Kafka’s Castle and the closed doors of Holyrood

THERE IS A SPECIFIC, QUIET HORROR in realizing that the record of a journey has been wiped clean. I was recently invited to join a highly literate book club. “It’s just a group of guys meeting up for a drink and a smoke,” I was reassured. But – and I wasn’t sure if this was advice or a warning – “we do take it seriously”. And indeed they do: the discussion, like the whisky, flows easily into the early hours.

This month we’re reading Franz Kafka’s novel, The Castle. The novel was unpublished in Kafka’s lifetime (he died in 1924), with its first English translation produced by the Scottish couple Willa and Edwin Muir in 1930. I had made copious notes and had intended to write a structured critique of what I thought were particularly interesting features.

But, like a character in a Kafka story, I found that the digital trail of my thoughts had vanished. I was left standing in the metaphorical snow, clutching nothing but fragmentary notes and the unsettling realization that I had become a “parallel K” – no longer an observer of the labyrinth, but a resident within it. That loss of direction became the key to unlocking what is particularly relevant about The Castle in light of the forthcoming Scottish election.

In his earlier novel The Trial, Kafka offers us the parable that is known today as “Before the Law”. We see a man from the country who travels to the gates of the Law, seeking entry. A formidable gatekeeper stands in his way, telling him he cannot enter now. The man spends his entire life waiting on a stool, bribing the guard and peering through the doorway, only to be told at the moment of his death that this particular door was intended for him alone. And now – it is being closed.

the same gatekeeper stands at the threshold of Holyrood

It was impossible to watch the political theatre of Scotland in recent weeks and not see that same gatekeeper standing at the threshold of Holyrood. We have heard the furore over Malcolm Offord’s jokes and witnessed the harrying of prospective parliamentary candidates, a process framed as socially virtuous but undoubtedly experienced as a calculated exclusion. Like the peasant in the parable, these people have the right to put themselves forward, yet they find the system is geared entirely toward the act of keeping them out. The gate is for them, but they are forbidden from passing through it.

This brings us to the irony hidden in the title of The Castle. In German, Das Schloss carries a double meaning that the Penguin Modern Classic cover captures: it translates to both “The Castle” and “The Lock”.

The general outline of the novel is that the protagonist, K., arrives claiming to be a land surveyor summoned by the Castle authorities. No one can confirm this, and the Castle remains permanently, bureaucratically out of reach. When K. arrives at the village, he expects a seat of power – a destination of majesty. Instead, he finds a wretched-looking town, a jumble of houses that offer no welcome. The building is not a goal; it is a mechanism that has fastened itself shut.

The Scottish Parliament building itself embodies this architectural and political disappointment. It was promised as a bright symbol of a new, accessible democracy, but it has become an indecipherable jumble of forms, nothing more than a collection of messy offices where the gears grind endlessly without the machine ever moving forward.

However, the most chilling part of the story is not the gatekeeper or the lock, but the villagers. In Kafka’s world, the people have lived under the shadow of the Castle for so long that they have accepted its absurdities as normality. They no longer question why the records are lost or why the doors are closed; they have simply adapted to the stasis.

The act of engaging with our politics has become a deliberately exhausting one

As we look toward the upcoming election, there is this same apathy settling over the Scottish mood. Holyrood’s ineffectiveness has created a nation of villagers who have grown used to the unresolved tension, passively accepting a system whose sole function is the spectacle of governance. We are being trained to expect disappointment, to accept the closed door, and to forget that the Law was ever supposed to be open to us at all.

The act of engaging with our politics has become, like the experience of Kafka’s protagonists, a deliberately exhausting one. The last twenty-plus years of devolution have been no path to a destination, but a lifetime spent waiting on a stool before a door that is just about to close.

Kafka intended his protagonist K. to be, in the end, ground down by the waiting. K.’s heroism, or the virtue in his powerlessness, was not that he expected the castle doors to be flung open and the managerial class to welcome him in, but that he refused to pretend that the bureaucratic system was anything other than a mechanism for its own self preservation.

K. never stops seeing that clearly. K. never becomes a villager. Nor does he become a bureaucrat. Neither should we.