Kafka’s ‘The Castle’ at FringeArts Festival

When we think of Franz Kafka, most of us expect bleak surroundings, robotic speech, paranoia and suffering.

This Idiopathic Ridiculopathy’s recent adaptation of Kafka’s The Castle upended such preconceptions. David Fishelson’s script contains a bit of Kafkaesque mystery and surrealism, but The Castle, unlike Kafka’s earlier novel, The Trial, also provides comedy and even some sex. The Castle shares with The Trial the presence of a remote, inaccessible authority, but its protagonist isn’t being persecuted, nor is he on trial— except in a generalized sense.

As directed by Tina Brock, all 13 of the thoroughly convincing players spoke their lines with clarity and made their feelings lucid. David Stanger, as the protagonist, was cheerful, energetic and hopeful. He was thwarted at every turn, it’s true, but he kept moving with determination. He was no victim. His character didn’t succumb to despair.

The Castle concerns the endless frustrations of man's attempts to deal with bureaucracy, not to mention the futile pursuit of an unobtainable goal. On a snowy winter night, a man known only as K comes to a village adjacent to a castle. Seeking to stay overnight at the inn, he discloses that he’s a land surveyor who has been hired to work for the authorities in the castle.

Yet none of the townspeople, absurdly, knows how to get to the castle.

Thwarted ambitions

The novel’s title, Das SchloÓŸ, may be translated as "the castle" or "the lock"— a double meaning that probably was intentional. The castle is locked and closed to K as well as the townspeople.

K is a foreign professional, sent for and then rejected. In Hebrew, the word for land surveyor closely resembles messiah, and thus K may be seen to reflect an oppressed minority's recurring hope for divine intervention. On the other hand, corrupt land surveyors in 19th-Century Russia sometimes cheated peasants out of their lands, so the villagers view K with suspicion.

K wants to get ahead socially. He desires a home, a wife and acceptance in the community, but these are denied to him. References to ethnic differences surface here and there.

Is K a stand-in for Kafka? Perhaps.

Jewish connections

Kafka was born in 1883 into an assimilated German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father, Hermann Kafka, was described by Franz as "a true Kafka in strength, health, appetite, loudness of voice, eloquence, self-satisfaction, worldly dominance, endurance, presence of mind”— hardly the sort of bewildered and victimized character that many of us associate with the Kafka name.

Although he had a bar mitzvah, Kafka’s Jewish education was minimal. In Berlin, he lived with Dora Diamant, a 25-year-old teacher from an orthodox Jewish family, who influenced Kafka's belated exploration of what it meant to be Jewish in that place and time.

Racial separatism

Several months into the writing of The Castle, Kafka took an interest in Hans Blüher's just-published Secessio Judaica, which claimed that Jews’ sexual attitudes and economic outlook, like their blood, were unclean, and that both Zionism and German anti-Semitism reflected the unavoidable racial separation of Jews from the German people.

Blüher insisted that he bore no ill will toward individual Jews, but his call for segregation confirmed Kafka's feeling that Jewish assimilation into German culture was doomed.

Kafka told his friend and publisher Max Brod that he envisioned an ending in which K would remain in the village and finally die there. The castle would notify him on his deathbed that his "legal claim to live in the village was not valid.” But Kafka died of tuberculosis in 1924 with his manuscript unfinished.