The Castle of Self Creation

Kafka on the Art of Becoming

During my weekly call home last Sunday, I remarked to my mother that the more I try to “act normally,” the worse I feel. Admittedly, I sounded very much like an angsty teen, lamenting the fact that people “just don’t understand me.” The sentiment is perhaps more accurately put: avoiding my own weirdness, rather than steering into it, only leaves me frustrated, discontented, and less happy. Last week, I wrote about how neuroses often reflect some deeper belief we have about ourselves. It follows that trying to suppress these symptoms will often feel like a betrayal of our beliefs, leaving us deeply dissatisfied with life and living.

Even as this analysis felt correct to me personally, it still felt a little cliched when I try to express it to other people. That, I think, only serves to support my thesis that conforming to a set of expectations for the sake of human connection can actually, ironically, frustrate the very connection we seek, leaving us alienated from both ourselves and others. This can quickly spiral into something like impostor syndrome, or the even more dangerous solipsism, but it doesn’t have to. Just as I was becoming fed up with social interaction, I picked up Franz Kafka’s The Castle which speaks to these frustrations better than, I think, even The Trial or The Metamorphosis.

To be yourself, try being someone else

The Castle tells the story of a land surveyor, K., who’s mistakenly called upon by castle authorities to work in a neighboring village. The village community, having no reason to accept him, treats him as an outcast, and the castle authorities, having made a mistake in their invitation, will not and cannot admit him into their protection. The post-structuralists, especially Zizek, have drawn the obvious connection from Kafka’s novel to the 20th century, bureaucratic context in which he wrote. Indeed, there is a great deal of biographical and textual evidence to support this connection. The protagonist, being not too distant from the author (as Kafka himself admits) has never “seen officialdom and life as interwoven as they were here, so interwoven that is sometimes even looked as if officialdom and life had changed places.” The bureaucracy is so complete in the village that K. feels ironically more at ease in his interactions with the authorities and, accordingly, more on edge in his more quotidian encounters with the everyday lay people of the village. “[O]nly in direct dealings with the authorities that a slightly less cautious approach, a degree of relaxation were in order…. whereas otherwise great care was called for at all times.” There is, in other words, more pressure to act normally, when such behavior is not explicitly defined. Likewise, Kafka himself was a product of a rigid social order that defined the fin de siècle of Europe and the decadence of the late Austrian-Hungarian empire.

The existential headache resultant from this negotiation of self and other reveals the fundamental trouble in being oneself. Further, it underlines just how contingent our beliefs about ourselves are bound to the external; that is, things and people other than ourselves. All of the sudden, being ourselves goes from being the most natural thing to do to the hardest thing imaginable. While I think there is nothing wrong with the bureaucratic interpretation of The Castle, it is my 18th century would call “the low hanging fruit.” I think the book is ultimately about the tension of being oneself while acknowledging how much that depends on those around you. No one understood this better than Kafka. The seeming paradoxes of The Castle, therefore, make it feel both particular to the author and universally human.

The other night, I watched the 2019 film The Two Popes about the friendship Pope’s Benedict and Francis. During a conversation aboard the Pope’s helicopter, Benedict remarks to Francis that “whenever I try to be myself, people don’t seem to like me very much.” Admittedly, this too would sound almost cringeworthy if it weren’t for the fact that it was coming from the Pope (or, Anthony Hopkins’s inspired performance as the Pope). Instead, Benedict must “perform the role” of Pope in order to relate to his fellow Christians. It is through this mediation that he is more fully himself whereas more lax social interactions, like his meetings with Francis, that he is ill at ease. Such is the paradox of the prescriptions of like “be yourself,” or “act naturally.”

The Two Popes (2019)

We are always trying to define ourselves in minor acts of expression, like choosing what to wear, or in major acts of self-creation, such as the moments of aspiration I outlined last week. The difficulty, Kafka says, is that we are “always trying to convey something that can’t be conveyed…to explain something which is inexplicable.” How do we relate to other people when we cannot even articulate to ourselves who and what we are? The solution for many of the existentialists is to give up on the idea that we are only one thing. In other words, we have to reject our sense of being and live in the moments of becoming. In The Two Popes, Francis insists that “nothing in nature is static, not even God.” Truth is found not in silent contemplation but “on the journey.” (In other words, while we’re Rambling; forgive me, I couldn’t resist). Similarly, we have to constantly make and remake ourselves in the image of other humans in order to connect with them. Such constant revision of the self would seem to suggest that there isn’t an objective truth out there, but Kafka disagrees. “There is only one truth… but it is alive and therefore has a vividly changing face.” Come to think of it, this is a pretty good theory of aesthetics.

I was talking to another English teacher in Prague last week about this idea. In this instance, we were talking about movies. She put it something like this: “just like Tenet was the most Nolanesque movie Nolan has made, so too was The French Dispatch immediately recognizable as Wes Anderson.” These two directors, Christopher Nolan and Wes Anderson, almost always work with a set of signifiers which indicate to their viewers that they are the director. For Nolan, these are a dark mood, non-linearity, and mind-bending plot twists. For Anderson, it’s pastel color palettes, symmetrical shots, and quirky, offbeat humor. Viewed one way, the trappings of a Nolan or an Anderson film can come across as artificial. Taken another, it is in this artificiality that they are able to relate some message to the viewer. Likewise, Kafka’s stories are quickly understood to be his work because they have similar motifs. Dark humor and irony, a protagonist who must navigate a paradoxical situation, absurdity and realism juxtaposed side by side. All of these amount to what we call the Kafkaesuqe. And it is in the play-acting as the author of a Kafkaesque story that Kafka himself was able to be more fully himself.

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

This can, to be sure, backfire on an artist whose audience comes to expect a certain set of signifiers and with it an understanding of who the author truly is. The performance and the person can be elided or conflated. But, again, I think this is part of the point. When all other attempts at expressing our authentic selves to others fail, we rely on these acts of self-creation to show the world what we believe to be true about ourselves and others. Thus, Kafka’s existentialism is the descendant of Pascal’s and of Nietzsche’s. Its beliefs are are externalized into a set of symbols that evoke a mood or feeling that others can relate to, or not. Ironically, Kafka relates to his audience not by being himself but by creating characters and becoming someone else entirely through his work.

From the particular to the universal

The Castle, in its patent absurdity, touches on something deeply human. It is also, I have come to realize, a profoundly Czech novel. This may sound counterintuitive because many critics have resisted calling Kafka a Czech novelist. Kafka himself identified more with his German language and Jewish heritage than his Bohemian birthright. Or, rather, he bore the multiplicity of his identity so heavily that he ultimately became suspicious of the very idea of identity categories. Yet, it is in his very skepticism of national identity that we find something particularly Czech. Folk heroes of the national revival like Božena Nemčová insisted on a Czech particularity through traditional storytelling while writers of the resistance like Ivan Klima used national identity as a tool against the communist occupation. However, I have found that the more insistent these appeals to an essential Czech character are the less the seem to acknowledge the mixed and messy cultural history of the land from which they spring. Kafka, on the other hand, exposes the emptiness of such essentialism and thus gets closer to the spirit of the Czech lands. Struggling for most of its existence to define itself in the greater context of first empire, then Nazi protectorate, and finally Soviet occupation, Czechia has had to rely on what it is not in order to describe what it truly is.

Likewise, the protagonist of The Castle can only conceive of his purpose in the village by negotiating between spaces in which he is not allowed. “Only as a village workman, as far removed as possible from the gentlemen of the castle, was [K.] in a position to achieve something in the castle.” I won’t go so far as to say that my experience here in the Czech Republic is perfectly captured in these lines, but I have observed a similar walling off in the way Czechs conduct business. Maybe its because I don’t speak the language, but all of my interactions with the authorities of my school and program are mediated by a network of colleagues and officials who, for whatever reason, cannot speak to me (or at least my mentor) directly. Accordingly, I rarely ever leave my wing of the school to see other parts of campus. The bureaucratic nature of my position is borne out, too, in the school’s architecture. The halls have been referred to by my colleagues as a maze more times than I can count. Similarly, K. is constantly finding himself lost in the labyrinth village, the castle always eluding him on the horizon and the inns of town always slamming the door in his face.

These moments, even at their darkest, are really funny too. Nietzsche suggested that it wasn’t in spite of existential dread but because of it that humans invented laughter. I really like the Czech sense of humor, if they can be said to have only one. It’s absurdity, like Kafka’s, is so blunt that it seems more real than reality itself. It’s weird and dark and it does not turn away from the terror of existential dread. It steers into this weirdness and thus normalizes it and makes it feel distinctly human. Kafka instructs his readers to “accept your symptoms…don’t complain about symptoms, immerse yourself.” I have reproduced the wisdom here that “it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” If being a little weird helps us get on in the world, then so be it. It’s the conceit of punk rock, absurdism, and the Kafkaesque. Rather than trying to resist that which is weird about ourselves, make something of it and Ramble on!