Franz Kafka died before the horrors of twentieth-century judicial terror and torture were well known to the world; indeed, before some of them had been invented. Mussolini had marched on Rome, but Hitler was not yet the master of Germany, and the madness in Stalin’s brain had not yet overcome that most frightful of tyrants. (Kafka’s three sisters were to know the truth about Hitler; all three died in concentration camps during World War II.) Yet all seems to have been evident to the clerk in the Prague insurance office. He knew what was going to happen: the violent knocking on the door in the middle of the night, the absurd charges that are only excuses for torture and murder, the confusions about the place and time of trial, the vain efforts to defend oneself, the hopes that are never finally justified. Kafka is one of the prophets of our age.
The Castle is in many ways similar to The Trial, but it is even better, partly because the author’s skill is greater, the terror is more refined, and there is frequent relief in humor—a happy comic touch that is often surprising in this book. A land surveyor, again named K., has been ordered to report to the Castle, where it is expected that he will find employment. He must make an appointment to see the Baron. But he cannot find out how to do this. He calls the Castle on the telephone but usually his calls do not go through, and when they do there is confusion about who he is and whom he is calling. A secretary? What secretary? The secretary he has reached is not the right one, no one knows about K., his file has been lost, as far as the Castle is concerned he does not exist. But how that can be, K. cries? He has been ordered to report to the Castle. Such things happen, an official replies; there is nothing that can be done about it. He is sorry, but there is other work to do …
K. lives in an inn at the foot of the mountain on which the Castle stands, and his life is not without its pleasures. From time to time he even receives small “expenses” payments from the Castle. Each time this happens he is exhilarated, believing that at last the Castle has recognized, or conceded, that he exists. But these payments should not be interpreted in that way, an official explains. They are quite normal; they would be given to anybody. K. must not think that his dossier has been found or that an appointment has been made, or that one is likely to be made. He must wait; he must take his turn. Probably, the official says, everything will become clear in time, although, he adds, that cannot be guaranteed.
This is another nightmare that Kafka has had for all of us, snared in the red tape of the modern world, mired in the bureaucracy that seems to be our greatest invention. No one ever understood it better than Franz Kafka. If you think because you are a cheerful, good-hearted, law-abiding citizen and pay your taxes that you can escape it, then read The Castle. It will remind you that civilization, as we like to call it, does not solve all problems.
AUSTIN TAPPAN WRIGHT
1883–1931
Islandia
The life story of Austin Tappan Wright is in itself a romance. Born in 1883, in New Hampshire, he began creating his imaginary country, Islandia, occupying “the southern portion of the Karain subcontinent, which lies in the Southern Hemisphere,” while still a child. (His grandfather had also created an imaginary country, and Austin’s younger brother, exiled because of a childish infraction from Islandia, created one of his own.) By the time Wright died in an automobile accident in 1931, there were 2,300 pages of closely handwritten manuscript, including a lengthy discourse on the geography and geology of this country that never existed and a 135,000-word history going back to its imaginary beginnings in the ninth century. All of Wright’s family knew about Islandia almost from birth—the family boat was called Aspara, the Islandian word for seagull—but after Wright’s death some eleven years had to pass before the novel Islandia was published. It appeared in 1942, much cut and edited from the huge original manuscript by one of Wright’s children. It immediately attracted a small but growing following, until it became, during the Sixties, one of the great “underground” novels of the twentieth century. That is as it should be, for Islandia is a minor masterpiece.
Geographically, the country of Islandia is not very large—perhaps about the size of New England—and rather sparsely populated, with about three million people living for the most part on farms and in very small towns. There is one large town, called simply The City. The Islandians are advanced in some respects, being excellent builders, for example; their houses and public buildings are not only beautiful but also constructed for the ages, not the decades (some of the stone houses are a thousand years old); their woven cloth is exquisite in its soft strength and subtle colors; they have excellent doctors and practically no mental disease. In other respects they are very backward: they do not really like city life, and they have no trains, planes, or automobiles, no banks or credit cards, no newspapers or magazines, no radio, television, or cinema, no electronic musical instruments or games, no computers, and no highly refined forms of art. The art of Islandia is living itself; all Islandians are artists of life, paying much attention to how they live and what they live for. Worst of all, from the point of view of the unsympathetic representatives of the great Western nations who figure rather largely in the book, they have refused to accept Western civilization and to join the modern world. They wish to be what they have always been, which is happy, and they will fight to the death to remain so.
The hero of this extraordinary, perhaps unique utopian fantasy is John Lang, a member, like author Wright himself, of the class of 1905 at Harvard. During his freshman year Lang meets and grows to be a close friend of Dorn, one of the very few Islandians in the United States, who has been sent to Harvard to learn something about the Western world that is trying so hard to absorb Islandia and to exploit its vast buried mineral riches. Lang learns Islandian, a fact that helps him to obtain the post of U.S. Consul in Islandia; but the pressure brought to bear upon the State Department by his uncle, an influential New York businessman who wishes to “open up” Islandia, is, as Lang later learns, even more important. Lang undertakes the long, difficult ocean voyage to Islandia and attempts to be a good consul, which means above all subverting the country that is his generous and welcoming host. But from the very beginning Lang is ambivalent, largely because of his friendship with Dorn, and in the end the U.S. Consul becomes himself absorbed by Islandia and all it represents of rebellion against the world that we all know so well.
If you are inveterately positive about the way the world is going, if you cannot imagine living on a farm and being surrounded by a silence that for the first few months drives even Lang almost mad, if you believe it would be sheer folly to go back to riding horseback instead of sitting behind the wheel of a car, if you think you could not get through an evening, to say nothing of a month or year or ten years, without being entertained by some electronic miracle, above all if you are unwilling to face the great question of whether you should live as you do, and if not then how you should live—if all these things are true, then Islandia is not for you. But if they are not true of you, or even if some of them are not true, then you are already an Islandian, just a little, and you will like Islandia.