Franz Kafka's The Castle

“The Castle” by Franz Kafka as a Prefiguration of Dystopia Daniel Kalinowski Associate Professor Pomeranian University, Słupsk Poland Abstract: The paper focuses on the work of the Austrian writer of Jewish origin in the context of space studies. A particularly interesting example is The Castle, the writer's last novel and one of the most difficult subjects for interpretation. The classic reading of The Castle is emphasising the hero's loneliness and mysterious laws that govern the entire reality of the novel (Max Brod). However, in postmodernist interpretations, the disintegration and nonsense of the world portrayed by Kafka (Maurice Blanchot) is much stronger. Reading The Castle from the perspective of dystopia allows us not only to notice the negative aspects of the novel, but also the positive ones: symbolism, mythologising, hyper-semantics of literary images. Kafka, as the author of the novel from 1922 about the lost man in a lost village in a lost time, thus becomes through his work one of the inspirers for the next generation of contemporary prose creators using the motives of dystopia. Keywords. Franz Kafka, German literature XX, space studies, dystopia Franz Kafka is certainly one of the most frequently interpreted authors of modern literature. This very fact is documented by all bibliographies concerning the reception of his works which simply overwhelm with the sheer number of studies published in different countries and languages (e.g. Järv 1961; Flores 1976; Binder 1979; Franz Kafka 1979; Born 1997; CaputoMayr, Herz 2000; Kalinowski 2006; Sommerfeld 2007; Franz Kafka 2008). The greatest number of studies, in the context which appears most obvious, are published in the discourse of German studies; however, the specific nature of his short stories and novels is such that--for a long time now--they have been interpreted beyond the sphere of the German language: inspiring, in a loose way, a whole variety of reinterpretations in diverse methodologies of the literary research. Therefore, it seems entirely possible today to publish studies focusing not only on a novel such as The Trial (Gräff 1990; Eschweiler 1990), The Castle (Shepphard 1973; Gottwald 1990), but also those delving into stories as short as The Judgement (Kafkas “Urteil” 2007) or Before The Low (Neue Literaturtheorien 1993). When we analyse The Castle--which was created in 1922 and published only after Kafka’s death in 1933--we are faced with a somewhat puzzling situation: his most extensive prose text is, in the research tradition, the one which is studied the least. One might even speculate that it is, in a way, ignored or simply met with an insignificant number of interpretative ideas. The oldest of them can be traced back to Max Brod who believed that it is an allegorical work, specifically, one concerning the man’s search for God (Brod 1948; Brod 1951; Brod 1982). Albert Camus offered an extensive interpretation--seeing the work as a symbolic story about loneliness of people who fail to find fulfilment in their existence (Camus 1991). There are also other interpretations: The Castle as a record of psychological complexes (Pawel 2003; Bloom