incommensurabilities, progresses in his later works with growing clearness towards a complete renunciation of earthly aims, while Franz Kafka’s hero obstinately insists to the point of exhaustion on regulating his life on earth in accordance with instructions from “the Castle,” although he is forcibly and even brutally rebuffed by every Castle functionary. The fact that thus he is led into open expressions of disrespect for the “Castle,” while retaining the deepest reverence for it in his heart, is essentially what constitutes the poetic mood, the ironical atmosphere, of this incomparable novel. All K. ’s vilifications merely show what a gulf there is between human reason and divine grace; a gulf seen from the wrong end of the perspective, of course, from the human end, so that the human beings ( K. as well as the pariah family of Barnabas) are apparently completely in the right, and yet in some incomprehensible way always turn out to be in the wrong. This relationship between man and God, running as it were along a distorted plane, and the fact that reason cannot bridge the gulf, could not be better expressed (and that is why on closer inspection the apparently bizarre form of this novel proves to be the only possible), than by Kafka’s presentation of Heaven as seen by human reason, which he gives with magical humour, showing heavenly powers now as objects of the greatest love and reverence, such as Herr Klamm (Ananke?) enjoys, and now as subjects for scornful criticism, both of the clever and the silly kind, even at times as utterly incompetent (the filing of the village documents), or as disreputable, moody or impish (the assistants), or as pedantic and narrow-minded; but in every case as inexplicable. The nuances with which Kafka describes his heavenly powers are not all on one note, but show an endless and delicate gradation both in tragedy and in tragicomedy. And he has an equally rich range of expression for the obverse of heavenly guidance, earthly blundering.

“Whatever one does, it’s always wrong”⁠—this theme could not be played on with more convincing and inventive variation than in K. ’s many vain attempts to get himself into the right relationship with the village and