c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) “Kafkaesque” is a term describing a complex and distorted situation filled with a bizarre sense of imminent and menacing danger. The word also means an implacable undefined authority that threatens our personal lives.

Because the expression is so embedded in our language, we often forget there really was someone named Franz Kafka whose last novel, “The Castle,” was published in unfinished form 80 years ago. At his death two years earlier in 1924 at age 41, the tuberculosis-afflicted author was relatively unknown, and in a macabre request, Kafka urged that his writings be burned following his demise. Fortunately, his friends rejected Kafka’s wishes.

Like his novels and short stories, Kafka was a bundle of inner contradictions and tangled identities.

He was a Jew born in a religiously pluralistic Prague that was part of the Catholic-dominated Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Kafka’s mother tongue was German, but he lived in a city where most inhabitants spoke Czech.

He wrote in a difficult literary German that was different from the daily language of Berlin and Vienna.

Kafka was a graduate lawyer who spent most of his working years as a clerk in the offices of various insurance companies.

In a 1922 letter sent to a close friend, Kafka wrote: “I have been dashing about or sitting as a petrified animal in his burrow. Enemies everywhere.” It is a perfect definition of “Kafkaesque.”

But despite or perhaps because of his psychological and physical problems, Kafka’s nightmarish writings continue to haunt millions of readers. Indeed, the melancholy Jewish writer with the piercing dark eyes still speaks to us of loneliness, alienation, confusion and dread.

Nowhere is this more evident than in “The Castle,” my favorite Kafka work.

In the novel, K., a professional land surveyor, arrives during a snow storm in a truly “Kafkaesque” village somewhere in Europe. He tells the hostile townspeople he has come to carry out a professional job assignment in the mystical castle on a hill that dominates the small hamlet. But K. is constantly blocked from assuming his duties even though the castle authority _ the ambiguous Other _ grudgingly acknowledges that K. has been engaged for a project. But K. is never permitted to begin his work.

He grows more frustrated and out of boredom or revenge K. enters into a sexual affair with the mistress of the castle’s authority figure. K. is compelled to become a school janitor while awaiting his constantly delayed opportunity to work at the castle. Despite the bureaucracy’s rejection, K. does not leave the village. Instead, time goes by and it seems clear he will soon die. Because Kafka never completed his finest novel, “The Castle” appropriately ends in the middle of a sentence.

What does “The Castle” mean? At least four things and maybe more … take your pick.

The novel describes Franz’ alienation from his father, who actually outlived his sickly son by seven years. Hermann Kafka, a boorish and overpowering parent who badgered his son, was a towering authority figure who withheld his love from Franz who chose to be a writer instead of a practicing attorney or a businessman like his father.

On another level, “The Castle” is a painful metaphor for the Jew living in Christian Europe; the perpetual outsider whose existence may be acknowledged, but who is excluded from the mystical “castle,” that represents full acceptance into all segments of European society. While Franz’s three sisters outlived their brother, they were murdered in German death camps during the Holocaust.

Kafka’s novel depicts the lonely individual who must continually confront a hostile bureaucracy. Obstacles and barriers are erected that place a person on perpetual “hold.” One waits in vain for a job clearance, an official response, an employment opportunity, but most important of all, acceptance … waiting, waiting, waiting.

Finally, “The Castle” is the story of personal alienation from God and the human community. K. yearns for reconciliation, but it never happens. Sadly, as the novel develops, K. withers away as the competent land surveyor and moves inexorably toward two kinds of death: first, as a talented professional, and then as a human being.

Although “The Castle” was first published in 1926, it still remains a fresh work of an extraordinary writer who captured our modern age of anxiety with frightening accuracy.

MO/JL END RNS

(A. James Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is the author of “The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of Us.”)

Editors: To obtain a photo of A. James Rudin, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.