Myth vs. Enlightenment in Kafka’s Das Schloß

Myth vs. Enlightenment in Kafka’s Das Schloß

Ritchie Robertson

Monatshefte, Volume 103, Number 3, Fall 2011, pp. 385-395 (Article)

Published by University of Wisconsin PressDOI: 10.1353/mon.2011.0072

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Myth vs. Enlightenment in Kafka’s Das Schloß

Ritchie RobertsonThe Queen’s College, Oxford

1. Myth and Late Style

Any discussion of Kafka’s late works, but especially one using the concept of “myth,” invites a consideration of late style, a phenomenon found in a wide range of creative artists. Adorno wrote about Beethoven’s “Spätstil”; Edward Said’s last book was entitled On Late Style and took its lead from Adorno, moving on to discuss “late style” in a number of artists including Genet, Vis-conti, Lampedusa, and Britten; the Shakespeare scholar Kenneth Muir, many years before, wrote a little book exploring distinctive features in the last peri-ods of three dramatists—Shakespeare, Racine, and Ibsen; and very recently another Shakespeare scholar, Gordon McMullan, has taken Shakespeare’s late plays as the occasion for comprehensive refl ections on late style.1 The most useful refl ections on late style that I have found, however, are by Hermann Broch, in an essay he originally wrote in English as an introduction to Rachel Bespaloff’s study of the Iliad. The English title is “The Style of the Mythi-cal Age,” but Broch intended the German version to be entitled “Mythos und Altersstil,” and it appears under this title, in a translation by his son, in the edition of Broch’s complete works by Paul Michael Lützeler.2 To fi nd what Broch actually wrote, however, one has to turn back to the old edition of Broch published in the 1950s by the Rhein- Verlag.3

Broch makes the important point that “the ‘style of old age’ is not always a product of the years; it is a gift implanted along with his other gifts in the artist, ripening, it may be, with time, often blossoming before its season under the foreshadow of death.”4 There seems, in other words, to be in the lives of some artists a kind of biological and creative rhythm, such that the approach of death makes possible a new phase with certain distinctive characteristics.

One common characteristic of late style is a disregard of conventional artistic form. Shakespeare in The Winter’s Tale inserts a gap of sixteen years in the middle of the action. Goethe in Faust II moves bewilderingly amid a variety of settings, often impossible to locate in time or space (who, for ex-ample, are the Kaiser and the Gegenkaiser?). Adorno, writing about the late Beethoven, talks of the abdication of art in the face of death – “Es ist, als wolle

386 Ritchie Robertson

angesichts der Würde menschlichen Todes die Kunsttheorie ihres Rechts sich begeben und vor der Wirklichkeit abdanken.”5 Alternatively, the artistic form of late works may be elaborated to a degree of refi nement that produces its own puzzles. Some late works are notorious for their obscurity and opacity. The last novels of Henry James, such as The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl, and the last stories of Adalbert Stifter, such as “Der fromme Spruch,” are at times almost unintelligible. Opacity may also result from an extreme reliance on allusion. Thus generations of commentators have gone to extra-ordinary lengths to elucidate the riddles that Goethe provided in Faust II. In Kafka’s case, Das Schloß defi es the normal expectations of story- telling by the extremely slow, even static quality of the narrative, which has often led critics to deny that it has any progression, and the castle together with its offi cials represents an enigma equally fascinating to the protagonist and to critics.

Late style often includes an explicit preoccupation with death. Shake-speare makes Prospero say “Every third thought shall be my grave.” In Henry James’s penultimate novel, The Wings of the Dove, the atmosphere grows darker as the “dove,” Milly Theale, comes closer to her death from consump-tion, which is not narrated and hence dominates the action all the more power-fully. W.G. Sebald showed in a fi ne essay how Kafka in Das Schloß presents a landscape of death, embodied in the snow which overlays all organic life for most of the year and makes even the simple act of walking along the street into an exhausting struggle; in the black clothes of Castle offi cials; in the constant motif of sleep; and in the invitation to K., near the end of the novel, to take refuge in a small subterranean room which strongly suggests the grave.6

But the preoccupation with death is not to be understood simply as ex-pressing the subjective mood of the author. Late style escapes from subjectiv-ity. It is impersonal. Prospero is not Shakespeare. Adorno maintains that in late works, personal subjectivity vanishes along with artistic conventions, and both are revealed as mere attempts to conceal the impotence of the self before the fact of death. Not all late works are so pessimistic as this implies. Shake-speare’s last plays turn on grace, forgiveness, reconciliation. Prospero realizes that “The rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance.”

Late style is not only impersonal but also abstract. Broch describes its “radical change in style” as “abstractism.” The settings of Faust II become increasingly abstract – an unspecifi ed promontory, a territory where Faust pro-poses to reclaim land from the sea, suggesting Holland but inhabited by Phile-mon and Baucis, then the jaws of Hell and an ascent into Heaven. Prospero’s island seems sometimes to be in the Mediterranean, sometimes in the Carib-bean, and the play’s poetry shows a fascination with the underlying elements of nature, especially with the tempest that brings Prospero together with his usurping brother. The snow- covered landscape of Das Schloß appears to be situated nowhere in particular, in a region with its own non- naturalistic micro- climate and its own social system.

Myth vs. Enlightenment in Kafka’s Das Schloß 387

As these examples show, late works are often dominated by physical objects which are important primarily for their symbolic implications. Shake-speare’s tempest, the tower in Ibsen’s The Master Builder, and the castle in Kafka’s last novel, are striking examples. The metonymy characteristic of realist texts gives way to metaphor. Solness’s tower has of course a “real” existence in the play, but it matters primarily for its increasing metaphorical associations with Solness’s manhood, his self- esteem, his need for atonement. Kafka’s castle moves further away from physical reality: it dominates the vil-lage, yet is inaccessible, and it looks like a collection of low houses, its identity as a castle being very much in the eye of the beholder.

As Broch insists, the “abstractism” practiced by the artist is “not that of science but – surprisingly enough – very near to that of myth.”7 The abstraction of late style can issue in a new myth appropriate for a new age. And the artist who provides such a myth is, in Broch’s opinion, Kafka. Broch attributes to Kafka his own deep doubts about the moral justifi cation of literature. It was for this reason, Broch maintains, that Kafka asked Max Brod to burn his works, as Virgil in Broch’s novel Der Tod des Vergil wishes to destroy the Aeneid. But Kafka also sensed, according to Broch, that literature could be valuable in evoking the new myth, the new imaginative landscape for humanity. Broch describes Kafka as being in a dilemma, “in his presentiment of the new cos-mogony, the new theogony that he had to achieve, struggling with his love for literature, his disgust for literature.”8

2. Myth in Das Schloß

In laying such emphasis on myth, Broch is very much of his time. In the 1940s and ’50s, the word “myth” was almost omnipresent in North American literary criticism, carrying a powerful emotional charge. It seemed to be an appropri-ate response to works of modernist literature such as Ulysses and The Waste Land, where the authors consciously and obviously reached back to mythical narratives like those of Odysseus and the Fisher King, or Der Tod in Venedig, where the protagonist encounters a series of incarnations of the god Dionysus. It seemed also, in a secular age, to resacralize literature by making it into a source of mystery and profundity. Myth criticism reached its high point in 1957 with Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, a grandiose attempt to sub-sume all Western literature within an archetypal scheme of seasonal myths derived from Frazer’s Golden Bough. This now seems a remote fashion. Myth and archetype as critical concepts invite considerable skepticism.

The concept of “myth” especially confl ates two distinct concepts, both admittedly of great importance for the understanding of modern literature and indeed modern thought. One is myth as narrative. Nietzsche maintains in Die Geburt der Tragödie that every culture needs a mythic narrative as the frame-work within which its creative energies can fl ourish: “Ohne Mythus aber geht


jede Kultur ihrer gesunden schöpferischen Naturkraft verlustig: erst ein mit Mythen umstellter Horizont schließt eine ganze Kulturbewegung zur Einheit ab.”9 Thus medieval European culture existed within the framework of the Christian myth of the fall and redemption of man, while modern secular cul-ture relies on a myth of the ascent of humanity from cave- dwellers to space- travellers, and Nietzsche wanted his contemporaries to regain as a framework the heroic myth of Wagner’s Ring.

Alongside myth as narrative, the other, even more pervasive concept of myth is mythic consciousness. While modern people inhabit a disenchanted universe and practice rational and logical thought, our primitive ancestors are supposed to have felt themselves to be part of an animated natural world and to have thought in terms of symbolic equivalence and poetic metaphor. This conception of the primitive mind goes back to Herder, to Vico, and beyond them to Bacon, who argued that poetic metaphor was the original language of humanity. It forms a key part of the primitivism, the fascination with the primitive, which is central to modernist art.

Both these conceptions of myth – myth as narrative and myth as con-sciousness – can be found in Das Schloß, though there is considerable danger of over- interpretation. A meticulous study of the novel by Richard Sheppard, which has received too little attention in Kafka studies, maintains: “Although the world of the village and the Castle are characterised at fi rst sight by an overwhelming banality and bleakness, behind that world lies a secret mythi-cal dimension which is rarely perceived by K. even though it is of the greatest importance for him.”10 Sheppard goes on to discuss the washing- day scene in Lasemann’s house, which he interprets as a purgatorial rebirth, and the fi re- brigade festival, which he thinks is “a festival of procreation and renewal” presided over by “the god of fate and fi re” (Sortini) and the god of water (See-mann).11 It is diffi cult to distinguish imaginative insight here from extravagant over- interpretation, and I would not go along with ascribing godlike status to Sortini and Seemann on the basis of multilingual puns.

What concerns me more, however, is mythic consciousness, and I want here to draw attention to another study that has been submerged in the re-lentless torrent of Kafka research, Karin Keller’s Gesellschaft in mythischem Bann.12 Keller shows convincingly how the villagers are under the power of the Castle, not just physically but mentally. They live by a set of taboos which have no rational basis but seem to them unchangeable. The village women not only accept the predatory sexual power of the Castle offi cials who take them briefl y as lovers and then discard them, but they attribute immense romantic value to these encounters. The chief example is the landlady of the Brücken-hof, Gardena, for whom her three encounters with Klamm, eighteen years before, are still the high point of her life, rendering her discontented with her present existence. Gardena is also the guardian of these taboos. She insists to K. that he cannot possibly have a personal interview with Klamm, and when


he asks the common- sense question: “Warum ist es unmöglich?” she replies with mere obfuscation, telling him how naïve, inexperienced, and generally contemptible he is. Another example of an irrational taboo is the ostracism suffered by the Barnabas family because of Amalia’s refusal to obey Sortini’s crude sexual summons. The villagers despise them and refuse to have any-thing to do with them. The Barnabas family not only suffer the effects of this taboo but internalize them, believing that they have fatally offended the Castle and must plead for forgiveness. Yet there is no sign that the Castle authorities are really offended; the Castle takes no action against them; the villagers, it seems, can be relied on to police themselves and punish any act of rebellion, however mild and however justifi able. Their subjection to the Castle, or rather their subjection to their own belief in the Castle, seems to keep them in a state of misery. The villagers in the inn watch K. “mit ihren förmlich gequälten Gesichtern – der Schädel sah aus als sei er oben platt geschlagen worden und die Gesichtszüge hätten sich im Schmerz des Geschlagenwerdens gebildet.”13 The villagers” existence is almost outside time and history. Seasonal changes are hardly visible: the summer lasts only a few days, and the deep covering of snow, with which K. constantly struggles, seems typical of the life of the village.

We have, then, a critical depiction of mythic consciousness. Kafka is not a primitivist. He is fascinated by primitive thought but also detached from it. During the war, Kafka with his friends Max Brod and Georg Langer visited a Hasidic rabbi who was holding court in an upper room in the Prague suburb of Žižkov. Kafka thought he looked unkempt and not very clean, and on the way home, according to Brod, Kafka remarked: “Genau genommen war es etwa so wie bei einem wilden afrikanischen Volksstamm. Krasser Aberglauben.”14

3. Versions of Enlightenment

In applying the concept of “enlightenment” to Das Schloß, it is tempting, but misleading, to start as Keller does from Dialektik der Aufklärung by Adorno and Horkheimer. In that book, Adorno and Horkheimer have a very specifi c, narrow, and historically one- sided understanding of enlightenment. Identify-ing enlightenment with rationality, they describe a process in which nature has been disenchanted, animism replaced by science, and nature made subject to measurement and manipulation, with the result that the scientifi c and technical conquest of nature threatens to destroy its object, the application of rational means to irrational ends has brought humanity into a state of oppression and misery, and enlightenment solidifi es into a new mythology.

Following this lead, it is not diffi cult to see in the Castle bureaucracy a parody of rational procedures divorced from any sensible purpose. Instru-mental rationality is supposed to ensure that nothing can ever go wrong. The village mayor praises the perfection of the Castle’s organization. To ensure


its fl awless functioning, all procedures are monitored by supervisory authori-ties; indeed, he claims, “Es gibt nur Kontrollbehörden.”15 Kafka satirizes this ultra- rational organization by drawing attention repeatedly to the intractable materiality of its operations – Sordini’s room can be identifi ed by the constant sound of piles of documents crashing to the fl oor, the mayor keeps documents in a cupboard which can only be closed by laying it fl at so that his wife and an assistant can jump up and down on it – and of course to the brutal physicality of the offi cials, with their predatory relationship to village women.

What Adorno and Horkheimer describe, however, is only one aspect of the Enlightenment as a historical phenomenon. The Enlightenment sought above all to challenge traditional power, whether wielded by priests or kings. It did this partly by refusing to accept the traditional charisma with which royal and priestly offi ces were surrounded. K. similarly challenges the rules by which life in the village is governed. On being told that to spend the night in the village he requires permission from the Count, he says that he will go and see the Count, and is promptly told that that is impossible. In conversation with Gardena, he repeats that he wants a personal interview with Klamm, and after withstanding much bullying from her over this unheard- of demand, she admits shamefacedly that it is actually possible. Another taboo is apparently infringed by K. when he mentions the Count to the schoolteacher and is told in French to remember the presence of innocent children. And of course he throws the village’s conception of decency to the winds by spending time with the ostracized Barnabas family. It is in this sense, in offering a challenge to traditional authority, that K. can be associated with enlightenment.

K.’s attitude is that of a rationalist who is prepared to argue against the unreasoned traditional customs of the village. Thus when the landlady, Klamm’s former lover, insists that a meeting with Klamm is impossible, K. gradually induces her to admit that it is actually possible and even persuades her to help to arrange it, though when agreeing she hides her face as if mak-ing an indecent remark (“als sage sie etwas Schamloses”).16 He appeals to empirical evidence. When the landlady asserts that her knowledge is based on experience, K. replies: “Also auch durch neue Erfahrung zu widerlegen.”17 K. argues with village offi cials, including the mayor and the schoolteacher. Instead of blindly accepting their authority, he appeals to the legal rights that he and others possess or should possess. When he is briefl y employed as a school janitor, he resists the schoolteacher’s petty tyranny. He refuses to accept his dismissal from the schoolteacher on the grounds that the teacher did not appoint him. Later, he refuses to allow the Castle secretary Momus to subject him to an interrogation. And when he hears about the obscene summons issued by Sortini to Amalia, he asserts that Amalia’s father ought to have made an offi cial complaint on her behalf.

To some extent, therefore, K. is a force for sense and enlightenment in a community trapped by its unreasoning reverence for tradition. He is also a


land- surveyor, associated with mathematical calculations. As a land- surveyor, his business is to check and if necessary correct the boundaries of people’s lands: he might therefore change property relations in the village, and it is hinted that the alleged malcontent Brunswick wanted a land- surveyor to be summoned for that reason. Hannah Arendt was perceptive when in 1944 she offered a political reading of Das Schloß in which the villagers, passively de-pendent on the Castle authorities, are confronted by K. who insists on human rights and thus “reveals himself to be the only one who still grasps, quite simply, what human life on earth is all about”.18

In associating Kafka with the historical Enlightenment, an important link is Salomon Maimons Lebensgeschichte, which Kafka read in 1917.19 Maimon, born in a Jewish community in Lithuania in 1753, educated himself in phi-losophy and outgrew the authority of Jewish religious communities and their symbols. When a rabbi in Hamburg showed him a shofar or ram’s horn, blown at New Year, and asked him if he knew what it meant, Maimon boldly replied: “Ja, es ist das Horn von einem Bock!” at which the rabbi was so shocked that he fell back in his chair and gave Maimon’s soul up for lost.20 This anticipates the aggressive iconoclasm with which K. confronts the traditional subservi-ence shown by villagers to the Castle.

4. Pre- and Post- Enlightenment Religion in Das Schloß

Besides issuing an enlightened challenge to irrational authority, we might ex-pect K. also to oppose the religious practices of the community. These are numerous and varied. Besides the reverence in which they hold the Castle in general and Klamm in particular, shown when Frieda drives away the Castle servants with the words “Im Namen Klamms,”21 we see Mizzi, the wife of the village mayor, kneeling in front of the cupboard full of documents in an atti-tude of prayer, and clasping her hands when she sees Klamm’s letter. Frieda maintains that Klamm brought her and K. together: “Wohl aber glaube ich ist es sein Werk, daß wir uns dort unter dem Pult zusammengefunden haben, gesegnet, nicht verfl ucht, sei die Stunde.”22 The religiosity of the villagers seems to refl ect Kafka’s reading in the anthropology of religion, especially the study by Nathan Söderblom, Das Werden des Gottesglaubens, from which he made excerpts in his diary. Söderblom argues that “primitive” religious concepts are on a continuum with more developed ones: thus the primitive concept of supernatural power or “mana” still lies at the basis of the concept of sanctity.23 Similarly in Das Schloß, the “power” ascribed to Klamm (including the capacity for shape- shifting) strongly resembles Söderblom’s description of “mana.”

K. too uses religious language. Trying to persuade the landlady that she is actually fortunate to have her husband, he says: “Der Segen war über Ihnen, aber man verstand nicht ihn herunterzuholen.”24 Moreover, his mission to lib-


erate the village is not directly political but has messianic overtones. This is the implication of the fact that the Hebrew word for land- surveyor, mashoah, is similar to the word for “messiah,” mashiah. W.G. Sebald, though not the fi rst to point this out, was the fi rst to explore its implications.25 K. then also inhabits a mythic world in which people’s lives can be imagined as subject to supernatural guidance, but he exercises freedom in interpreting the nature of such guidance.

We might also expect that the novel would present a disenchanted world that itself undermines the superstitious traditional beliefs of the villagers. But in fact the novel contains repeated tantalizing intimations of transcendence. A famous one occurs when Barnabas introduces himself to K with the words “Barnabas heiße ich, ein Bote bin ich” (S 39), where the gratuitous inversion makes the word “Bote” seem more important and perhaps draws attention to the fact that in Hebrew, as Kafka knew, the same word, malakh, means “mes-senger” and “angel.” The description of Barnabas makes him stand out against the mundane dreariness of the village:

Er war fast weiß gekleidet, das Kleid war wohl nicht aus Seide, es war ein Win-terkleid wie alle andern, aber die Zartheit und Feierlichkeit eines Seidenkleides hatte es. Sein Gesicht war hell und offen, die Augen übergroß. Sein Lächeln war ungemein aufmunternd; er fuhr mit der Hand über sein Gesicht, so als wolle er dieses Lächeln verscheuchen, doch gelang ihm das nicht.26

But when Barnabas brings K. to his own house instead of to the Castle, K. feels he has been misled:

Ein Mißverständnis war es also gewesen, ein gemeines, niedriges Mißverständ-nis und K. hatte sich ihm ganz hingegeben. Hatte sich bezaubern lassen von des Barnabas enger seiden glänzender Jacke, die dieser jetzt aufknöpfte und unter der ein grobes, grauschmutziges, viel gefl icktes Hemd erschien über der mäch-tigen kantigen Brust eines Knechts.27

In Klamm’s sleigh, K. fi nds a bottle of cognac with a delightful aroma: “der Geruch war so süß, so schmeichelnd, so wie wenn man von jemand, den man sehr lieb hat, Lob und gute Worte hört . . . “28 But when he drinks it, it is a warming but coarse drink fi t only for coachmen. Such episodes have been interpreted as indicating a Gnostic conception of the world, in which the purity of spiritual things must always be degraded by their translation into material reality.29 But they could also be interpreted as revealing the human propensity to look for spiritual fulfi lment where it is not to be had.

One can fi nd in Das Schloß both an acknowledgement of the powerful desire for transcendence and a Nietzschean message similar to Zarathustra’s injunction: “Ich beschwöre euch, meine Brüder, bleibt der Erde treu und glaubt denen nicht, welche euch von überirdischen Hoffnungen reden!”30 Transcen-dence in the sense of going beyond everyday life turns out to be illusory, like access to the Castle. But there is also the possibility of transcendence within


everyday life. One example, of which Stephen Dowden has given a fi ne appre-ciation, is a moment of understanding between K. and Amalia. In conversation with K., the normally withdrawn and sombre Amalia breaks into a smile:

Amalia lächelte und dieses Lächeln, trotzdem es traurig war, erhellte das düs-ter zusammengezogene Gesicht, machte die Stummheit sprechend, machte die Fremdheit vertraut, war die Preisgabe eines Geheimnisses, die Preisgabe eines bisher behüteten Besitzes, der zwar wieder zurückgenommen werden konnte, aber niemals mehr ganz.31

Dowden cites this luminous breach in the wall of personal isolation as an example of Kafka’s sublime. For classical aesthetics, the sublime is a mode of experience that gives us thrilling glimpses of “a sort of infi nity” outside everyday life.32 Kafka, however, locates the sublime, not in magnifi cent land-scapes, but in the mystery of another person: “Kafkan sublimity has to do with human identity, a bond that is individual and common. Amalia’s smile breaks through the hard shell of ice that surrounds her, and it gives off a light that clarifi es her face and establishes a humane contact with K. that exceeds words.”33 Among other moments of everyday transcendence, one might men-tion, most obviously, the erotic encounter with Frieda in the unlikely setting of the bar- room fl oor, and the dream that K. experiences when he falls asleep on Bürgel’s bed.

Skepticism about traditional conceptions of transcendence can be found also in Kafka’s letters and notebooks. In February 1913 we fi nd him question-ing Felice Bauer about her religious beliefs: “Fühlst Du – was die Hauptsache ist – ununterbrochene Beziehungen zwischen Dir und einer beruhigend fernen, womöglich unendlichen Höhe oder Tiefe?”.34 Here Kafka thinks it crucial to feel connected with something outside oneself which can be expressed only in metaphors of distance, whether height or depth. Almost fi ve years later, in one of his Zürau notebooks, his imagery has shifted from outside to inside:

Der Mensch kann nicht leben ohne ein dauerndes Vertrauen zu etwas Unzer-störbarem in sich, wobei sowohl das Unzerstörbare als auch das Vertrauen ihm dauernd verborgen bleiben können. Eine der Ausdrucksmöglichkeiten dieses Verborgen- Bleibens ist der Glaube an einen persönlichen Gott. 35

Belief in a personal God, in a transcendent object of faith, is here said to be an illusion – not necessarily a harmful illusion – which conceals from the be-liever the real object of belief, namely something permanent and indestructible located both within the individual self and within the collective self of human-ity.36 The object of faith still cannot be described in personal, anthropomorphic terms, but insofar as it can be (metaphorically) located, its location is within the world and within the self.

To sum up: myth is present in Das Schloß as the mythic consciousness of the villagers, their subjection to a range of unjustifi ed rules and taboos. K.


challenges this mythic consciousness by appealing to reason and experience. But, insofar as these rules are accompanied by religious practices, K. does not challenge them. Instead, he uses the language of religion (“Segen”). He still hankers after some way of transcending the everyday world, preferably by reaching the Castle. But he fi nds repeatedly that transcendence is available within the everyday world, as in the moment of mutual understanding with Amalia. Enlightenment is often thought as a process of disenchantment and demystifi cation, powered by a hard, dry, Voltairean skepticism, which reveals a world devoid of emotional satisfaction. Kafka’s enlightenment is not like that. It might be called a process of demythologization which strips away the surface of a myth – or of religious language – but acknowledges the inner emo-tional content of which myth and religious language were the expression. And thus Kafka can be included among the modernist writers who do not simply yearn for a lost world of myth but, as Thomas Mann does in the Joseph tetral-ogy, reanimate myth in conjunction with a modern skeptical intelligence.

1 Theodor W. Adorno, “Spätstil Beethovens”, Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, vol. 17 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982) 13– 17; Edward Said, On Late Style (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006); Kenneth Muir, Last Periods of Shakespeare, Racine, Ibsen (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1961); Gordon McMullan, Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing: Authorship in the Proximity of Death (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007). I am grateful to Karen Leeder for directing my attention to McMullan’s work.

2 Hermann Broch, “Mythos und Altersstil”, Broch, Schriften zur Literatur 2: Theorie, ed. Paul Michael Lützeler (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975) 212– 233.

3 Hermann Broch, “The Style of the Mythical Age”, Broch, Dichten und Erkennen, ed. Hannah Arendt (Zurich: Rhein- Verlag, 1955) 249– 64.

4 Broch, “Mythos und Altersstil” 249.5 Adorno, “Spätstil Beethovens” 13.6 W.G. Sebald, . “The Undiscover’d Country: The Death Motif in Kafka’s Castle”. Journal

of European Studies 2 (1972), 22– 34.7 Broch, “Mythos und Altersstil” 251.8 Broch, “Mythos und Altersstil” 263.9 Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke, 3 vols., ed. Karl Schlechta (Munich: Hanser, 1966), 1: 125.10 Richard Sheppard, On Kafka”s Castle: A Study (London: Croom Helm, 1973), 105.11 Sheppard, On Kafka’s Castle 105.12 Karin Keller, Gesellschaft in mythischem Bann: Studien zum Roman “Das Schloß” und

anderen Werken Franz Kafkas (Wiesbaden: Athenaion, 1977).13 S 39.14 Max Brod, Über Franz Kafka (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1974) 137.15 S 104.16 S 138.17 S 137.18 Hannah Arendt, “Franz Kafka, appreciated anew”, Arendt, Refl ections on Literature and

Culture, ed. Susannah Young- ah Gottlieb (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007), 94– 109: 99. This essay was originally published as “Franz Kafka: a revaluation,” Partisan Review 11 (1944), 412– 22.

19 The letter to Weltsch is found in Franz Kafka, Briefe 1902– 1924, ed. Max Brod (Frank-furt a.M.: Fischer, 1958). Kafka describes Maimon’s book as “eine äußerst grelle Selbstdarstel-lung eines zwischen Ost- und Westjudentum gespenstisch hinlaufenden Menschen” (203).

20 Salomon Maimons Lebensgeschichte, ed. Jakob Fromer (Munich: Georg Müller, 1911) 295.


21 S 66.22 S 83– 84.23 Nathan Söderblom, Das Werden des Gottesglaubens: Untersuchungen über die Anfänge

der Religion, ed. Rudolf Stübe, 2nd edn. (Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs’sche Buchhandlung, 1926) 26.24 S 135.25 See Sebald, “The Law of Ignominy: Authority, Messianism and Exile in The Castle”,

in On Kafka: Semi- Centenary Perspectives, ed. Franz Kuna (London: Elek, 1976) 42– 58. The pun was fi rst pointed out by Evelyn Torton, Kafka and the Yiddish Theater (Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P, 1971), 195.

26 S 38– 39.27 S 52.28 S 164.29 See Erich Heller, “The World of Franz Kafka”, Heller, The Disinherited Mind: Essays in

Modern German Literature and Thought (Cambridge: Bowes & Bowes, 1951) 157– 181.30 Nietzsche, Werke 2: 280.31 S 265.32 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime

and Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990) 71.33 Stephen D. Dowden, Kafka”s Castle and the Critical Imagination (Columbia, SC:

Camden House, 1995) 137.34 B2 82.35 NS2 124.36 On this conception, see Ritchie Robertson, Kafka: Judaism, Politics, and Literature

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985) 200– 202. Kafka derived the concept from Schopenhauer: see the chapter entitled “Über den Tod und sein Verhältnis zur Unzerstörbarkeit unseres Wesens an sich” in Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, ed. Julius Frauenstädt, 2 vols (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1923), 2: 528– 583.

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Myth vs. Enlightenment in Kafka’s Das Schloß