【现货速发】城堡
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作者弗朗茨·卡夫卡
出版社译林出版社
ISBN9787544757256
出版时间2016-03
装帧平装
开本16开
定价26元
货号23927831
上书时间2024-12-24
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前言
KAFKA’s last novel centres on a simple and compelling cluster of images. A rural castle, the property of an absent nobleman, is run by an administrative staff who dominate the village beneath the castle. The protagonist, K., coming from outside and ignorant of the village and the castle, has painfully to learn their ways and to discover that, despite all his efforts, he cannot gain access to the castle. So far, this may seem to match the associations of gloom and oppression suggested by the term ‘Kafkaesque’. Kafka, however, has much more to offer than the ‘Kafkaesque’, and if one can put aside such presuppositions, The Castle provides many surprising discoveries.The reader of The Castle is likely already to know The Trial, and may think that Kafka has simply replaced one opaque, hierarchical authority, the court, with another, the castle. In their texture, however, the two novels differ considerably. In contrast to the anonymous city of The Trial, The Castle has a vividly presented material and social setting. We are in a remote village, in the depth of winter. The snowbound village is repeatedly evoked: ‘more and more little houses, their window-panes covered by frost-flowers’, ‘a narrow alley where the snow lay even deeper. Pulling his feet out of it as they kept sinking in again was hard work’ (p. 13). We feel how exhausting it is to have constantly to struggle through the deep snow. Moreover, the village is a community, with friendships and hatreds that go back through the generations. We learn about the village’s two inns, the humble Bridge Inn and the more pretentious Castle Inn, and about how the latter’s landlord and landlady acquired it; we meet the families of the tanner Lasemann and the cobbler Brunswick, and hear about their standing in the village; and we are told at great length about the family of Barnabas, the castle messenger, and how the family are in bad odour because of their refractory attitude towards the castle. And whenever a new figure is introduced, he or she is neatly characterized, so that even those who appear briefly — the carter Gerstacker, the village schoolmaster, the schoolmistress Gisa and her languishing suitor Schwarzer — are vivid presences.This community is also the setting for a love story. Unlike the callous and self-centred protagonist of The Trial, the main character here is at least briefly capable of love, and the rapid development and decline of his love-affair with Frieda has moments of poignancy notfound earlier in Kafka’s work. These features offset the extensive conversations about the puzzling ways of the castle authorities, which correspond to Kafka’s profound concern with ambiguity, but which sometimes make one feel that the novel could have benefited from the work of an editor. Kafka did not complete the novel; like his others, The Trial and The Man Who Disappeared, it was published after his death by his friend Max Brod.If we seek access to the novel through Kafka’s biography, we shall be disappointed. The snow-covered environment is that of the ski resort of Spindlermuhle in the Tatra Mountains, where Kafka stayed in January 1922, while the rural community no doubt reflects his experiences in Zurau, where he stayed on his sister’s farm in the winter of 1917 – 18. The emotional drama goes back, in complex and untraceable ways, to his relationships with the Czech journalist Milena Polak, nee Jesenska, and with Julie Wohryzek, his second fiancee. But the isolated setting of the novel, and its quasi-fantastic social system, enable Kafka above all to explore and dramatize some long-standing intellectual preoccupations.One of these was the idea of a community. Kafka’s personal writings constantly express his sense of solitude, his isolation from his family, his need to find a substitute in writing, and his wish to found a community by marrying and starting a family. But, while attracted to the community as an ideal, he was also sharply aware of the frictions arising from living with even one other person. When he and Felice Bauer stayed together in a hotel in the summer of 1916, Kafka recorded in his diary how laborious it was to live together, adding: ‘only deep down perhaps a narrow trickle worthy to be called love’ (5 July 1916). Integration into a community such as the fictional village would be many degrees harder. Hence K. the outsider is treated with condescension, contempt, and outright dislike by the villagers, and allowed only a marginal place in their community as janitor in the village school. His situation has been compared to that of Jews seeking a place in European society. But to interpret the novel accordingly would be too narrow.The novel is also concerned with authority of various kinds. The castle is said to belong to Count Westwest, whom we never see. In his absence the castle is run by a huge staff of bureaucrats, arranged in a hierarchy, who manage the affairs of the village. There is muchsatire on bureaucratic confusion and inefficiency. But it is also clear that the bureaucrats arrogate to themselves the respect formerly paid to the vanished aristocracy. Kafka was writing just after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian empires. His novel asks in part what will take the place of traditional authority.Alongside political power, the castle and its staff receive religious devotion from the villagers. The many religious overtones in the text have sometimes been interpreted as meaning that the castle has an enigmatic religious significance: thus Max Brod called it the abode of divine grace. Erich Heller memorably challenged this interpretation by pointing to the misbehaviour of the castle bureaucrats: ‘The castle in Kafka’s novel is, as it were, the heavily fortified garrison of a company of Gnostic demons, successfully holding an advanced position against the manoeuvres of an impatient soul.’But this may be both extravagant and misguided. The castle is enigmatic: we cannot tell what power it contains — if any. The image may have been suggested by a passage in Schopenhauer’s great philosophical work The World as Will and Idea, where Schopenhauer argues that scrutiny of the world can never tell us about the true, inner nature of things: ‘we can never arrive at the real nature of things from without. However much we investigate, we can never reach anything but images and names. We are like a man who goes round a castle seeking in vain for an entrance, and sometimes sketching the fa?ades.’Perhaps the castle contains no secret. It may be more appropriate to see it not as a real spiritual authority, whether benign or malign, but rather as ‘the emblem for the modern, secular, post-religious era’, and as the projection of people’s desire for a spiritual authority.As in The Trial, where we are invited to wonder why Josef K. submits to the authority of the court, so here Kafka is examining the psychological mechanisms that lead people to believe in a spiritual authority and submit to its demands — demands which are based in their owndesires and hopes, and thus ultimately in their own power. Kafka summed up the problem of authority in a little parable written on 2 December 1917:They were given the choice of being kings or royal messengers. Like children, they all wanted to be messengers. Therefore there are only messengers; they rush through the world, and as there are no kings, they shout their meaningless messages to one another. They would gladly put an end to their wretched condition, but they dare not because of their oath of loyalty.This closed circle — servitude to an authority that one has oneself created and could in theory destroy — is the condition of the villagers in The Castle. K. challenges that authority; he is a land surveyor, whose work consists in rational calculation, and thus a representative of the disenchanted, post-religious modern world. But he is also susceptible to its appeal.Within Kafka’s work, the castle and its hierarchy seem to be an expansion of the legend of the doorkeeper which the chaplain told to Josef K. in The Trial. There, a countryman comes to the gate of the Law, as K. comes to the village, and is told by the doorkeeper that he cannot enter yet; the man spends his whole life waiting submissively for permission to enter, only to be told, as he dies, that the entrance was intended specially for him. The doorkeeper resembles the castle official of whom K. sees a portrait soon after his arrival: both have big beards and prominent hooked noses. Both are members of a hierarchy: we hear later in The Castle of a warden with several deputy wardens, besides officials and secretaries, while the doorkeeper evokes a series of further doorkeepers and says: ‘The sight of just the third is too much even for me.’ A similar phrase occurs in The Castle, when the landlady of the Bridge Inn asks K., ‘how did you bear the sight of Klamm?’ (p. 47). The doorkeeper professes to be ‘powerful’, and the word is used in a similar undefined way by the landlord, who describes officials, but not K., as ‘powerful’ (p. 10). K. imagines Klamm’s door being guarded by a ‘doorkeeper’ (p. 108).The castle is defined by its contrast with a traditional religious building: not with a synagogue, as one might expect given Kafka’s increasing consciousness of his Jewish identity, but with a church. As K. looks up at the castle on his first morning in the village, he compares it with the church in his home town: In his mind, he compared the church tower of his childhood home with the tower up above. The former, tapering into a spire and coming down to a broad, red-tiled roof, was certainly an earthly building — what else can we build on this earth? — but it had been erected for a higher purpose than these huddled, low-built houses and made a clearer statement than the dull, workaday world of this place did. (p. 11)This passage may be cautiously agnostic, but it concedes that the church spire at least points to some goal beyond or
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