But he never explains in the intellectual sense. ‘True reality is always unrealistic,’ a friend records him as saying. ‘Look at the clarity, purity and truth of a Chinese coloured woodcut. To talk like that – that would be something.’ Kafka makes pictures.

Can there be hope if truth ends as it begins, in the inexplicable? Or do we misunderstand the nature of hope? Writing is a positive and optimistic act, and Kafka must write or die. He is on record as saying the pen is not an instrument but an organ of the writer’s. In the month in which he starts to write The Castle he speaks in his diary of ‘the strange, mysterious, perhaps dangerous, perhaps saving comfort there is in writing’. And in that letter to Milena where he talks of listening to ‘the frightful voices from within’, he also speaks of his conviction that the fears themselves form a path to truth. Either that, or he has no access to truth: he has no other material.

‘It is true,’ the letter continues, ‘that this fear is perhaps not only fear but also a longing for something which is more than all the things which produce fear.’ His life is fear, but is it possible that fear is simply a false interpretation of events? In The Castle we find a double-aspect surface which reflects duality in the writer. In one aspect the surface as experienced seems fragmentary, disconnected and therefore inexplicable, a source of anxiety. In the other there is dream-like acceptance which implies belief in harmony beyond intellectual perception. The book is charged with essential fear, but also with essential hope, both together as they exist in the man.

It is easy to classify Kafka’s novels as catalogues of woe and handbooks of frustration. But he is presenting the evidence, the only evidence we have, and the writer starts from here. This evidence has to be absorbed. ‘Accept your symptoms,’ says Kafka in his diary. ‘Don’t complain about symptoms, immerse yourself in your suffering.’ This faith that revelation must and can come only from immediate suffering, the assault of experience, underlies many diary entries which seem puzzling if the images are not accepted as form given to innate belief, pictures of thought. ‘Mount your attacker’s horse and ride it yourself. Only possibility. But what strength and skill that demands! And how late it is already!’ And perhaps most pathetic and inspiring: ‘Somewhere help is waiting and the beaters are driving me there.’ The beaters are his experience of life, there to be endured in every trifling detail, for no detail is trifling.

The Castle is nonsensical by rational standards. This is Kafka’s way of saying reason is not enough. He has told us through Milena that he is always trying to explain the inexplicable. But he never explains. In The Castle he makes no attempt to persuade the reader that events should follow like this. We are given a picture and told in effect: ‘This is how it is.’ The absurd is presented with such assurance, fantasy made so precise, that we are moved to follow as if by a law of induction.

Perhaps art is simply induction. The picture in prose or paint or stone touches vibrations in us we did not know existed. We respond and understand, beyond explanation. The secret understanding induced by art changes the structure before us from the absurd to the magical, and we know there is a common relationship between parts even if it can’t be understood, a unity or coalescence like the one suggested when K. tries to telephone the castle and hears only a buzzing sound quite unlike anything he has ever heard before when using the phone, and it seems to him, the attentive listener, as if from this strange sound there emerges ‘in a quite impossible fashion a single high-pitched yet powerful voice that struck the ear as if demanding to penetrate deeper than into mere hearing’. In a unified world nothing can be separate, not even the senses. Vibrations are common, and commonly observed; and it is primarily through sound that vibrations are perceptible, can even be seen to shake affected objects. Who can tell if the violin is silent when untouched by the bow?

In The Castle K.