4 - The Castle

Summary

Something which appears to everyone in childhood and where no one has ever been: Heimat.

Ernst Bloch

The modern Western subject, the citizen-individual, is emancipated from the milieu of his birth, he sets his own values, and he exercises rights freely negotiated in the social contract. K., the hero of Kafka's third novel The Castle, lays claim to such rights, saying shortly after his arrival: 'I want always to be free' (DS: 14). He has left his place of origin, his 'little home town' or 'old home' (DS: 17), he has travelled as a free agent to take up a post in a new place, and asserts the right to negotiate terms: 'I want no grace and favours from the castle but my rights' (DS: 93). The German word he uses is Heimat, meaning home town or homeland, which designates a physical place, or social space, or bounded medium which links the self with something larger through a process of identification signified by a spatial metaphor. Since no single English word could convey the many associations, I shall use the German term. But if K. is a modern subject, he seems to have arrived at the wrong destination. In contrast to Kafka’s first novel with its New World setting and to The Trial set in a modern city of banks and proletarian suburbs, in The Castle only electric light and the telephone disrupt the otherwise vaguely feudal atmosphere of a village located under the shadow of a castle.