lives in a space where magical connection is taken for granted. The strong erotic charge in the novel, which is a transposition of Kafka’s passion for Milena, finds its climax when K. and Frieda make love amid the rubbish and puddles of beer on the floor of the bar at the Count’s Arms, and K. ‘constantly had the feeling that he had lost his way or wandered farther into a strange land than anyone before him, a strange land where even the air held no trace of the air at home, where a man must suffocate from the strangeness yet into whose foolish enticements he could do nothing but plunge on, getting even more lost’. Apart from being a reasonably accurate description of the physical form of the novel as a strange land, this can also be taken as yet another commentary on the central theme of familiar and strange, reason and fantasy, caution and ambition, doubt and certainty.

To understand beyond understanding we too must be in a mood of acceptance. Our reason is bounded by perceptions which cover part of reality, not the whole. Kafka as an individual is not protected by the skin of habit and selective awareness. Each sentence in his works uncovers him, and one phrase in particular in his letters to Milena, given in parenthesis, seemingly an afterthought, suddenly illuminates his writing: ‘Sometimes I think I understand the Fall of Man better than anybody else.’

What he means is that he is abnormally sensitive to the damage caused by consciousness of self. We are told in Genesis how Adam and Eve eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and are suddenly aware of themselves in their surroundings. This awareness is the real expulsion from Paradise. Unconscious harmony is traded for conscious intellect, and mankind finds itself opposite and always opposite. From the darkness of harmony we move to the faint light of knowledge and the fractures of definable experience. This is the Fall Kafka understands so well.

For Kafka’s heroes, as it happens, especially in The Trial and The Castle, the shades of night are always falling fast, no matter what time of day it is. They grope through the dark as if in search of a truth reluctant to appear in the illuminated segment we call intellect. It’s as if they are always searching for the state of unconscious harmony before ‘their eyes were opened and they knew that they were naked’. The Castle in particular often seems a study in shadows, as if the hero is aware of dark harmony at the end of his quest, beyond the frustrating complications of the present. K. is always making for the remote castle on the hill, always on the point of achieving something, never quite getting there. As he looks at the castle, ‘the longer K. looked, the less he could make out, and the deeper everything sank into semi-darkness’. The effort itself is an obstacle because, as a conscious expression of individual and separate entity, it remains a denial of harmony.

In this novel even the physical movements of the hero seem to be affected by the peculiar regulations of dreams. Everybody else can skim over the surface of snow, it is only K. who flounders. ‘There is a goal but no way,’ says Kafka in one of his notes: ‘What we call a way is hesitation.’ K. drags his feet as he hesitates before choice. He does not know if any one way is better than another. His perplexity is transposed (as everything in this book is a transposition of mood) into the suffering character who sinks at every step into the deep snow which is a firm crust for everyone else. In every moment of life the material is the same, only judgement differs.

Standing in the snow, K. sees the twins Arthur and Jeremiah glide past him at speed. He has not seen them before, he now learns their names, he knows they are from the castle.