Fractals, Actoids and the Momus Apocryphon of Kafka’s The Castle
“The picture changes in a way that I find less than comprehensible” (198), these words uttered by K. the central character of Kafka’s The Castle, speak for the succession of encumbrances and obstacles; delays and roundabouts that make up what might best, at least at first glance, be described as a muddled fairy tale wherein K.’s quest as land surveyor to be received by the Castle or officially recognized by Klamm (the Castle personified) is repeatedly denied. It is a fiction of sheer terror in which identity itself is turned inside out then hanged, drawn and quartered, where time appears to stop until it suddenly rushes forward. Through tenebrous stages of despair, hope, paradox; general outbursts of mix-up and confusion, Kafka portrays how completely life can be rendered senseless by an authoritarian state that administers through the semblance of ferment and disarray.
The ludicrousness is so relentless and yet rigidly held it takes on a clinical precision: “At eight o’clock in the morning all of them may be traveling on a certain road, half an hour later all are on a different one, ten minutes later on a third, half an hour later back on the first, which they then remain on all day, but at any moment this may change” (217). The further one delves into the tale, the more suspect the village attending the Castle becomes: “everything is idiotic and everything is lost” (291). As if its very absurdities were part of a greater orchestration; its villagers—talking gibberish, outdoing one another with exaggerations and fabrications—merely vessels of the same operation whereby the Castle becomes a living, breathing organism, invisibly feeding upon K.’s willpower and volition.
The argument can be made that K.’s exchanges and interactions—whether with Hans, Barnabas, Artur, Jeremias, the Village Chairman, Frieda, Olga, the list goes on and on—at some point become so pointless yet surgically drawn-out they are but fragments of the same frivolous interrogation, disrupting not only temporal distinctions but the individual autonomy of perspective itself. Indeed, it becomes trivial as to which character outwardly is for or against K.’s well-being, as each engagement, rapidly transitioning from one point to another, signifies another roadblock or filibuster, draining his remaining resolve. The narrator cagily, at times, nods to this: “K. had never heard Amalia speak continuously at such length, it even sounded different from her normal speech, for it held a certain majesty” (169).
We enter a world of actoids in which to be naturalized means to be neutralized, to be broken or fractured in order to serve in ways one otherwise would not be capable. As Kafka writes, the villagers work as if hypnotized with what “from the outside looked like weariness but was actually indestructible calm, indestructible peace” (274). Ensconced in Kafka’s realm of fracture and subfusc–as with those who, as prophetically or not, came before–K. succumbs to this weariness, becomes part of the project, the program, the automation; and tragically just when he might have been closest to rupturing The Castle‘s fourth wall, to recognizing that, beyond the village maze, it has none. In other words, the Castle is merely nominal. It is the lack of distance and limit of scope that ultimately fail K., that keep him (and most readers) klammed to “that probably entirely useless path, that probably lost day, that probably futile hope" of breaching the Castle.
The genius of this seemingly unfinished novel then revolves around Kafka’s own form of writing, how it serves as the original instance from which the fractal pattern emerges and replicates. It is only by recognizing the narrative’s elemental design that one may unlock The Castle. It is worth mentioning that the term fractal, whether lost to Kafka or not, stems from the Latin, frāctus, meaning ‘broken’ or ‘fractured,’ and fittingly (for the plot) is integral to the Theory of Chaos, which will take on a new meaning from here.
As Kafka admitted to Max Brod during the months spent writing Das Schloss (which in German is a homonym referring to a lock): “The movement multiplies itself–it is a regular solar system of vanity […] Such a writer is continually staging such a scene” (LFFE 334). The prototype expands from here if we interrogate two characters; one major, one small who combine for that molded “someone who was more than you and me and all the people in the village” (309). Momus, who on the surface appears as merely Klamm’s village secretary, is in fact Klamm; or more accurately Klamm is Momus. In line with Kafka’s dark humor, Momus can be traced to the Greek Mōmos, meaning “disgrace, blame, ridicule.” In Greek Mythology, he is the god of satire, mockery and of poets; the daemon of evil-spirited blame and unfair criticism, who, read in this light, certainly comes to feast upon K. at all points and stages.
Because of his incessant mockery of the Olympians, Momus was sequestered to a rock where he was gelded like a horse. However, missing the minor god’s honesty if not openness, Jupiter salvages a manuscript in which Momus records how to rule firmly with a tight grip. As for any fractal evidence, Olga’s cagey revelation will suffice: “A powerful young gentleman, isn’t he? And so he probably doesn’t look at all like Klamm? And yet you can find people in the village who would swear that Momus is Klamm and none other than he” (181). What’s more, Momus is often rendered in sculpture and paintings lifting a mask as if to nod towards his penchant to deceive. It is through this framework–of Momus wearing the mask of Klamm–that K. is klammed, which (in German) roots down to something kept clamped, gorged, locked. Further, it is through this mask that the daemon is able to roost over The Castle‘s labyrinth, that he is able to possess inhabitants as he freely does with the chairman, Artur and Jeremias–“the smiles” of whom K. finds “indistinguishable” (61).
This unique ability to escape notice at so many different scales and levels is precisely due to his very abundance; speaking through village actoids, his recurrence is continually ignored, misunderstood, or underestimated because of the sheer absurdities in which his authority is cloaked. In closing, Momus as Klamm serves, however invisibly, as the mouthpiece for the rule of tyranny–whether this is seen through to the tyranny of one, or the tyranny of many, depends on the degree to which you have been fractured.
Oh and with this fractal reading, The Castle, ending mid-sentence with “but what she said,” should be taken not as unfinished but open-ended.
EPILOGUE
Certainly, the vatic vision of mind control seems to have leaked out of The Castle, leaving its stain of “exhaustion, disappointment, inconsiderateness, and indifference” in the tourbillion of Trump’s Amerika. The Castle eerily anticipates the cold war objectives of Project CHATTER (Russian) and our own Germanic BLUE BIRD: to discover a means of conditioning personnel to prevent extraction of information, to explore the viability of controlling individuals by application of special interrogation.
I’ll borrow from Bürgel’s disclaimer before wandering off too far: “I don’t want to get into the question of the true state of affairs, the illusion may actually correspond to reality, in my position I lack the distance that is necessary to establish that, but listen carefully to what I am saying, sometimes opportunities do arise” (261).
Works Cited
Kafka, Franz, and Mark Harman. The Castle: A New Translation, Based on the Restored Text. New York: Schocken, 1998. Print.
Kafka, Franz, Richard Winston, and Clara Winston. Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors. New York: Schocken, 2016. Print.
Eric Helms holds degrees from Furman University and Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Some of his work can be found in the Asheville Poetry Review, key_hole, Prelude, Diagram, Rhino, Souvenir, American Athenaeum, and Blunderbuss. He resides in North Carolina.
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