubt, at first) that, when he is challenged to give an account of himself, he is unable to do so. But who is it that challenges him to give an account of himself? In The Trial it is the mysterious and partly corrupt hierarchical Court; in reality it is he himself in his act of reflexion (which also is hierarchically ordered).
The Trial, then, represents the criminal case that a man brings against himself when he asks himself ‘Why do I exist?’ But the common run of people do not ask themselves this question; they are quite content in their simple way to take things for granted and not to distress themselves with unanswerable questions—questions, indeed, that they are scarcely capable of asking. K.’s landlady, a simple woman, discussing K.’s arrest with him, says ‘You are under arrest, certainly, but not as a thief is under arrest.
If one’s arrested as a thief, that’s a bad business, but as for this arrest—It gives me the feeling of something very learned, forgive me if what I say is stupid, it gives me the feeling of something ab-stract which I don’t understand, but which I don’t need to understand either.’ (p. 27)
So, then, K. is under arrest, but he has arrested himself. He has done this simply by adopting a reflexive attitude towards himself. He is perfectly free, if he so wishes, to set himself at liberty, merely by ceasing to reflect. ‘The Court makes no claims upon you. It receives you when you come and it relinquishes you when you go.’ (The priest on p. 244.) But is K. free to wish to set himself at liberty? Once a man has begun to reflect, to realize his guilt, is he still free to choose to return to his former state of grace? Once he has eaten the fruit of the tree of reflexive knowledge he has lost his innocence,² and he is expelled from the terrestrial paradise with its simple joys. Having tasted the guilty pleasures of knowledge can he ever want to return to innocence? Can he, in terms of The Trial, secure a ‘definite acquittal’ from guilt, or does his case have a fatal fascination for him?
‘In definite acquittal the documents relating to the case are com-pletely annulled, they simply vanish from sight, not only the charge but also the records of the case and even the acquittal are destroyed, everything is destroyed.’ (pp. 175-6) ‘Definite acquittal’, in other words, is a total forgetting not merely of one’s actual past reflexions but of the very fact that one ever reflected at all—it is a complete forgetting of one’s guilt. So long as one remembers having reflected, one goes on reflecting, as with an addiction; and so long as one continues to reflect, one holds one’s guilt in view; for the Court—one’s reflexive inquisitor—, ‘once it has brought a charge against someone, is firmly convinced of the guilt of the accused’, and ‘never in any case can the Court be dislodged from that convic-tion.’ (p. 166) To reflect at all is to discover one’s guilt. So, then, is it possible to get a ‘definite acquittal’, to choose to unlearn to reflect? ‘I have listened to countless cases in their most crucial stages, and followed them as far as they could be followed, and yet—I must admit it—I have never encountered one case of definite acquittal.’ (Titorelli, on p. 171.) No, whatever theory may say, in practice having once tasted guilt one cannot unlearn reflexion and return to the innocence of immediacy, the innocence of a child.
The best one can do to ward off the inexorable verdict—‘Guilty, with no extenuating circumstances’—is to seek either ‘ostensible acquittal’ (p. 176), wherein awareness of one’s essential guilt is temporarily subdued by makeshift arguments but flares up from time to time in crises of acute despair, or else ‘indefinite postponement’ (pp. 177-8), wherein one adopts an attitude of bad faith towards oneself, that is to say one regards one’s guilt (of which one is perpetually aware) as being ‘without significance’, thereby refusing to accept responsibility for it.
K., however, is not disposed to try either of these devices, and seems, rather, to want to bring matters to a head. He dismisses his advocate as useless—perhaps the advocate in The Trial represents the world’s professional philosophers—, and sets about organizing his own defence. For this purpose he recruits, in particular, women help-ers, perhaps regarding them as the gateway to the Divine (if I remem-ber rightly, this is one of Denis’s earlier views—in Crome Yellow—that makes life so complicated for him). This view is clearly mystical, and is denounced in The Trial. ‘“You cast about too much for outside help,” said the priest disapprovingly, “especially from women. Don’t you see that it isn’t the right kind of help?”’ (p. 233) In The Castle, on the other hand, K. uses women to get him entrance into the kingdom of heaven, and perhaps with some effect; but in The Castle guilt is evidence of the existence of God, and the guiltier one is the better chance one has of getting the favour of the Castle (thus Amalia indignantly rejects the immoral proposals of one of the gentlemen from the Castle and is promptly cut off from the Divine Grace, whereupon her sister Olga prostitutes herself with the meanest Castle servants in the hope of winning it back).
In The Trial the task is to come to terms with oneself without relying on other people; and although we may sympathize with K. and the other accused in their efforts to acquit themselves before the Court, actually the Court is in the right and K. and the others in the wrong. There are three kinds of people in The Trial: (i) the innocent (i.e. ignorant) mass of humanity, unable to reflect and thus become aware of their guilt, (ii) the (self-)accused, who are guilty and obscurely aware of the fact but who refuse to admit it to themselves and who will go to any lengths to delay the inevitable verdict (the grovelling Herr Block of Chapter VIII, for example, has no less than six advo-cates, and has succeeded in protracting his case for five years), and (iii) the (self-)condemned man, who, like K. in the final chapter, faces up to the desolating truth and accepts the consequences.
‘The only thing for me to go on doing is to keep my intelligence calm and discriminating to the end. I always wanted to snatch at the world with twenty hands, and not for a very laudable motive either. That was wrong, and am I to show now that not even a whole year’s struggling with my case has taught me anything? Am I to leave this world as a man who shies away from all conclusions?’ (p. 247) For the reflexive man who retains his lucidity, there is only one verdict—‘Guilty’—and only one sentence—death. K.’s death in The Trial is the death of worldly hope; it is the immediate consequence of the frank recognition that one’s existence is guilty (that is to say, that it is unjustifiable); and this execution of the capital sentence upon hope is actually the inevitable conclusion to The Trial. I think you told me that you had found that K.’s death was an arbitrary and artificial ending to the book, which ought to have finished inconclusively . This would certainly have been true of Block, who clearly did not have the moral courage to face facts: Block would never have condemned himself to death (i.e. to a life without hope), and to have him executed by divine fiat would have been senseless. But with K. it was different: just as he had arrested himself by becoming reflexive, so he had to execute himself by admitting his guilt; and this is the furthest that anyone can go—in the direction of understanding, that is—without the Buddha’s Teaching.
What I said in my last letter about K.’s reason for recruiting, in particular, women to help his case—namely, that he perhaps regarded them as the ‘Gateway to the Divine’—is excessive. It is true enough of The Castle, where K. is seeking God’s grace; but in The Trial K. is simply attempting to justify his own existence, and his relations with women do not go beyond this. Here is an illuminating passage from Sartre:
Whereas before being loved we were uneasy about that unjustified, unjustifiable protuberance which was our existence, whereas we felt ourselves “de trop,” we now feel that our existence is taken up and willed even in its tiniest details by an absolute freedom [i.e. that of the one who loves us] be which at the same time our existence conditions [since it is our existence that fascinates our lover]be and which we ourselves will with our freedom. This is the basis for the joy of love when there is joy: we feel that our existence is justified. (B&N p. 371)
In The Trial, then, K. is seeking to use women to influence the susceptible Court (‘Let the Examining Magistrate see a woman in the dis-tance and he almost knocks down his desk and the defendant in his eagerness to get at her.’—p. 233). In other words, K. is trying to silence his self-accusations of guilt by helping himself to women (which does indeed have the effect—temporarily—of suppressing his guilt-feelings by making his existence seem justified). But K. is told—or rather, he tells himself—that this sort of defence is radically unsound (in Dr. Axel Munthe’s opinion,
a man’s love comes to an end when he marries the girl). And, in fact, Sartre’s detailed analysis of the love-relationship shows only too clearly its precarious and self-contradictory structure.
¹ (‘Of whom and of what in fact can I say “I know about that!” This heart in me, I can experience it and I conclude that it exists. This world, I can touch it and I conclude again that it exists. All my knowledge stops there, and the rest is construction. For if I try to grasp this self of which I am assured, if I try to define it and to sum it up, it is no more than a liquid that flows between my fingers. I can depict one by one all the faces that it can assume; all those given it, too, by this education, this origin, this boldness or these silences, this grandeur or this vileness. But one cannot add up faces. This same heart which is mine will ever remain for me undefinable. Between the certainty that I have of my existence and the content that I strive to give to this assurance, the gap will never be filled. Always shall I be a stranger to myself.
…Here, again, are trees and I know their roughness, water and I experience its savour. This scent of grass and of stars, night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes, - how shall I deny this world whose power and forces I experience? Yet all the science of this earth will give me nothing that can assure me that this world is mine.’) —A. Camus, Le Mythe de Sisyphe
A more lucid account by a puthujjana of his own predicament could scarcely be desired. This situation cannot be transcended so long as what appears to be one’s ‘self’ is accepted at its face value: ‘this self of which I am assured’, ‘this same heart which is mine’. The paradox (Marcel would speak of a mystery: a problem that encroaches on its own data)—the paradox,
(His) very self is not (his) self’s. (More freely: He himself is not his own.) (Dhammapada v,3 <Dh.62>), must be resolved. This necessarily rather chromatic passage, which does not lend itself kindly to translation (though one is provided), makes the overtone of despair clearly audible. Needless perhaps to say, this despair marks the extreme limit of the puthujjana’s thought, where it recoils impotently upon itself—and not by any means his normal attitude towards the routine business of living from day to day.
² Note the ambiguity, the ambivalence, of this word innocence, so close to ignorance, just as guilt and knowledge are sometimes almost synonymous. Adam and Eve, after eating the apple, knew that they were naked, and they were ashamed.
[In an early letter (29 June 1958) to the Ven.Nanamoli the author remarked: ‘Avijjā is a primary structure of being, and it approximates to innocence, not to bad faith, which is a reflexive structure, far less fundamental. Is it not odd that, existentially, avijjā would be translated alternatively by “guilt”—Kafka, Kierkegaard— and “innocence”—Camus, Sartre? Innocence and guilt, both are nescience.’]
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