After K

He's still one of the touchstones, Franz Kafka. The new arts centre in Manchester, Home, has "Kafka's Monkey" as part of its opening season, and last night I went to see an oddity, a version of his unfinished manuscript "The Castle", filmed by Michael Haneke.  Originally shown on Austrian TV in 1997 it feels older, somehow, a faithful retelling of a somewhat untellable tale. For "The Castle" was one of those manuscripts that Kafka may well never have wanted to see the light of day. It's telling that the best way to describe the film is as "Kafkaesque", so emblematic has Franz's work become. The Land Surveyor turns up in a village on the outskirts of the Castle that has hired him. Its a great opportunity for the man, yet the labrynthine bureaucracy that led to him being hired is so deep in the past that initially he is denied access, even to a bed, given that he has no permit. He is then assigned two "assistants", spying on his every word, as he begins to make his presence felt in a community that lives under the whims of a faceless bureaucracy, where livelihoods can be destroyed through some unknowing gesture. The Land Surveyor (with no land to survey) is made of strong stuff, and will not take no for an answer. He has been given a name - "Klamm" - who has apparently hired him. When he seduces/is seduced by Frieda, Klamm's mistress, is it because he wants to get nearer to the source of his trial (to echo that other Kafka novel) or because she is another spy? The absurdist novel is turned into an absurdist film which is occasionally ridiculous, with the grotesques of the village reminding you of Polanski's "The Fearless Vampire Killers", filmed 30 years earlier. The depiction of East European peasantry having not moved on much in the interim. What makes the film compelling, apart from its still resonant source material, is its lead actors, where both K, (the Land Surveyor) and Frieda, are brilliantly portrayed. The film, like the book, finishes as Kafka wrote it, mid-sentence, the story unresolved; yet it feels that any resolution would be a betrayal of the system that exists in place at the Castle, which is perfect only that any possibility is interpretable. Such is the tyranny of bureaucracy. Required viewing for any of the current government's disability assessment advisors.

For what we still see in Kafka is a reflection of a society that at the time he was writing, was yet to be named. He gave us a language by which to mock, if not understand, the emerging technocracy. The ruthless efficiency of tyranny is surely based upon what Kafka's books described, a circumlocuting of man, so that he no longer has agency; but that those agents that destroy him are themselves equally powerless actors behaving on the nebulous instruction of the machine.

What struck me watching "The Castle" as well, was the humanity that is at the heart of his diaries and letters. When K meets Frieda in the corridor of the inn towards the end, both having committed a kind of betrayal, their speeches read like something out of the letters. For love, denied love, was Kafka's other subject, and provides the counterpoint to that cold humour of displacement.

A hundred years on from the first publication of "Metamorphosis", Kafka still has a cultural resonance, that has outlasted many of his peers. The troubled publication history of work that was not finished for publication at the time of his death means that there have been several "versions" of Kafka - rather than a definitive text. Add to that the ambiguities of his life and nationality, and it seems we are not quite done with him yet.