THE CASTLE (DAS SCHLOSS)
THE CASTLE (DAS SCHLOSS)
Before starting to analyze the Novel of Castle, we would like to mention the author of the book Franz Kafka briefly. As one of the pioneers of Modern German Literature of the 20th century, Franz Kafka, who was born in Prague in July 1883, can be described as an author who has a vision ahead of his time, narrating both in a realistic and fantastic way the crises and loneliness of western society in the process of industrialization and modernization. Considering that Kafka himself also worked as a lawyer for fourteen years in the Workers Accident Insurance Agency, the fact that he experienced challenges of bureaucracy in person makes us think that the novel bears traces from himself.
The novel is fictionalized around a castle, village, and cadastre official assigned in the castle. In the novel, while the castle symbolizes power, state, authority and bureaucratic management, the village represents ruled people. The hero of the novel is called “K”.
In Kafka’s novel, which we can describe as the ironic expression of the bureaucracy’s resistance against power, description of the location materialized as the conceptualization of castle, indicates an environmental plan making someone confuse his way in his effort to reach out to unreachable high-ranking officials in fact, also indirect means, nonsense and irrational processes of bureaucracy. From this aspect, bureaucracy is conceptualized as irrational processes, not as rational processes of the Weberian mind.
That villagers always follow K. and hesitate to adopt him in their own lives leads K. to struggle for existence and accept unreasonable contexts. As he tries to reach the castle, he constantly goes back to the beginning and gets in a vicious circle. Finally, getting tired, he is forced to accept the rationale of the castle.
With a reference that the appointment and promotion of all civil servants in the bureaucratic system depend on certain principles, in the novel, K. tells the headman of the village that he was appointed as a cadastral official. The headman of the village states that there is confusion because they have told the officials that they do not need a cadastral official; which causes a complicated correspondence process. The following words of the headman enlighten us about the complexity of the bureaucracy; “At such big authorities like earldom, some units can sometimes take different decisions and none of them knows about the other’s”.
As stated in Weberian bureaucracy, relations between village and castle are also a system of law and rules rather than a human system. Indeed, in the novel, when regarding the relationship with the castle, villagers can act irrationally in the name of adherence to the rules and exclude those who act in a contrary manner.
If we talk about Weber's concept of “specialization” in his understanding of bureaucracy, we need to look at the following words of the woman named Olga, while speaking to K., the main character of the novel, which clearly indicating bureaucratic specialization of the castle’s officials.
“Officials are highbrowed people, but their culture is unilateral. If one official hears one word regarding his own profession, he can uncover the whole chain of thought on the other side. However, he can listen to you but understand nothing if you tell him something regarding another department for hours”.
Directing K. to an official on his own work continuously and attaching importance for the intolerance of authority failures highlight the strict separation of authority in the bureaucracy.
The hierarchical separation between the castle and the village and the organization seeming both very close and far demonstrate the gap between the public and the administration. Furthermore, that K. communicates with high-ranking officials in the castle only via messengers and that he has troubles in reaching out to high-ranking officials indicate the hierarchy of superior-subordinate of the existing bureaucracy between the managers in the castle and villagers.
Appreciating K.’s work and wishing it to continue in the same way, the letter, brought by messenger Barnabas and sent by Klamm, the high-ranking official in the castle, reminds us of the correspondence codes, resembling to printed correspondence procedures in the bureaucracy, including general expressions without understanding the nature of the subject and being written just to write.
Referring to the Marxist concept of alienation, in the close and oppressive system between the castle and the village, that K. is constantly highlighted by villagers as a foreigner, K. cannot understand the cowered, objectified, inconsistent and irrational behaviors of the villagers against the authority, and finally, K. adapts and obeys to their system to be adopted by villagers bring to mind the officials turning to a machine in bureaucracy’s impersonal rules.
With the feeling of alienation, K. comes closer to the Barnabas family excluded by villagers since they have not bowed to the authority. As a result of this, he is excluded too. Therefore, K. is forced to adopt the logic of the system, which causes his personality to be lost in the system.
Dilek ŞAHİN