Kafka's The Castle

I have just read Kafka's The Castle, having merely read a few short stories previously. An extraordinary work; life rendered in a kind of elemental, skeletal dream world. I don't feel I have the ability, and to a compensating extent much interest in critiquing books( I have my doubts about skeletal, elemental dream world), or for that matter any ability for descriptive prose whatsoever, but that very refusal to be edited or reduced into a lesser form than it is is an element of what is so extraordinary about this work, and perhaps of art in its purest sense. A much impressed Aldous Huxley wrote of it: One would need to have a very special sort of mind to write it... In a work of art, a truth is always a beauty truth; and a beauty truth is a mystical entity, a two-in-one; the truth is quite inseparable from its companion, so you can only state in the most general terms what its nature is. 

 The desire to leave the work, in this case The Castle, as it is and not analyse it perhaps includes the temptation towards nebulosity, but it does seem on the other hand a temptation towards the kind of certainty that is inimical to the nature of The Castle to wish, for example, to decipher the meaning of K's assistants: to seek a hook upon which to rest the rationalising intellect, whereas Kafka seems to dissolve all such refuges of false certainty. 

To resort to the words of another great artist of the last century, Andrei Tarkovsky, might be a helpful escape route for this post: We can express our feelings regarding the world around us either by poetic or by descriptive means. I prefer to express myself metaphorically. Let me stress: metaphorically, not symbolically. A symbol contains within itself a definite meaning, certain intellectual formula, while metaphor is an image. An image possessing the same distinguishing features as the world it represents. An image — as opposed to a symbol — is indefinite in meaning. One cannot speak of the infinite world by applying tools that are definite and finite. We can analyse the formula that constitutes a symbol, while metaphor is a being-within-itself, it's a monomial. It falls apart at any attempt of touching it...A true image is an abstraction, it cannot be explained, it only transmits truth and one can only comprehend it in one's own heart. Because of that it's impossible to analyse a work of art by utilising its intellectual significance. I am an enemy of symbols. Symbol is too narrow a concept for me in the sense that symbols exist in order to be deciphered. An artistic image on the other hand is not to be deciphered, it is an equivalent of the world around us. I think symbol and allegory rob the artist.

And from Tarkovsky again, but on a somewhat different theme: Juxtaposing a person with an environment that is boundless, collating him with a countless number of people passing by close to him and far away, relating a person to the whole world, that is the meaning of cinema.