Kafka's Grail Castle

"Gewiss," sagte K., "noch besser aber verstehe ich, dass hier ein entsetzlicher Missbrauch mit mir, vielleicht sogar mit den Gesetzen getrieben wird. Ich werde mich fur meine Person dagegen zu wehren wissen." "Wie wollen Sie das tun?" fragte der Vorsteher. "Das kann ich nich verraten," sagte K. (Das Schloss 88) Marthe Robert, in her book, The Old and the New. From Don Quixote to Kafka, argues that the Kafka hero is an inversion of the traditional quest hero: "Unique to Kafka is the fact that the prized object or goal has itself no fixed value. [ . . .] Kafka's hero is the inverse of the traditional quest hero who may be overwhelmed by the trials he must undergo but knows at least the value of the Golden Fleece or the Grail or any other symbolic object worthy of his efforts. K. the Land-Surveyor knows nothing at all about the Castle save that it exists and that apart from himself no one seems much concerned with it" (194). Robert's comparison of the fixed value of the grail or Golden Fleece to the unfixed value of the Castle begs a more important question for a critic approaching Das Schloss: is K.'s goal "the Castle," and, if so, what does that mean? Certainly, K. wants to penetrate the Castle and meet with every official he can. But another important shift has occurred from the traditional quest narrative to Kafka's that Robert does not mention: not only does K. know nothing at all about the Castle, but the "symbolic object worthy of his efforts" has become a place rather than a thing - a place where, in the traditional grail romance, the grail is kept. A comparison of the medieval grail romance with Das Schloss reveals many important similarities that have not yet been examined. InPerceval (1 181), the first extant version by Chretien de Troyes, the naive (nice) young Welshman enters a wasted land (terre gaste) where no crops can grow. He meets a wounded fisherman (the Roi Pescheoir) who offers him hospitality at his castle and gives him directions. Perceval follows them, but he cannot find the castle, and assumes he has been tricked. Then a castle tower seems to emerge as if from nowhere. Inside, Perceval sees a procession of mysterious objects, including a lance that bleeds and a brilliant grail (graal) carried by a beautiful maiden. He defers his questions as to why the lance bleeds and whom the grail serves because he was warned earlier that day that a knight should never be too inquisitive. After he leaves the castle the next day, he learns that asking about the lance and the grail would have healed the wounded Fisher King and lifted the curse from the land. Perceval sets out to find the castle again, beginning what Juliette Wood calls the "wanderings and adventures" stage common to most grail narratives, in which the hero repents for his sins before earning a second chance (170). In Das Schloss, K. arrives in a seemingly deserted village trapped in an endless winter, which, as Levi-Strauss points out, is the origin of the waste land theme (23). The barmaid Pepi remembers spring and summer lasting only a few days, and even on those days the snow was falling (488) . K. is looking for a castle, though it is not at all clear why. K.'s first words upon waking up at the Gentlemen's Inn in the village are, "In welches Dorf habe ich mich verirrt? Ist denn hier ein Schloss?" (8). When he tries to walk toward the Castle,1 no road leads to it. As he nears it, in fact, it doesn't even look like a castle anymore: "es war doch nur ein recht elendes Stadtchen, aus Dorfhausern zusammengetragen" (17). The Castle, it turns out, has no defined physical place; it is anywhere that official business takes place. At the Gentlemen's Inn, K. sees the official Klamm through a peephole sitting at a table, sleeping. K. seduces the barmaid Frieda, who is Klamm's mistress and serves him his beer. The next day, K. decides that he must talk to Klamm, and struggles to do so for the rest of the book without so much as gaining another glimpse of him. …