Beckett's "Reversed Metamorphosis"-What Constitutes a Serious Reading of The Castle?

Comparative Literature, Fall 2004 by Kalinowski, G M

I've only read Kafka in German-serious reading-except for a few things in French and English-only The Castle in German. I must say it was difficult to get to the end. The Kafka hero has a coherence of purpose. He's lost but he's not falling to bits. My people seem to be falling to bits. Another difference, you notice how Kafka's form is classic, it goes on like a steamroller-almost serene. It seems to be threatened the whole time-but the consternation is in the form. In my work there is consternation behind the form, not in the form. (Samuel Beckett, interviewed in The New York Times, May 6, 1956)

INCONSISTENCIES IN BECKETTS CRITICAL terminology, particularly with respect to what he variously denotes by form, have led the above remarks to be read specifically to the end of formulating a Beckettian aesthetic. James Mays, for instance, has noted that Beckett makes analogous points critiquing the artist Masson in the "Three Dialogues": Masson "has to contend with his own technical gifts, which have the richness, the precision, the density and balance of the high classical manner" (Beckett, Disjecta 141). According to Beckett, Kafka's "competence" similarly "keeps at bay problems it cannot encompass" (Mays 274). As a result, Kafka's fidelity to failure is short-circuited by a technical competence that limits him to expressing what can be, as opposed to the "expression that there is nothing to be expressed, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express" (Disjecta 139). In short, Kafka does not go the whole Beckettian hog and is merely another can-doer circumscribed, like Masson, within the circle of his technical competence.1

Although Mays elucidates some valid formal contrasts in his essay, he neglects seriously to consider the engagement suggested by Beckett's remarks, and especially the question of what Beckett means by "serious reading." This critical omission dates back to Ruby Cohn's 1961 essay "Watt in the Light of The Castle," which has seemingly persuaded posterity to consider the subject laid to rest. In fact, however, Cohn leaves the question of a direct link between Walt and The Castle dangling. In an attempt to buck the trend in assimilating Kafka and Beckett to shibboleths like "pessimism," Cohn provides a series of finely calibrated contrasts between The Castle and Watt, while at the same time neglecting a playful logic haunting the very contrasts she observes. In what follows I attempt to uncover that logic by identifying in those contrasts a structure of intertextual operations that reflects Beckett's reference to "serious reading."2

What constitutes (a) "serious reading"? I begin my attempt to answer this question by returning to a phrase from Beckett's remarks on Kafka: "I must say it was difficult to get to the end." Now, coming from anyone else this remark would seem innocuous enough, reflecting what is, after all, a common grievance with The Castle. Coming from Beckett, however, it gives considerable pause for thought. For even after one notes the calculated and comical impertinence-Beckett remarking the difficulty of another's writing-and masters one's suspicion that, coming from Beckett, this might even constitute a compliment, one has yet to begin to appreciate the phrase in the light of Beckett's literary rhetoric and practice. For it is difficult to imagine that Beckett, the incomparable poet of ends, and never one to take words lightly, accidentally stumbled upon the phrase I must say it was difficult to get to the end.

The Castle, after all, famously remains incomplete, and appended to its abortive end are several unfinished chapters, fragments, and variations, followed in turn by Max Brod's "Nachwort" or "Additional Note," in which Brod relates the projected end of The Castle: "Kafka never wrote his concluding chapter. But he told me about it once when I asked him how the novel was to end" (Brod 441). It is indeed difficult for anyone to get to the end of The Castle: Beckett's predicament is ours as well.3

Dwelling on Beckett's remarks might encourage us to reconsider, for instance, Cohn's observation that "on the one hand ... we have an actually unfinished novel, and, on the other, a novel whose surface finish is a subtly controlled device" (155). Like The Castle, Watt has an assortment of odds and ends attached to its (ostensible) end. These "Addenda" are accompanied by a footnote declaring that "The following precious and illuminating material should be carefully studied. Only fatigue and disgust prevented its incorporation" (Watt 247). In the case of The Castle, this task of carefully studying unincorporated "precious and illuminating material" fell, of course, to Brod, who appended that material to the unfinished novel for subsequent perusal.

Watt might therefore be read as Beckett's response to The Castle's reception, as an attempt to incorporate within his novel the unserem history of Kafka's. Indeed, the relation between Sam, Walt's peculiar narrator, and Watt bears an uncanny resemblance to that between Brod and Kafka: much as it fell to the faithful Brod to salvage The Castle for posterity, it falls to the good Sam to salvage Watt's story. Watt also seems to replay the process whereby Brod's "Nachwort" became increasingly entangled with the literary work it was intended to explain (an erosion of textual perimeters that may have its source in the fact that Brod's extraliterary commentary is accommodated, under the same title, alongside Kafka's literary text).4 Beckett's leitmotif of the uncertain relation between observer and observed occurs in Kafka as an uncertain intertextual relation between novel and commentary.