The Master Has Returned Home — The Scholars, Chapter 3#

Fan Jin stands in the market holding a chicken. His family has run out of food, and his mother has sent him to sell the bird for rice. The men carrying the examination results enter the village while he is away. His neighbors search for him and finally drag home a man who still refuses to believe the news. The notice already hangs in the house. He recognizes his name, as though decades of examinations have been settled on that sheet of paper, then collapses. When he wakes, he loses his reason. By the time Butcher Hu slaps him out of his delirium, everyone around him has changed their manners.²

Hu once treated his son-in-law as a penniless pedant. Now he fears harming this incarnation of the Literary Star. Fan Jin walks ahead, and Hu follows with his head lowered, repeatedly straightening his son-in-law’s clothes. At the door, he announces that the master has returned home. Zhang Jingzhai invokes a teacher-pupil connection to claim kinship, calls Fan Jin a brother, and gives him money and a house. Fan Jin has yet to write another essay or perform a single official duty, but forms of address, kinship and access to resources have all changed. The notice supplies a rank; the butcher, the local notable and the neighbors turn the rank into a life. Before Fan Jin can decide who he has become, others have believed for him and acted on that belief.

How can a sheet of paper make everyone change how they address him at once? We need to look before its arrival. Mr Ma Er surveys the routes open to learned men, from selection by words and conduct in the Spring and Autumn period through Song Neo-Confucianism, before arriving at the present dynasty’s selection by examination essays. In his account, even the sages would have to write the prescribed form to obtain office today. After years of failure, Ma Er reads scripts and edits model essays for publishers. Learning keeps returning to examination preparation: what to read, how to read it and how to judge it must all be recognizable to the examiner.³

Long examination training familiarizes students with a division of labor. Someone else sets the question, an authorized judge assesses the answer, an institution preserves the rank, and success may bring a social position. When this division occupies the main hours of study and controls the principal channel of feedback, posing a problem can recede behind answering it well. Students still think, but the examiner’s selections increasingly confirm what their thinking is good for.

Rankings also turn a particular answer into a judgment about a person. A mistake belongs to one moment, but repeated records can make it something “this person is bad at.” A high score can likewise expand into a general assessment of intelligence, discipline and prospects. Schools, families and employers save the effort of learning who someone is afresh. Those being assessed learn to tell their lives through the same record. Doubt, redirection and temporary failure must all find their place on the curve of their scores.

In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault places the examination at the intersection of hierarchical observation and normalizing judgment. Names, marks, comments and ranks make an individual a “case” that can be described, compared and retrieved.⁴ The scripts are collected; the case remains. Once families and institutions repeatedly call on a record, it can enter marriage, employment and ordinary association, answering in advance how a stranger should treat the person it describes.

Common standards allow that record to travel farther. Ronald Dore’s account of the “diploma disease” identifies two joined institutional conditions: standardized examinations give certificates a common currency, while career bureaucracies use general educational qualifications to select future members.⁵ Recruiters can make an initial choice and assign applicants to occupational routes without waiting for each to perform the job. This lowers the cost of selection at scale and extends the force of an educational history into the future.

A credential thus has something of the character of credit: it preserves a past assessment and underwrites a possibility yet to be realized. Zhang Jingzhai gives Fan Jin a house before he takes office, anticipating the power and connections a successful candidate may later acquire. The notice first answers “Who is Fan Jin?” Other people’s gifts then arrange the life that name might lead to. A past result acquires a future tense, and a person begins to organize the present through that future.

I Am Waiting for a Buyer — Analects, “Zihan”#

Fang Hongjian spends several years studying in Europe without completing a degree he can account for at home. As his return approaches, he needs a visible result to present to his father and his late fiancée’s family. He buys a doctorate from the fictitious Carleton University. The purchase adds nothing to his knowledge, but the identity of a foreign-trained PhD reaches home ahead of him. His elders can exhibit a return on their educational investment, and local society has a ready-made name for him.⁶

He knows that the degree is fraudulent and retains one principle: he will not use it formally to obtain a job. Yet photographs, newspapers and relatives have already taken possession of the title, making a respectable career and marriage imaginable. Shame keeps him at a private distance from the false doctorate; it does not stop the identity’s public effects.

Original conceptual illustration: the diploma takes finished form on the desk while its holder prepares the role he will be expected to play. Not an archival image or a reconstruction of a scene from the novel.

The Castle carries this identity that arrives in advance into an appointment. K reaches the village late at night and, when threatened with expulsion, says that the Count has summoned him as land surveyor. A telephone call first denies that there is such a surveyor, then acknowledges the earlier answer as a mistake. The novel never displays an original contract capable of settling the dispute, but administrative procedures already move around the role. K ties his claims to lodging, employment and access to the castle to the name “land surveyor.”⁷

The role first gives him a timeline for explaining what happens now. Refusal means that the paperwork is incomplete; humiliation can be compensated by eventual recognition; a person with connections may open the next door. K sees that the village procedures contradict one another, yet devotes much of his energy to proving that he was entitled to the position all along. His resistance demands that the castle honor the appointment. Whether that future can be secured becomes his reason for enduring the present.

A copy of the 1926 first edition of Kafka’s “The Castle.” Photograph by Zassen, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons; converted to WebP.

Barnabas knows how to make shoes and can help his father complete orders. Olga, however, places the family’s hope of restored standing in her brother’s identity as castle messenger. The office-issued outfit has yet to arrive, and neither the status of the assignment nor the way to carry it out is clear. She still reads each contact with an official as a possibility that the family is drawing closer to the castle.⁸

Delay need not bankrupt this future. The missing outfit can mean that recognition is on its way; an errand of uncertain origin can be treated as a trial before formal appointment. The more effort Olga puts into confirming the identity, the harder it becomes to treat the next errand as just an errand. The father’s shoemaking sustains today’s livelihood, while the messenger post commands the family’s interpretation of tomorrow.

Future positions can enter the present by another route as well. A Ministry of Education directive on graduate employment requires institutions to link employment outcomes to admissions and training, issue red- and yellow-card warnings for programs with poor employment quality, and incorporate career education into degree programs.⁹ Data about jobs after graduation thus feeds back into decisions about programs, resources and curricula. The fit between supply and demand becomes an object of educational governance.

The policy feedback has a defined administrative purpose; the roles in these novels enter family expectations, the individual’s endurance and everyday relationships. They meet at the point where a position yet to come can organize the present. Whether it also takes over judgment depends on whether subsequent practice can change that arrangement. Fang’s shame, K’s mockery of procedure and Barnabas’s doubts have not yet done so. Relatives and villagers continue to act in the name of the PhD, the surveyor and the messenger. Before any work product is visible, diplomas, appointments and letters answer on its behalf.

The Finest Essay Under Heaven — The Scholars, Chapter 3#

When Zhou Jin serves as an examiner, Fan Jin is still a candidate who has not attained licentiate status. Zhou Jin first reads his essay and finds it incomprehensible. On the second reading he begins to see some sense; on the third he declares it the finest essay under heaven and ranks Fan Jin first, admitting him as a licentiate. Zhou Jin has suffered in the examinations himself. The fifty-four-year-old candidate recalls his own history. He resolves to read the scripts closely rather than allow his aides to overlook real talent; a wish to repair an old injury enters the reading as well. The pen in the examiner’s hand then turns that reading into admission.²

Calling him discerning, or calling him partial, cannot by itself account for the change. The novel gives us no independent standard for a final assessment outside the examination hall, and sympathy does not erase the care of his repeated reading. We can still ask what changed between the three readings. For those who subsequently act on the published roll, however, that question has been settled: the examiner writes his judgment into the rank, and the process of reading disappears behind the result.

In The Castle, it is harder to find even that one person who decides. The village head begins by saying that the village needs no surveyor, then recounts the appointment’s history. The village had already replied that it had no need, but the papers reached the wrong department. Relevant documents may have remained in the village or vanished in transit; the department that received the mistaken delivery eventually obtained only an empty file cover. Investigating the mistake generated more documents. Each office continued from the material it had handled. K could find no person who both knew the whole sequence and would take responsibility for the appointment as a whole.¹⁰

Original conceptual illustration: the mistake in the appointment is dispersed among files and offices, leaving each custodian with only one part. Not a still from an adaptation of “The Castle.”

This way of doing business also gives doubt somewhere to go. A missing document may be in another review; if the clerk at hand knows nothing, someone farther inside may know. K and the villagers keep guessing which sheet lies closer to the castle’s intention. They doubt the telephone calls and letters while arranging housing and work around the appointment. Žižek’s term “objective belief” becomes useful at this separation between actions: belief can reside in rituals, objects and social practices, and one person’s doubt does not by itself stop others from carrying on as before.¹¹

Zhou Jin makes the selection on the script himself, leaving an author of the judgment who can be questioned. Castle officials cite earlier documents, while the village head explains the decision as a continuation of administrative history. Looking back leads to someone else’s material; waiting leads to the next procedure. The appointment remains in force, but its author becomes harder to identify. The script can be reread; correction in the castle keeps adding files.

Set that archival history beside what the village head said at the outset, and the contradiction becomes clearer. Boundaries are already marked, land seldom changes hands, and the few boundary disputes are settled locally. There is no surveying to be done, but the surveyor’s status still awaits a procedural resolution. The land cannot close the administrative case.

No Retainers, Yet Pretending There Are — Analects, “Zihan”#

Barnabas later delivers a second letter bearing Klamm’s name. It praises the surveying K has completed, commends the assistants and urges him to finish the work well. K immediately says that the superior has been misinformed: he has done no surveying. Barnabas can also see for himself what the assistants are worth. The village has no need for a survey, K has no survey results, and praise has already arrived.¹²

The gap between letter and land reveals an evaluative loop. The appointment gives K the name of surveyor, assistants appear around that name, and a letter from above declares progress. No such progress can be checked on the land. The mechanism this essay reads here is that evaluation may rely on an institution’s own records, while the work those records claim to describe cannot enter the evaluation.

A survey must agree with the land, shoes must fit, and the dirty water in a classroom must be changed. Intellectual work also encounters things that do not agree with it, though the conflict may emerge more slowly. Textual evidence can defeat an elegant interpretation; students who do not understand can force a teacher to find another way to explain; people affected by a policy can identify consequences omitted by a model. Such feedback tells workers what they need to change. If it may only be heard, without changing methods or conclusions, assessment will still stop at what the institution has already written.

Credits, reviews and project records let organizers follow work across large collaborations. The problem arises when pay and promotion depend on the record, while failures exposed by the work cannot revise it. Participants are then more likely to spend their effort on what can be entered and recognized. Ma Er reads, annotates and publishes with care; his collections make later candidates more familiar with the rules of assessment. If those candidates later become teachers or examiners, their own success can testify for the old rules in turn. Teaching and learning remain busy, but fewer answers are able to change those rules.

After K accepts a school caretaker’s post, he does have work whose results are visible at once. One morning the female teacher and pupils are already in the room. K carries out the dirty water, fetches fresh water and begins sweeping; Frieda scrubs the floor. Dust and dirty water do not read Klamm’s letter, and those present can see how the work is done.¹³ This does not give K a secure refuge from the castle. Reproaches and public humiliation persist. He is thinking of Barnabas and the future himself, placing the caretaker’s work within the days of waiting for formal recognition.

Cleaning the schoolhouse at least preserves a connection between work and result. No survey is performed on the land, yet the letter claims progress; whether the classroom has been swept can be answered by the room itself. Judgment must admit that kind of contradiction if it is to change with the work. Yet even when everyone’s actions are visible, the full consequence can still have no identifiable person responsible. Amalia’s family carries the problem from evaluation into attribution.

Not Me, but the Year — Mencius, “King Hui of Liang, Part I”#

Olga recounts the family’s history to K. The castle official Sortini once sent a vulgar and threatening letter ordering Amalia to come to the inn at once. She tore it up, threw the pieces in the messenger’s face and refused to go. She made no later gesture of submission, even in appearance. There was no formal trial, but the family began to be punished in everyday life.¹⁴

Customers retrieved the boots they had left for repair, and the entries in the order book were crossed out one by one. The assistant Brunswick left to establish his own business. Friends and acquaintances withdrew. The Fire Brigade Association told the father that his membership had ended and asked him to return his certificate. Aid from relatives preserved some connections for a time, then ceased. The father sought pardon from office to office, but officials said there was no accusation, at least in the records accessible to lawyers. He could name no formal measure the castle had taken against him. Even the grounds for asking pardon could not be acknowledged.

Sortini wrote the summons, while villagers carried out most of the punishment. Olga speaks of fear, but also of the embarrassment that made people unwilling to hear or discuss the affair again. She identifies no single command joining the customers’, assistant’s and association’s actions into one measure. The castle need not announce a verdict publicly: the family’s income, reputation and relationships have already collapsed together.

Watching one another is enough to keep the punishment going. When others withdraw, a later observer can more easily take withdrawal as proof that the affair has been settled. Their own retreat leaves the same reason for the next person. Each act need not wait for an order from above. For others, withdrawal may avoid risk or offer a chance to pursue a different livelihood. For the family, the successive losses of trade and association already amount to complete exclusion.

Retrieving boots, leaving a master and withdrawing a certificate each have identifiable actors and immediate consequences. Those actors know, at least, which relationship they are ending. How much each knows of the castle’s intention, how much pressure each faces and how much room each has to refuse are not described with equal precision in Olga’s account. Dennis Thompson calls this “the problem of many hands”: attribution requires us to trace causal contribution, knowledge and pressure person by person.¹⁵ A division of labor makes judgment harder; it does not make the acts unperformed.

The punished family cannot assemble these separate consequences into a case that can be heard. The father can point to no overall decision, effective date or signatory, and officials explain his losses as matters of craft and market. Customers collect their own boots, an assistant seeks another occupation, the association handles membership, and officials check public records. In isolation, everyone can offer an account of their action. Once the question becomes what those acts have done together, there is nowhere they must answer together.

Public punishment takes on the appearance of an environment. Villagers face the risk of continued association; the father faces refusal to hear his case at one place after another. He has suffered losses but can find no decision that acknowledges their source. Rules take effect in daily life, then retreat into separate affairs when challenged. People living in such an environment are more likely to protect their own relationships and positions, because those are at least things on which they can act.

Outside the Office, Do Not Deliberate on Its Affairs — Analects, “Taibo”#

K first encounters the separation between surveying and praise, then hears from Olga about the separation between punishment and decision. As soon as he hears the summons described, he identifies Sortini’s abuse of power. Under different conditions, such acts could succeed, even without the victim recognizing them. He has not yet heard how villagers shunned the family or how the father later sought pardon. A single letter already reveals a public problem: an official’s private demand can draw on the castle’s power to compel obedience.¹⁶

Yet K’s understanding also assigns unequal weight. He thinks that the insult to Amalia could readily be compensated and forgotten within days; what alarms him is the general possibility of abused power. Olga continues and compares Amalia with Frieda, touching his private connection to Klamm. K then concedes that the affair has changed shape in his eyes. Amalia principally concerns him because she is Barnabas’s sister and her fate may affect the messenger’s work; Frieda is his own fiancée. He lists the lodging, position and work he has obtained, his prospective marriage and village membership, and his connection to Klamm. The family history is still being heard, but the center from which he weighs it has changed.

K does not lack action. He argues with the village head, refuses to give a deposition to Momus, waits for Klamm in the snow, and uses lodging, marriage and the messenger connection to look for openings. He sees the absurdity of the procedure more clearly than many villagers. His actions keep circling around possessives: my appointment, my rights, my way in. His clarity makes him more adept at moving within the castle’s relations; it has yet to become action with the villagers to question the rules together.

When no one can be found to answer for a decision and no place will hear an appeal, people are liable to return to what they can alter directly. Application materials are one such thing. Someone facing admissions quotas and labor regimes alone can more readily sit another examination, change fields or add a certificate than make the setting of the rules a common question. Institutions continue to receive materials arranged by the old criteria, and some successful candidates pass those criteria to the next cohort. Individually reasonable responses help the old conditions carry on.

Who allocates educational resources, what labor wins recognition, and who gains or loses from organizational decisions all concern common rules. In an individual’s hands, however, these questions often contract into whether a field is popular, the application complete or a route secure. This transformation is what the essay calls political detachment: intense sensitivity to rankings, recruitment and promotion, coupled with difficulty reaching the power that sets standards and assigns consequences. Initiative remains vigorous, but goes chiefly toward obtaining the next position.

Livelihoods do depend on examinations, migration and career choices, and public action can accompany them. A public question is more likely to become enclosed within a private route when improving one’s position crowds out action to question the rules together, and those who set the conditions cannot enter the same dispute as those who bear the consequences. K knows that telephone calls are unreliable, files disappear and superiors praise work yet to be done. He has also named an abuse of power. Knowledge and resistance remain, but the villagers still have no place to address the punishment of Amalia’s family together.

Craftsmen Stay in Their Workshops to Complete Their Work — Analects, “Zizhang”#

When Barnabas delivers the letter of praise, K asks about the private message he had previously entrusted to him for Klamm. Barnabas says that on the following day he did not go to the castle: his father had too much shoemaking and needed his help. K reacts furiously. Klamm’s affairs should take priority; how could a message be forgotten at a shoemaker’s bench? Barnabas keeps explaining that these were orders from Brunswick, and that he is his father’s assistant.⁸ The dispute sets two kinds of work together: one awaits recognition whose source and force remain uncertain; the other has work at hand to finish.

Shoemaking offers none of the castle’s glory, but must answer to leather, measurements and eventual use. A title cannot make a shoe fit. A failure returned by a customer must be handled by its maker. The messenger’s assignment has yet to give Barnabas defined rights or an office-issued outfit, while Olga searches ambiguous encounters for signs of progress. What a finished shoe is like cannot be changed simply by explaining it once more.

Original conceptual illustration: a messenger post can remain suspended; leather, fit and use demand an answer from the craft at hand. Not a still from an adaptation of “The Castle.”

Knowing how to make shoes has not protected the family from punishment. Amalia tears up the letter and preserves her judgment; the whole family then suffers isolation. The father’s original orders are canceled one by one. Only later does Barnabas obtain low-paid work from Brunswick, collecting orders and returning the work in darkness. Craft can still sustain life, but trade and association are governed by the village’s power relations too. Amalia’s refusal exposes the castle’s dependence on this cooperation. While everyone calculates the risk alone, the family continues to bear a punishment with no overall decision.

Restoring inspection within work therefore also requires places where feedback can change judgment. A credential can preserve an assessment made at the end of training. Once work begins, texts, students, customers and affected people should be able to make that assessment change. A degree records that an author received training; one counterexample can still defeat a judgment in the next article. Complex divisions of labor must leave places where responsibility can be pursued: affected people can appeal, and completing a part of one’s duties still requires an answer for its consequences. Politics beyond the personal route begins in relationships that can be questioned and changed together.

The notice in Fan Jin’s house preserves an admission; Butcher Hu, Zhang Jingzhai and the neighbors make it a social reality. Olga can interpret the castle letter in Barnabas’s hand again and again, finding another promise of a future in each delay. That day the letter gives no answer about Barnabas’s identity. The leather on his father’s bench still waits for him to take its measure.