FRANZ KAFKA (LIKE THE REST OF US) faces the disappearance of the millennia-old Transcendent Center from European consciousness. In the absence he does not find cause for despair but from it discovers a new dimension of existence. Through the deployment of underlying narrative “strange loops” (to borrow a term from Douglas Hofstader), Kafka’s work, in particular The Castle (Das Schloss, 1926), constructs an art that can survive the disappearance of a grounding center. His novel is an endless stairway on which, discovering that we are not lamed by the absence of God, we walk briskly on to meet ourselves in this new century. The Castle’s “strange loop” narrative leads us ever upwards, ever downwards, and always back to ourselves, always back to reality through fictions that defy the “many” who “complained that the words of the wise are over and over again merely parables and of no use in everyday life, and that’s all we have” (KSS, 161).

With the disastrous absence of the Transcendent Center — an absent center, not merely a central absence (the Gnostic’s deus absconditus) — goes the traditional grounds of a theistic culture — or so one story goes. Resting neither on Something nor on Nothing, post-god Man can be neither a magician, manipulating through ritual and language the capricious and unfathomable forces that govern his life, nor a mystic, emptying himself out to overleap his precarious condition. If we maintain the necessity of being maintained, the situation becomes intolerable. The past century argues, in ashes more eloquent than words, that all that is left for us if we must rest on something and yet, having exhausted our gods, can rest on nothing, is the Morton’s Fork of existentialism or nihilism — absurdity or self-destruction, twin parodies of priesthood and kenosis.

Nietzsche grasps this intolerable freefall into infinitude best when he writes that “we have forsaken the land and gone to sea! We have destroyed the bridge behind us — more so, we have demolished the land behind us!”2 The intimate and disastrous consequence of this destruction follows immediately, in his parable of the madman in the marketplace who cries of the death of God: